The monster was the size of a house, and it was winning.
Jin saw it from the top of the last ridge before the capital, an hour after he'd first heard it: a broad green valley with the road running through it, a cart on its side, two dead horses, and in the middle of it all a thing like a bull built by someone who had only ever heard bulls described. Four legs as thick as tree trunks. Plates of grey armour layered over its back like roof tiles. And a horn, one great curved horn of black iron, that it swung like a scythe.
"Ironhorn," Doyun breathed beside him. "C-rank. Must've broken out of a gate in the hills."
Five hunters were fighting it.
Jin stopped on the ridge and watched them, and for a moment he forgot to be anything but amazed.
There was a woman with a tower shield at the front, and when the horn came down she didn't dodge. She set her feet and shouted a word, and a dome of gold light snapped up around her shield, and the horn hit the light and screamed off it in a shower of sparks. Two men with swords went in on either side while it was off balance, fast and low, cutting at the joints between the plates. Behind them a young man in grey was chanting, and every time one of the others took a hit, green light ran over the wound and closed it. And at the back, a woman with a staff was calling the shots.
"Left leg, Tam! Hana, shield up, it's turning! Now, now, now!"
Hana. Jin flinched at the name. Not my Hana. Just a woman with a shield.
They moved like one body. When the shield went up, the blades went in. When the blades pulled back, a bolt of white fire from the staff hit exactly where they'd been. Nobody had to look to know where anybody else was.
That's what we were.
That's what we were trying to be, with swords and a dart gun and Daewon yelling.
They've had five years and magic. We had two years and each other.
"D-ranks," Doyun said. His voice was tight. "All five. A good party. They'd have it, normally."
"Normally?"
The Ironhorn lowered its head and hit the shield straight on.
The gold dome cracked like ice. The woman behind it went backwards twenty feet and landed hard and didn't get up. The healer ran to her, which was the right thing and also the wrong thing, because it left nobody watching the left side, and the horn came round and took one of the swordsmen off his feet.
Doyun was already running.
"Doyun!"
"They need a spear!" he shouted back, and then he was down the slope with the blue fire running up his weapon, because of course he was. Because he was Doyun.
* * *
It went wrong very fast.
Doyun got one good thrust in, blue fire into the gap behind the monster's shoulder, and it hurt the thing, Jin could hear it. Then the Ironhorn turned with a speed that something that size should not have had, and its flank caught Doyun and threw him into the rocks at the edge of the valley like a doll.
The mage tried to hold it off with fire. It walked through the fire. The second swordsman dragged the first one back, the healer dragged the shield-bearer, and step by step the whole party gave ground until their backs were against the cliff wall at the end of the valley with Doyun among them, half sitting, blood on his face, spear still somehow in his hand.
Cornered.
The Ironhorn pawed the ground and lowered its head.
Jin was already walking down the slope.
He didn't run. He didn't draw his sword. He thought about it, about the pebble and the stumble and the very good impression of a terrified man, and decided there was no impression good enough for this.
Sorry, Doyun. I liked being protected.
It was nice while it lasted.
* * *
The monster smelled him before it saw him. It swung its great head round, away from the cornered hunters, toward the man in the old uniform walking across the grass as if he were out for an evening stroll.
It snorted. It pawed the ground.
Jin stopped about twenty paces away and let a little of his ki out.
Not much. Not a punch. Just pressure, the way he used to stop the orc in the square, in the long years when it had stopped being worth the effort to fight it. A weight, laid over the air. He aimed it for kneel.
The Ironhorn's front legs folded.
It went down onto its knees in the grass, head dropping, horn grinding into the earth, until its nose touched the ground at Jin's feet. It looked, for all the world, like it was bowing.
And then it kept going.
The ground under it gave way. The grass split in a ring around the monster, and the earth sank, and the Ironhorn sank with it, pressed down and down into the valley floor by a weight that wasn't there. The armour plates on its back cracked one after another like ice on a pond. Something deep inside it broke with a sound like a building falling in.
Then there was a crater in the valley floor, very round and very deep, and the Ironhorn was at the bottom of it, flat.
Silence.
A bird, a long way off, decided to stop singing.
* * *
Jin stared at his hand.
That was nothing.
That was a nudge. In the trial, that much pressure would have made the orc sit down and think about its life. It wouldn't have broken a tile.
He looked at the crater again. At the way the edges were smooth, as if they'd been pressed in a mould.
He thought about the last years in the trial. How the mountain had taken fifty years. How the fire field had stopped being hot, and the lake had stopped being deep, and how, near the end, it had felt less like getting stronger and more like pushing against a wall that was always just a little further away.
It was holding me down.
The whole time. Like training with stones tied to your back. I got used to the weight. I forgot it was there.
And now the stones are gone.
He did the sum, the way he'd done it on the cave stone on the first day: badly, and by feel.
A hundred times. At least. Maybe more.
I don't want to find out where "more" stops.
A window opened in front of his eyes.
[Second Layer of Immortality: threshold reached]
[Processing…]
He waited.
It stayed there. The little dots didn't move. It had the same feeling as the moment at the end of the trial, after the third target is immune, when the System had gone quiet and he had felt it thinking.
Second layer.
I haven't even figured out the first one.
* * *
Nobody was looking at him.
That was the first thing he noticed when he finally turned round. Five hunters and Doyun, pressed against the cliff wall, and not one of them was looking at his face. They were looking at the crater. At the grass. At their own feet. Anywhere else.
The healer's hands were shaking so hard he'd dropped his bandages. The woman with the shield had come round, and she was holding on to the young man's arm. The mage, the one who'd been calling the shots, had her staff pointed at Jin, and he could hear her heart going like a bird's.
And Doyun.
Doyun was the worst. He was sitting against the rock with blood on his face, and he had gone a colour Jin had only ever seen on men who'd just watched someone die. He was looking at Jin the way you look at a cliff edge you've been walking along in the dark for two weeks without knowing it was there.
He called me a blank for thirteen days. He bought me dinner. He stood in front of me at the ford.
Now he thinks I'm going to kill him.
Jin held up his empty hands, slowly.
"I'd like to ask you something," he said, as gently as he knew how. "All of you. Please don't tell anyone what you just saw."
For a moment nobody moved. Then the mage lowered her staff an inch, and nodded. Then the shield-bearer. Then the swordsmen, both at once, very fast. The healer just kept nodding after everyone else had stopped.
"On the Goddess," the mage said hoarsely. "We didn't see anything. The Ironhorn… it fell in a sinkhole."
"Thank you," Jin said.
Lie number… I've lost count. I'm good at losing count.
* * *
They walked the last hour to the capital in the dusk, just the two of them, the way they'd walked all the way from the border. The party had gone the other way, quickly, without looking back.
Doyun didn't talk.
It was the first time in thirteen days that Doyun hadn't talked, and the silence was louder than anything he'd said in all that time. He walked a careful two paces to Jin's left, and every so often Jin heard his breath catch, as if a question had got as far as his throat and been sent back down.
Near the gates, it finally got out.
"Are you…" Doyun's voice cracked. He tried again. "Jin. Are you the…"
"Don't ask me that." Jin didn't look at him. "Please."
Doyun shut his mouth.
He didn't ask. They walked on, and after a while, very slowly, Doyun's two paces became one and a half.
He's the first person in this world who knows what I can do.
He's also the first one who's afraid of me.
I hope he stops being the second thing.
* * *
The walls of the capital rose up out of the dusk, white and enormous, with lamps burning all along the top like a string of stars.
Jin looked up at them.
Behind his eyes, where nobody else could see it, the window was still open.
[Processing…]