Hiroshi sat in the back of a merchant cart, watching the city slowly disappear behind him.
The arrangement had been simple enough. The Church administrative office had connected him with a trader heading northeast toward the border regions. Cheaper than hiring a private carriage and faster than walking.
The merchant hadn't asked questions and Hiroshi hadn't offered conversation. They'd settled into a comfortable silence broken only by the creak of wooden wheels and the steady rhythm of hooves against packed dirt road.
The countryside opened up gradually as the city fell behind.
Fields first, wide and flat, farmers already working the early morning rows. Then forest, dense and dark on both sides of the road, the kind that swallowed sound and made the world feel smaller.
Occasionally a village would appear, a cluster of buildings around a well or a crossroads, and then disappear just as quickly.
Hiroshi watched it all pass without really seeing it.
Four days of this. Sitting in the back of a cart with nothing to do and nowhere to be except eventually somewhere else. His body was healed enough to function but not enough for training.
His coin situation was temporarily solved but would need addressing again soon.
He pulled his knees up and leaned back against a sack of grain, watching clouds move across the sky above the treeline.
He opens his status window.
Name: Hiroshi Tanaka
Level: 10
[STR: 13, AGI: 19, VIT: 22, INT: 18, WIS: 12, CHA: 9]
Skills:
- Adaptive Evolution ( Unique)
- Pain Suppression ( Level 1 )
- Dodge (Level 2)
- Fighter Instinct (Level 2)
- Sword Mastery (Level 1)
Hiroshi had spent a considerable amount of time during his recovery thinking about his ability.
Adaptive Evolution. Simple enough name. The reality of it was considerably less simple.
He understood the basics. Copy one of enemy skills. That part was straightforward. He'd seen it work, felt it work. But the moment he tried to dig deeper than the surface level understanding, things got murky fast.
Why did it copy some skills and not others?
In the G-rank dungeon he'd killed rats and slimes and walked away with nothing. Not a single skill copied despite clearing the entire dungeon.
But in the E-rank dungeon, fighting wraiths and skeletal warriors, the copies had triggered. Was it a level threshold? Did the enemy need to be above a certain strength before the ability activated? Or was it something else entirely, some condition he hadn't figured out yet?
He didn't know.
And then there were the experience based skills. Dodge, Fighter Instinct, Sword Mastery. Those hadn't come from copying anything.
They'd formed on their own, built from repetition and understanding and something the system apparently recognized as genuine growth.
That mechanic felt different from the copying function. Almost like two separate abilities bundled under the same name.
Which raised its own questions. Were there limits to how many experience based skills he could develop? Was there a ceiling on how fast they could form? Could he accelerate the process deliberately or did it happen on its own timeline regardless of effort?
Again. He didn't know.
But the thing that bothered him most, the question that kept returning no matter how many times he pushed it aside, was the strength multiplier. For a limited duration.
He'd used it once in the boss fight, activated it out of pure desperation with no real understanding of what he was doing. It had worked. Saved his life. But he still couldn't explain how he'd triggered it or whether he could do it reliably again.
He didn't know how long it lasted under normal conditions. Didn't know the cooldown, the cost other then the extreme pain, whether it damaged his body with repeated use or had some other consequence he hadn't discovered yet.
He'd gotten lucky before but luck is anything but reliable.
Luck wasn't a strategy.
He needed to understand his own ability properly. Every part of it. Because fighting with tools he didn't fully understand was just another way of getting himself killed.
Bang...
The attack came without warning.
One moment the road was empty, trees lining both sides in silence.The next, three figures dropped from the branches above, landing in the road ahead of the cart.
The merchant's horse reared back with a panicked whinny, and the cart lurched to a sudden stop that nearly threw Hiroshi off the back.
He caught himself on the sideboards and looked up.
Three bandits blocking the road ahead. Two more emerging from the treeline on the left. Another two on the right. Spread in a loose formation that cut off any possibility of the cart simply pushing through.
They were armed. Clubs, short swords, one with a hunting bow already drawn. Their clothes were rough and mismatched, the kind of gear that came from taking what you could rather than buying it. But they moved with the practiced ease of people who'd done this before.
The lead bandit, a broad man with a shaved head and a long scar across his chin, pointed his sword at the merchant. "Off the cart. Both of you. Leave everything and walk away."
The merchant raised his hands immediately, his face pale. "Please. I'm just a trader. The cargo isn't worth..."
"Off the cart."
Hiroshi stepped down from the back of the cart slowly, his hand moving to the sword at his hip. He'd requisitioned a replacement blade before leaving the city.
The scarred bandit shifted his attention to Hiroshi. "Hand over the sword, boy. Nice and slow."
Hiroshi looked at the seven of them. Assessed distances and positions the way his Fighter Instinct had been trained to do.
The two on the right were standing too close together. The bowman was focused on the merchant, not him. The three blocking the road ahead were the biggest physical threats but also the furthest away.
"I'd rather not," Hiroshi said.
The scarred man blinked, apparently not used to that response. "You'd rather not." He glanced at his companions with a short laugh. "Kid's got nerve. I'll give him that."
"Last chance," one of the others said, stepping forward. He was younger than the rest, with a wooden club that he slapped against his palm. "Hand it over or we take it."
Hiroshi drew his sword.
The young one with the club came at him first, swinging hard and fast. Hiroshi's Dodge skill read the trajectory before the swing was halfway through.
He stepped inside the arc, let the club pass harmlessly behind his shoulder, and drove his elbow hard into the bandit's face.
The young man's head snapped back and he sat down heavily in the road, club dropping from his fingers. Not unconscious but not functional either, both hands going to his nose.
The two on the right rushed him simultaneously.
Hiroshi moved toward the closer one rather than away, closing the distance fast.
His Fighter Instinct calculated angles and the Sword Mastery guided his movements into something approaching actual technique. He caught the man's sword arm at the wrist, twisted sharply, and used the man's own forward momentum to send him stumbling into his companion.
They went down together in a tangle of limbs and cursing.
The bowman had finally shifted his aim from the merchant to Hiroshi. An arrow sang through the air and Hiroshi's Dodge skill screamed at him to move left. He did, the arrow passing close enough that he felt it displace air near his ear.
No time to think about how close that had been.
He closed the distance to the bowman in a sprint, ignoring the two scrambling back to their feet behind him.
The bowman fumbled to nock another arrow but Hiroshi was already inside his effective range.
He grabbed the bow with his free hand and pulled it forward sharply, dragging the man off balance, then reversed his sword grip and cracked the pommel hard against the side of his head.
The bowman dropped.
The scarred leader and his remaining companion came together, more cautious now, having watched four of their number go down in under a minute. The leader's sword was up, his expression no longer relaxed.
"What are you?" he asked.
Hiroshi didn't answer. He watched them both, letting his Fighter Instinct read their movements.
The companion broke first, charging with his sword raised high. Telegraphed, desperate, no technique behind it. Hiroshi sidestepped, let the blade pass, and kicked the man's legs out from under him. He hit the road face first and didn't get up.
That left the leader.
They stood facing each other in the middle of the empty road, the merchant frozen on his cart, the other bandits groaning or unconscious in the dirt around them.
The scarred man looked at his companions. Looked at Hiroshi. His sword arm lowered slightly.
"You're not going to kill us," he said slowly. It wasn't a question. "You had clean shots on three of them. You didn't take any of them."
"No," Hiroshi agreed.
"Why?"
Hiroshi considered that for a moment. Honestly he wasn't entirely sure himself. These men were criminals.
They'd threatened lives and would do it again the moment he walked away. By most reasonable standards putting them down permanently would have been justified.
But killing felt like a line he wasn't ready to cross casually. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if he could avoid it.
"Put the sword down," Hiroshi said instead of answering.
The scarred man held his gaze for a long moment. Whatever he was looking for, or whatever he found, he slowly lowered his sword and set it on the road.
"Smart," Hiroshi said.
He gathered the weapons from the conscious and unconscious bandits alike, walked to the treeline, and threw them deep into the undergrowth where finding them would take considerable effort.
Then he cut strips from one of the fallen men's cloaks and used them to tie the ones who were still mobile, hands behind their backs, secured to a tree trunk off the road.
The unconscious ones he left where they were.
They'd wake up eventually.
The scarred leader he left untied, standing in the road.
"There's a village about two miles back," Hiroshi said, climbing back onto the merchant's cart. "Turn yourself in or don't. That's your choice."
The man said nothing.
The merchant snapped the reins with shaking hands and the cart lurched forward, wheels rolling past the scattered evidence of the brief fight. Hiroshi settled back against the grain sacks and watched the road behind them until the bandits disappeared from view.
"That was..." the merchant started, then seemed to lose the word he was looking for.
"Fine," Hiroshi said.
The merchant didn't argue with that assessment.
The road stretched ahead, quiet again, like nothing had happened at all.