“What in the sparks... did I miss something?”

Arson asked Anastasia as he had no idea whom else he could ask. The truly random question was asked as he’d noticed that the number of trials he’d completed had risen by quite a few. Yet he’d done nothing that he’d seen as an advancement of his runic knowledge, nor completed the trial given to him once he’d arrived in Origin.

“No, not unless I missed something?”

“What happened to the trial count?”

“Oh, that, you finished a lot of them in a trial series or whatever it's called. Did you not see the notifications?”

Arson shook his head, confused. He’d seen no such notifications, and didn’t have any clue how to turn off the perpetual pop-ups.

“What were the trials?”

“Oh geez, let me look at the log,” said Anastasia as Arson ran through the city on his way to where he’d been told the master bowman lived and worked.

“A few were runes, one outside the bank, another on the ceiling of the UnionForce reception area, a few more on the statues held there as well, and you practically get one every time you talk to anyone since you’ve been here and started speaking in Uni-Vare.”

While the AI spoke, images flashed in his vision of the runes he’d found. Not that he’d known what he’d been looking at, as many were obtained by him simply roaming throughout the city from what the images showed. A plethora of runes on the side of buildings and even on the multitude of monuments he’d passed; the images seen as if captured in his peripheral vision, rather than looked at directly.

“What do you mean I haven’t been talking in Uni-Vare?”

“Um, okay… sure you haven’t, but everyone around you in this city has been, and we’ll just act like they understand common tongues rather than the language of creation.”

“What?”

Arson stopped running and thought back on his experiences since arriving, and couldn’t believe what his mind had simply missed, the shift in dialect something he wouldn’t have noticed if Anastasia hadn’t pointed it out to him.

“What the sparks…”

“Yeah, this place is so full of magic, I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t blown up yet.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Arson started to jog once more, growing more and more weary of his surroundings as Anastasia stayed silent, eventually answering him after a sweat inducing amount of time.

“Umm, let’s just say that the system sees anything without balance as problematic. Many civilizations, throughout time even before the system, that spoke only the language of magic and creation have all ended in utter ruin, which is why the system treats those periods of time and places as delicate. Makes me wonder why the trials have even sent you here.”

“What kind of utter ruin do you mean, the normal stuff like war and famine, or -”

“They go boom, all of them either end with mass ascension of the populous to higher realms or planes of existence, or the culmination of power that the language draws from the rest of existence compresses, until poof, everything is turned to ash.”

Arson almost stopped running again, but that seemed like the wrong thing to do. He needed to get these trials done, and now. He thought that this place could be a subtle break from the unending peril that came with the trials of Endless, but now knew better.

I wonder how many have been lost to the trials by staying too long in the wrong place, or even just finding a place that felt better than home?

“You don’t think that what I’m supposed to find out, the secrets of Origin I mean, are somehow connected to this place's end, do you?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for a trillion credits. Some of the trials seem like created instances to test cultivators, maybe even replicas of times and places that did exist, but this all has a level of authenticity that makes me feel like you’ve been sent back to a real place, I’ve honestly been feeling that that is what has been happening to you more and more since you ventured to the mana monarch kingdom.”

Arson nodded.

“Things feel far less figure-out-this-simple-puzzle than ever before, but in all honesty, I still may rob that bloody bank…”

Anastasia gasped in feigned shock, before giving Arson an invisible shrug; smirking as he lifted his wrist to look at her. The two bursting into laughter as their destination came into view.

The manor of the bowman was quite beautiful. Large imposing walls sat around the edges of what seemed like a forest set within the city itself. The home wasn’t fully visible until Arson strode over a bridge; a mote surging like a clockwise river as far as Arson could see in either direction as he crossed.

It wasn’t until he was on the other side of the bridge that he realized that the bridge itself also served as the door that separated the manor from the rest of the city. He truly loved the design of the fortification, keeping it in mind for his own home if he ever built one.

He looked around, taking in the manor in its entirety, as he walked toward what seemed to be the keep, equal to that of any nobleman's keep Arson had ever seen. Only a flying object soaring in the distance distracted him momentarily.

Turning his head, Arson noticed a literal flying target, arrows stuck from edge to center in its face as it zipped in and out aerially through the edge of the nearby forrest.

Well that was interesting…

He turned back and looked at the large white marble that the keep was made up of. All the marble curved, making the edifice more circular than rigidly straight.

“It's almost like a miniature castle…”

“You're only saying that because you’ve seen pictures of Maelstrom’s castle in the diamond sector, this is actually quite large.”

“I suppose you're—“

Then Arson saw him for the first time in his life. The man who would change his life in his youth even more than his own father or any other influence or role model, Master Acu.

The giant of a man strode onto the balcony of a section of the manor that seemed to be both a garden and a platform.

The bowman seemed to be somehow both muscular and lanky, mighty, yet agile. A true aura of danger touching Arson’s senses even as far away from the man as he was now.

The two would meet many times throughout Arson’s life, and many changes would occur for both him and the master bowman, but neither he nor Arson were near to their pinnacles; a fact that would become a determinant of many, many lives.

The man pulled a longbow free of his shoulders as he approached a barrel, almost as tall as Arson himself, which was full of arrows. Whatever the projectiles were made from was unyielding; the long arrows not bending in the slightest as the bowman lifted the first one to his weapon to fire.

The first shot took Arson’s breath away, not only because his perspective wasn’t high enough to truly witness the bow being used; the man moved that quickly, but also because of the sound that made Arson feel as if the sky itself was being ripped open under the duress of the arrow's movement.

He turned to try to see what the man was shooting at, and managed only to see a target turning to dust, all the arrows formerly lodged within the flying target flung off to land tangled into the branches of the trees below, like that of forest shedding unneeded weight.

This continued, and Arson’s urge to meet the bowman named Acu only grew in intensity by the breath. After a while, Arson was alerted by his Closed Eye Dominion that he was being approached from behind. An attendant but a few feet away by the time he turned around.

“May I help you, youngling?”

Arson nodded, pulling free the papers he’d been given by the receptionist at UnionForce, handing them over to the bald man with a bushy white beard and black suit. Arson couldn’t help but notice the man’s power emanating out of his pores like he was oversaturated with raw energies.

I wonder how old this dude is really, he seems oddly strong, maybe even strong enough to fight Seneschal… Or maybe even Uncle Winter?

“I see,” said the old man, turning on his heels with a beckoning hand toward Arson.

“May I ask your name, sir?”

“My name, my name is Ocean, Ocean Grey, grandfather to the master of this keep.”

“Nice to meet you, sir. My name is Arson, Sovereign Arson Omni.”

“Hmm, any relation to Carter Omni and his daughter?”

“Uh, maybe, I don’t believe my grandfather’s name is very common. I actually only found out I was related to him before I left home to come here.”

“Did you not come here with him, or maybe you have come to visit him while he is here with your parents?”

“No, my parents aren’t here, and I didn’t know Carter was here?”

Arson looked down at his watch as the AI’s own gaze went wide in his direction. Anastasia had told him many things that were common misconceptions about his family tree. One of the largest details being that Almarine wasn’t Carter’s daughter, but his sister.

Apparently before the pair became immortal, Carter grew to look far older than his sister, coming to a subtle revenge that still bothered Almarine. She’d teased him for his seemingly elderly visage, and he’d gotten even with a prank that still followed the Orphan Mother during present day times, the lie older than the system itself.

“Yes, he and his daughter are staying in the palace as guests of our lady and lord Vanity.”

“Thank you for letting me know that. I’m sure he’d love to see me, I’ll have to stop by the palace at some point.”

Arson had no plan on following through with what he’d stated, but hoped the man had no plan on fact-checking him.

The pair walked through the interior of the manor. Most places within were only sparsely decorated. Nothing in the interior was truly lavish, but more comfortable and refined with simple elegance.

The home made Arson miss home, his mother’s own villa not as crowded as the orphanage, allowing Arson to become comfortable quickly in the short time he’d lived there. Yet, he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit to missing the hustle and bustle of the orphan grounds. The place truly more magical than any place he’d ever been, even after all the trials he’d completed across the realms.

“Just how difficult is it to meet the master’s standards?”

“You are of a royal blooded line, how difficult is it to meet your own parents' standards?”

The old man looked over his shoulder toward Arson with a smile that made his blood run cold. He nodded, thinking of his mother’s relentless training sessions, and prepared himself for the worst.

They continued up a long set of stairs, coming to a long hallway that was open to the elements. A strange sound coming to Arson’s ears like that of a punched drum being slammed without rhythm. Just a powerful echoing punch that pierced the air with its resounding magnitude.

They finally came to see the master of the manor, firing his bow. The sound Arson had heard that of the man’s bowstring snapping back into place after each shot.

“Holy…”

“What is it, grandfather? You know that I am practicing,” said the man, continuing to fire, not distracted by the intrusion by the slightest, his accuracy completely unaffected.

“A new trainee is here from the contractors. Apparently he has promise with the bow, and the bank is in need of another…”

Ocean looked back toward Arson before he cleared his throat and looked back toward his grandson.

“willing participant.”

“The union couldn’t see talent if it was delivered from the maiden herself to their doorsteps.”

Arson laughed, enjoying the view given to him by their current vantage. Seeing the master shoot from the elevated angle only made the shots much more impressive. Targets being hit at distances that Arson couldn’t confirm with his vision, but instead heard being crushed from incredibly far in the brief silence between each shot.

“That is amazing. How do you not run out of targets?”

The man for the first time glanced back to take in Arson and his grandfather behind him.

“You can see what I’m doing?”

Arson nodded, but then brought a finger to his chin before he shook his head.

“Your movements are too fast for me to catch the entire motion once you put your arrow to your bow, and I can track the arrows that you fire toward the edges of the forest closer to us, but anything toward the middle and beyond is currently well beyond the limits of my perception.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, before he turned back and started to fire once more.

“In the center of the forest is a mimic that spawns offspring that are living duplicates of the first item set within its body, this breed of mimic doesn’t come to life until something is set within the limits of its treasure chest’s interior.”

“Oh wow, so you put a target inside it, but that doesn’t explain how you haven’t killed all of its children with how fast you are shooting, does it?”

The man chuckled.

“That monster pulls from the nearly unlimited amount of mana in the environment in this cataclysm of a city, and gives birth to litters in the thousands… daily.”

“How do you keep up with that? Are you not worried the forest will become overrun?”

“I’ve told the monarchs that for seasons, they don’t listen, my father was capable of killing them at a dozen times my current speed, so they expect the same of me, but that is nothing for you to worry over.”

Acu glanced back toward his grandfather and jutted his chin toward the corner of the balcony.

“Give the boy a training bow, we will see if he is cut out to be a bowman or if he is merely an archer as every other supposed talent they send my way…”

Arson took a deep breath, looking away from Acu for the first time since they’d gotten to the balcony. Ocean quickly strode over to a box filled with an innumerable amount of bows, the interior filled with so many types of ranged weapons that Arson was filled with excitement at the thought of trying them all.

Ocean finally returned with a bow nearly as tall as Arson, handing it over to him with another chill inducing smile. Arson took the bow gracefully nodding in return. Then Acu paused, and looked back, looking between Arson and the bow, a single nod the only sign telling Arson that the man approved of the weapon he’d been handed before he returned to firing and spoke.

“Start, you have until the sun dies in the sky to hit a target, or I will not train you.”