Interim Growth

Strength has increased by 3 points.

Agility has increased by 2 points.

Endurance has increased by 2 points.

1

The arrow zipped through the air, whistling, then struck the painted target on the far tree with a dull thunk. The shaft protruded from the wood, shuddering from the impact, then stilled. Another bullseye.

The fourteenth, by his count.

Archery had been a hobby of his at first, when he was a small lad with little better to do. It had been his father’s hobby before him, and the reason he’d wanted to try it to begin with.

His father had been decent with the bow, and had come second or third in over a dozen competitions over the years. Respectable, though nothing stupendous.

But it was the first one his father had taken him to, at the age of five or six, that had enamored him so.

The competition was fierce that year, with hunters and adventurers coming from nearby cities to try their hands. Some had been famous, at least locally, due to their skills. His father knew them all by name, could list off nearly every competition they had won or scored well in. If his father had ever been happier than he had been that day, Gosfrid could not recall it.

His father was already well known by then. Dozens of fans and competitors recognized him by sight, spoke with him, cheered his name, congratulated him. Still, he was not seen as the frontrunner to win that year, having done poorly in the last few competitions. Not that Gosfrid cared. Life had been mundane until that point, despite the little fame his father had garnered; already he had accepted that his father had been nothing special in the grand scheme of things, and that he, too, would never become the best, would never be special.

His thoughts began to change that day.

Round after round, elimination after elimination, his father had climbed the ranks of that competition with an excellent display of skill. He could not recall ever seeing his father in such good form, nor in such high spirits, before or after, as if he were possessed by the art of archery itself that day.

By the final round Gosfrid had been leaning over the edge of the wooden fence used to separate the crowd from the archers, staring intently, not once blinking despite the sting of his eyes. He couldn’t miss it. If he did, he’d never be able to live with himself, he’d thought. A foolish thought for a foolish five year old, perhaps, but thirty years later Gosfrid still wasn’t so sure. It had been that good.

It was the best showing his father had ever had, and the best of his opponent. The final round, as always, was a simple test: one competitor would shoot at a target over a hundred feet away until he missed the bullseye, and then his opponent would try and beat his number.

His father’s opponent, a man called Leofstan, had gone first. An up and comer at the time, Leofstan was an excellent archer by every metric. He’d won the five previous competitions and even set the record for most bullseyes in the final round in the previous competition; a mind boggling twelve. The record, before that, had been seven.

And then, on that fateful day, he beat his record by two.

The crowd had cheered so loud at that fourteenth shot that Gosfrid thought he’d go deaf. He’d never seen anything like it, the crowd had never seen anything like it. No one had, excepting the Imperial Archers, but they were different, separate. What the Imperial Archers did couldn’t be counted with what normal people could do.

Leofstan missed the fifteenth shot, receiving a halfhearted cheer. Gosfrid’s father patted Leofstan on the back, exchanged some words Gosfrid couldn’t hear, and then stood at the ready, bow in hand.

Tension rose with every arrow Gosfrid’s father loosed. One after another they struck the bullseye, audible even from a hundred, two hundred feet away. The crowd was too enraptured to cheer or talk or do anything other than watch.

Six, seven, eight, the arrows hit their mark. Each one brought about a strange sense of worry in Gosfrid, an underlying fear that the next arrow would miss, his father would lose. He couldn’t stand that now, unlike before. His father had come so far, farther than Gosfrid had thought possible. He was somebody to him now.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

The competition had been long by that point, and the sun had begun its descent, the sky red and cloudy and threatening to turn to night. Even as the temperature dropped, his father sweat and sweat and sweat, looking as if he’d been standing out in the rain for hours. Pulling the bow string back took a great deal of strength to begin with, strained the muscles of the back, and his father had been doing it all day.

But as his father pulled the bow string back, taking careful aim at the target, his father became perfectly still, like a statue carved and painted by the greatest sculptor in all the world. Even as young as Gosfrid was, he knew what his father was feeling. There was no tiredness in him, no pain, no pressure. Only him, and the target.

The arrow flew as fast as the ones that came before it, yet time seemed to stop, to slow, the arrow hanging in midair, so still that he could almost count the feathers fletched on its end. It was the first time Gosfrid realized how gifted his sight truly was.

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With a thud the arrow hit the target, and silence hung as the crowd processed what had happened. The fourteenth bullseye.

The uproar that followed was tremendous, so loud that the ground itself seemed to shake. Gosfrid could even feel the crowds cheering rumble through his chest, he recalled.

It was minutes before the cheering died out and anxious anticipation replaced it. Fourteen was only a tie, after all. His father still had one chance to win.

And he did win, in the end.

The uproar that followed was among the greatest Gosfrid had ever experienced. There was screaming and cheering and yelling, jumping and hugging and shoving and fighting, all in such a tremendous mess that it was impossible to comprehend it all. So loud that the elder attendees complained of hearing loss for several months, and Contractors that had been away in the local forests at the time had complained of lost game due to the noise.

Gosfrid had been beside himself as much as the crowd was, having jumped the fence and run to his father, hugging him with all the strength his childish body could muster, and his father doing much the same, nearly breaking in two.

Looking back, it had been the fifteenth shot that had sealed Gosfrid’s fate. His father was the best archer that day. Unbeatable. The very pinnacle of what could be accomplished. Had his father merely tied at fourteen, however, he would have been a completely different man, would have lived a completely different life. It was not archery that had interested Gosfrid so; it was winning, being the best.

And Gosfrid was the best, eventually. Entering the realm of competition at the age of sixteen, Gosfrid rose through the ranks, eventually winning his first competition at seventeen (during which he earned the nickname ‘Gosfrid the Eagle Eyed’), broke his father’s competition record at the age of eighteen, and finally retired from competition altogether at the age of twenty-two, after winning more than thirty consecutive competitions. From there he turned to a life of hunting, in which he excelled due to his skills in archery and, more so, his excellent vision.

It was fair to say that Gosfrid was among the best archers not within the corps of Imperial Archers. Perhaps the best, if you’d asked him some weeks ago; he was far better than he had been at twenty-two, at the very least.

But, looking now at the painted target that stood some two hundred feet away, its center filled to the brim by more than twenty arrow shafts, Gosfrid understood just how far from the best he truly was.

Alden. That was the name of this blasphemously skilled man. A knight, and his assigned leader, the man was otherwise unimpressive; taller than most by a fair few inches, a plain face, pale skin, gray eyes beneath a mop of brown hair in need of a trim. He did not at all give off the aura of a knight, even with his plate armor. He was merely a boy climbing the ladders, as Gosfrid had been so many years ago.

Yet Gosfrid had seen the man’s strength, had watched him fell a tree with a single punch, had seen the ferocity of his magic. And, most strangely of all, had seen the man’s missing hand slowly regrow over the span of a week.

There had been some consternation regarding their leader the week before. There had been the crows, of course, which was never good for one’s mood, and which could put the most paranoid thoughts in any sane man’s head. None rightly wanted to know if the tales were true. And when the strange mage knight they called their leader began to groan and growl, hunched over in his saddle day after day, sweating fiercely in cool weather and on the verge of tears—well, some had suspected a curse.

Then one day, as they were passing another herd of wild horses, Alden pointed at them.

“Any good breeds down there?” Alden asked.

Gosfrid had looked at them—his eyes were the best after all—and saw that they were nothing special.

“Just some common horses,” he’d said, turning back. It was only then, seeing the still pointing finger, that Gosfrid had realized what he was looking at. Alden’s left hand. The one that had been cut off.

He hadn’t made a fuss of it. None of them did, once others began to realize. The man was a knight and a mage, had seduced an enemy knight, and was well known for his healing magic. It seemed more reasonable with all that considered.

He was somebody, after all.

Still, when Alden had asked to be trained in the ways of archery, Gosfrid had accepted. There was no reason to refuse. Alden was his leader, and a fine young man besides, from what he’d seen, if a little green around the ears. Refusing him would have been remiss. And, Gosfrid reasoned, he couldn’t have been a natural at everything.

But Gosfrid never could have anticipated his student becoming the best archer he’d ever seen in the span of three days.

2

Skill Up

Archery has advanced to Rank B.

Reward: 50xp

Alden stared at the target and grinned. He had shot twenty-five arrows today, and had hit the bullseye twenty-five times.

“Good,” Gosfrid said from beside him. It was all he ever said about Alden’s archery. Staring intently down the range, Gosfrid did not seem impressed. He did not seem anything at all, really, except perhaps bored. There was never a smile, never an ounce of excitement from him. That only meant there was room to grow.

But how much room, Alden wondered? Daily, Alden would rise early in the mornings and practice with either sword or spear, would travel and digest as much as he could from the Book of Complete Knowledge, would use Body Reconfigurement to increase his muscle mass throughout the day, and would practice his archery at night before sunfall. And yet, despite his efforts, despite his Extreme Development Ability, he had yet to breach the mythical barrier to a Rank A Skill.

He could only imagine how much longer it would take.

Putting his bow and arrows away, pain flared up in his left hand. He shook it, hoping to alleviate the stinging, aching sensation that always followed archery. The fingers were still stiff, hard to move (except when they twitched, often against his will), hurt constantly, and hurt worse when he used them. Then there was the outer two, his small and ring fingers, which even now remained curled against his palm, refusing to move an inch.

What the issue was, Alden was uncertain. A mistake in the musculature, an issue with the bones, malformed nerves. A bit of it all, most likely.

Regenerating his arm had been costly to his reserves of mana, so much so that, in an attempt to reduce his expenditure of mana, he had guided the regeneration as purposefully as he could. It was his only choice, thinking back. Had he simply allowed his body to regenerate by simple intent then it would have taken weeks with his current mana supply. As messy as the current results were, they had taken only a week.

And, staring back down the range at the arrows embedded in the tree's bark, they would do for the time being.