Something wet and slimy landed on Agni's forehead with a disgusting splat.
He groaned as consciousness slowly returned, his entire body feeling like he'd been trampled by a herd of angry horses. Everything hurt—his chest where the bullet had torn through his lung, his shoulder where his arm had been severed, even places that hadn't been injured somehow ached with a deep, bone-deep exhaustion.
Agni rubbed his eyes with his left hand and reached up to touch whatever had woken him up.
"Bird shit," he muttered, staring at the white and gray mess on his fingers. "I'm getting crapped on by birds while lying in a pool of my own blood. Just fantastic."
He blinked up at the forest canopy, where he could see a small songbird perched on a branch above him, looking smugly satisfied with its morning bathroom break. For a brief moment, Agni seriously considered killing the thing for breakfast—he was definitely hungry enough—but it flew away before he could muster the energy to try.
That's when the reality of his situation really hit him.
He felt weak. Really, really weak. The kind of bone-deep exhaustion that came from massive blood loss and trauma. His chest had apparently healed during his unconsciousness—he could breathe without that horrible bubbling sensation—but when he tried to push himself up with both hands, only his left arm responded.
"Oh, right," he said with bitter humor. "I'm missing an arm. My right arm, too. The useful one."
Agni slowly sat up, his head spinning from the movement. Around him, the forest looked like a battlefield. Scorch marks from his Flame Bursts had charred several trees, and there were strange gouges in the ground where his Void Slashes had cut reality itself. The air still carried the thick, cloying smell of death—blood, burned flesh, and the early stages of decay.
He looked around with growing confusion. It was clearly early morning now, based on the angle of the sunlight filtering through the canopy, but there was no sign that anyone had discovered the massacre. No investigators, no cleanup crew, not even curious animals beyond that one disrespectful bird.
"Suspicious how no one's come looking," he mused, then shrugged. "But I guess we're pretty far from any main roads."
His first priority was obvious—he needed his belongings if he was going to survive the rest of his journey to Aethermoor Academy. Big B's saddlebags were still intact, though the poor horse's body was... well, better not to look too closely at that.
The luggage was way too heavy to carry one-handed, so Agni focused on the essentials: his map, some food, and a change of clothes that weren't soaked in blood and other unmentionable fluids.
Finding his severed arm took a few minutes of searching through the undergrowth. When he finally located it, the limb looked disturbingly pale and had started to stiffen. But it was still recognizably his, complete with the royal signet ring his father had given him years ago.
"Well, this is thoroughly disgusting," Agni said, picking up his own arm like it was a particularly unpleasant piece of luggage. "But maybe someone at the academy can reattach it. Magic healing has to be good for something, right?"
He made his way to a small stream that fed into the river where they'd first been attacked. The water was cold and clear, perfect for cleaning both his wound and the severed limb. The process was nauseating, but necessary—infection would be even worse than being one-armed.
After wrapping the arm in clean cloth from his spare clothes, Agni turned his attention to Big B's remains.
"You saved my life, Big B," he said softly, gathering fallen branches and dry leaves around the horse's body. "Least I can do is give you a proper send-off."
He lit the pyre with a controlled Flame Burst and watched as fire and smoke carried Big B's remains skyward, a final farewell to his loyal companion.
Agni waited until nothing remained but ashes, then used his boot to push the remains into the stream. The current carried them away downstream, toward the larger river and eventually the sea.
"Hope someone finds you and knows you were a good horse," he said to the flowing water. "You deserved better than this."
With that grim ceremony completed, Agni shouldered his reduced pack and consulted his map. According to the route his father had marked, he still had about four more days of travel ahead of him. On foot. With one arm.
"Great start to this whole 'personal growth' thing," he muttered, then set off deeper into the forest.
Two hours later, he was ready to give up entirely.
Agni collapsed against a tree trunk, breathing hard and fighting the urge to vomit. His pack, which couldn't have weighed more than ten pounds, felt like it was full of lead bricks. The wrapped-up arm he was carrying added maybe another eight or nine pounds, but it might as well have been fifty.
"This is ridiculous," he gasped, sliding down until he was sitting on the forest floor. "I can't even carry basic supplies without feeling like I'm gonna pass out."
He looked down at his severed arm, still wrapped in increasingly blood-stained cloth.
"And what was I thinking, trying to keep this thing? It's been hours since it was cut off. Even if I could get it reattached, the tissue is probably already dying."
But that got him thinking about something else—something that had been nagging at him since he'd regained consciousness.
"How did I do those spells anyway?" he wondered aloud. "I never learned Void Slash or that enhanced Atomic Pulse thing. I just... made them up on the spot."
The more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Magic wasn't supposed to work like that. You had to study spell formulas, practice the mana manipulation techniques, understand the theoretical framework behind each effect. You couldn't just invent new magic in the middle of a life-or-death fight.
Could you?
"It felt like being in a trance," he murmured, trying to recall the exact sensation. "Like everything around me turned into lines and patterns that just... made sense. Like I could see how reality was put together and figure out how to take it apart."
That was his unique perception ability, he realized. The same gift that let him see people's mana circuits and internal anatomy had somehow allowed him to understand magic at a fundamental level.
"Maybe if I meditate on it, I can figure out how it works," he decided, shifting into a cross-legged position. "Need to focus on that rush of adrenaline mixed with calm understanding..."
He closed his eyes, tried to recapture that moment of crystal-clear perception when the spells had felt as natural as breathing.
"Focus, focus..." he muttered.
Within minutes, he was fast asleep.
Heavy rain pounding against his face woke him up several hours later, as if the weather gods were personally punishing him for his laziness.
"Ugh, seriously?" Agni groaned, scrambling to his feet as cold water immediately soaked through his clothes. "Can't a guy get some peaceful meditation time?"
The forest had transformed while he slept. Dark clouds blocked out most of the sunlight, and the rain was coming down in sheets that made it almost impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. Thunder rumbled ominously overhead.
He needed shelter immediately, or he'd end up with pneumonia on top of everything else.
Agni grabbed his pack and his wrapped arm, then started running through the forest as fast as his weakened condition would allow. The rain made every surface slippery, and more than once he nearly fell face-first into the mud.
After what felt like an eternity of stumbling through the downpour, he spotted a dark opening in a rocky hillside—a cave that looked big enough to wait out the storm in.
"Finally, some luck," he panted, hurrying toward the entrance.
That's when he noticed he wasn't the only one seeking shelter from the rain.
"Is that a fucking bear?" Agni stopped dead in his tracks, staring at the massive creature just inside the cave mouth.
It was huge—easily twice his height when standing on its hind legs, with dark brown fur and claws that looked like they could tear through steel. This wasn't just any bear, either. The size and distinctive markings identified it as a Kodros Bear, one of the most dangerous predators in this region.
But what made Agni's blood run cold wasn't the bear itself—it was what the creature was doing.
A smaller shape huddled near the bear's feet, obviously a cub. And in the cub's mouth, barely visible in the dim light, was what looked suspiciously like a human hand.
Agni squinted through the rain, and his enhanced vision confirmed his suspicions. The pale fingers and distinctive brown sleeve fabric belonged to Walton, the young assassin he'd killed hours earlier.
"Well, that's... cute," he said with black humor. "Junior's first taste of human. What a precious family moment."
Apparently, his voice carried farther than he'd intended. The adult Kodros Bear's massive head swiveled toward him, small dark eyes fixing on him with predatory interest.
"Oh, shit."
The bear's claw slashed through the air where Agni's chest had been a split second before. Only his combat-sharpened reflexes saved him from being disemboweled on the spot.
"Sorry, sorry!" he shouted, already turning to run. "Didn't mean to interrupt dinner!"
The Kodros Bear roared—a sound like an avalanche mixed with a thunderstorm—and charged after him with surprising speed for something so massive.
"Fuck me!" Agni gasped, running through the forest as fast as his legs could carry him. The rain made everything treacherous, but the alternative to running was being eaten alive by a carnivorous parent protecting its cub.
He could hear the bear crashing through the undergrowth behind him, getting closer with every stride. In desperation, he spun around and tried his most reliable attack.
"Flame Burst!"
The fire magic erupted from his left hand—but the heavy rain killed it almost immediately, reducing his dramatic magical attack to a few pitiful sparks that disappeared in the downpour.
"Of course it doesn't work in the rain," he muttered. "Why would anything be easy?"
The bear's next swipe came close enough to tear through his shirt, leaving shallow claw marks across his back that burned like acid.
That's when Agni ran out of forest.
He skidded to a halt at the edge of a cliff that dropped away into darkness. Through the rain and mist, he could make out the opposite side maybe fifty feet away, with what looked like a steep but possibly survivable slope leading down into a valley.
Behind him, the Kodros Bear was approaching with predatory confidence, apparently realizing its prey had nowhere left to run.
"Well," Agni said, looking down at the drop. "This is either really stupid or really clever."
He jumped.
The fall was terrifying—a chaotic tumble through space with rain whipping at his face and rocks rushing up to meet him. He hit the slope hard, then rolled and slid down the muddy incline for what felt like miles, bouncing off trees and rocks until he finally came to rest in a heap at the bottom.
Above him, the Kodros Bear had stopped at the cliff edge, apparently deciding that chasing one skinny human wasn't worth risking a fall.
"Thank... god," Agni wheezed, checking to make sure all his remaining body parts were still attached. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken. His pack had survived the fall, and miraculously, so had his wrapped arm.
"Please, no more," he said to the universe in general. "Just... stop it. I've had enough adventure for one day."
The rain was starting to ease up, but he was still soaked to the bone and shivering. His Military Travel Rations were designed for situations exactly like this—waterproof packaging and high-calorie content that could sustain someone through extreme conditions.
"At least the food's still good," he sighed, opening one of the sealed packages. It tasted like compressed cardboard mixed with salt, but it was warm in his stomach and made him feel slightly more human.
As night fell, Agni tried to warm himself with small applications of Flame Burst to heat the air around him. But the technique was exhausting, and he was already running low on mana after the day's magical expenditures.
"I can't keep this up," he admitted to himself. "Don't want to. It's too exhausting."
That brought his attention back to his most pressing problem—his severed arm. The limb had been wrapped in cloth for hours now, and he could smell the early stages of decay even through the fabric.
"If I'm gonna reattach this thing, it has to be now," he decided. "Before it rots completely."
But how was he supposed to perform surgery on himself? He had no medical training, no proper tools, and definitely no sterile environment.
What he did have was his unique perception and an increasingly desperate understanding of his own magical abilities.
Agni unwrapped his severed arm and examined it closely. His enhanced vision could see the cellular damage that was already spreading through the tissue—blood vessels collapsing, muscle fibers breaking down, nerve endings dying.
But some of the damage was reversible, if he could somehow reestablish blood flow and nerve connections.
"Remember the sensation from when I healed my leg," he muttered, settling into a meditative position with the arm balanced across his lap. "Cellular Regeneration at the microscopic level."
He placed the severed limb against his shoulder wound and focused every bit of his concentration on the boundary between living and dead tissue. Using the finest possible control of his flame magic—Precision Flame Control, he decided to call it—he began essentially welding flesh back together.
The process was agonizing. Every nerve ending screamed as he reestablished connections, every blood vessel burned as he forced circulation to resume. It was like performing surgery on himself while fully conscious and without anesthesia.
But it worked.
Slowly, painstakingly, Agni convinced his body to accept the reattached limb. He guided individual blood cells through newly reopened vessels, coaxed nerve impulses across the gaps, even encouraged bone marrow to resume production in the reconnected bones.
It took six hours.
By the time he finished, the rain had completely stopped and dawn was breaking through the forest canopy. Agni flexed his right hand experimentally—the fingers moved, though they felt stiff and unresponsive.
"It's attached," he said with weary satisfaction. "Whether it'll actually work properly is another question, but at least I'm not one-armed anymore."
He looked at his map in the growing daylight, trying to calculate his position. The fall and detour had probably cost him at least half a day's travel, and he still had roughly two-thirds of the journey to Aethermoor Academy remaining.
"Still have to cover all that distance in the remaining days of the week," he sighed. "What a pain."
But for the first time since leaving the castle, Agni felt like maybe—just maybe—he might actually make it.