CHAPTER 10 — THE PATH HE CHOOSES

(Long — continues directly from Chapter 9)

I said the word out loud because silence did nothing to make it false.

"Hell."

The stone parapet hummed under my palms. The eastern horizon still smoked, a dark smear against the blue, but the worst of the roar had passed. Hunters poured back through the gate in ragged lines—some limped, some carried, and a few did not come back at all. Men and women moved like ghosts, their armor scarred with fire and shale. I had watched my father become one of them and learned the cost of the life we now kept under this fragile roof.

Raylen's absence had filled the yard and the house and the narrow hours like a weight. He had gone and returned with less of himself. He did not hide it; he wore it as if to teach me the price in plain sight.

I still had the taste of that battlefield in my mouth—iron and cinder and the sharp after-smell of a mana seal. When I closed my eyes the retainer's carapace and the line of hunters' shields burned into the back of my eyelids.

"Liam," Arin's voice was at my shoulder, quiet as breath. "Come down. You need to eat."

I looked at her. She was a tangle of worry and fierce brightness, hair knotted back so she looked eleven and twenty at once. Ren shadowed her feet, clinging to a broken toy and smiling at nothing. Elara watched us all from the kitchen doorway, hands folded as if steadying herself to keep steady all of us.

I stood because it felt wrong not to. Movement dispersed the ache in small, manageable ways. Raylen had left instructions before he vanished into the mob of hunters—small tasks, but specific. "You will train. You will read. You will learn the map of Rayfall." He had given his orders quietly, like a man guiding a young sword, no room for theatrics.

We ate and the normalness of soup and bread tried to stitch the holes—faltering, but honest. When the food was finished and the dishes cleared, Raylen returned, a stiff figure wrapped with bandages and calm. He moved slower than before. He moved like someone who kept a list.

He sat across from me, and we didn't need to speak. His glance told me the same thing his words had in the yard: we start now.

THE WORLD HANDS YOU CHOICES

Raylen called it "scaffolding." Elara—my mother—called it "a map of the self." Arin called it the "list of things that keep you breathing." But the world had rules, and one of them was that when your mana stirred you could take one of three main roads.

I had read—every night, with the lamp low—through the codices Elara set before me. The system took shape in my head like a city:

Path of Fortification — the route to strengthen the body and base mana core. Hunters who followed this training made themselves bricks: more life, longer endurance, higher mana capacity. This is the path to survive the long hunts and withstand a sovereign's crush. The technique work here emphasized body conditioning, defense arts, core densification, and rune warding.

Path of Projection — the route to specialize in manifesting mana outwardly: focused spells, elemental projection, artillery-style magic. This path trained a person to be a weapon in the world—a firebrand, an archer of lightning, a cannon in human form. Control, containment, and spectacle lived here.

Path of Artification — the rare, quiet path of those who pushed mana into objects: forging blades that keep heat in their edge, inscribing runes that sing, creating artifacts that last beyond one life. Artificers were half-smith, half-mage—keepers of the gear hunters used to stand against beasts.

"You don't have to pick one for life," Elara told me once, smiling as she stroked a page I had bent. "But most choose the road that fits their body and their soul."

I had grown up thinking my body was an excuse. In the slums a body was survival, not a promise. Raylen wanted me to take the scaffold and build on it. He had the same bluntness at the table as in the training yard: "Paths do not make you less or more. They make you focused. You pick what your life must need."

My life's needs were not grand: safety first, then knowledge, then the right to stand beside my family. Yet beneath the practical list there burned a small dream that surprised me: I wanted a body that was not weak, and a mind that could hold both the spear and the incantation. I wanted to be a hunter who could use a weapon and not need someone else to look after my hands.

"You want to be a mage who fights," Arin said once, grinning like she'd discovered a secret map. "A proper weird hybrid."

Elara's hands stilled on the hem of a cloth. "It is possible," she said. "There are many paths that cross. A strengthened body feeds projection. Artificers need discipline. We will help you train, Liam."

And I would choose—because the choice itself felt like standing on the parapet and not flinching.

SWIFT STYL: WHAT MAKES RAYLEN'S STYLE DANGEROUS

If the world had a vocabulary for killing elegantly, Raylen spoke it fluently.

He called his method Swift Styl—a name he used rarely, like a prayer. For him it was not just a set of moves but an architecture of attention. Over the next week he explained it in pieces, and I wrote them down in small, careful script.

Core principles of Swift Styl:

Economy of Motion. Every movement must either gain you a position, remove you from harm, or place steel where it will wound. Waste becomes vulnerability.

Wind Integration. Raylen's blade is not merely metal; it is air shaped into a sliver. Wind Blade Art compresses air, forms invisible "razors" that slice at a distance, and extends the reach of the sword. The wind carries intention; the blade simply channels it.

Gale Footwork. Footwork is not running; it is displacement. The feet create micro-vortices that shift weight so quickly the eye cannot follow you. In practice this looks like teleportation—only faster, and rooted in balance.

Resonant Cut. A higher technique. The Swift Styl forms are organized into "phrases" and then "songs." The Resonant Cut uses breath timing and an undercurrent of wind to make a slash that vibrates through rune-scarred chitin. It is the strike hunters use to find a sovereign's weak seam.

Echo Strike. Raylen's advanced twist: a sound-based wind technique where a cut is paired with a sharp tonal burst—an air note that interferes with a beast's sensory field. The sound does not merely harm; it disorients. That's his higher form: sound-grounded wind. It makes beasts hesitate, retainer cores twitch, and fellow hunters have the space to act.

He taught me the forms broken into three levels:

Basic forms (1–3): stance, short cuts, push, and pull using wind. Important for survival.

Intermediate phrases (4–7): combination slashes that combine Gale Footwork and compressed wind. Used to create openings and protect others.

Advanced sequences (8–10): Resonant Cut and Echo Strike. Require core control, breath discipline, and a steadied heart. These are A-rank level techniques and define what an elite could do in a battle.

Raylen showed me how his missing arm had forced innovation: prosthetic bracers that channel wind pistons; a repositioning of weight that made his remaining hand faster. That loss became his teacher. The Echo Strike came from years of refining a way to fight with what remained rather than what was lost.

When he demonstrated, the air sang. A cut sent a visible line of dust spinning away like an erased sentence. He used his sound-based attack in the battle that took his arm: a low, furious chord made whole flank beasts stumble—and cost him dearly when a grafted barb snapped into his side.

"But that sound," he said, voice heavy with memory, "keeps hunters alive. It makes the world hesitate long enough to step out of the death line."

Those things mattered to me. The world could be faced in many shapes. My body could be one of them.

ELARA'S ICE: THE ART OF STABILITY

Elara's training was different: stillness first, cold logic second. She moved like frost—silent, inevitable, cutting not by speed but by the hard geometry of ice. Her power centered on crystalline formation: she shaped ice into blades, lattices, and shields that held longer than water and sharper than glass.

Her teaching focused on two things for me:

Body durability: physical conditioning that let the cold anchor you; breath control that made heat manageable; joint work that resisted tearing.

Complementary combat: how ice could slow a beast's motion, how a shard at the right place could give a sword-thrust a chance. Her techniques were perfect for a warrior who wanted to space control, letting wind do the motion and ice the halt.

She taught me small calluses of magic: a thin ice band around the wrist that chilled the skin but increased mana retention; a layered shard that could hold a compressed wind-blade for a second longer. Together, wind and ice meant speed and hold—push and lock.

"Don't try to be flame without containment," Elara said when I asked about projecting spells. "Fire without ice is a wildfire. Fire with ice is a tempered blade."

I liked the logic. It fit the place inside me that wanted to use a weapon and hold an incantation.

CHOOSING: A BOY WHO WANTED BOTH

So I chose, in a moment of clear, stupid bravery.

I would build a body to hold both the blade and the weave. I would take Fortification as the base—because you cannot throw projection well from a body that collapses—and I would walk on the edge of Projection, learning to toss out fire in measured shards backed by the ice Elara taught me. Over time I would study Artification—the ways to make a blade that remembered how I liked to move—so that my tools could be made for my hands.

"Three paths intertwined," I told Raylen one night, and he placed a rough hand on my shoulder.

"Then we will train those things first," he said. "One step at a time."

GROUND-LEVEL DANGERS & DUNGEON HIERARCHY (SHORT AND USEFUL)

Before the training became a rhythm, Raylen walked me through what I needed to know about threats.

Ground-level hazard: petty bandits, mana-fumes near broken wards, mutated vermin that attack markets. These are the small things that can trip a hunter who is unprepared. They teach caution.

Retainers: mid-tier threats (often tied to S-rank beasts). Fast, vicious, adaptive. Dangerous in packs.

S-rank Beasts: intelligent predators with unique cores; they can alter terrain and command tendrils of corruption.

Sovereigns: near-mythic cores that reshape regions; they are the "big" disasters and are rare.

Dungeons are graded by environment and mana density: shallow pocket dells (low risk), middling ruins (B–C rank), and true dungeons that require hunter parties and raid planning (A–S rank). Monster cores inside dungeons are the currency of hunter work. Clearing a dungeon gives materials and mana-cores, but the gate can shift to a violent rupture if left unchecked.

Beast Marks are the dangerous and coveted bonding marks: only formed through S-rank beast bonds or core fragments. They start weak then grow. I would not have one yet; it remained a rumor and a possibility—never a plan.

Raylen let me hold his old mission logs that night. I read the margins where names were inked over and the cost of a wrong turn written down for anyone to see.

TIMELINE AND THE FIRST STEP

This is where the calendar found me. I am thirteen years and eleven months old. We agreed on the baseline: I would not go to the Hunter Academy until I was fifteen. There would be an eleven-month focus: study, fortify, and internalize the Swift Styl forms; the family would prepare me and watch how my dual affinity settled. After eleven months would come a three-month final push—sponsorship arrangements, official tests, and the written exams for the academy entrance.

If I failed to keep up, they warned, I could be delayed or find a different route. Sometimes late bloomers entered via guild sponsorship; sometimes not. The world offered leeway but not mercy.

I took the first steps that night—breathing until the wind-shape of a blade gathered at my fingertips and the ice around my wrist held for one proud second. Raylen nodded once, and Elara smiled like a patient sun.

They had given me a home and a sword. They had given me a scaffold and a path. I had chosen where to walk.

And when I slept that night, the dreams were quieter. The distant red eyes at the treeline still watched—some things do not forget—but inside me a small, steady fire took hold: not the fever of revenge, but the tempered hunger of a boy who had been given back a life and would train to keep it.

You said:okay add core powers next, hunter power , different core beasts, and something about monsters and demons .