The jungle was no longer theirs.
Week one was a war of confusion. The Kumate did not understand what was happening. They sent out war parties—groups of twenty, loud and angry—beating the bushes, hunting for the intruder.
They found nothing but silence and corpses.
Argentus did not fight twenty men at once. He was patient. He watched them from the canopy, counting their numbers, memorizing their patterns. He waited for the heat of the midday sun to sap their strength, for their tongues to grow thick with thirst.
He waited for the straggler who stopped to tie his sandal. He waited for the scout who wandered five feet off the trail to relieve himself.
Those men simply ceased to exist.
No screams. No struggle. Just the wet sound of a blade finding flesh, and then silence.
By the second week, the confusion turned to paranoia.
The war parties stopped chanting. They walked back-to-back, their identical bulbous noses twitching frantically at every shadow. They flinched at the sound of falling nuts. They shot arrows at rustling bushes, wasting ammunition on phantoms.
Argentus escalated.
He stopped using simple bamboo stakes. He began to weaponize the island itself, turning their home into a labyrinth of death.
He found a hive of Bullet Wasps—insects the size of a thumb with stingers that delivered agony like molten iron injected into the veins. He didn't burn the nest. Instead, he spent an entire night carefully cutting the branch, lowering it via vine until it hung directly above the morning patrol route.
When the sun rose and the patrol passed beneath, Argentus severed the vine.
The screams that morning echoed across the entire island. Men rolled on the ground, clawing at their own faces as the wasps burrowed into their flesh. When the survivors finally stumbled back to the village—swollen, blinded, and weeping—they spread a fear far more potent than any arrow could deliver.
The demon in the jungle didn't just kill. It tortured.
By the third week, the drums—once a thunderous roar that shook the leaves and announced the tribe's dominance—began to lose their rhythm.
There were simply fewer hands to beat them.
Argentus sat in his cave, methodically stripping the bark off a fresh spear shaft. The wall behind him was covered in scratches—a ledger of the dead, carved with obsessive precision.
Forty-two.
He had changed. The baby fat of childhood had been burned away completely, replaced by wire-taut muscle that shifted beneath his skin like cables under tension. His ribs pressed against his torso, each one visible. He was covered in infected scratches and insect bites that he had stopped bothering to treat. He hadn't slept for more than two hours at a time in twenty days.
But his eyes were clear. Sharp. Focused.
He began to raid their minds.
At night, he would creep to the edge of the village perimeter. He didn't kill the sentries—not yet. Instead, he used his growing speed to dart from torch to torch, snuffing them out with wet rags, plunging sections of the wall into sudden, suffocating darkness.
He let them scream into the void. He let them waste their arrows shooting at shadows. He let the lack of sleep rot their minds, turning warriors into trembling, paranoid wrecks.
They began to fight amongst themselves. Argentus watched from the ridge one afternoon as two tribesmen brawled over a scrap of dried fish, their tempers frayed to breaking by the invisible demon haunting their woods. One stabbed the other with a bone knife. The tribe did nothing to stop it.
"Good," Argentus whispered, his voice a rasp of disuse. "Starve. Fear. Weaken."
By week four, the patrols stopped entirely.
The Kumate surrendered the jungle. They retreated into their village, fortifying the perimeter with sharpened wooden spikes—ironically, copying the very traps Argentus had used to slaughter them.
They huddled around the great fire, too terrified to venture beyond the walls even for water. The green wall of trees had become a prison, and they were the inmates.
The cave was silent, save for the rhythmic drip of condensation hitting stone.
Argentus sat in the center of the chamber, legs crossed, breathing shallow and controlled. His eyes were closed, but he wasn't sleeping.
For the last month, he had lived with a knife pressed to his throat. Every snapping twig could herald a spear. Every shadow could conceal an ambush. The constant, crushing paranoia had stripped his nerves raw, peeling away the layers of his consciousness until only a raw, vibrating sensor remained.
He wasn't meditating. He was expanding.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, the cave wasn't black. It was a fuzzy, static-filled map of sensation. He could feel the spider weaving its web in the far corner, each strand vibrating with purpose. He could feel the bat hanging five meters above him, its heartbeat slow and steady in sleep. He could feel the tension in the sapling he had bent back near the entrance, ready to spring.
He opened his silver eyes. They didn't look tired anymore. They looked terrifyingly sharp, like polished mirrors reflecting a predator's focus.
He stood up slowly, his joints popping from hours of stillness.
In front of him, stretched across the cave floor, was a tripwire he had rigged himself earlier that day. It was connected to a bundle of three crude bows, their arrows aimed directly at the center of the room where he had been sitting. A suicide test.
He didn't hesitate. He reached out with his knife and severed the wire.
SNAP.
The tension released with a violent twang.
Three bamboo arrows hissed through the air, traveling at lethal speed toward his unprotected back.
Argentus didn't turn around. He didn't flinch.
In his mind's eye, the trajectory of each arrow appeared as bright red lines cutting through the darkness. He felt the displacement of air before the projectiles even reached him, the faint pressure against his skin like the breath of a predator.
He tilted his head two inches to the left. An arrow buzzed past his ear, close enough to ruffle his hair. He shifted his torso slightly to the right. Two arrows passed through the space where his ribs had been a millisecond before. He lifted his left shoulder with minimal effort. The final arrow sailed harmlessly beneath his arm.
Whizz. Whizz. Whizz.
All three arrows slammed into the rock wall in front of him with violent cracks, their shafts vibrating from the impact.
Argentus stood perfectly still, staring at the embedded arrows. A thin smile touched his lips—not one of joy, but of grim satisfaction.
"So this is it," he whispered, clenching and unclenching his hand, feeling the new awareness flowing through him like a sixth sense. "The power the old man talked about."
Observation Haki. Kenbunshoku.
He closed his eyes again, focusing on the sensation. The bubble of awareness expanded around him like ripples on a pond. Five meters... eight meters... ten meters.
Within that invisible circle, nothing could hide. He could feel the heartbeat of a lizard buried under a rock outside the cave. He could predict the moment a drop of water would fall from a stalactite. He could sense the flow of wind through the tunnel entrance before it touched his skin.
"I can see them now," Argentus murmured, turning his gaze toward the cave entrance and the jungle beyond.
He looked in the direction of the village. He couldn't physically see it through the dense trees, but he knew that once he got within range, the walls, the huts, and the terrified cannibals cowering inside would light up in his mind like fireflies trapped in a jar.
He walked to the corner and picked up his spear—the iron shaft scarred and dented from weeks of brutal use, but still serviceable.
"Time to end this," he said to the empty cave.
He stepped out into the humid jungle air. He didn't need the cover of darkness anymore. He didn't need the element of surprise.
He walked straight toward the village, his footsteps deliberate and unhurried.
The rain had stopped hours ago, leaving the jungle dripping and heavy with humidity. A thin mist clung to the ground, swirling around Argentus's boots as he emerged from the treeline.
He stood in the center of the muddy clearing that led to the village gates, making no attempt to hide. The fortifications the Kumate had erected were crude but functional—sharpened logs lashed together with thick vines, forming a wall three meters high and reinforced with diagonal support beams.
Torches flickered atop the barricade, casting dancing shadows across the frightened faces of the sentries who spotted him.
Argentus didn't crouch. He didn't draw a weapon.
He simply stepped into the ring of torchlight and stopped, his silver hair catching the firelight like a beacon.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind and the distant crash of waves.
Then—
"He's here!" one sentry shrieked, his voice cracking with terror. "The Demon is here!"
Inside the village, the huddled mass of survivors erupted into chaos. Footsteps pounded on packed earth. A dozen archers scrambled to the wall, their hands shaking so badly they dropped arrows as they tried to nock them.
"Kill it!" someone screamed from inside. "Kill it now before it gets in!"
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.
A ragged volley of twenty arrows arced through the night sky, raining down on the lone boy standing in the mud.
Argentus didn't move his feet.
He simply closed his eyes.
In the dark void of his mind, the world exploded into clarity. The air rippled with information. He saw the trajectory of each arrow as a bright red line cutting through space, their paths as clear to him as if they were painted on canvas.
One aimed at his left shoulder. Two at his chest. One at his knee. Three more wildly off-target, fired by trembling hands.
He opened his eyes.
Time seemed to slow.
He tilted his head two inches to the right. An arrow buzzed past his ear with a whisper, so close it severed a single strand of silver hair that drifted down to the mud. He twisted his torso with minimal effort.
Two arrows passed through the space where his heart had been a millisecond before, continuing harmlessly into the darkness behind him. He lifted his left leg slightly. An arrow struck the mud where his foot had stood, embedding itself with a wet thunk.
To the Kumate watching from the walls, it looked like sorcery. The boy stood in a storm of death, swaying like a reed in the wind, every movement impossibly precise. Not a single arrow touched him.
"Impossible..." a sentry whispered, his bow slipping from nerveless fingers and clattering to the ground.
Argentus stopped swaying.
He began to walk forward, his pace unhurried and deliberate.
More arrows came, launched in panicked desperation. Spears were hurled from the walls. Argentus didn't break stride. He slapped projectiles out of the air with his bare hands, the impacts barely slowing him. He sidestepped others with bored efficiency, his Observation Haki painting a perfect map of every threat.
His awareness pulsed outward—a ten-meter sphere of absolute perception.
He knew when they were reloading before their hands touched new arrows. He knew which sentry was about to throw his spear before the man's muscles even began to contract.
He reached the heavy wooden gate.
It was reinforced with ironwood beams, thick enough to stop a charging boar or a battering ram. Iron bands held the planks together. It was the village's final defense, built to withstand a siege.
Argentus didn't look for a latch or a weak point.
He planted his feet in the mud, shoulder-width apart, and pulled his right arm back. His muscles—dense and corded from months of brutal training—coiled like steel cables ready to snap. He didn't know how to coat his fist in Armament Haki yet, but he didn't need to.
(END OF CHAPTER)
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