"We are terribly sorry, Ara…"
The rest of the words dissolved.
The selection committee chairman's mouth kept moving behind the long oak table, his expression arranged into something that was supposed to look apologetic, but Ara Thein had seen that face four times now.
She knew what lived behind it. Not regret. Not even discomfort. Just the practiced performance of a man who had already been paid.
She sat straight in her chair and did not cry as the last three times.
The sound of her dream shattering was quieter than she expected. Not a crash of glass on a hard floor. More like glass settling into sand, grain by grain, too fine to catch with your hands.
Four trials. Four times she had outscored everyone in the hall. Four times she had stood in front of these same men in these same chairs and watched them shuffle papers and avoid her eyes before announcing someone else.
Someone whose father had a telephone number that mattered. Someone whose family name opened doors that skill alone could never reach.
She was Thein Myat's daughter. The great Thein Myat, Olympic gold medalist, a man whose face still hung in the national sports hall in a frame too large to ignore.
She had grown up in the shadow of that frame, had learned to love what it represented rather than resent it. Her father had never asked her to carry his legacy.
But she had picked it up anyway, at age seven, with small fingers that could barely grip a recurve bow, and she had never once put it down.
It did not matter.
None of it mattered to these men.
She stood, thanked them in a voice that gave nothing away, and walked out.
*
* *
The training complex was empty at this hour. Late afternoon light came through the high windows in long, flat columns, cutting across the rubber floor in pale strips.
Ara changed without thinking, pulled her hair back without looking in the mirror, and walked to lane seven because lane seven had always been hers, even when nothing else was.
She nocked the first arrow.
She did not think about the committee, nor about the chairman's rehearsed apology, or the name they had announced instead of hers.
'An archer's mind should only occupy the arrow when she nocked the arrow.'
Her father's words sounded in her brain. A drop of water slipped through the corner of her eyes. If he was here, would things be different from now? Would the chairman still dare to cheat her slot?
'Clear your mind, Ara…'
'Yes…'
She thought about her anchor point, her elbow angle, the precise moment of stillness before release that her father had spent three years teaching her to find.
That moment belonged to no one else. No committee could vote on it. No envelope passed under a table could take it.
She released. The arrow buried itself in the center of the target.
She nocked another.
"Four times."
The voice came from the lane to her left. She did not turn.
"Four times and you still show up to practice." A short laugh, hollow and mean. "That's either dedication or something closer to delusion. I genuinely cannot decide which."
Mark Dessa. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of confidence that had nothing underneath it. He had joined the national training program two years ago on a recommendation from a federation official whose son he happened to be friends with.
His scores were average on a good day. He had never once outranked her on the range, and he had never once forgiven her for it.
He had also, eight months ago, asked her to dinner in a way that made it clear dinner was not the actual offer. She had declined with more patience than he deserved. He had been a different kind of unpleasant ever since.
Ara never bothered to reply. Wasting air on a man who thinks with his dick was below her standard.
He stepped into her peripheral vision, arms crossed, wearing a smile that did not reach his eyes. "They're not going to pick you, Ara. They were never going to pick you. Some people don't understand when a door is closed."
She released the arrow and nocked another one. Four more releases in ten seconds. Long enough to let him see that his words had landed nowhere important.
"You.."
She nocked the next arrow. Drew. Found the stillness.
And the world went out.
Not darkness. Darkness implied an absence of light. This was different. This was an absence of everything. Sound, sensation, the weight of the bow in her hand, all of it simply stopped, as if existence itself had been interrupted mid-sentence.
'What is this?'
Her mind scrambled for a foothold. A power cut? No, this was not visual. She could not feel the floor beneath her feet. She could not feel her feet.
'Am I dying?'
The thought arrived with a cold clarity that was almost worse than panic. Had something happened to her heart? Her brain? Was this a stroke? She was twenty-one years old, she was in peak physical condition, this could not be a stroke.
Then it ended.
Light returned, sudden and total, and with it came something else. Something that had not been there before. A translucent blue screen hovered at the center of her vision, soft and luminous, filled with text she could not focus on.
She blinked. The screen remained. She raised her hand toward it and her fingers passed through empty air.
She could hear her own breathing. Fast. Too fast.
And beneath it, something else.
A low sound. Wet and guttural, like an animal working through a problem it did not have the mind to solve. It was coming from her left.
She turned.
Mark stood four meters away. He was facing the far wall, shoulders risen, head dropped forward. His hands hung at his sides with the fingers spread wide and trembling.
The veins along his forearms had turned a deep blue-black, visible even from here, branching upward toward his neck like frost spreading across glass. The skin around them had gone the color of old paper.
Ara gasped.
His head moved.
Rotating slowly, mechanically, past the point a human neck was designed to reach, until his face swung around toward her with his body still pointed the other way.
His eyes were white. The teeth came apart.
Then his torso wrenched to follow, the rest of him snapping into alignment with a sound that sent chills to her heart, and he ran at her.
"May be we can talk like civilised humans. Oh, better not."
She did not think.
Her feet were already set. Her draw hand was already at anchor. The bow was already up, the arrow already nocked from three minutes ago, when she had been thinking about nothing more significant than form and breathing and the geometry of a perfect release.
The arrow left the string.
It crossed four meters of air in less than the time it took her heart to beat once.
It entered between his eyebrows and did not come out the other side.
Mark Dessa dropped.
The blue screen, which she still could not read, erupted with new light. A chiming sound rang through her skull from no direction at all, and then the text sharpened, suddenly and completely, as if the System had decided she had earned the right to see it clearly.
[You have killed a Mutant (Unranked)]
[Congratulations. First single-shot mutant kill recorded.]
[Title awarded: One Shot Queen]
[One Shot Queen: Every single-shot kill grants 10x EXP and may yield bonus rewards.]
"It's considered as self defence, right?.."
She stood over the body with the bow still raised and the string still vibrating.
From somewhere outside the training complex, beyond the walls and the high windows and the long columns of afternoon light, something screamed. Then something else answered it. Then a hundred things answered that.