Viktor turned the sling over in his hands. The leather was old and worn, but the cords were still sturdy. Cheap, simple thing, but in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, this was a weapon that could kill.

  “Have you used one before?” asked Lucian.

  “Nope.”

  He crouched and dug through the snow, fingers numbing as he fished out a rounded pebble. Smooth, slightly damp, about the size of a walnut. He set it into the pouch of the sling, took a breath, and stood up.

  He knew how this was supposed to work. In theory, at least. He just had to whirl it in a nice little arc to build momentum, then release at the right moment.

  Yes. Spin, spin, spin, release. Easy enough.

  He eyed his target, a dead tree twenty paces away, and started swinging. The cords hissed through the cold air above his head. One, two, three... and he let go.

  The pebble launched out of the pouch with a satisfying snap, flew toward the tree in a beautiful trajectory, before... vanishing somewhere into the frozen white beyond.

  Well, throwing a rock was easy. The hard part was actually hitting something.

  “Nice shot, Quinn,” Lloyd said with a grin. “That tree is probably shitting itself from the might of your throw.”

  “Shut up,” Viktor said with a snort.

  He handed off the sling to the other contestant in this stupid game, Lucian, who looked warily at the primitive weapon, not sure what he should do with it.

  “Can someone remind me what the hell we’re doing out here?” Viktor asked. “Why are we terrorizing dead trees with rocks?”

  Lloyd shrugged. “Your friend Lucian here is having a crisis about his career path, isn’t he? He looked like he had the weight of the world resting on his shoulders. So I’m offering a way for him to let off a little steam. And what better way than throwing rocks at stuff?”

  Ah yes, the one-eyed brutes’ favorite pastime. Viktor had already been acquainted with a human-gremlin, and now he knew a human-cyclops. Wonderful. Fishing in freezing weather suddenly seemed healthy by comparison. What a day. He had met one lunatic after another, and each somehow made the last look disturbingly sane.

  “I’m not sure that unleashing anger is the right way to handle emotional conflict,” said Lucian.

  “Oh come now. It’s just a tree. Can you really call yourself an adventurer if you can’t even target a tree?”

  “Did you miss the part where he doesn’t know if he wants to be an adventurer?” Viktor said. “That’s literally the damn crisis you’re trying to solve by flinging rocks at plants.”

  Lloyd swatted off his objection with a dismissive hand.

  “Lucian, you said you’ve been sitting by the river for weeks, fishing or meditating or whatever. You spend several hours a day, but you’re still as confused as ever. So why not try a different approach? Instead of looking for silence and stillness, now do the opposite. Embrace the chaos. Give in to the fire. Unleash the beast within, Lucian.”

  Viktor had no idea what he was talking about. Then again, there was no point in questioning the logic of a madman. At the very least, the guy didn’t suggest taking part in a tavern brawl.

  “Alright,” Lucian said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll give it a try.”

  He picked up a stone of his own, then copied Viktor’s earlier motion. The sling whistled through the air, and the pebble smacked against the trunk of the tree with a dull thunk.

  “Nice!” Lloyd said, clapping his hands. “Pretty solid for your first shot.”

  Lucian let out the breath he had been holding through a smile.

  “Thanks!”

  “Feel better now?”

  “A bit, yes. But I’m not sure this is going to solve my actual problem.”

  “Well, from now on, whenever you run into gnolls in the dungeon, just imagine they’re trees.”

  “Err...”

  Like hell that’s going to work!

  It turned out that Lucian’s party had stumbled into a pack of gnolls in his dungeon. And when the moment came, the three kids froze like frightened rabbits. Too scared, too confused, or both. Either way, they couldn’t lift a finger, so Noi’ri was forced to fight alone, in a four-on-one battle. The gnoll emerged victorious, killing every last one of his foes, though he suffered severe injuries in the process.

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  Yet, it was not the flesh that bore the deepest scars.

  Lucian, Cedric, and Fiora. Three idealistic youths raised in Beryn, a shining little city where humans and gnolls lived side by side. For their entire lives, gnolls had been friends and neighbors. But in his dungeon, they came to know gnolls as monsters. “Kill or be killed” wasn’t just a phrase anymore. It was real, and it was ugly. Thus, after the encounter, the three kids were no longer the same, and they weren’t quite sure if they wanted to be adventurers anymore.

  “What are you waiting for, Quinn?” Lloyd said after taking a swig from his flask. “Your turn.”

  Taking the sling back, Viktor loaded another stone, spun it overhead, and let it fly. The pebble launched straight up, disappearing into the clouds in the pale sky.

  Lloyd grinned. “Very impressive. I think you just murdered a crow on the other side of the town.”

  Ignoring the man, Viktor turned to Lucian.

  “I get that you grew up seeing gnolls as people. But people kill people all the time. War is a thing, you know?” he said with a shrug. “Also... I don’t know exactly what kind of place Beryn is, but I’d bet it’s just like any other place. There are good people there, sure, but also thieves and murderers. Am I correct?”

  “You’re right, but...”

  “Hearing about something, Quinn, isn’t the same as watching it happen right in front of you,” Lloyd said. “You have that know-it-all attitude only because you’re standing somewhere safe and talking about things that didn’t happen to you. You don’t know what it’s like when someone’s trying to kill you, and the only way out is to kill them first.”

  Well, about that...

  He had killed a bandit not long ago and hadn’t lost any sleep over it. And that kill was not even necessary. The poor bastard just happened to rob the wrong person at the wrong time.

  But, to be fair, he wasn’t the thirteen-year-old boy everyone assumed he was. Remembering back when he was as young as Lucian, he could see why the boy felt that way. His first kill was indeed messy, and he did feel terrible afterward. As time passed, however, the trauma began to dull. The thing about killing was that the more one did it, the more they got used to it.

  “Speaking of someone trying to kill you,” Viktor said, “didn’t that already happen? When Alycia and her friend ambushed you and Noi’ri in the street? What were you thinking back then? Did the thought of killing them ever cross your mind?”

  Lucian scratched the back of his head.

  “I... don’t know. I mean... I was furious at the time. I didn’t really think clearly. I’m not sure what I might’ve done in the heat of the moment...”

  “What happened?” asked Lloyd.

  “Well,” Lucian replied, “there was a party from Arstenia—”

  He stopped mid-sentence, blinking, as if a sudden realization had just dawned on him. He slowly turned toward Lloyd, brow furrowed.

  “You’re... an Arstenian, right?”

  “I am,” the man said nonchalantly.

  Oh.

  And they had just spent the past ten minutes talking about gnolls, war, and people killing people.

  Wonderful.

  Lucian shifted uncomfortably. Then, he did what any sensible man would do when caught in such an awkward situation. He grabbed the sling from Viktor’s hand and hurled another stone at the dead tree.

  Thunk.

  It struck the trunk. Of a different tree.

  The boy let out a breath. “What do you think about Beryn?” he asked after a pause. “About Berynians?”

  Lloyd shrugged. “Well, yes, we did have a war, but that was a long time ago. Personally, I don’t care. Neither do a lot of folks I know. Some nobles are still bitter about it, though. The great humiliation, the black mark on our history, the stain on our honor, they say. But trust me, most people have better things to do than track whose grandpa stabbed whose great uncle.”

  Lucian didn’t say anything. He just handed the sling back to Viktor.

  He made his shot, and he missed again. Damn it. At least this time the drunk didn’t throw his stupid grin at him. Instead, he lifted his flask and gulped down a mouthful.

  “And gnolls?” Lucian asked. “What do you think about gnolls?”

  “Not much, really. In fact, I saw more of them after I left Arstenia than I ever did back home.”

  Lucian frowned. “How so? Gnolls are slaves in Arstenia, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they’re slaves. But they’re also soldiers. And not the kind of soldiers who patrol the streets or stand guard in front of buildings, but the ones you unleash to tear out the throats of your worst enemies. So no, the average civilian in Arstenia almost never sees a gnoll in their everyday life.”

  “So what do people think about it? Keeping gnolls as slaves, I mean.”

  “Depends who you ask. Some support it. Some oppose it. Most just ignore it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  In other words, the way Manfred and his entourage had behaved wasn’t exactly typical of most Arstenians. The man must have been one of those bitter nobles Lloyd had mentioned, and the women probably just did whatever they thought would please him the most.

  “How about you then?” Lloyd asked. “What do you think about Arstenians?”

  Lucian didn’t answer straight away. He took up the sling again and loosed another stone. It clipped the tree and stripped off a bit of bark.

  “As long as you’re not hostile to me, my friends, or my people,” the boy said at last, “I don’t really care where you’re from.”

  Lloyd chuckled. “Good. Means we can be friends, right?”

  “Maybe,” Lucian said with a shrug.

  Lloyd held out his flask. “Want some?”

  “I’ll pass.” Lucian gave an awkward laugh, shaking his head. “Anyway, why is it just Quinn and me playing this game? The game you suggested, no less. Shouldn’t you participate as well?”

  Lloyd’s expression instantly shifted into one of punchable smugness.

  “It’d be a bit unfair if I joined in. Don’t want to humiliate the beginners.”

  The words were irritating, sure, but annoyingly enough, they were probably true. The man had once told Viktor that he hunted rabbits with that sling, so he should be pretty good with it.

  Lucian frowned. “Humiliate me, then.”

  Lloyd crouched, hand burrowing into the snow, and he didn’t come up with a single stone, but a handful of pebbles.

  What the hell is he trying to do?

  Lloyd loaded the first stone into the pouch and gave the sling a short whirl, barely a full rotation, before snapping his wrist. Before it even found its mark, he caught the pouch mid-swing, loaded the next one, and fired again—then again, again, and again. The man and his sling never stopped moving, and effortlessly, he loosed every last of his pebbles in rapid succession.

  What was even more remarkable than the speed of his shots was the fact that every single projectile struck true, while he was aiming at the branches instead of the trunk, no less. One by one, brittle limbs cracked and fell, littering the snow beneath.

  If there was anything being humiliated here, it was the tree. The man had completely stripped that skeletal frame of whatever dignity it might have had left.

  Lucian stared, his jaw dropping halfway to his knees.

  Viktor snorted. “What a showoff.”