Chương 72: Chapter 71. Bran

The night always reminded Bran of his past when he had been a completely different man. The darkness stretched wide around the small fire he had created to take a little rest. He had already sent the other scouts in different directions, in pairs, to find the signs of the female stonefur bear. Till now, they have found nothing, but Bran didn't want to spend more than a night in this part of the forest. He always worked the best alone either way. Though, having no company also brought back memories.

Decades ago, before the bow felt like an extension of his arm and before the army had carved discipline into his bones, he had been nothing more than a farmer's son. A nobody from a nameless village pressed against the southern mountains of the kingdom, where the land was warm, the soil kind, and danger came quietly. His parents had worked the fields their entire lives. Honest people. Poor, but proud of it.

They had believed that if you kept your head down and paid whatever the local lord asked for, the world would leave you alone. They were wrong. When Bran turned sixteen, the world had sent bandits to their village. They came at dusk. He still remembered the sound first—the horses, the shouting, the laughter that carried too easily over screaming. He had been out in the field, too far to help but close enough to watch. His father had tried to stand in front of their home with an old rusty sword.

His mother hadn't even had a weapon. The man leading the bandits was a gruff man with a long beard and hair, styled just as a demon. He held a long sword and Bran still considered him the cruelest person he had crossed paths with. Whatever he said, the bandits obeyed him instantly. And nothing he said was kind. That man was named the Bandit King. Back then, he had simply been the one who killed Bran's parents and burned their house to ash. Bran hadn't cried. Not until much later.

He buried them alone and left the village the very next week. The village chief had died the same as his family, and he had later found out that the local lord had been the victim a week back. Knowing no help would arrive, he had done the one thing that has shaped the next decades of his life. He joined the army because he had heard a rumor—just a whisper carried through taverns—that the crown was finally tired of the bandits. That a campaign was coming. That soldiers would be sent to take care of the Bandit King.

He enlisted easily enough and finally had access to a class, but the next few months were nothing but hell. The army wasn't kind to new recruits, and even the food was only given to men who proved themselves worthy of it. The rest lived on crumbs. For the entire period of his training, Bran didn't talk about revenge. Didn't talk about his family. He just said he could work, didn't complain, and could already shoot straight with a hunting bow. The bow saved him.

At first, he was nothing more than another body in formation, another spear in a line. But he practiced at night, fingers raw, shoulders aching, until even veterans started watching him shoot. Someone noticed his patience. Someone else noticed he didn't panic when sent ahead alone. He was reassigned as a scout before his first year ended. That was where he belonged. He already knew how to move through the forest, spot tracks, and listen more than speak. And the army simply made it better.

Killing monsters gave him levels, and the gods pushed him towards being a ranger with their skills. And then the army finally decided to start the campaign to kill the Bandit King. The command was given to Count Harven—one of King's Xanders favored nobles—and he brought his sons with him, eager for glory. Three of them. Bran remembered seeing them ride in, polished armor catching the sun, banners snapping proudly.

Boys pretending to be men, but he was simply thankful that they were going to be killing the men who destroyed his family. And by fate, he had been selected as a part of it. Bran was assigned to the squad of the third son. The youngest of them all. He was selected as a scout since the man lacked one, and Bran took his job very seriously. By then, he was already reaching close to the first wall, and had a feeling that taking revenge would let him breakthrough to become someone his parents would be proud of.

Unfortunately, the gods had other plans for him. The first few weeks of that campaign were great. He tracked bandit camps, raided them alongside the whole squad and slowly made a name for himself. The Bandit King wasn't called a king for no reason. By then, he already had hundreds of bandits under him, a fault of the crown who hadn't tried to stomp his ambitions before, and Bran killed dozens of them. But no matter how many he killed, it never felt enough.

The bandits never stayed at one position, and back then, the kingdom wasn't as developed. There were large patches of forests and hills where no one lived. And the bandits took full advantage of that. Midway through the campaign, they even started to put traps and Bran fell for one of them. He had seen marks of a large bandit camp near a river, and informed the young lord about it. He had looked excited hearing that as if a child handed a sword for the first time. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. Bran knew the man was trying to prove himself to the count. He had been reckless due to that and although Bran himself hadn't said anything due to his lowly stature, he didn't feel right when the lord immediately called for an ambush. The entire squad had moved to ambush the bandits, not knowing that they were the ones being hunted. Bran looked into the fire and recalled the scene very clearly.

One second the young lord had been crouched beside him, whispering about how they would be capturing a few bandits to find the location of their king. The next, his skull had simply… opened. Bran hadn't even heard the arrow that killed him. He remembered the wet sound more than anything else. Chaos followed. Absolute, mindless chaos. The lord's knights screamed and charged without orders, fury tearing their discipline apart. Steel met steel. Arrows flew in both directions.

The ambush turned into a slaughter so fast it was impossible to tell what was going on. Bran survived by running. Not away—not really—but sideways, dropping into brush, crawling through mud and roots while arrows hissed overhead. He shot when he could, killed when he had to, and moved every time he did. He remembered pulling a wounded man with him, then losing him when a blade came down out of nowhere. He remembered tripping over bodies, slipping in blood that wasn't his.

By the time the fighting ended, only three of them were still breathing. The bandits were dead. Every last one of them. The knights had made sure of that, cutting down even those trying to flee before succumbing to their own injuries. The forest floor had been red by the time silence finally fell. But the young lord was gone. And that was all that mattered. They carried the body back. Or what was left of it.

Bran walked the entire way in silence, bow slung uselessly over his shoulder, hands shaking no matter how tightly he clenched them. He didn't speak when the survivors were faced with the count. Didn't explain. Didn't beg. He didn't need to. Count Harven's face had been enough. The rage on it made sure he didn't say anything. He listened to the report they had submitted calmly, but when it ended, his cold eyes turned towards Bran.

He had expected a sword to cut him down just then, but Count Harven was a man who believed in justice through law. And Bran was simply thrown in the cell that very night. He spent a year in it. It was a year in complete solitude. And he would only know how much time had passed when he called to meet the truthsayers. Again and again, they asked the same questions. How did you find the information? Did you not check it thoroughly? Were you working with the bandits? The truth never changed.

He replied the same thing over and over, and even accepted his fault. The truthsayers never found a lie in him. Not once. And when Count Harven realised he wouldn't be getting hanged, he sent men every night in his cell to beat him up. Not a day passed when Bran didn't feel blood on his tongue. But eventually, the torture also ended. He only found out why later. As it turned out, Count Harven died fighting the Bandit King.

Both of them ended each other in the battle, and with him dead, his first son that succeeded him wasn't really fond of his younger brother, and simply ignored Bran. He spent six more months in the cell before he eventually walked out and got reinstated into the army. But his name was already treated as poison. No one wanted to go against a count's house even if they didn't care about him. So, he was moved from one squad to another, sent to campaigns that got near to killing him. Years passed like that. He fought.

He scouted. He survived campaigns others didn't. His level climbed steadily—twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty—but something inside him never crossed over. The moment never came. The breakthrough he had once felt so close during the Bandit King campaign—the pressure, the edge, the sense that one more step would change everything—had vanished. Like the gods had turned their faces away. Bran often wondered if it had died with the young lord.

Sometimes, late at night, he caught himself thinking about that boy in polished armor. Wondering what kind of man he would have become if the arrow hadn't found him. If he would have grown wiser. Less eager to prove himself. If Bran might have become his captain someday instead of his scapegoat. Those thoughts never led anywhere good. But another pair of thoughts always accompany them these days. About Rayne, the former noble bastard. For some reason, he reminded Bran of the young lord.

Reckless and competent with a lot of potential. And also hiding secrets he knew might get him in trouble. He briefly wondered what would become of him. The fire popped softly, pulling Bran back into the present. The forest around him was quiet. He realised he had rested enough, took a sip from his waterskin and rose slowly, joints creaking. He stamped out the embers with practiced care. The night air was cool against his skin. Bran took a deep breath before he moved towards the directions he hadn't looked into yet.

The stonefur bears ruled over a large territory, and that meant more work for him. Fortunately, it didn't seem like the other monsters were yet aware that most of the family was dead. But they would know soon, and hence, he had to hurry. For an hour and two, Bran found nothing. Marks of other monsters, but not one of a stonefur bear. A few times, he wrongly followed a false trail and simply walked in circles, but finally, his senses screamed that he was in the right direction. [Mark of the Hunter] activated.

A skill that had taken ten years of practice to earn, and one that made him more aware of his surroundings when he was close to a trail. It didn't take long to spot it. At first, he thought it was nothing—just another scatter of rocks near a fallen log. But something about the shape made him pause. He crouched, fingers brushing over the surface. He turned one piece over, then another. The texture wasn't natural. It wasn't part of the forest floor, either.

It had fractured cleanly, like armor broken apart and left behind. Bran immediately recognised it as stonefur bear plating. He had seen enough of it today. He immediately moved around the area after that. There were no footprints, so he could only rely on his instincts. He guessed that the bear was absent for at least a few days, and maybe that's why both the father and son's sleep cycles had been ruined. They might have been waiting for her to come back. Or hoping she would.

Finally, after half an hour of searching, he found a slope that led downward. Having searched everywhere else, he followed it. The roots were thicker around here and his instincts sharpened the more he walked, and then he saw something that made him realise where the female stonefur bear might have gone. A dungeon. The entrance yawned open between two leaning slabs of rock, half-hidden by hanging vines and shadows. Cold air drifted out of the vortex that swirled in front of him.

Briefly, he recalled the bug dungeon that had never become his death and shuddered. If not for Rayne and the others, he might have not survived. Bran didn't get close, simply watching over it before deciding that his search had ended.

"I wonder what Captain Edran will say to this," he muttered, turning around. He might have found an answer for his superiors, but he still needed to look for the other scouts before making their way back to the camp. Fortunately, finding them wouldn't take so long.

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