Chapter 11.
I woke up the way I always did now — as though from an internal alarm clock, collected and ready to move. My body knew the schedule on its own. I washed my face with icy tap water — the shower had been torture at first, but now I'd almost made peace with it. I stretched right there in the room, feeling my muscles respond eagerly to familiar movements. Yesterday Sly had put me through some kind of intensified program as though he were administering a final exam, and so the hunger that had been my constant companion these months — a side effect of active muscle growth — was sharper this morning. Time for breakfast.
I went to the storeroom door where the rations were kept and found it locked. Naturally, I didn't have a key, and the only person who could have done that was Sly.
So I went to the dining room. He was already sitting at the table, drinking his black tea and reading some battered hardcover. I quietly brewed my own cup in my own mug, sat down across from him, and just watched him for a moment. He didn't look up from the book, but I knew — he was perfectly aware of my gaze.
"The storeroom door is locked," I finally said, breaking the silence.
Sly unhurriedly took a sip of tea, set down the mug, and finally looked up at me. His eyes were calm, as always.
"Supplies are out," he said in a level tone.
I almost choked on my tea.
"What do you mean out? There was plenty yesterday — I saw it myself!"
"Yesterday I locked the door," he clarified, without blinking. "A new stage starts today. You want to eat — go into the forest and catch something. You have the skills. Time to put them to use."
Everything turned over inside me. Was this lunatic serious? Another one of his hellish training exercises? I mentally cursed him out in exhaustive detail, imagining exactly where he could put his lock and his methods. What I actually said was just to swallow and push out:
"Understood. Will you help?" I asked, without much hope.
"The first couple of times we'll go together. I'll show you what to look for. After that — on your own. And yes, the storeroom is locked and sealed." His voice hardened. "And if you try to break in… you will have very, very serious problems. Understood?"
I swallowed thickly and nodded. I believed him. Sly had never bluffed.
As my weapon, he handed me a brand-new hunting knife. The cold steel lay unfamiliarly heavy and genuinely serious in my hand.
We went out to the surface. The air was fresh and cool. Sly moved deeper into the forest, and I trailed behind him, gripping the knife handle.
"A bird or small animal," he said over his shoulder. "You catch it, kill it, dress it, cook it. All yourself."
A bow and arrow would have been more effective for birds, but I didn't know how to make one, let alone shoot it. So I found a straight branch and used the knife to sharpen one end into a primitive spear. Then I mixed mud with water and applied it to my face and exposed skin, trying to mask the human smell and blend into the surroundings. Everything as Sly had taught me — Sly, who had already dissolved into the forest. I knew he was somewhere nearby, watching, but I saw him only rarely — in brief glimpses through gaps between the trees. He could have not shown himself at all.
The hunt turned out to be a test of patience rather than anything else. But I did manage to track a young boar. It was rooting peacefully in the earth, eating something. I approached it slowly and carefully over a long stretch of time, using everything I'd learned. "Critical Eye" helped me catch the smallest changes in its movements, "Motion Analyzer" predicted where it would step next. I positioned myself, drew back the spear — and threw.
The throw caught it on the back, glanced off bone, and left only a bleeding gash. The boar squealed and bolted, disappearing into the undergrowth. I cursed silently, pulled the spear out of the ground, and trudged on, feeling like a complete failure.
Luck came to me only several hours later. I spotted a large forest bird scratching around at the base of a tree. This time I took my aim more carefully. I threw the spear sharply and precisely. Hit. The bird cried out and fluttered upward — but didn't fly away; it crashed into the grass.
I sprinted over to it. It was still alive. Its small body trembled in my hands, and its tiny bead eyes seemed to be staring at me with a mute, uncomprehending horror. And that was when I froze. I had never killed anything living before. Flies, mosquitoes — yes. But this was different.
Sly emerged from the undergrowth and stood a couple of steps away from me.
"Stop dragging it out," he said quietly, but clearly enough. "End its suffering and get us food."
I swallowed the knot in my throat. My hand moved on its own toward the knife.
*It's just food,* I began telling myself silently. *Like chicken from a grocery store. Just a protein source. There's nothing frightening about this. It's a necessity.*
I raised the knife to cut off the bird's head, but immediately felt Sly's iron grip on my wrist.
"Don't cut," his voice was just as quiet, but it allowed no argument. "Wring its neck. It's cleaner, faster, and more merciful for it. Cutting always means a bloody mess."
I swallowed again, looking at the bird still trembling in my hands. Hell. All right. I readjusted my grip to secure the body and head together. My hands were shaking. The bird seemed to sense the threat coming from me and began struggling even harder. I closed my eyes for a second, gathered myself, and then in one clean, decisive movement, twisted its neck sharply. A quiet but distinct crack. The trembling stopped immediately and the body went limp.
Everything went cold inside me. I stood looking at the motionless bundle of feathers in my hands.
"Good," Sly said briefly, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Now dress it."
Under his supervision and instructions, I plucked and gutted the bird. My fingers became sticky with blood and viscera. The smell was sharp and unpleasant. Then we made a small, nearly smokeless fire and roasted the catch on an improvised spit. The meat was tough and had a particular wild taste, but for my empty stomach it was a feast. We ate in silence. I tried not to think about the fact that half an hour ago this creature had been alive.
Over the next six days I hunted birds. Each time went faster and with more certainty. That first internal breaking point didn't return. The Traits did their work, smoothing the emotions and helping me accept the new reality faster. But on the seventh day, when I came back with a couple of unremarkable carcasses and was already imagining their taste, Sly met me at the bunker entrance.
"Enough of this nonsense," he said bluntly. "You're spending half the day chasing scraps, and you're not getting proper training in. Birds don't count anymore. I need large game. Enough meat to last. A boar, a deer, whatever. No kill, no food."
What a brutal son of a bitch. I almost said exactly what I thought, but held it back. There was no point arguing. I just nodded, dropped the carcasses at his feet, and walked into the forest, feeling my empty stomach begin to gnaw at me unpleasantly.
I spent the rest of the day making several sturdy spears with tips hardened in fire, and setting primitive snares and traps at locations where I'd noticed signs of larger animals. The seventh day came and went for nothing. I checked the traps, tracked what I could find, but caught nothing. By evening I was back at the bunker — tired, frustrated, and hungry. Sly was sitting at the table having dinner, apparently eating the very birds I'd caught earlier in the day. He didn't look my way once. I drank water and went to sleep with my stomach growling. God, the humiliation of it, and the hunger.
But the next day smiled on me. Or rather, it wasn't luck — it was stubbornness. Into one of the snares I'd set along an animal trail walked the same boar I'd wounded a week ago. Small as it was, it looked sufficiently fierce. The wound on its back had begun to close, but the fur around it was matted and dirty. It thrashed violently, trying to wrench itself free of the wire loop, and occasionally grunting and squealing.
I stopped ten paces away, gripping my strongest spear in sweaty palms. My heart was hammering. This was nothing like the bird. This was a relatively strong and angry animal that could have hurt me if it were free. And it needed to be killed. With my own hands.
I looked around for Sly, waiting for guidance — some kind of involvement. There was no one. He was watching, I knew that. But this time he had no intention of helping. This was my particular kind of exam.
And yes, I understood perfectly well what this whole circus of Sly's was actually for. Not to teach me how to hunt. But to get me used to the sight of blood, to the act of taking a life — so that when the time came to kill a person, I wouldn't freeze in place the way I had with those two agents.
And the infuriating thing was — he was right. Killing a person was a qualitatively different order of thing. But dispatching an animal, even one like this — that was more like a preparatory class. Brutal, but effective.
*To hell with it,* I swore to myself.
I took a slow, deep breath and made the trembling in my hands go still. I approached the boar from the side, staying out of range of its tusks. I raised the spear. The animal lunged toward me, its small eyes blazing with fury and fear.
I drove the spear into its neck, just below the head. The strike was strong and accurate. The boar let out a wild screech, dark blood pouring from the wound. It screamed and thrashed harder in the snare for a time, then jerked a few more times and went still. And I heard a notification sound from my system, which I didn't pay attention to in the moment.
Standing over the carcass, I just breathed for several minutes, trying to push back down the nausea that had risen in my throat.
At that moment Sly appeared. Silently, without praise of any kind. He took out his knife and began showing me how to properly skin and dress such game. I began to mirror his movements mechanically. I cut the hide, separated meat from bone, removed the viscera. It was a long, dirty, deeply unpleasant process. But I did it.
When it was done, we carried the carcass to a stream. I stripped off my blood-soaked clothes and climbed into the ice-cold water. The water washed off the blood and sweat, but could not wash away the heavy, pressing feeling inside. I scrubbed at myself with sand and clay, trying to clean not just the surface.
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Back in the bunker, Sly got to work on the meat and the cooking. I poured myself some tea, sat down on a chair, and stared at a fixed point on the wall.
The thoughts were not simple. Yes, it had been brutal. Yes, revolting. But Sly had given me the chance to cross that line in relatively controlled conditions. He could have handled it differently. He could have put me in front of some captured HYDRA agent and told me to put a knife in them. And I… I wasn't certain I could have done it. But this way… this way I had learned to manage it. That feeling. That revulsion. I hadn't become a monster from it. I had simply… begun to adapt. And in some perverse sense I was grateful to him for it. This lesson, for all its brutality, was probably the gentlest version of itself that my situation allowed. And one of the most important. Now I knew I could. If it came to that. And today, I had also earned 1 WP for my first real kill.
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⁂
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Two months passed. Now every few days I went out to hunt, and it had become as much a part of the routine as brushing my teeth or the morning workout. That first heavy threshold separating me from the act of killing had gradually worn away. I felt no pleasure from it — God, no — it was simply necessity, obtaining food. I had stopped being afraid of blood and viscera. More than that, it was specifically through hunting animals that I had been able to genuinely understand anatomy — and how to strike with a knife correctly. If I had hit that first boar precisely in the heart or cut the aorta, it would have died almost instantly, without suffering. And so now I tried to hit cleanly: one sharp thrust under the right shoulder blade — and done. Fast, efficient, and, if such a word could be applied to killing, merciful.
Sly, seeing my progress, resumed full-intensity sparring. And the sessions hadn't gotten easier — on the contrary, they had become more nuanced and more refined. We often sparred with knives now, using wooden blades, but they were no less painful for that. My Traits were running at full power: I could see his movements now, analyze his strikes, and even began to parry his attacks occasionally. My body, while still lagging slightly, was starting to respond in time. I was still losing — but they were no longer routs. They were hard, grinding training fights.
And naturally, I kept close watch on my system. After that first boar, I never received Will Points for hunting again. The system had apparently judged the action mastered and no longer a source of genuine overcoming. That only confirmed my theory: to grow, you had to constantly raise the bar — find new challenges, each one more painful and more dangerous than the last.
And yes — over this time I had been fully confirmed in the rightness of choosing "Critical Eye" and "Motion Analyzer." They had given me an incredible boost in my training speed. But my theory was confirmed too: the growth of the Perception characteristic had essentially stopped. Where before I could see the bar slowly creeping forward from constant environmental awareness, it had now stalled at five. Any gains, if they came at all, were negligible — barely detectable. The conclusion was obvious: Traits that enhanced a characteristic simultaneously slowed its natural growth. Which meant that going into the Physical Superiority section was worth doing only once the characteristics had been pushed as far as possible naturally — ideally to ten. Then the enhancement would carry its greatest weight.
This observation gave rise to another thought. If I had access to "Accelerated Recovery" right now, I might be able to level Strength and Agility faster through more intensive training. But Endurance would likely hit the same wall as Perception — it would run up against the Trait. So I set my primary goal as accumulating WP and leveling the base stats through ordinary brutal training.
And the effort was producing results. Just last evening, during an exhausting cross-country run in armor over the rough ground around the bunker, a new number finally lit up in the system:
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*[Agility: 7]*
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And as an unexpected bonus — the system rewarded me with another Will Point for the breakthrough, apparently judging this qualitative leap significant enough to merit one. So after all this time in the bunker, my status looked considerably more promising:
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*[Status.*
*Characteristics:*
*Strength: 5*
*Agility: 7*
*Endurance: 6*
*Perception: 5*
*Will Points: 4*
*Traits:*
*"Nerves of Steel" — Level 1.*
*"Structural Thinking" — Level 1.*
*"Iron Discipline" — Level 2.*
*"Critical Eye" — Level 1.*
*"Motion Analyzer" — Level 1.]*
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Four Will Points. They kept tempting me to spend them, but I held firm in my decision to save them. To wait for a genuine, life-threatening situation where I could put them to maximum use.
Agility seven. I felt it in every cell. My movements had become more fluid, more precise. My reactions were faster, my balance sharper. This was real, tangible progress. Progress I had earned through stubborn, grinding work.
And so this morning, stepping out of the bunker, I ran through a few warm-up movements and enjoyed the lightness in my body despite yesterday's exhaustion. Today's hunt was promising. I'd recently tracked the signs of a small deer and hoped to bring it down before midday. My faithful Glock sat in the drop-leg holster, and the hunting knife was in my hand. I had taken a few steps toward the treeline when a voice called out behind me.
"Hey, Hard."
I turned. Sly was standing not far from the bunker entrance, and in his hands were his pistol and his combat knife. My heart picked up speed. He never came outside with weapons at the ready. The only thought that came to me was that our shelter had been tracked down.
I reacted instantly — gripped the knife harder and took several quick steps toward him to close the distance and get out of any potential line of fire.
"What happened? Where?" I asked rapidly, my eyes sweeping the treeline, searching for movement, a glint, any anomaly.
Sly said nothing. Instead he raised his pistol smoothly and leveled it at me. I went completely still, not understanding. My brain refused to accept what it was seeing. Was this some new training exercise? A test of alertness?
And then he fired. Two sharp, nearly overlapping cracks.