Chapter 334

"The Centaurs," Rudra said grimly, "were worse."

Iris stopped pretending to check her ammo and simply turned her head.

. . .

The Majestic Centaurs.

Their tribe lived on a high plateau in the neighbouring Haken Kingdom, ten days' march past the Ogre valley.

Rudra and Iris spotted them long before reaching the camp. A herd of silhouettes was tearing across the horizon at an absurd, physics-defying speed. Manes streaming in the wind. Coats of chestnut, grey, and gold flashing under the sun.

By the time the two of them reached the edge of the plateau, the whole herd was already waiting for them.

There was only one word to describe them: beautiful.

From the waist up, they were tall, broad-shouldered men and women with sharp, sculpted features and intricately braided hair. From the waist down, they were thoroughbred warhorses built purely for speed—long-legged and muscular, their coats brushed until they practically glowed. Even their idle standing posture looked like they had practised it in front of a mirror for hours.

Stepping out in front of the herd was the fastest and most magnificent of them all. And he made damn sure everyone knew it.

Chief Charon had a coat of deep, glossy black, split by a single white blaze down his chest. His dark mane fell past his shoulders in one flawless, shampoo-commercial wave. He looked down at Rudra from his towering height, his eyes shining with a very familiar, very dangerous sparkle.

It was the exact same look the Ogres had given him. And the Orcs before them.

'Ah Fuck. Here we go again.'

"The Muse of the Goddess," Charon spoke, his rich voice echoing across the plains. "Stories of your grace have reached our ears. We welcome you to our herd, and we hope you will grant us the honour of following you."

Rudra blinked. "Really? Just like that?"

"Of course," Charon said warmly. "Right after you compete with us."

'I fuckin knew it.'

"In two trials," Charon continued, raising two elegant fingers. "The two things that matter most in this world, second only to beauty. Archery. And speed."

Thump! Thump!

The herd stamped its hooves in approval.

Behind Rudra, Iris let out a tiny, almost imperceptible sound.

He knew exactly why.

. . .

Two weeks ago, by a quiet riverside camp.

Rudra had been watching Iris clean her guns. Finally, he couldn't hold back his curiosity anymore and asked the question that had been itching at his brain since the day he crafted them.

"Can I try shooting one?"

Iris stared at him for a long moment. Then she handed a pistol over.

"Here."

Rudra was excited. In real life, the closest thing to a gun he had ever touched was a cheap plastic water pistol at his cousin's birthday party. Now he was holding a Unique-rated weapon, in a game where his Dexterity was among the highest on the continent.

'How hard could it possibly be?'

He aimed at a tree twenty metres away. A very thick, very wide tree.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The first bullet splashed into the river.

The second tore up the mud on the riverbank.

The third struck a boulder behind the tree and ricocheted straight back at their faces—Iris calmly tilted her head two inches to the left, letting the bullet whistle past her ear.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth shots flew somewhere into heaven, never to be seen again.

The big tree didn't even have a scratch on it.

Rudra lowered the gun and stared at the gun in disbelief.

"How does this make any sense?" he asked in shock. "I have the highest Dexterity among all the players. My control should be among the best. I can cook steaks to the perfect sear."

"Hand Control is not aim," Iris said. She took the gun back, checked it carefully for damage, and holstered it. Then, after a pause, she added, "When I first picked up a gun, I was six."

"...What?"

"I could have hit that tree by then."

. . .

Back on the plateau.

Standing in front of a hundred gorgeous horse-people with an archery contest staring him in the face and the trauma of that river burned into his soul, Rudra did the only thing a Duke could do.

He shamelessly bluffed.

He straightened his posture, put on his most noble, aristocratic expression, and looked Charon dead in the eye.

"Archery is a noble art," Rudra declared with heavy dignity. "Far too noble for the Muse to casually sully with his own hands. Among my people, the Muse does not draw the bow himself. When the Muse must strike from afar..."

He took a dramatic step to the side and gestured grandly toward the woman standing next to him.

"...his trusted companion becomes his arrow."

Iris turned her head very, very slowly to stare at him.

Rudra kept his gaze locked firmly on Charon. He refused to look at her. He knew for a fact that if he made eye contact with her right now, his poker face would completely shatter.

The herd murmured amongst themselves. Charon frowned slightly, mulling over the foreign custom. Then, he looked properly at Iris for the first time, and something in his face shifted.

"Very well. Then let the Muse's arrow fly!" Charon declared.

Iris bored holes into the side of Rudra's head for one more agonisingly long second.

Then, she stepped forward.

Chak-!

One of her pistols smoothly transformed in her grip. The barrel elongated and the stock unfolded with a crisp mechanical click, turning into a sleek, long-barrelled rifle. She raised the weapon to her shoulder and didn't even bother pausing to aim for more than 1 second.

The Centaurs' target stood at the far edge of the plateau, so distant that any normal human would have had to squint to even see that it was present.

Taaang—!

The bullseye of the distant target simply vanished, exploding into splinters.

Dead silence fell over the plateau.

Iris lowered the rifle, folded it back into a pistol, and holstered it as though nothing had happened and then turned back.

The Centaurs stared at her with wide, trembling eyes.

"...Beautiful," a centaur in the front row whispered.

"That form," another breathed out, clutching his chest. "Did you see her shooting posture?"

Charon pressed one hand over his heart, deeply moved. "The Muse's arrow has spoken! There is nothing left to prove in the realm of archery. Now, we race!"

As the herd thundered off to prepare, Iris walked past Rudra without slowing down.

"You owe me cake," she whispered.

"I will bake you a mountain of it," Rudra replied with complete sincerity which prompted a small smile from her.

The rules of the race were simple. Sprint straight across the plateau, round a flag planted on a distant hill, and run back to the starting line.

No obstacles. No tricks. Just speed.

Twenty elite Centaurs lined up at the mark, stamping their hooves and tossing their glossy manes. Rudra stood wedged between them, the only participant with just two legs.

Charon raised an arm. The entire herd went dead still.

He dropped his arm.

DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

The ground exploded under a hundred hooves. Twenty Centaurs surged forward as one, a wall of muscle and streaming hair, and Rudra ran with them.

He was fast. His Agility was over four thousand, already higher than any player who had poured every single stat point into nothing but Agility since level 1. In a straight footrace, there wasn't a human on the continent who could see his dust.

The problem was, Centaurs weren't human. Even if their Agility Stat was lower than his, their Agility Stat to Movement Speed Co-efficient was much higher than humans, so despite having lower agility stat that him, their overall speed was higher than him.

For the first hundred meters, he kept pace with the pack. By two hundred, the leaders were pulling ahead. Their strides grew longer and smoother the further they ran, their speed climbing and climbing, their bodies stretching out low across the grass. Charon was already a black streak at the very front, his mane flying behind him like a banner.

Rudra rounded the flag on the far hill in the sixth place.

He was losing. Badly.

A dappled-grey Centaur galloping beside him glanced back over his shoulder. Worse than mockery, the horse-man's eyes were filled with disappointment and pity.

'Alright,' Rudra thought, his eye twitching. 'Alright. I really didn't want to use this.'

The finish line was a straight run back across the plateau. No turns. No trees. No rocks. Just open grass.

If there was ever a safe place to use this insane skill, it was right here.

[The skill 'Godspeed' has been activated!]

[2,500 Health and 5,000 Mana will be consumed every second.]

ZZZZZT!

The world went white.

Violent arcs of blue and white lightning erupted from Rudra's body. Every single nerve ending in his body lit up simultaneously.

The Centaurs around him slowed to a crawl, the grass stopped swaying, the falling dust hung in the air, and in the same instant his own body was moving far faster than his mind could follow.

He'd learned the hard way, against the Devil Monarch Clone Lucious, what happened when he tried to control his body at this speed. So he didn't even try. He locked on to the finish line, stopped thinking, and let his body run.

A straight line. All he had to do was go in a straight line.

Kwa-gagagak!

He blew past the disappointed grey Centaur before the creature's eyelid could even finish blinking.

He went past another one in a single step. Then another. He was no longer a man running; he was a bolt of white-hot lightning carving a scorched, smoking trench straight across the plateau.

At the very front, Charon heard the deafening thunder behind him. He turned his head just in time to witness a blinding blur of white lightning rocket past him—so close that the sheer wind blew his immaculate black mane straight up into a frizzy mohawk.

Rudra crossed the finish line in first place.

And then, he kept going.

He couldn't stop.

His body was moving too fast for him to control it to stop, and by the time it he got back control, he'd overshot the line by thirty meters.

Right into the path of a massive granite boulder.

CRASH!

He slammed into the rock face-first at the speed of sound.

Again.

[You have received 31,200 damage.]

[Godspeed has been deactivated.]

Rudra slid slowly down the front of the boulder and landed on his back in the grass, smoking slightly, little sparks still crackling in his hair and blood flowing from his broken nose.

Four seconds. He had left the skill active for a measly four seconds. It had cost him 10,000 Health, 20,000 Mana, and his dignity against a rock.

Staring up at the spinning blue sky, he gave a mental thumbs-up.

'Worth it. Absolutely worth it.'

One by one, the Centaurs finally trotted across the finish line.

Nobody cheered. Nobody made a sound. The entire herd gathered around him in a wide circle. They stared in utter disbelief at the long, blackened scorch mark burned across their pristine plateau, at the deeply spider-webbed boulder, and finally at the smoking man lying flat on his back in the dirt with a bloodied nose.

Charon arrived last. He walked up slowly, his frizzy mane still sticking up at odd angles, and stared down at Rudra for a very long time.

Then, slowly, the proud chief folded his front legs and knelt in the grass.

"Lightning..." Charon whispered, his voice trembling with awe. "You became lightning itself."

"That caused me to hit that freaking rock," Rudra groaned from the ground.

"Even the way you struck the boulder was magnificent!"

"Ooooh..." Around them, the entire herd let out a long, deeply reverent sigh.

For the rest of the day, Charon sulked.

He sulked while declaring to the entire herd, in a long and very grand speech, that the Majestic Centaurs would follow the Muse to the ends of the earth. He sulked while describing Rudra's "glorious stride of lightning" in loving detail for nearly ten minutes. He sulked while asking, three separate times, when they could race again.

He sulked so thoroughly and so handsomely that by the time the sun went down, Rudra honestly couldn't tell if he was being worshipped or bullied.

That night, after summoning Winfred as usual, Rudra brought out the big guns again: the Beauty Meat. The Centaurs ate the glazed roast while maintaining impeccable posture, and as their coats began to gleam like polished silk in the firelight, their affinity directly hitting 100.

[Species 'Centaur' has been satisfied.]

[Quest 'The Path of the Cooking Saint': Species satisfied, 7/10.]

The next morning, Rudra stood before the packed herd and raised his hand, just as he had done in the Ogre valley.

[Mumud's Mass Teleport has been activated.]

A massive magic circle of blue light rose up, enveloping the hundreds of Centaurs. Even as the spatial magic swallowed him whole, Charon was still loudly demanding a rematch.

. . .

Back in the foggy Gloamhorn Wilds.

"I crashed face-first into a rock," Rudra told the fog, his voice hollow. "For that race. And to heal my broken nose status abnormality I even had to use [Saint's Breath] skill."

Iris didn't reply.

Then, very quietly, a sound escaped her lips.

Pfft.

It was a laugh. Just a single, tiny breath of a laugh—there and gone so fast that Rudra almost thought he hallucinated it.

He snapped his head around and stared at her suspiciously.

Iris was intently inspecting her pistol magazine again, her expression as cold and blank as a sheet of ice.

"I did not laugh," she stated preemptively.

Rudra just looked at her suspiciously.

But before Rudra could ask anything, he heard a noise.