High above him, something large made the branches sway.
Valor’s voice didn’t come from any one direction. It slid between the trees, split and rejoined in the air as if the wind itself was speaking.
“The forest is the one place where hearing trumps vision. Stop hunting the loudest thing,” Valor said, low and calm. “The forest will drown you in its choir of sounds if you let it. Pick one note and hold it.”
Gage kept his pace measured and patient.
He’d spent three months learning what stillness cost and what it bought.
He’d read briefings in Braille until the dots felt like his first language. Zorion trained him how to slow his breathing until his body turned to silence, and he’d learned to enter a room without announcing himself, becoming so still others forgot he was there.
He practiced listening past chaos and isolating a single breath in a crowded room. The Browns trained him how to disarm instead of kill— studying anatomy and which joints, bones, and pressure points to break that would eliminate a threat without ending their life.
In his unique studies of mastering patience, discipline, and restraint, he became something more efficient… and far more dangerous.
Adrian and his personal combat team had ingrained habits in him until his body reacted before his mind could second-guess his decision.
Tonight, his brothers weren’t giving him simulated targets. The Greens were showing him their world.
A screech owl called once, twice, before tiny claws skittered up bark. Frogs whistled and crickets chirped alongside the heavier croaking of bullfrogs deep in the brush, and Gage was able to decipher and isolate one sound.
The threat.
He let his environment speak. He didn’t argue or negotiate with it. Instead, he listened and obeyed.
To his right, a tree took the weight of something solid, then released it.
Valor spoke again from someplace closer. “The forest doesn’t care about your courage, Gage. It’s waiting on your respect and submission.”
Gage angled his head, measuring the echoes of height and distance, letting the smallest nuances tell him where things were.
He absorbed the way the insects’ chirps lowered under a canopy and flared above another, the way the wind struck an open clearing, changing its pitch, and how a heavy body made a branch complain with a low groan.
A second presence moved above him. Lighter and faster than Valor. A different kind of quiet.
Zorion.
Gage didn’t speed up. He didn’t try to chase him. Zorion had a signature. All he had to do was wait for it.
It came as a whisper that wasn’t wind, a retraction and release of taut string before the faintest hiss of steel shot through the air.
Gage jerked left and dipped his shoulder as an arrow tore past where his throat had been and sank into bark with a wet thud.
“Good. You heard the lie. Nature can’t make artificial sounds.”
Valor taught like the master he was, trained by the great Grandmasters of Imuma Aga Khan.
His tone held the authority of a warrior shaped by discipline, knowledge, and a code of honor that Gage may never understand.
Another hissing sound pierced the wind from a different angle.
He felt the air pressure change a heartbeat before impact.
He planted his cane to anchor his balance and rolled forward as the arrow cut past his shoulder.
Heck yeah!
“Don’t celebrate,” Valor said. “You win a couple of clean dodges, and you think you’ve won the fight. But the forest despises arrogance…and so does the field.”
