Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 24: Chapter 24 — On His Own

Three weeks passed after the boundary expedition before Arlen felt ready to take on something solo again — not out of any lingering fear, but because the guild’s quest board had been generous with lower-risk work in the meantime, and he’d found himself, without quite planning it, saving toward a specific goal.

He’d priced out a proper hunting knife at Torv’s shop, one better suited to field-dressing game than his general-purpose blade, and a lightweight bedroll that would pack down smaller than his current one for overnight trips. Both purchases could wait. What couldn’t wait, he’d decided, was simply getting back out there on his own terms, testing what he’d absorbed from watching Yorin and Kaelis and the rest without the safety net of an experienced party around him.

The quest he chose was modest by design: a two-day gathering assignment for a rare moss used in dye-making, found only in a shaded ravine a half-day’s walk into the outer forest, remote enough to require an overnight camp but well within terrain he’d already grown comfortable navigating. Reward: 12 silver, plus whatever game he could reasonably bring back for his own use, since the posting farmer had mentioned in passing that the outer boar population near the ravine had grown thick enough to be considered a minor nuisance.

”Take a shot at one if the opportunity’s clean,” Mina told him, processing the assignment. ”Boars aren’t dangerous to a prepared adventurer, and the guild’s not tracking a formal bounty on them right now, but the meat’s good eating and nobody’ll object if you bring one back.”

Arlen set out at first light, pack considerably lighter than it had been for the boundary expedition, moving at his own pace for the first time in weeks without needing to match anyone else’s rhythm. There was something quietly satisfying in that — not better than traveling with Reya’s party, exactly, but different, a return to the particular self-reliance he’d spent eight years building before he ever registered at the guild.

He reached the ravine by early afternoon, located the moss without much difficulty — pale gray-green, clinging to the shadowed underside of rock outcroppings exactly as the guide had described — and spent a few unhurried hours harvesting a generous supply, more than the quest strictly required, the old habit of maximizing every trip still fully intact.

He set up camp well before dusk, in a small clearing a short distance from the ravine’s edge, close enough to a stream that fresh water wasn’t a concern, positioned with the same careful attention to sightlines and defensible ground that Torv had drilled into him weeks earlier. He built his fire, arranged his gear, and settled in to wait for evening with the particular contentment of a job going exactly according to plan.

The boar found him, rather than the other way around.

He heard it before he saw it — a low, snuffling grunt somewhere in the brush beyond his camp, followed by the crack of a branch underfoot that was considerably less careful than anything a predator stalking prey would manage. Arlen went still, one hand drifting to his sword, and watched a heavyset shape emerge from the treeline a short distance off: a Rank 1 forest boar, exactly as the guide had described, dark bristled hide and modest curved tusks, more interested in rooting through the undergrowth for food than in the human sitting quietly by a fire nearby.

He had a choice, in that moment, that he turned over with the same careful deliberation he applied to most decisions now. He could let it pass — it hadn’t noticed him, wasn’t hunting him, posed no immediate threat if left alone. Or he could take the opportunity Mina had all but handed him, a clean shot at practical, low-risk game that would feed him well and put something worthwhile in his pack for the walk home.

He thought of Bram’s old advice, turned it over, and decided the risk was reasonable enough to take.

He moved slowly, circling wide to put himself between the boar and its likely retreat path, sword drawn but held low, exactly the way Torv had taught him to approach rather than charge. The boar noticed him only when he was already close, snorting in alarm and wheeling to face him rather than flee, tusks lowered in clumsy warning.

It charged.

Arlen sidestepped rather than met it head-on, the same instinct that had saved him from the jackal’s leap months earlier — don’t meet force with force, let the bigger, faster thing carry its own momentum past you — letting the boar barrel by before he brought his sword down across its flank in a clean, decisive strike.It squealed, staggered, and turned to charge again — slower this time, wounded — and Arlen finished it with a second strike before it could close the distance, the whole engagement lasting less than a minute from start to end.

He stood over the fallen animal afterward, breathing hard but steady, none of the trembling aftermath that had followed his fight with the jackals. A cleaner kill. A calmer mind. Proof, quiet and undeniable, of exactly how far he’d come since Miller’s Bend.

He field-dressed it carefully that evening by firelight, using techniques he’d read about in the guild library and half-guessed at through practical trial, setting aside the hide and a generous portion of meat for the walk home, and keeping a smaller portion back for his own dinner that night — more meat than he’d eaten in a single sitting in longer than he could easily remember.

He built up the fire properly, spitted a generous cut of the boar meat over it, and settled in to wait while it cooked, the smell rich and wild and entirely unlike anything the guild tavern’s stew had ever managed to produce. He was hungry in a way that felt earned rather than desperate, for the first time in a life that had known both kinds of hunger far too intimately.

When the meat was finally ready, he ate slowly, deliberately, savoring it the way he’d promised himself he would savor things, all those years ago in a different life, in a different world entirely — and had no way of knowing, as the first proper mouthful settled warm in his stomach, that something inside him had already, quietly, begun to change.