Chapter 11: Precision and Perfection

After the other pirate squad left, Wade emerged from around the corner.  

He positioned himself in the two men’s blind spot, gripping the longbow with his left hand while drawing an arrow from the quiver on his back with his right.  

Nocking the arrow and drawing the bowstring flowed seamlessly into a single motion.  

It wasn’t an illusion – he truly had mastered this longbow.  

Back in the wooden hut when he first drew the bow, he’d felt an instinctive connection, as if the wooden arrow was simply an extension of his own arm.  

He wasn’t shooting by intuition alone. When he aimed, he knew with absolute certainty the arrow would strike exactly where he intended.  

During his human life, Wade had briefly studied archery as a hobby, but only at the most basic level.  

Back then, handling a bow always felt awkward and unnatural.  

His archery instructor had told him that even a talented archer needed at least ten years of training to reliably defeat enemies in combat.  

Wade certainly didn’t have a decade of archery experience – his opportunities to use a bow had been pitifully few. At best, he’d known how to loose an arrow.  

Yet now, he’d somehow become a master archer.  

After killing eight pirates, Wade realized his joints and movements had become far more fluid than during his time wandering the wastelands.  

That rusty, creaking stiffness had completely vanished.  

This transformation hadn’t been sudden – he’d gradually grown more adept at controlling his fleshless body.  

The first day crawling from the earth, he’d moved like an old man with rheumatism, barely able to walk steadily.  

But with each skull he cracked open in battle, each soul fire absorbed from his skeletal brethren, the cracks and wear on his bones steadily repaired.  

His motions grew increasingly smooth – raising a foot or lifting an arm no longer felt delayed or jerky.  

By the time he’d dug his hillside burrow, his movements felt indistinguishable from a living young man’s.  

No – judging by his current experience, he’d become something beyond human.  

Never before had he felt such perfect control over every single bone.  

After smashing his sixty-fourth skull and absorbing his sixty-fourth soul fire, after mending every last fracture in his frame, he’d crossed some invisible threshold into a new realm.  

It was like the moment when, after days of practice and countless falls, a rider suddenly understands how to balance a two-wheeled bicycle – that instant when skill becomes instinct.  

Now he could pedal freely, feeling the wind, seeing new vistas, knowing he’d never forget this ability.  

Wade now understood how remarkable a skeleton’s existence truly was.  

No living human could bend their right knee forward at a ninety-degree angle – that would require snapping the joint like a broken branch, held together only by shredded flesh.  

But skeletal Wade could twist his limbs into any unnatural configuration.  

He could even detach his arm and swap it with his foot, with both functioning perfectly.  

Undead skeletons operated by completely different rules.  

A living man might lack the flexibility for splits, but a skeleton faced no such limitations.  

At this moment, Wade felt he could do anything he imagined.  

Splits? Backflips? Even rotating his skull 360 degrees? All possible.  

With focused control, he could command every bone precisely.  

Meaning if he understood the mechanics of nocking, drawing, and releasing, with sufficient concentration, he became an infallible marksman.  

His bones moved with mechanical precision, each piece perfectly aligned.  

Wherever his gaze fell lay within his killing range.  

When he knew this shot would pierce a pirate’s eye, his pale finger bones released the string.  

The wooden arrow shot forth with a wisp of cold air, disturbing falling snowflakes as it carved a momentary vacuum trail through the air.  

In that instant, the arrow crossed the distance and buried itself in the first pirate’s right eye.  

The shaft exploded the eyeball, the sharp point driving deep into brain matter until stopped by skull.  

Brains and vitreous fluid erupted outward, splattering blood across the second pirate’s face.  

Even through the protective conical helmet, the arrow proved instantly fatal.  

Precision and perfection.  

No archer alive could fault Wade’s technique.  

Without pause, he loosed a second arrow.  

Identical result – another right eye penetration, as if replaying the first kill.  

The surviving pirate hadn’t even processed his companion’s death when darkness claimed him too.  

Wade watched their life forces dissipate. One advantage of being undead – no one could play dead around a skeleton.  

He called Mia down from the rafters to feast on the pirates’ souls.  

Wade almost felt like a villain – his victims didn’t just die, their very souls were devoured by a “malevolent phantom.”  

Though truthfully, Wade’s body count paled next to these pirates’ lifetime atrocities.  

He didn’t begrudge Mia her meals. He’d raised children before, but never a ghost – yet Mia reminded him of an innocent child.  

Having formed a soul-deep contract with her, Wade intended to care for her properly.  

She was newly born – she needed nourishment to grow.  

The little spirit radiated joy at feeding time as three writhing soul fragments emerged from the corpses, their ugly human faces twisting in the flames before Mia gulped them down and retreated into Wade’s hat.  

Wade turned toward the warehouse entrance. Five pirates remained – two standing guard on the steps who’d heard nothing suspicious over their own laughter moments earlier, still aiming bows at the cellar door.  

Below, three more pirates continued hacking at the door, their chopping vibrations uninterrupted.  

Moving silently to the doorway, Wade saw the door was nearly breached. The two guards began nocking arrows.  

He tossed in a silver coin – a Tania silver piece stamped with lilies.  

A Netherlandic farmer would labor half a year to earn one such coin.  

A Viking pirate might collect fifty to eighty annually – thirty years’ wages for that farmer.  

Naturally, pirates recognized the sound of silver far better than peasants.  

The metal disc clattered musically across hardwood planks.  

As one pirate turned toward the sound, he toppled like harvested wheat – an arrow through his skull.  

His companion whirled toward the attack’s origin –  

Just as the firelight dimmed.  

A shadow fell across the flames.  

Something unseen now stood behind him.  

By the time this realization raised his hackles, a longsword punched through his heart from behind, transfixing his body.  

His throat slit, vision failing, he collapsed with a final thud.  

In his fading consciousness, he heard an odd grating noise…  

Familiar, yet not – softer, slower than the sound of an axe splitting human ribs…  

More like… bones scraping together…  

Are those my bones?  

The pirate never solved this final riddle. His life expired first.  

He’d never have dreamed a skeleton would be his killer.