The sky burned in copper tones as the sun crawled towards the horizon.
On the academy's firing range.
At one hundred and fifty meters, the mobile target slid with a rhythm that would disorient most... but not him.
Beneath the crisp fabric of his uniform, every muscle, from his shoulders to his fingertips, aligned in controlled tension.
His eyes, fixed on the distant target, didn't just see the moving target; they calculated, an imperceptible flicker in his mind, the angles, the invisible air resistance, the humidity, the exact tension of the bowstring under his fingers.
He maintained a stable breathing rhythm. Controlled. He also took into account the timing of each movement the target made.
With a neat uniform, perfect posture, fixed gaze. He didn't tremble, didn't blink, his short blond hair moved slightly with the wind, but it didn't bother him; in fact, perhaps, it even calmed him.
The bowstring barely creaked, his fingers tense on the arrow, he held his arms steady.
To an amateur, he would seem not to move at all, but only the best archers in the world could notice the slight predictive movement of his bow with each shift of the target.
His face was a mask of concentration, stripped of any emotion. In that moment, only function existed: the target, the bow, the arrow.
Shooting the arrow, the technical part. Alignment, breathing, rhythm. It was, paradoxically, the simplest thing now.
The truly difficult thing had been accustoming his own body, making it forget the tremor it once knew.
During the early years, every time his finger hesitated on the trigger, he received an electric shock. Not lethal, but enough to brand onto his skin the price of hesitation.
Now, his body fires before his mind orders it.
His sky-blue eyes, a mirror reflecting only emptiness to anyone who looked at him, as if the seventeen-year-old boy were not alive at all.
A single Inhalation of air, further stabilizing his precise pulse on the bow.
A single Exhalation, pushing all his senses to the maximum.
The bowstring briefly sings. The arrow emerges like a shot, and cuts through the air as if guided by the wind, without any explosion or extravagant movement.
But it hits the exact center with a clean snap. In the process, it destroys half the mobile target with an imperceptible force that no one thought he possessed.
A second of pause.
Then, the murmurs, people who had been in complete silence moments before.
They speak, much to the young archer's annoyance, which he doesn't show, maintaining an indifferent expression.
"Again..."
"Impressive..."
"He never misses."
The murmurs don't cease, as if he couldn't hear them.
Superficial praise, used to flatter him and get his attention.
Envy hidden in criticism.
Looks that regard him as a mere object.
'They only admire him for this. For this stupid sport.'
A slight clenching in his jaw was the only sign of his annoyance, quickly suppressed beneath the mask of indifference.
If they only knew... it wasn't just about this 'stupid sport'. Shooting, cooking, moving through a ballroom, disassembling a rifle in the dark... they were just programs. Installed functions. He no longer failed.
Not after they taught him the price of imperfection.
The first time he failed a math test, he was still six years old. It was a tenth of a point. And even so, his mother turned off his bedroom light for a week, leaving him to study by the light coming from the hallway window. 'The world won't forgive your tenths,' she'd say.
The image of his mother, the lights out, the coldness in her voice: 'The world won't forgive your tenths.' Seventeen years old. And Yuta no longer failed.
He walked decisively out of the firing range.
With the same precision with which he had drawn the bow, Yuta moved.
He places the kyudogi and the weapon on the shelf, each gesture measured, an acquired elegance. He slips out of the firing range, returning to his student uniform.
Two figures approached his side, bubbling with the energy of the end of training. One, nervously playing with a strand of her own hair, asked, not daring to look directly into his sky-blue eyes:
"Got plans for afterwards?"
The other laughed. - "You should join the strategy club, we could use an elegant sniper."
Yuta barely tilted his head. A carefully calibrated smile, perfect and empty, formed on his lips.
"Of course," he replied courteously.
"I'll keep it in mind this week." - The tone, friendly and evasive, closed the conversation.
He stepped away from them, the lightness of his movements devoid of naturalness. In the changing room, every action, from taking his backpack from his numbered locker, to tying his shoelaces. It was executed with the precision of a clock. His steps on the hallway tiles sounded identical, monotonous, an echo of his own inner being."
He walks down the exit corridor.
He reaches the door. Hand on the doorknob.
He turns it, leaving the door slightly ajar, when...
A damp wind brushed against him.
He stopped the gesture. He inhaled. It didn't smell of chlorine, nor gym rubber.
It smelled of forest. Of wet leaves. A cold bewilderment seeped into his mind. The air itself felt... wrong, dense and vibrating. And, for the first time in years, he noticed a subtle tremor in the hand still holding the non-existent doorknob.
He turned slowly.
There was no door anymore.
There was no hallway anymore.
He was at the top of a hill, under an impossible sky and an endless forest.
The sky was starry, the environment felt different. Yuta beheld an unreal landscape.
Three moons, one full, one crescent, one waning.
A bluish sun was sinking below the horizon.
In the forest. Some trees bent in the wind, but others did not.
One in particular seemed to lean only when he looked at it, as if responding to his attention.
There was no gravitational logic. No climate pattern. It was as if the environment had a will.
Yuta contemplated everything. He didn't ask questions, he didn't shout.
But he did whisper something:
"What the hell is this?"
His intuition, his sharpest tool, failed him.
The vegetation clusters defied all botanical logic. The humidity in the air did not correspond to the density of the surrounding flora.
Any analyst would have cried out 'Artificial!', 'Unnatural!'. But Yuta saw patterns. A different code, yes, but not an error. This wasn't chaos. It was a living nature he didn't yet understand.
Yuta absorbed the impossible sight... The control, tensed for years, began to yield. His shoulders dropped barely a centimeter. His jaw relaxed. And then, something unthinkable.
The subtle tremor disappeared without a trace, and...
For the first time in years, the unknown air filled his lungs, his chest expanded freely. The mask cracked. In the imposing solitude of the hill, under the alien moons, a sigh escaped his lips, laden not with fear, but with pure, stunned disbelief.
The ground beneath his feet was soft, covered in turquoise moss.
The trees seemed twisted by gravity, their shapes and appearances unrecognizable. Some seemed totally symmetrical, others resembled pines but were strangely contorted.
The air... it felt heavy. It vibrated. As if something invisible danced in every breath.
He found no points of comparison.
The world was new. The place untouched, with no visible wounds from human hands.
His mind, calibrated for rapid analysis, processed every stimulus. Turquoise moss beneath his boots. Trees whose forms defied known botany, twisted as in alien dreams.
And the air... it felt heavy, it vibrated, as if an invisible energy pulsed in every breath. Strangeness.
That was the only irrefutable data. Not fear, not denial, just overwhelming and fascinating strangeness.
He approached the tree line. He touched a gnarled trunk, scraped off a bit of dry bark. Its texture wasn't so different from that of an Earth oak, but the vitality that seemed to emanate... a subtle intention, almost unreachable, pulsed beneath the surface.
As he moved along the slope. His eyes calculated inclines, escape routes, cover points.
He cut straight branches. Analyzed the fiber. Identified useful stones.
At measured intervals, Yuta marked the way back with small engraved branches, sticking them into the soft earth or the bark of trees, often adding a numerical notch as part of his own controlled, multi-layered orientation system.
Simultaneously, he sketched a detailed map in his notebook, noting unusual tree formations, concentrations of fungi, clear signs of passing wildlife. A breadcrumb system for a world without trace of paths.
His hands, expert at recognizing materials, selected straight branches and sharp stones. With precise movements, he carved a crude, functional spear.
Feeling the weight of the stick in his hands, the friction of the wood beneath the stone, a memory erupted:
Smaller hands, trembling uncontrollably in the rain. He was eleven years old. The dull blade, the damp stick, the mud covering his arms as he carved.
His father, a silent and relentless figure, watched. If he didn't finish before nightfall, the cold waited for him outside. Blood welled from the calluses on his palms, but with each cut carved into the rain-soaked wood, the tremor decreased.
It wasn't obedience. It was the concentration on the task that anchored him, that allowed him to exist.
As he walked through the forest, he found a clearing, from a distance he could spot a small stream. Approaching stealthily, he saw some fish passing every few minutes.
He subtly arranged longer, more flexible sticks to resemble a net.
After that, he approached the stream, and used the larger firewood as leverage to support the wooden net.
Yuta tied the spear to his backpack with a rope.
He crouched down to Test the water on the back of his hand. Then on his lips, and waited half an hour to see if he found signs of skin irritation.
As the blue sun set. He gathered dry firewood, the movement automatic.
But while his hands worked, his mind wandered. _The differences_... In just a few hours in this place, he had found a strange and wild freedom he hadn't found in seventeen years of 'routine'.
There, skills were refined out of obligation, then out of the inertia of imposed perfection. He could have broken the cycle, reported 'those people', dismantled their control. But for what? It no longer mattered.
Not compared to this. This forest, teeming with unknown life, offered something that control never did: space to simply *be*.
As the sky began to turn purple under the bluish sun, he sat on a rock.
_His improvised net swayed gently in the nearby stream, waiting._
He looked up at the unknown starry sky, where the three moons traced their orbits with hypnotic slowness.
He inhaled, filling his lungs with air that tasted of damp earth and the unknown.
He exhaled... and it was almost a sigh.
No eyes watched him.
Only him, the whispering forest...
And whatever is already moving among the trees.
And on his lips, a tension was released.
A minimal, strange curve formed. Not a smile of joy, but something deeper, more unexpected.
Peace.