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After returning both sacred texts to the shelf, he searched the library for more books on the races of the Age of Darkness.
Unsurprisingly, everything he found was mythology and legend. The one thing worth noting: the northern Forsaken people, owing to their generally large frames, had long believed themselves to carry giant blood — the bloodline had simply weakened over too many generations, leaving them merely taller than most, rather than truly giant.
The big idiot had been teased more than once at school for his size, called a northern barbarian. He had a vague memory of his father mentioning that their family did, in fact, carry half Forsaken blood.
Given that the gods were, at their core, Extraordinaries, Ryan couldn't help wondering whether the War of God had some connection to the giant race. Otherwise there was no reason to go around promoting "giant blood" as a point of pride. In this day and age, having blue hair could earn you discrimination — it was a common trait of those with elven heritage — so having giant blood and not being discriminated against, but actually taking pride in it, was odd.
"Maybe the War of God was a traitor to the giant race," Ryan speculated.
Betraying your own people for godhood wasn't exactly an unheard-of story. And if the god himself had once been a giant, then giant blood would naturally become a mark of honor among his followers.
"Still — how exactly does giant blood get passed down? Can a human body even handle it?" That question actually puzzled him more. Surely it isn't literal bloodline degradation.
"Well… maybe it is degradation, just not of the blood itself — but of the supernatural power. Without it, you lose the physical form."
Because the giants of the old age had been able to go toe to toe with the gods, perhaps every giant once possessed supernatural power. Modern Forsaken people, being mostly ordinary humans without that power, couldn't maintain the three-to-four meter height of true giants — so they'd "degraded."
Not a bad theory, actually.
Dong, dong, dong — the noon bell rang out right on schedule.
"It's already noon?" With his current hearing, it wasn't hard to tell that the sound was coming from the clock tower in the square outside. "I can't believe I actually had the patience to read biographies and mythology all morning."
It felt strangely similar to the experience of cracking open a new history textbook at the start of a school term — that same inexplicable excitement. Followed, inevitably, by complete boredom before the first class was even over — by which point he'd usually already flipped through the whole book two or three times.
Life had a way of surprising you. He'd assumed that after leaving school, the only things he'd be able to read for any length of time were web novels and technical manuals. The reason he'd gone straight to work after university instead of pursuing graduate school was simple exhaustion — he had never once felt satisfaction from doing homework to prove he'd learned something.
He waved to the young librarian on his way out and headed southwest.
His destination: the "Kevin" bar, located on the border between the Docklands and the slum district.
He had no appetite for lunch, and nothing nearby was within his budget anyway. Ryan set off at a brisk, ordinary pace toward the Docklands.
When the buildings around him grew increasingly rundown and dilapidated, Ryan glanced around. Confirming no one had a direct line of sight to him, he stepped into the shade out of reach of the sun and vanished.
Then he extended the hem of his jacket into the sunlight — and immediately reappeared.
The docks were still in the thick of unloading the morning's last shipment. Sailors and dockworkers hadn't yet broken for their midday rest, the brief window when they'd wander into bars. Which meant it also wasn't yet time for the kind of under-the-table dealings that needed some cover — so Kevin Schneider, the owner of the Kevin bar, almost certainly hadn't arrived yet. Whether it was the bar itself or the underground trading market below, he only provided the space; as long as no one caused a scene, he was practically invisible to ordinary patrons. No reason for him to show up this early.
The other reason Ryan had come out now was to use the daylight docklands for testing his Assassin abilities. Broad daylight wasn't ideal for an assassin — but something that only finds you at convenient moments isn't really an accident.
Fully merged back into the shadow, Ryan approached a taller building, intent on determining exactly how high he needed to be before Featherfall would trigger.
He picked out a reference point and a launch spot, then crouched and jumped hard — but it was well below the threshold, as expected; he didn't even clear his own knee height. No surprise that it didn't trigger. He caught the railing as planned, bent his right foot onto a protrusion he'd already identified, straightened up to gain more height, then kicked off the wall again.
This time Featherfall activated normally.
That surprised him more than he expected. He was already well past anything a normal person could do, but he had no such thing as a wall-kick double jump. The height of that second leap hadn't been impressive — he hadn't actually expected Featherfall to activate. The main point of the whole maneuver had been to test how accurately he could gauge his own height.
It was only by getting outside and moving around that Ryan began to realize the Assassin potion had given him far more than knowledge and abilities.
Since finishing breakfast, he'd gradually noticed that he wasn't just well-versed in assassin fundamentals — tracking, disguise, infiltration and the like — he was also acutely sensitive to elevation, routes, terrain, and the positions of people around him. He'd been effortlessly memorizing potentially useful terrain features along his entire route without thinking about it.
Like clearing fog of war and mapping out the area in a game. Fortunately, the mental map didn't come with specific details or floating exclamation points. Otherwise he might genuinely have suspected he'd transmigrated into a video game.
In any case, this potion was no joke — it was literally rewriting his DNA. Skills and instincts that a real assassin might spend seven or eight years, maybe decades, building up had been packed into his head overnight and etched into his bones.
He glanced back at his earlier reference point and confirmed that the experience-backed instincts were far more reliable and precise than the vaguely described supernatural abilities — his estimated height matched actual height almost exactly.
And that was exactly what surprised him. At this height, he was fairly certain a normal person would, at worst, only get injured from the fall — and for an assassin, a tuck-and-roll would have handled it fine, aside from the wall in the way.
That's not even that high. So how exactly does this ability decide whether the height qualifies?
He was still turning that over when he reached out a hand to stop his face from making close acquaintance with the opposite wall — activating Featherfall didn't send him drifting straight down like a feather; he continued along the diagonal trajectory he'd already been on, upward and forward.
And the fact that he'd stopped moving but wasn't falling reminded him of something else: Featherfall only freed him from gravity — every other force still applied normally.
"These games have misled me."
Who else could say they'd been tripped up by video game logic somewhere other than an argument?
Ryan gave the wall a thoughtful push, repositioned himself between the two walls, then deactivated Featherfall and dropped.
Through repeated toggling and careful height calibration, he eventually worked out the minimum trigger height for Featherfall: roughly three meters. More interesting to him was that this height was noticeably higher than what he'd reached on his wall-kick jump — and it sat right at the threshold where a straight drop would still be manageable for an assassin without impeding immediate action afterward.
Land, absorb, roll. Without needing anything more complex, just a basic shock-reduction tuck, he landed solidly. If the wall hadn't been in the way, that height wouldn't even have slowed him from immediately accelerating into a run.
"So what's the difference between a straight drop and a wall-kick jump?"
He thought it over as he melted back into the shadows. The landing sound hadn't been loud enough to disturb any ordinary person, given the distance to those around him. But what if someone nearby wasn't ordinary?
He moved to a different spot.
This time the two walls were closer together, but that didn't matter. He jumped again — this time mimicking a high-jump technique, keeping his body roughly parallel to the ground at the apex, and holding that position. He didn't push hard, in case his guess was wrong and the fall hurt.
Featherfall activated again.
"So the threshold is anything above the maximum height an assassin can safely land from without affecting subsequent movement."
He laced his hands behind his head and considered it idly. The wall-kick jump had triggered Featherfall because he'd still had forward momentum — the distance he'd cover would have meant hitting the wall even with a perfect roll, which would've disrupted any immediate follow-up action, even without injury. A straight vertical drop had no such problem.
"Which means the threshold is determined by my own judgment.
Hm. If I jumped blind — with no idea how high I was — would Featherfall activate even from a height that would normally kill someone?" The thought struck him out of nowhere.
Under his current circumstances, that scenario was nearly impossible to engineer — it would require jumping blind into completely unfamiliar terrain. But still.
As he neared the ground, another idea surfaced. He kicked off the left wall, used the rebound to meet the right wall, pressed a hand flat against it to brake his descent, then began climbing with the other hand.
And that was how a man who almost certainly exceeded two hundred pounds moved up a building face as soundlessly and swiftly as a gecko.
From friction-braking at the start to barely grazing the surface with his toes — once his thinking opened up, Ryan moved between buildings at a speed he couldn't have imagined before, utterly silent. His augmented hearing and eagle-sharp vision fed him a constant stream of information about his surroundings. His brain mapped the area as he went, plotting routes, anticipating sight lines from inside buildings and from anyone on the ground who might glance up.
He didn't feel rushed or clumsy for a single second — more like someone who'd been doing this for years and had simply forgotten.
"In pure wall-climbing terms, I've already got the Witcher beat by a mile." The thought came with a flicker of genuine excitement.
Author's Note (this chapter):"If I jumped blind — with no idea how high I was — would Featherfall activate even from a height that would normally kill someone?"
Hunan The ability doesn't work on subjective belief alone.Author reply: You're right — I was mistaken when writing this. I thought there was a height limit on the ability (there isn't), which is why the line ended up there.