He sat on the concrete, pulled the arrow from the rat, and wept. Not for the kill. For the fact that it was perfect. The SRW had not betrayed him. His body remembered the shot: anchor point under the jaw, back tension, expansion, release. The bow had done its job so well that he had no excuse. He could survive. He could hunt. He could protect.
The Sabre SRW-113 was never meant to be a weapon of war. It was a tool of precision, a marriage of carbon foam and high-modulus carbon, designed to send an arrow through the eye of a storm at seventy meters. Elias had bought it secondhand from a retired Olympian, its limbs scarred but its soul intact. He’d saved for two years, working the night shift at a depackaging plant, breathing in the ghost-scent of recycled plastics, dreaming of stillness.
“I know,” Elias said. “That’s the difference between us. I choose not to.”
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