Chapter 1

 

If I could choose to forget just one thing from today, it would have to be this gods-awful smell. When the other levies talked about the horrors of war and what sort of hell we were throwing ourselves into, no one ever mentioned this stench. If I knew about this, I might’ve stayed back on the farm. Probably not, but I might’ve. 

 

Where am I? How long have I been out? What is this smell? My head is killing me. The left side of my face is unbearably painful. I think it’s swollen. I open my eyes and I see nothing. I haven’t gone blind have I? Why do my legs feel so heavy? Why does my body feel so heavy? 

 

The back of my head is excruciatingly painful like someone took an axe and tried splitting my skull in half. What happened to me? I try to sit up but I can’t. Something on top of me moves from my struggling and a tiny ray of scarlet light floods in through a crack. Based on the color of the light, it might be around sunset. 

 

At least I can see a bit more clearly now, though I terribly wish I couldn’t. Thomas’s bloodied face is right above me, nearly touching my own. I grit my teeth as hard as I can, suffocating the scream in my mouth. This doesn’t stop me from pissing myself though. The warm liquid runs down my thighs as I cover my mouth with my left hand. Dear gods my hand reeks. 

 

Dozens of thoughts rush through my head but the most prominent one is a memory from a few days ago. I wasn’t used to the marching we had to do and after a few hours of tormenting myself, I had to stop by the roadside and vomit. Thomas hung back for me and didn’t say a thing. He just squatted down next to me and patted me on my back as I emptied my stomach.

 

The tears start and I can’t stop them. I can feel my chin quivering but I don’t dare to make a sound. I look into Thomas’s lifeless eyes and my eyes are drawn to the bloody gash across his neck. The poor man. Although, his lifeless eyes combined with the paleness of his face makes him look peaceful somehow. He no longer feels any pain, he’s no longer suffering, and he’s just enjoying his eternal serenity now. What the hell am I thinking? 

 

My thoughts are disrupted by a series of thudding noises. The noises keep getting louder and I think they’re swiftly approaching where I am. I know these thuds because I’ve heard them before on the farm. The realization sends shivers down my spine. The thudding noises keep getting louder and louder until it sounds like they’re passing right by me. Suddenly, I hear a man with a husky voice shouting, “Back to the camp! Leave the bodies! The moon is…”

 

The horseman’s voice trails off as he rides his horse past where I’m hiding. Following the order, I hear people all around me cursing and then running after the horseman. I hold my breath. I didn’t realize there were this many people in such close proximity to me. If I didn’t stop myself from screaming… just the thought sends my body shivering. 

 

How long should I even wait for? It’s been five minutes and I don’t hear a thing around me. I want to leave. I want to get away from all these bodies. I want to get away from this foul stench. But every time I start to move my body, I freeze because I start imagining a soldier standing right outside of this pile of bodies, just waiting for me to come out with a sword in his hand. 

 

It takes me a few minutes to fight off my own imaginations, but I eventually manage to turn myself over and onto my frontside before I start crawling out. It’s not easy. There’s bodies directly on top of me that move every time I move, mortifying me. 

 

When I finally manage to get out from underneath all the bodies, I don’t get up immediately and opt instead to stay laying down on my belly. I’m lying directly in the dirt right now with tufts of grass all around me. There’s tall trees in the distance, surrounding this small clearing. The sky is already dark now but I can still see clearly due to the torches. 

 

There’s a lit torch on the ground in front of me that’s starting to burn the grass around it. With how sparse the grass is around here, I doubt these torches could start a forest fire but you never know. Looking around, there’s torches all around me and they must have been dropped by the soldiers who just left. I grab one of the torches and I slowly get on my knees, frantically searching for soldiers in hiding. I can’t get rid of this growing sense of dread inside me. 

 

I muster my courage and stand upright, turning back to look at the pile of bodies where I crawled out from. All the bodies are piled on top of each other, creating a rather gruesome mound in the middle of the clearing. Every corpse is dressed in simple, dirty linens. Only a few of them were able to afford leather boots. I recognized quite a few of the faces in the mound and I had spoken with many of them over the last few days. 

 

We weren’t soldiers, I realize that now; we were never soldiers. Even if we called ourselves soldiers and hyped ourselves up saying we’d change our lives using the swords in our hands, we were just deluding ourselves. We were just farmers playing make believe and our swords were the hoes we brought from home. No matter how articulate Lord Aldore was with his flowery words, you can’t turn farmers into soldiers with words alone. 

 

Am I supposed to be a slave even when I die? Dark thoughts flood my mind as I notice several more corpse mounds scattered across the clearing. How many died here today? Many of them were fathers, some of them were brothers, and all of them were sons. Leaving the farm was a mistake. 

 

Looking at the ground, I see several lit and unlit torches beside my mound alongside a bundle of tree branches. Shivers go down my spine when I realize they were about to burn the corpses. My legs won’t stop trembling but I don’t have the time for this. 

 

Next to the corpse mound is a small pile of weapons. Well, our weapons to be exact. Most of them are farmers’ tools like hoes, hand scythes, and pitchforks. I can even spot a shovel in there. Who brought that? I shouldn’t be casting stones since I stole a kitchen knife from the farm and brought it with me.

 

Picking up a woodcutter’s axe, I quickly put it back down realizing I’m biting off more than I can chew. I wasn’t the weakest out of all the levies, but I’m definitely not strong enough to carry this axe around comfortably. I pick up a small iron hand axe and swing it through the air a few times. The axe feels light in my hand and it’s easy to swing although the axehead does look a bit worn. This will do fine. 

 

I wonder if Lord Aldore died somewhere around here. His body was covered in valuables and his sword would be a blessing for me even if it’s a bit heavy. What else do I need?

 

May the gods forgive me for what I am about to do. I find one of the bodies in the mound wearing leather boots and quickly undo the laces before plucking them off of its feet. I’m sorry but the linen wraps covering my feet aren’t going to cut it moving forward. Besides, it’s not like you’re not using them anymore. The boots are a little big for my feet but I’ll make do with them. They’re also covered in blood and other dark liquids but I can’t be too choosy here. 

 

Actually, what are these black splotches? Giving them a whiff I instantly vomit but nothing except stomach acid comes out. I haven’t had anything to eat since this morning and I’m only now realizing I’m starving. The burning sensation in my throat and the bitterness in my mouth reminds me that some things are better left unknown. 

 

However, this discovery lets me know that I’m currently covered in blood and shit. My shirt, my pants, my hands, and even my hair. I guess I was at the bottom of a pile of corpses. If I lost my sense of smell for the rest of my life right this moment, I’d be fine with it. But why is there so much… Ah, I remember. 

 

Some of the levies tasked with digging and maintaining the latrine pits were complaining about the horrid smell. Someone else chewed them out and said it’d be even worse once we got to the battlefield since people shit themselves all the time when they died. This somehow sparked an hour long argument among the levies regarding shit. Good times. 

 

My clothes are covered in filth but I don’t see anything that could replace them. It looks like the majority of the bodies in the mounds were stabbed through the body, ruining their clothes. I want to leave but where should I even go? As I’m looking around at the battlefield, the grisly landscape seems to jog something in my memory and I start to recollect what happened to me. 

 

…

 

We were marching east away from Vilnau toward another town on the eastern coast of the peninsula. I remember it was sometime in the afternoon because of the sweltering heat. I was in the middle of our marching column when I heard screaming all around me. 

 

Everyone around me stopped moving and our uniform marching column quickly devolved into a giant, confused mess. I bumped against the person in front of me because he abruptly stopped moving while the person behind me knocked me over. Thankfully Alain was right next to me and pulled me back to my feet. 

 

Right as I was about to thank him, one of Lord Aldore’s attendants, Sir Serra, rode past us on his horse warning us, “Enemy attack on the left! Group up and fight together! Show those Ribierian bastards your bravery!” 

 

If we weren’t panicking before his warning, we were panicking now after it. How could there be an enemy attack here, of all places? How in the thousand hells did the Ribier Kingdom manage to get its soldiers on our peninsula? We’re in the complete opposite direction of the warfront. Why did they come here? 

 

Everyone tensed up when they heard Sir Serra’s words and a lot of us, me included, started thinking about running away. Can you really blame us? We weren’t part of the army for more than a month at that point. All they’ve had us do is march in formation. We weren’t taught how to fight, we weren’t taught how to group up and fight, we weren’t taught how to be brave, and most importantly, we weren’t taught how to be soldiers.

 

Unfortunately for the levies on the left column, they didn’t have a choice. Ribierian soldiers swarmed out of the woods from our left and started slaughtering everyone in front of them. That’s right, slaughtering. This wasn’t a fight. What I saw couldn’t be called a fight. 

 

There weren’t even that many soldiers rushing toward us and it looked like we had them outnumbered twice over. But they immediately showed us that even with our numbers advantage, we weren’t on the same playing field. It wasn’t just the difference in equipment. Although they had genuine swords, shields, spears, and leather armor compared to our hoes, it was more than that. Those Ribierian soldiers didn’t see us as fellow human beings. We were nothing more than livestock to them and they were the butchers. 

 

The bastards unlucky enough to bear the full brunt of the Ribierians’ assault were quickly put down without being able to put up much of a fight. We had 200 levies when we left Vilnau and within the first ten minutes of the attack, we lost more than 20 men. Those soldiers taught me a lesson I’ll never forget: soldiers don’t farm and they sure as hell don’t fight using farming tools. We were just farmers playing soldiers and when we saw our friends being massacred right in front of us, we stopped playing soldiers as well. We reverted back to being powerless, frightened farmers. 

 

As I was drowning in my fear and despair, Alain shook my shoulder and woke me up from it. “We gotta get the fuck out of here. Remember the rocks where we had breakfast this morning? I’ll be waiting there.” 

 

Before I could respond, he had already taken off. I’m not one to ignore good advice and right after he left, I turned around and started running away too. The rocks he referenced were these huge stone boulders scattered around a small clearing where we ate our wheat gruel that morning. It’s in the opposite direction of where we were marching towards. Before I could get far however, a Ribierian soldier tackled another levy in front of me and pinned him to the ground. 

 

The soldier and the levy were grappling onto each other for dear life, trying their hardest to subdue each other’s arms. A small group of people, including me, stopped running to try and help the young boy. Right, help. We were terrified. We wanted to help but no one wanted to really get involved and be targeted by the soldier next. 

 

We all looked at each other, having what seemed like full on discussions with our eyes. If you hit him first, I’ll back you up and start hitting him too. No, you first, you have an axe and I have a hoe. Hurry up and save him, he’s going to die and it’ll be your fault. Why does it have to be me? You do it. 

 

I stood there, merely a few feet away holding onto Augustine’s kitchen knife, trembling like a newborn calf. I despised myself at that moment. Why did I run away from Augustine’s farm if I was just going to stay a coward for the rest of my life? I should have just stayed on that farm and let him keep beating me. At least I’d still have a roof over my head, some straw to sleep on, his leftovers to keep myself fed, and I wouldn’t be in the middle of a battlefield right now. But when I thought of my dreams, I knew I would never be satisfied with being a slave my whole life. 

 

What ultimately did it was seeing the boy’s face. He was a kid, just like me. I knew him and we’ve talked a few times before. He told me how his mother was sick and he answered the recruitment drive in Vilnau because that was the only way he could earn enough money to pay for her medicine. 

 

Or at least that’s the story I fabricated for him in my mind. We did talk a few times but it was always about the cute girls he saw in Vilnau. The kid’s 15 winters old and all he can think about is tits and ass, he’s a fucking mess. But he’s a mess I know.  

 

Call it a moment of bravery for my sake. But if I’m being honest with myself, it was closer to a momentary lapse in sanity due to my accumulated stress and anxiety spilling over and overwhelming my mind for just an instant. But what a glorious moment it was. Running forward, I stabbed my kitchen knife at the back of the soldier’s neck, aiming for the unprotected flesh right between what his hat covered and what his vest covered. Long story short, I missed my stab. 

 

Can’t really blame myself on this one. I’ve never used a weapon against another person before. Also, it was a kitchen knife. It wasn’t really meant for stabbing soldiers. 

 

Although I missed, the knife still pierced into the back of his neck and the knife’s tip ripped itself out of his trapezius muscle. The sensation from tearing through his flesh oddly felt familiar. Blood burst from the knife wound and for a moment, I felt like a hero. I did this, me. I saved this kid and he’s going to live on to earn enough money to save his sick mother. 

 

Then that moment was gone. I probably, definitely, absolutely, should have made sure the soldier was dead before celebrating. But I’ve never seen blood spurt out like that from a person before and grossly overestimated how much blood actually came out. I also didn’t notice the shield strapped to the soldier’s left arm. 

 

The next moment, the soldier got off the levy and slammed his shield into the left side of my face. That explains the pain and swelling I felt when I woke up. I collapsed onto the ground, holding the left side of my face, tears welling up in my eyes. Before I could get back up, I felt an intense pain on the back of my head and that’s when I blacked out. 

 

…

 

… I came really close to dying today. I’m still not sure how I managed to survive. Looking around, I searched for the spot where the soldier was and I think I found it a few yards away from where I’m currently standing. It’s a bit difficult to tell since it’s dark now but I recognize a solitary tree right in between two corpse piles that weren’t there earlier. I see a body there. 

 

It’s different from all the other bodies because it’s covered in leather and it hasn’t been tossed into one of the piles. I have to contain my excitement as I make my way over to the body. Please let his sword still be here, please. I check around the body carefully and to my disappointment, the sword is gone. 

 

If they had the time to pile up the bodies in preparation to burn them and the time to pile up our weapons, they must have had the time to recover their own weapons. I wonder if he has anything else on him. That leather armor looks usable enough. A bit bloody which might be why they didn’t strip their fellow soldier but it’s good enough for me. 

 

When I squat down next to the body, I’m astonished to see a huge gaping gash on the back of the body’s neck stretching towards its shoulder. Oh, this is him. This is the guy. I knew there was no way he was going to survive such a massive injury. 

 

Feeling a peculiar and possibly misplaced sense of accomplishment, I notice the shield still strapped to the body’s left arm. Not a sword, but good enough. It looks like a simple round wooden shield with metal plating covering the shield’s rim. In the center of the shield, there’s a protrusion of metal sticking out. I wonder what that’s for. 

 

The back of the shield has a leather strap and a wooden handle for gripping I suppose. There’s a pretty sizable crack near the bottom side of the shield that extends all the way towards the center. This is probably the reason why the other soldiers didn’t bother collecting it. I’m able to shimmy the shield’s strap off the body’s arm and I carry the shield by its handle. It’s a little difficult because I’m trying to juggle holding the torch and the shield with one hand. 

 

I’m also going to need all this leather armor. It’s bloody and it has a few cuts but it’s better than nothing. He’s much bigger than me and I doubt it’ll fit me properly but I’ve been wearing hand-me-downs all my life. I prop up the body into a sitting position and right as I’m about to start taking off the leather vest, the body twitches.