Chapter 5

 

It takes us about half a day of walking and we get to Misanth around noon. The village was burned to the ground. It must have happened a while ago because there was no smoke in the sky. All the houses in the village are simple wooden huts, different from the well built houses in Vilnau. 

 

There are no bodies on the street this time. It looks like the soldiers had more time or maybe more manpower here and burned the bodies along with the houses. Alain doesn’t say a word and I’m unwilling to say anything right now. He already has a route in his head as he leads me through the destroyed village. 

 

After a few minutes, we arrive in front of another burnt wooden house, slightly further away from the rest of the houses. He gets down on his knees and starts lifting away the burned lumber. I quietly get down next to him and start helping. 

 

After we lift away the majority of the burned house, we don’t find a body underneath. I’m not too hopeful here because it might be possible the body was lumped together with bodies in other houses before being burned. I look towards Alain but he doesn’t seem to be despairing yet. 

 

“There’s a chance. Follow me.”

 

Alain stands up and heads out of the village toward the nearby woods. Following behind him, I can feel a spark of hope well up in me as well but I smother it to lessen the pain I might feel later on. Before long, we arrive at a small valley hidden in the forest. Valley might be too generous of a word here, since it is closer to an oversized ditch in the ground. 

 

“I found this while exploring when I was a kid. It looks like an ordinary little ditch that you wouldn’t think twice about. But if you hug the left wall and follow it until you reach the center where it caves inward, you can find a cave in the wall. I used to always hide here when I got into trouble and my dad would crawl inside to sit next to me, waiting for me to break and say something first.” 

 

We arrive before a large tree growing out of the ditch and when we move its leftmost tree branches and foliage aside, the tree reveals a small cave in the wall. The entrance is pretty big and we don’t need to bend down to get in. But once we got inside though, Alain stopped moving abruptly. 

 

In front of us are two bodies. The one closest to us looks familiar since I tried robbing a corpse with the exact same equipment a few days ago. The Ribierian soldier has a woodcutter’s axe lodged deep into his left shoulder. The other body is dressed in simple linens and is slumped against the back of the cave wall. 

 

There’s an iron longsword pierced through the stomach of the second body, dying the midsection of his shirt red. His eyes are still open, but there’s no life in them. His eyes are the same color as both Alain’s and mine. His brown hair is the same color as Alain’s too but his hair is long and runs past the shoulder, nearly reaching his waist. Alain has been silent the entire time since entering the cave. I’m sure he’s already prepared himself for the worst even when he said there was a chance. 

 

Sighing gently, Alain walks past the soldier’s body and squats down next to his father, tossing the club to a dark corner of the cave. He tenderly pulls the meter length blade out of his father’s stomach before dropping it and hugging his father’s body. He stays like that for three minutes before pulling away and slowly closing his father’s eyes. When he turns around, he looks at the soldier’s corpse with… disdain on his face, rather than anger. There’s a sort of coldness to him before he picks up the longsword. 

 

When he raises it, ready to hack the body to pieces, I shout out, “Wait.” 

 

He looks back at me and raises an eyebrow. I said to him, “Give me a minute here. We’re gonna need the armor regardless of what we do next. Hey, he’ll be naked too, disgraced even in death and all that.” 

 

I said flatly as I tried to quickly strip the leather vest off the body. Before I can get it off, the axe gets in the way and I have to stand over the body, stepping on its torso with my right boot and putting both hands on the axe’s handle, straining to get the axe loose. 

 

“Now the godsdamn goblin arm is starting to make sense to me. Would you get rid of it already? I can’t believe you carried it all the way here.” Alain chuckles. The axe loosens and I’m able to jimmy the axehead out of the body’s shoulder. 

 

“At this point, it’s become a part of me. If you don’t like it, I’ll bring this guy’s arm around instead.” I smile back. 

 

“Gods you actually have lost your mind. Was it due to being buried under all those bodies? Seeing Thomas’s dead face right in front of you? What about the massacre at Vilnau, did that push you over the edge?” Alain fires back with a grin. 

 

I let him know he’s very funny by blowing air from my nose. Once the axe is out, I strip off the leather vest. The top is slightly damaged due to the axe strike, but it’s better than nothing. The dead soldier is wearing a long sleeve linen top underneath as well but it’s been soaked through with his blood. 

 

After throwing the leather vest away from the body, I take off his leather boots, one foot at a time. These might be better than the ones I’m wearing now and Alain probably won’t want to wear the boots of his father’s killer. After loosening some of the strings tightening the waist from the pants, I pull the pant legs down past his feet and manage to get the leather pants off without getting it covered in blood. 

 

This whole situation feels surreal to me right now and I think I reach my breaking point when I burst out laughing. “This is definitely not how I thought my first time undressing someone else would go.” 

 

Alain starts giggling too and he says, “Why the fuck did you start laughing? You’ve gone insane. You are, in the most literal sense, laughing while robbing a dead body. What has happened to us? Is this what war is?” 

 

There’s tears in my eyes from laughing and I tell him, “Hey, you still have a sword in your hands. You’re about to butcher this poor man’s body while the both of us laugh. We’ve both lost our minds.” 

 

Once I give him the signal to proceed, Alain swings the longsword and hacks into the body’s torso. He quickly pulls it out and hacks into the body again. Again, again, and again he hacks the sword into the body as it turns into an unidentifiable, bloody mess. At some point, Alain’s laughing turned into crying and a look of undisguisable rage filled his face. I calm down as well and start putting on the leather clothing while he works out his feelings. 

 

The leather vest is too large for me but I’m still wearing my disgusting linen shirt underneath. It’ll do as a second shirt and it should keep me a bit warmer at night. The leather pants are a larger problem because the pant legs are too long for my legs. 

 

I find a solution by rolling up the bottoms of the pant legs and stuffing them into my new leather boots, which once again are too big for my feet. I can’t wait to find boots that fit well but not today I suppose. When I’m finished changing my clothes, Alain is sitting next to his father, leaning against the cave wall while panting. 

 

“Already out of breath sir knight?”

 

“Fuck off.” Alain breathes and he flips me his middle finger.

 

“Alright, what next? By the way, you can wear these leather boots if you want, they’re not this guy’s but one of the other levies from the corpse mound.” 

 

“I’ll think about it. I want to bury my dad before we leave.” 

 

“Alright, I’ll lend you a hand.”

 

“You don’t have to.”

 

“I want to. You want to bury him here or somewhere else?”

 

“Good question. I do like it here since I have memories with him here but I don’t know if they’d be tainted by his death. There’s also the other fucker’s body too.”

 

“Ehh, fuck it. Who’s he to come between your memories? Besides, his last moments were here right? His last moments weren’t just his death, they were glorious too right? Your dad, who was a woodcutter his entire life and had a bad back, killed an enemy country’s soldier in single combat. Who else in the entire village can claim the same thing? 

 

“Fuck it. Who else in the entire peninsula can say the same thing? Well I can, but that’s besides the point. We’ll boot the other body out of here, toss it in a ditch, and bury your dad here where he was at his most glorious, how does that sound?”

 

“...I have a feeling you’re saying all that because you’re too lazy to help me carry him somewhere else.” 

 

“I’m hurt. Truly. Is that truly how you think about your best friend? Don’t forget, we’ve slept with each other already.”

 

“Would you please not phrase it like that? Also, when did we become best friends, we’ve known each other for less than two weeks.”

 

“Stop. Friendship is a beautiful mystery in the world that cannot be judged based on its length. Our souls are kindred spirits and we’ve probably known each other for hundreds, no, thousands of years. You’re like a brother to me and your dad was like a father to me. Now, let us brothers bury our father where he had his most outstanding moment.” 

 

Shaking his head, Alain gives in to my persuasion and we work together to carry the dead soldier’s body out of the cave. Once we get a decent distance away from the cave opening, we throw the body into a bush and dust off our hands. It’s pretty easy to find our way back to the cave since Alain’s earlier sword practice left the body decimated and it left a gruesome bloodtrail back to the cave. 

 

Thankfully there is a soft dirt patch on the right side of the cave and using our hands, we’re able to dig a pretty sizable hole. While we’re digging, Alain gets furious with me when I try to use the goblin arm as a sort of shovel saying he doesn’t want it anywhere near his father’s resting place. He’s honestly a slave driver. After the hole is dug, Alain and I gently lower his father’s body into the hole. I give him a moment to say his final words and leave the cave. 

 

Looking around, I see a pretty little blue flower growing next to the tree right by the cave’s entrance. Picking it, I wait for a moment before going back inside. It looks like Alain has finished up his goodbyes and we both cover the hole with dirt. Once the dirt is nice and packed, Alain places his father’s axe on top of the grave. I sort of want to bring the axe along with us but I’m not willing to get into a fight with him over it right now. I place the flower on top of the axe, finishing the grave and giving it a nice touch in my opinion. 

 

“You know that flower’s poisonous right? Only if you eat it though.”

 

“How the fuck is everything poisonous in this place? This forest sucks. This peninsula sucks. This kingdom sucks. How the fuck do they let a bunch of farmers and woodcutters get invaded by another kingdom on the opposite side of the continent?”

 

“Ehh, what’re you going to do? Rebel? We’re already deserters, although we might as well add treason to the list, right? So, what now? I have an idea but I want to hear you out first.”

 

“I mean, what can we do honestly? If even Misanth was burned down, we have to expect every single Nasaaran village on the peninsula to be burned down too, right? I don’t know why they’re here but if they took the time to come all the way to Misanth to burn it down then they’d probably do the same for every other village There’s nothing else we can do except try to get off the peninsula and I’m not even sure how we’re supposed to do that.”  

 

“Well, we’re gonna need to move south until we reach Mountain’s Toil and go through the undermountain pass there if we want to get onto the main continent. But what about afterwards?”

 

“Afterwards? I don’t know. After leaving Augustine’s farm, the army was the only thing I had planned and we know how that turned out. Maybe we could be adventurers? I fought a goblin and it wasn’t really tough. Augustine’s other slaves always talked about becoming adventurers one day and slaying a dragon. We’re not gonna be doing any dragonslaying but we could earn money doing that and at least we won’t starve.”

 

“That sounds good so far. You really sure you don’t want to at least check up on your home village though?”

 

“Nah, there’s nothing there for me. No family, no friends, nothing. The only thing of value I have from that place is the kitchen knife I stole and that thing’s long gone.” 

 

“Okay, I’m just putting this out there and if you think it’s a good idea, we can do it. My dad told me that I have an uncle in Midriver. When I was a kid, he told me if something ever happened to him, I should go to Midriver and find my uncle. What do you think?”

 

“Midriver? Where in the hells is that?”

 

“It’s on the main continent, but that’s all I know. So we’d still need to get to Mountain’s Toil first and then find where Midriver is.”

 

“I think that’s fine, we’re already headed that way regardless. Once we get to Mountain’s Toil, we can also check where we can become adventurers and do that for money until we can get enough to travel to Midriver. You alright with me tagging along when you’re going to visit your uncle?”

 

“What, you’re asking me that now? I thought you said we were best friends from thousands of years ago? That we’re brothers from the same father?”

 

“Alright, fuck it. If he’s your uncle, he’s my uncle too.”