Author's Note: My first Samurai 7 fanfiction, but hopefully not the last. Comments are highly appreciated!

Old Boots

It was only after the last chaingun wound down and the dust began to settle that Kyuzo took stock of those who had fallen. Not a thought was spared for anything other than the enemy during the battle, but afterwards their deaths replayed through his mind, forcing him to relive each one in sequence.

Matsui…

He had been the first, taken out by a reckless bullet fired before the lines had even been properly drawn. Kyuzo distinctly remembered Matsui's final words, a playful proclamation on how many they were going to kill today and a loud, boastful laugh that had been cut abruptly short by a fleshy splatter. The unit had gone very quiet after that. It was an unlucky omen for an already bleak situation. They'd been outnumbered three-to-one, not that Kyuzo cared much for numbers. He had certainly killed more than three before it was over.

Yamada…

He had been young – others may have thought he was too young for this war but Kyuzo held no such illusions. If you could pick up a sword and swing it with any finesse you were needed. Yamada had a natural skill for it that had irritated a few of the veterans as much as they had praised him for it, but today it was not enough.

Back near the start of the war Kyuzo might have told him about how he overextended his backswing, leaving a hole in his defence, but he'd long since stopped wasting his breath. He had told others; they had still died. Kyuzo didn't speak much anymore.

Emori…

An overheard snippet of conversation had enlightened him to the fact that Emori had come from a village not far from Kyuzo's own…or where it had originally been. The blurred lines of the battlefield had run across it so many times that it had been erased from every map. There was no more town. Even the rubble was no longer reminiscent of the houses that had once stood there. Kyuzo had lingered there for a while before coming to the conclusion that the battlefield had become his home, not the few square miles of dirt that he'd struggled to protect, and when the fighting had eventually moved on he'd moved with it.

Hanai…

Hanai was the only remnant of Kyuzo's last unit, and had acted as the apologetic buffer to Kyuzo's strangeness and his silence. In a way, Kyuzo was almost regretful. He'd gotten used to having Hanai around. The man was calm and capable in a fight, and had made working with the rest of them easier. Kyuzo would miss him in the same way he missed not having a proper whetstone to sharpen his swords, but the feeling would pass soon enough.

Genji…

Of all of them, Genji had been the loudest objector to having Kyuzo join the unit even though they'd been badly in need of the manpower. These days there were no reinforcements to be had from the cities. You could only pick up stragglers from the battlefield, band together with whoever survived the last round of fighting in a chancy game of mix-and-match.

Kyuzo, it seemed, had acquired something of a reputation. It wasn't untrue. He went through units like a man went through shoes, wearing them down until they were full of holes and finally there was nothing to do but discard the tattered remains and move on to a new pair. He went where the fighting was thickest, stayed with others out of convenience, but it always ended the same. Kyuzo had lost count of how many different groups he had joined up with and ultimately left behind as corpses to be picked at by the birds. Being the sole survivor of so many battles didn't earn the good will of the men standing next to you, wondering if they would share the same fate as those who had come before.

Mochizuka…

He had scoffed at Genji's accusations, calling them superstitious nonsense. Kyuzo was fairly certain he'd been more interested in maintaining the morale of the unit than defending Kyuzo's honor. It didn't matter to him one way or the other. He didn't care for their opinions. He didn't need their approval or their friendship. It was his job to cut a bloody swath across the continent, through the ranks of the enemy, and he was doing that just fine without anyone else's direction.

Mochizuka had been pinned to the ground by a particularly vindictive machine and slowly crushed to death. Kyuzo wondered in a disinterested sort of way whether he'd regretted the rousing speech about Kyuzo being a godsend rather than a death-bringer in those last, painful moments.

Haruhide and Izumi…

They'd taken the ship; the last and only one the unit had. From what Kyuzo had heard, they made a good pair. He hadn't had much of a chance to see it. The only time the ship had entered his vision was when it had been spiralling out of control towards the ground, one of the engines on fire and Izumi clinging to the wing with futile desperation as Haruhide tried to pull them out of an impossible dive. The explosion had made the ground tremble like an earthquake. Kyuzo went to inspect it personally, but the ship was only a burning pyre of shrapnel. Izumi's sword was sticking from the ground not far away, blackened by soot. Kyuzo left it there.

It was a shame he couldn't salvage it. Already he could feel the shape of the battlefield changing. The fighting was moving on, and following that bright spark of action on foot was like trying to outrace the sun, but Kyuzo had gotten very good at walking. He rested so minimally these days it was hardly a wonder that he was numb to anything but the song of his swords cutting through his enemies. He was just about to move on before he remembered.

Akashi…

They had been a ten man unit. He recalled that Akashi had been knocked down as he'd tried to take one of the enemy leaders, but it hadn't been a killing blow. In the parade of death his mind subjected him to, he couldn't see Akashi's corpse amongst the others. Kyuzo hadn't sensed his death. After a brief moment of calculation he chose to return to the west end of the battlefield even though it meant wading over the still-twitching corpses of the machines and risking the chance that one of them had a final self-destruction mechanism. Not many were equipped with it, but Kyuzo had learned to be wary.

He found Akashi in the dirt, the head of the enemy leader nearby. Though his expression betrayed a bemused contemplation of the sky above, his face brightened in agonized relief when Kyuzo loomed over him.

"I thought…I w-was the only one," he coughed, spraying blood that dribbled over his chin. "H-help me. I don't think I can m-move on my own…can't feel my arms."

Akashi no longer had arms. One had been severed above the elbow. The other had been crushed so unrecognisably that it was difficult to tell how many fingers he still had. The dirt around him was dark and wet with blood.

"P-please," Akashi pleaded when Kyuzo didn't move. "Help…"

There were no doctors left on this part of the field. They were too valuable, and most had been pulled back to the cities for the bureaucracy's benefit. Even if Kyuzo had the supplies he wouldn't have been able to keep Akashi alive more than a day. As it was, the only thing he carried with him were his swords, and it was the only relief he could offer.

Akashi's death mask was one of horrified surprise. Kyuzo spared a moment to close his accusing eyes, and then another appraising the body. He and Akashi were almost of size, and though the dead man's arms and torso were shredded, his legs were perfectly fine, as were his boots. Kyuzo's had worn to the point that he could feel the blood leaking through the soles, and without further thought he took Akashi's shoes for himself, wasting only enough time to ensure they fit comfortably before moving on.

The battle was raging elsewhere, and he had a lot of walking to do.