Arrows come raining down from the sky. Screams and shouts fill the air with a dread that has my body more alert than it ever has been. A boost of adrenaline keeps me moving, deflecting attack after attack. I draw enough blood from the enemy to immobilize them, but not enough to kill them. I know that's making me hold back, and that's putting me at a disadvantage, but I don't care. I'm going to uphold my oath to Yuuri. I need to. I want to. It's all I have.
Sweat leaks from my brow, and slides down my face. My whole body is aching, pleading some source of relief. I'm tempted to tear the armor off to alleviate myself of the extra weight that I've been carrying, but there's no time.
One after another, soldiers come at me. I fight them off, feeling myself sink lower and lower into desperation. Fatigue and dizziness threatens to bring me to my knees. But I can't give in to that. I have to keep going.
I'm overpowered by one soldier, pushed down onto the ground. I gasp and struggle to get up, like a turtle that's been knocked back onto its shell. The man is ready to strike. The point of his sword aims at my head. My eyes widen. No, it can't end here. I can't die here!
I shoot my hand up, and summon fire. The soldier goes up in flames, and wails in agony, taking a couple of slow steps before crumpling onto the dirt path. Shortly after, he's silent, and the flames crackle, and consume him.
"It's a demon!" One soldier screams.
"One of them is a demon!" Another relays this message at a louder volume.
"Wolfram," Conrart shouts from behind. His hands grab at my upper arms, and heft me to my feet. I stumble, and he reinforces his grasp. "Get a hold of yourself!"
I stare at the body decaying inside the flames. The man is still. He's dead. I killed him.
"Wolfram," Conrart shakes me.
I burned him to death.
"Wolfram!" Conrart thunders.
I smell his burned flesh. His incinerated carcass that will be completely unrecognizable to those who love him, those who are anxiously awaiting his return. They'll be devastated. They'll feel every horrible thing that I felt when Father was killed. Above all else, hate, utter contempt for the Demon Kingdom, which they will condemn as being evil.
They'll yearn for our blood.
"Yozak!" Conrart calls. "Get him out of here!"
"But Captain," Yozak is about to object, but Conrart stops him short.
"We'll be fine here. Now, go!"
"Yes, sir."
They'll want to kill us.
"Come on, Excellency." Yozak tugs at my arm just as soon as Conrart releases me to rejoin the battle. "We have to go."
And we'll want to kill them.
Kill, kill, kill…it'll go on forever and ever until every last person is dead.
Yozak exhales, loudly. "You leave me no choice." Effortlessly, he lifts me over his shoulder, and takes off, like I don't weigh a pound. I look at the battlefield, and see countless bodies lying dead on the ground, neglected by the men that are still locked in combat, fighting for their lives. The pandemonium fades off into the distance as Yozak takes me further away from it.
Even so, I'm still fighting a battle within myself, and I'm losing.
Yozak locates a place for us to hide in an alleyway of a ghost town. He sets me onto my feet, and I sit down, leaning my back against the ragged stone of the abandoned building. It does nothing to soothe my throbbing body, but it provides me relief from standing. I feel just like this place, run-down and spent.
"Do you understand what I meant when I told you that it was your life or theirs?" Yozak asks, seriously. "With all due respect, Your Excellency, this is war. You can't just freeze up like you did. Your brother and I can't always be there to…"
"Shut up!" I snap, smacking my legs, the contact sharp like the crack of a whip. "Just shut up." I get what he's saying. I know what he's saying. He doesn't have to tell me.
I'm not a bonafide soldier. A bonafide soldier would not have flinched at the sight of a lifeless body. A bonafide soldier would have cut the enemy down without any remorse. A bonafide soldier would be there for his comrades, and continue to fight for their country.
They'd fight for their king.
I made a mistake. A huge mistake. As much as I hate to admit this, even to myself, Yozak is right. About everything. I can't let myself be shocked stiff. I have to keep fighting.
Do what you can to survive…That's what Yuuri wrote. I realize that I have to take what he wrote as an order.
For him, I'm willing to become a killer. I'm more than willing to kill in order to keep him safe. To do that, I have to break my promise to him. A promise that is already cracked by the soldier that I burned to death.
I feel myself put that wall up, but then I remind myself of what Yozak said. I can't freeze up. I have to keep moving, no matter how stifling this living nightmare can be. With that thought in mind, I push myself up onto my feet, and dust myself off.
"Let's go back." I tell Yozak, who is silent for a moment, as if pondering if we should do just that. He appears to be reluctant, his lips pursed, his eyes skyward. I assume that he's torn between following through with the order that he was given by Conrart and being there to back him up. There's no doubt that he's also thinking about whether or not I'm in good enough condition to return to the battlefield. But there's no time to waste waiting for him to make a decision.
Without looking back, I take off, even after Yozak calls. "Wait, Your Excellency!"
It doesn't take him long to catch up. When he does, he grabs me roughly by the arm, causing me to wince. I turn to scowl at him, and try to yank my arm out of his grasp, but he holds fast. "I'm not letting you go back there!"
"Why the hell not?!" I bark. "I have to go back! For Yuuri's sake, I have to go back and fight!" His eyebrows rapidly ascend, and his grip on me loosens. I take this chance to break away and run. I hear Yozak sprint behind me, but he makes no move to restrain me again.
I'm horrified when I see that there's rubble covering the span of the battlefield, and that the source of the rubble is the mountain.
I rush over to the disaster area, and shift through the broken rock to recover the survivors. I find a dead soldier. The sullied beige uniform underneath the hackneyed armor indicates him as one of Conrart's men. I pull him out of the rubble, my body shaking. Then another, and another, and another, and my stomach lurches at the unbearable truth of it all. The pallid, lifeless bodies that litter the battlefield. The rock slide that the enemy caused with the power of esoteric stones that still lingers in the air. Unable to hold back any longer, bile shoots a path of fire up my throat, and I double over, and regurgitate.
I put a cool, quivering hand on my hot face.
This is too much.
So much death. So much destruction.
I let them all down. I should've been here to fight alongside them. I should've been able to prevent this from happening.
I should've burned the whole lot of them.
"Captain!" Yozak shouts in alarm, grunting as he moves some of the rubble. I look up to see him free Conrart from the rocks that he was trapped under.
I wipe the last trace of puke off the side of my mouth with my sleeve before I stumble to my feet. I make my way over to them, and drop down to my knees on the hard ground where Conrart sits with Yozak supporting him. He's covered in nasty-looking bruises, cuts, scratches, and deep gashes. When I see the blood on him, I panic, and snatch his hands, tightly closing my eyes, desperately wanting to summon my healing powers to make his pain go away.
I can't conjure it. Why won't it come? Conrart needs this! I need to give it to him! I can't let any of his wounds get infected. I won't let him share the same fate as his men!
"Easy there, Excellency." Yozak says, softly, patting my back.
He's right. I have to calm down. My healing powers won't work otherwise. I take a few deep breaths, and remind myself that I need to focus on ridding Conrart of the lacerations on his body.
I feel warmth build up in my core, and travel out through my hands and into his. I guide the warmth throughout his body, pinpointing each and every wound, tending to them all. I feel myself grow weaker and weaker, my body growing heavy with exhaustion.
Just a few more. I tell myself. Don't stop.
Before I can finish, Conrart slips his hands out of my grasp, and pulls me towards his iron-clad chest. I sag against the warm metal that's covered in debris, and fight to catch my breath. Dirt, rock, blood, death – I smell it on him. The sickening scent of burning, of rotting flesh overpowers my senses.
Tears flood down my face, and my head feels like its being cut in half.
"That's enough, Wolfram." Conrart says, shakily. "That's enough."
It's never enough. I think.
"What the hell happened here, Captain?"
"They called in reinforcements that wield esoteric stones, and they used the power of the stones to cause a rock slide." He holds me closer. I get the feeling that he needs my support, or at least to know that I'm here, to know that I'm alive. "Please, Yozak, tell me that there are survivors." In this moment, Conrart isn't a leader. He's reduced to a lost man on the brink of misery.
Yozak scans the ruin before us, as if to stall. Then he gulps and confirms Conrart's apprehension. "I'm afraid…that everyone has been wiped out, sir." These heavy words that are tinged with remorse and despair accumulate in the air and weigh down on us.
"This can't be." Conrart says, aghast. "It just can't be."
Yozak doesn't say anything. He squeezes his eyes shut, as if trying to escape from all the devastation surrounding us. He clenches his hands into tight, quaking fists, and he does something that I never saw him do. He weeps.
Two of the strongest men I know are breaking down.
We're all worn and torn and at a loss of what to do next. We're drowning in a sea of blood, and the currents are too strong to escape from. The blood of our fallen comrades. The blood of corpses that we won't be able to bury with their ancestors, in a place where their loved ones can visit them, and see the one last time before saying goodbye. The remains of soldiers that are reduced to meat that wild animals will soon feast upon to sate their hunger.
I realize then that we have all taken one step into the abyss, and that we have no choice but to continue our tortuous descent.
A/N: Hey, everybody! I know it's been a while since I updated last. I've been busy with college work lately so yeah...But here's the chapter now! Full of angst. What a turn this story has taken. A really dark turn, I'd say. I wasn't going to have Wolfram kill someone at first, but then I thought of how unrealistic that'd be during a war. Please let me know what you all thought of this chapter. Thank you all for reading! Much thanks to Sawyer Fan and Winry1021 for reviewing the last chapter!
