"Are the shoulders under the weight of other deaths heavy..."
I closed my eyes so hard the muscles in my face throbbed. *Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.* I prayed to hear the rhythmic hum of the ceiling fan in my room back in the city. I waited for the smell of the battlefield—that copper, iron-like stench—to fade into the scent of my mother's tea. But when I opened them, the ceiling wasn't white plaster. It was the bruised, grey sky of **Sephtis**, choked with the black smoke of burning wood and hair.
The nightmare was still here. And it was getting closer.
*Splap. Splap.*
The sound of heavy boots in the thick, viscous mud was slow and methodical. I panicked. My heart was a trapped bird fluttering against the cage of my ribs, its beat echoing inside my steel breastplate. I looked down at the crest etched into my gauntlet—the fading eagle of **Romania**—and then I looked at the two men approaching. Their armor bore a sun, jagged and cruel.
The soldiers of **Minocia**. They weren't a rescue party. They were the cleaners.
I watched through the narrow, horizontal slit of my helmet as one of the Minocian soldiers stepped over a wounded Romanian knight. The dying man was reaching out, his fingers trembling, begging for a drop of water or a hand to hold. Without a single word, the Minocian soldier drove his spear through the man's throat. There was a wet, bubbling sound, followed by a brief twitch, and then... silence.
They were making sure no one from Romania left this field alive.
Fear, cold and sharp as an icicle, forced my brain into overdrive. I couldn't run. This armor—this thirty-kilogram shell—was a tomb I hadn't learned to move yet. I was a turtle flipped on its back, waiting for the knife to find the gaps in my skin.
I reached out, my gauntlet slick with the dark, cooling blood of the soldier beside me. I began to smear it. I painted the crimson filth over my visor, blurring my vision. I rubbed it across my chest and over my hands. Then, with a surge of strength born of pure, unadulterated terror, I grabbed the heavy, limp arm of a fallen Romanian soldier lying next to me—a man much larger, much wider—and dragged his corpse over my torso.
The weight was staggering. It wasn't just the physical pressure of a hundred kilograms of meat and metal; it was the *presence* of death. The smell of his open wounds, the stagnant sweat of his gear, and the bowels that had loosened in his final moments filled my helmet. It was suffocating. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream and push the dead man off me and run until my lungs burst.
But I stayed. I became a statue made of steel and gore.
Through the tiny gap between my shoulder and the corpse's waist, I saw their boots. They were standing right there. I could hear the rhythmic clanking of their gear and the casual way they spoke, as if they were discussing the weather rather than finishing off the wounded.
*Thud.*
One of them drove a sword into the leg of a body lying just inches to my left. I heard the blade bite through leather, muscle, and bone with a sickening *crunch*. I didn't move. I didn't even breathe. I let my body go completely limp, trying to convince the world that the weight on top of me was the only "life" left in this spot.
**[USER: RIAN]**
**[09 YEARS | 364 DAYS | 23 HOURS | 48 MINUTES | 05 SECONDS]**
The violet light of the **Soul Roulette** flickered in the darkness of my helmet. It was so bright in my own eyes, so neon and obvious, that I was certain they would see the glow through the mud. But they didn't. They just stood there, looking at the pile of meat I was hiding under. To them, the air was empty. Only I could see my life leaking away, second by second, toward a ten-year horizon I couldn't even imagine.
My lungs were burning, screaming for oxygen. My chest felt like it was being crushed by a vice. I held my breath until my vision began to spark with white dots.
The Minocian soldiers moved. Their shadows shifted over the mud, stretching toward me like grasping fingers. One of them stepped closer, his heavy, iron-shod boot sinking into the mud right next to my visor.
"This one looks fresh," a voice said—low, bored, and terrifyingly close.
I felt the corpse on top of me shift. The soldier wasn't moving away. He had grabbed the dead man's shoulder. He was pulling the body off me to see what was underneath.
They were approaching me. And I was still paralyzed in the mud.