"The heart beats loudest when it is certain it is about to stop. In that final moment, you don't hear anything without silence"
The blade didn't make a sound when it entered the meat.
I was staring through the narrow, horizontal slit of my visor, my vision a blurred, red-streaked mess. The blood I had smeared over the steel was starting to dry, sticking to my eyelashes and stinging my eyes. Just inches to my left, a Minocian sword hissed through the freezing air and buried itself into the thigh of a fallen Romanian knight. I didn't see the wound, but I heard the wet, heavy thud of the steel biting into the bone.
I didn't breathe. I didn't blink. I was no longer Rian, the sixteen-year-old student from a world of textbooks and piano lessons. I was a piece of debris. I was a rock in the mud. I was already dead.
Step. Step. Step.
The two soldiers moved closer, their iron-shod boots churning the mud into a grey, bloody soup. They weren't just checking for survivors; they were performing a ritual. To them, this wasn't a tragedy—it was a harvest. They spoke in low, bored tones about the quality of the local ale and the blisters on their heels, all while their hands performed the mechanical task of ending the lives of men I had once called countrymen.
They stopped right beside me.
The silence that followed was a physical weight, pressing down on my chest harder than the hundred-kilogram corpse of the Romanian knight draped over my torso. I could hear the faint, rhythmic hiss of their breathing through their own helmets. My lungs were a furnace, a hot, searing fire spreading through my chest as I forced myself to hold my breath. My vision began to swim with white sparks.
The violet timer of the Soul Roulette flickered at the edge of my consciousness—a cold, digital ghost in this world of iron.
09 YEARS | 364 DAYS | 23 HOURS | 30 MINUTES...
"You Romanians are the worst," one of the soldiers spat, his voice thick with a casual, terrifying hatred. "Always hiding in the dirt like rats, hoping the ground will swallow you before we do."
I heard the screech of steel against a leather-bound scabbard. My eyes widened in the dark. My muscles were locked in a tetanic grip of pure, primal fear.
SHINK.
The soldier plunged his sword downward with a grunt of effort. I felt the violent vibration travel through the corpse above me as the blade tore through the dead man's lower back, splintering his spine, and buried itself deep into the mud beneath us.
The cold edge of the sword grazed the side of my own breastplate. I felt the metallic shiver of it against my ribs, a ghost of a kiss from the reaper. If I had shifted an inch to the right—if a single sob had escaped my throat—that blade would have pinned me to the earth like an insect.
"Fall back! To the lines!"
A new voice boomed across the field. It was deep, resonant, and carried the weight of absolute, unquestioned authority. It came from a man on horseback, his armor gleaming even in the dim, ash-choked light of Sephtis.
The commander rode his massive warhorse right into the pile of bodies. I saw the horse's hooves splash mud onto my visor. The man looked down at the sea of Romanian dead with nothing but pure, unadulterated disgust.
"Come back, you two!" the commander barked. "We've won this war. The sun has set on Romania. We are marching back to the Kingdom of Minocia. Every rat in this field is already dead or dying; there's nothing left to check but rotting meat."
To emphasize his words, the commander leaned over his saddle. With a slow, deliberate motion, he gathered the moisture in his throat and spat directly onto the face of a fallen Romanian captain lying mere inches from my head.
It was a gesture of total dominance. To him, we weren't even worthy of being enemies anymore. We were just trash to be stepped over.
"Move out!"
The pressure on the corpse above me finally eased. I heard the soldier grunt as he yanked his sword free from the dead man's body with a wet shloop.
"Lucky rats," the soldier muttered, his footsteps joining the growing thunder of the retreating army.
I listened as the rhythmic clanking of thousands of suits of armor and the heavy tread of victory started to fade into the distance. The world grew quiet again, leaving only the sound of the wind whistling through the gaps in broken shields.
I lay there for a long time. The weight of the dead man was still crushing me, but for the first time, I felt the warmth of his blood seeping through the gaps in my armor, soaking into my undershirt. It was the only warmth in this cold, decaying world.
I was alive.
The realization didn't bring joy. It brought a violent, uncontrollable trembling. My limbs began to shake so hard that my armor rattled against the stones, a frantic clink-clink-clink that echoed inside my helmet. I had experienced it—the absolute threshold. I had seen the edge of the abyss and felt the cold breath of the blade on my skin.
I opened my mouth and let out a ragged, silent sob, the carbon dioxide finally escaping my lungs in a burning rush. I was a survivor, but I was also a coward covered in the filth of a dead man's grave.
[USER: RIAN]
[09 YEARS | 364 DAYS | 23 HOURS | 25 MINUTES | 12 SECONDS]
The timer didn't care. It just kept ticking, marking the start of a decade in a hell where where peace is the only thing I can find in death