Chapter 2

Chapter 2.

His vision was complete darkness.

No, darkness was not enough to describe it. Pitch-black despair pressed down on his eyelids, and only faint specks of light, created at random by his crushed optic nerves beneath that weight, drifted through the air. All that stabbed his nose was the nauseating stench of mud, blood, and spilled intestines mixed together. If every foul smell in the world were gathered in one place and boiled, would it smell like this? Every breath drove rotten air deep into his lungs, numbing even his sense of survival.

Something damp and cold was pressing down on his back. The feel of hard leather and bone. It was the corpse of an ally. Another corpse lay piled over it, and more corpses were strewn beside him. Rian was at the very bottom of a mound of bodies, practically buried alive.

‘Am I alive?’

He asked himself, yet he could not answer. His senses felt so unreal that it was difficult to tell whether he was alive or dead. A stupid thought crossed his mind that perhaps he had already died, and this was the entrance to hell.

BOOM!

That was when it happened. A dull impact sounded above his head, and the ground trembled faintly. Was it the sound of someone’s shield being smashed apart by a warhammer? Or the sound of a sternum being crushed together with armor?

“Gaaah!”

As if in answer to that sound, a short, severed scream came from nearby. The death cry of a life that had been alive only moments ago as it flickered out.

Rian’s heart cooled like a shard of ice. The heart that had been thrashing madly until just moments ago was now hiding behind his ribs, barely beating in faint pulses. Every muscle in his body stiffened like stone.

Reflexively, he pressed harder against the hand covering his mouth. His knuckles turned white. If even a small groan slipped out, it was over. The monsters above him, Wolfgang of the “Iron Fist” and his soldiers, were still hunting.

‘I have to hide. Keep hiding. I can’t be found.’

Inside his mind, numbed of reason, only that thought flickered precariously like a dying candle. Rainwater seeped through the gap in the cloak of the corpse covering his back and coldly soaked the nape of his neck. Goosebumps rose at that cold sensation, but strangely, it also seemed to bring him back to his senses a little.

Rumble, THUD! THUD!

The sound of several footsteps and clashing metal gradually drew closer. It was the sound of death’s footsteps, heavy plate armor stepping through mud.

‘They’re here. Right above me.’

Rian squeezed his eyes shut. All that appeared before him was Wolfgang’s overwhelming figure swinging his warhammer. He desperately wished he would just pass out like this.

How much time had passed? One minute? Or ten minutes that felt like eternity? Fear had swallowed even his sense of time. The noise of battle, which had seemed as if it would continue without end, began to subside little by little, but clearly. The frequency of the sharp sounds of steel clashing against steel decreased, and only intermittent screams and groans mixed into the rain.

‘Is it over?’

No. Not yet. Don’t be fooled.

A faint hope tried to sprout from the ashes, only to be crushed at once by even greater fear. The battle might be over. But they would still have “cleanup” left. Their own cruel ritual of finding the survivors and cutting off their breath.

Because of his crouched posture, his legs began to cramp. Pain like being stabbed with an awl spread from his calves to his thighs. But Rian could not move. This pain was nothing compared to the terror of death.

‘Please. Please just go. Please don’t let anyone find me.’

The rain that had been pouring down fiercely grew thinner little by little. As the noises that had sounded like the end of the world faded, paradoxically, the small sounds around him came through even more clearly. The pained groans of the wounded in the distance. The sound of a torn flag fluttering in the wind. And…….

Perfect silence, without a single sound.

Rian was confused. This silence was several times more terrifying than the noise of the pandemonium. He tried to move his cramped leg just a little, so minutely that no one would notice. He felt as if he could not endure unless he loosened the muscle spasm.

That was the moment.

The tip of his right hand, buried in the mud, touched something cold and hard. Startled, he tried to pull his hand back, but soon realized that it was a human hand. A hand already beginning to stiffen coldly, emptied of life.

In that instant, a memory passed through Rian’s mind. Before the battle began, in the trench, a scout comrade had been sharpening his dagger with agile movements. He had not been in Rian’s platoon, but they had crossed paths a few times. His name was…… Flynn, perhaps.

‘You’re dead too.’

Even amid extreme terror, a very faint, dust-like sympathy passed through him. It was a result everyone had expected anyway. He was about to pull his hand away from Flynn’s hand, which he had touched without thinking.

At that very moment.

Zzt.

A weak static shock ran from his fingertips, like when someone touched a metal handle on a dry day.

‘……What is this?’

It was strange. Static electricity in this damp mud?

Before that question could even end, a bizarre phenomenon began. From the palm touching Flynn’s corpse, something cold and horrifying began to seep in. It was a chilling suction, like a leech clinging to the skin and sucking blood.

Rian was terrified and tried to pull his hand away. But regardless of his will, his palm stuck to Flynn’s corpse like a powerful magnet and would not come free.

‘U-uaaaagh!’

He wanted to scream. But from his terror-stricken throat, not even the sound of leaking air came out.

Even with his eyes closed, a grotesque vision unfolded before him. A pale blue haze rising from Flynn’s corpse wound up his arm like a snake. It was a horrifying sight. Though he knew it was a hallucination, it was far too vivid.

The chill passed through his forearm to his shoulder, then along his back and spine, driving straight into his heart. A fear as if his whole body were plunged into ice water and cooled in an instant. But this was not simple cold or fear. It was an instinctive rejection and disgust, the sense that some foreign thing was invading his territory.

And then…….

Suddenly, fragments of unfamiliar memories slammed into his mind like a hammer.

—Shwaaaa. The sound of leaves brushing together. Rough breathing battered his ears. A first-person view of someone running madly through the forest. His vision shook violently, and the feeling of sharp branches scratching his cheeks came through vividly.

‘I’ve been spotted! Damn it, it was an ambush! I have to inform the main force!’

This was not Rian’s thought. It was not his memory. It clearly belonged to someone else. It was the extreme urgency and anxiety Flynn had felt just before his death.

Rian’s own fear and the fear of Flynn, now dead, mixed together until it felt as if his head would burst. Amid the confusion of the boundary between his own emotions and another person’s emotions collapsing, he could not breathe properly.

Whoosh!

—A sharp sound cutting through the wind from behind. A despairing intuition that it could not be avoided.

Then came a terrible impact that pierced through his entire back. Along with pain driving deep into his lungs, he felt the strength drain out of his body.

“Hup!”

Rian inhaled as if he himself had been struck by an arrow. Every muscle in his back screamed and spasmed violently. His real body and the pain of the hallucination mixed together, driving him mad.

‘I’m confused…… My head…… feels strange.’

That was when it happened.

Tap.

Like a machine whose power had been switched off, the hand stuck to the corpse fell away weakly. The blue haze that had been dizzying his vision also vanished as if it had been a lie.

The eerie chill that had wrapped around his whole body disappeared, but the aftermath of that horror remained intact inside Rian.

His body felt strangely light.

As if he had become a feather. It was a bizarre sensation, as though the weight of his body, steeped in long hunger and exhaustion, had vanished. At the same time, every nerve stood on end like a sharp needle, as if he could detect even the tiniest changes around him.

‘These…… aren’t my senses.’

They clearly did not belong to Rian himself. Yet without a doubt, he was feeling them inside his own body. His familiar body had, in an instant, transformed into something unfamiliar and foreign.

***

How much time had passed? Ten minutes? Or perhaps even longer.

His surroundings were now wrapped in perfect silence. Even the occasional groans of the wounded had all faded. Only death, silence, and the thin rain remained on the battlefield.

Rian still could not move. What he had just experienced was so unreal that he could not even distinguish what was reality and what was hallucination.

Squelch. Squelch.

Then a new sound broke the silence. Heavy footsteps stepping through mud. It was not one person.

Rian’s heart began pounding again. At a speed incomparable to before.

The “cleanup” had begun.

The “extreme fear of being discovered” that had forcibly flowed in from Flynn used Rian’s own fear as a catalyst and amplified severalfold, crashing over him. His reason felt as if it would be completely paralyzed. The impulse to leap out of this place at once and flee screaming clashed violently in his head with the instinct to stiffen like a rock and hide.

Along with the footsteps drawing closer and closer, he faintly heard their conversation. It was the language of the imperial bastards.

“……Stubborn bastards. Some of them are still breathing.”

With a short choking sound, one of the groans that had been coming from afar was cut off forever.

Rian could not even move his eyelids. The fear born from Flynn’s memory instead made his body freeze perfectly in the face of danger. Every muscle in his body betrayed his will and chose the best option for survival: pretending to be dead.

“Check this pile too. It’s annoying, but we have to deal with them thoroughly.”

‘They’re coming. Toward me.’

Alarm bells rang inside his head.

Squelch.

At last, the footsteps stopped right in front of him. Through the narrow gap in the cloak covering the corpse, Rian could see the front of an imperial soldier’s dirty, large military boot. His heart felt as if it would stop.

Thud.

He heard the dull sound of the soldier prodding the corpse beside him with the shaft of his spear.

Thud. Thud.

One by one, he was stabbing the bodies as if checking them. Next was his turn. No, the corpse he was lying on top of, or the corpse covering him, would be next.

He could feel the soldier adjusting his grip on the spear. He lifted not the spearhead, but the heavy shaft.

THUD!

The shaft struck hard against the chest of the corpse right above Rian’s head. A dull sound rang out as it hit the solid breastplate. The impact passed through the corpse and reached Rian’s head intact. For an instant, his vision flashed, and dizzying pain struck him.

Flynn’s fear and Rian’s fear tangled together, instead creating a state of perfect rigidity in which not even a scream came out. It was the realm of a living corpse that allowed not a single breath, not the slightest tremor of muscle.

“Looks like they’re all dead on this side. Not even a twitch.”

One soldier spoke indifferently.

‘Please. Please…… just go.’

Rian prayed madly inside. He called upon every god in the world, but if there was a god here, he was surely on the side of the imperial bastards.

“Damn, what a hassle. Let’s just give them a quick stab and move on. Now that the rain’s stopped, the smell’s even worse.”

Another soldier grumbled.

Squelch.

No sooner had those words ended than the sharp spearhead pierced deep into the mud beside Rian’s arm. The cold, chilling feel of metal brushing against the skin of his arm was far too vivid. If it had stabbed just a little farther to the side, the spear would have gone straight through his arm.

Rian did not even breathe. His lungs felt as if they would burst, but he instinctively held his breath.

“……Done. Let’s go. There are still plenty left to deal with.”

At last, the words he had been waiting for came.

Squelch. Squelch.

The footsteps of death began moving away again. Until they could no longer be heard at all, Rian did not move a muscle.

How much time had passed? The receding footsteps vanished completely, and only silence remained in the world again.

Only then did the tension in Rian’s body release all at once.

“Hup, haa, haa, haa…….”

He silently gasped for breath, rough and desperate. He devoured air as if a levee had burst. His whole body was soaked in cold sweat, and he could not tell whether he was wet from rain or sweat.

More time passed. Until every sound on the battlefield had disappeared completely.

The rain had stopped entirely at some point. Between the thick clouds that had hung overhead, pale, faint moonlight began to leak through.

Very slowly, as if opening the lid of a coffin after hundreds of years, Rian carefully pushed aside the edge of the cloak covering him.

The night sky visible through the gap. And beneath the moonlight, the faintly revealed landscape of hell. The grotesque silhouettes of corpses strewn everywhere. Broken weapons and flags.

Rian slowly raised himself up.

‘I……survived.’

The moment he recognized that fact, what surged over him was not relief but an immense emptiness. He had survived, but for what? To die again tomorrow?

But he had no time to feel joy or emptiness. A more fundamental sense of wrongness seized his whole body.

‘It’s my body…… but it doesn’t feel like my body.’

Even when he tried to move a single fingertip, he felt a nimbleness unlike before. From the tips of his fingers pressed against the dirt, the texture and temperature of the mud, even the feel of tiny pebbles, came through several times more vividly than before. It felt as if a dull tool he had used all his life had turned overnight into an extremely keen, honed sword.

‘What on earth…… happened to me?’

He chewed over the unanswered question. Then he looked down at his palm. An ordinary hand, dirtied with mud and blood. But just moments ago, the final moments of a man named Flynn had flowed in through this hand. That cold sensation still remained somewhere in his arm like an afterimage.

Rian, left alone in the land of death.

In his eyes, there lay not the relief of survival, but a deeper, darker fear of the unknown writhing inside his body.

The night deepened, and the silence of the battlefield settled heavily over him, as if it would swallow him whole.