Chapter 16: A Soldier's Complains

Darus Kael woke up when he felt something soft and watery being poured into his lips. He almost wanted to gag at the nasty texture, but he swallowed it anyway. His parched throat made him crave liquid, any liquid. His starving body craved any sustenance.

Even something as disgusting as this. Liquid was liquid, food was food.

At least it was edible. Better, in fact, than the rations he’d choked down on missions. Those were utterly disgusting. The last time he had to rely on those provisions, he almost couldn’t push them down his throat. They were dry and yet disgustingly moist at the same time. A dryness that scraped his throat, and a moistness made of oil and fat.

He tried opening his eyes, with little success at first. It was true what the old soldiers said: when you’re near death, it’s your fingers that move first, not your eyes. It felt like he had no energy at all, no feeling over his face.

Yet he did open his eyes. His blurry vision showed the blurry outline of a woman. When his vision finally focused, he was shocked to his core.

He croaked in horror, “Corpse!”

“Who’s a corpse? You’re a corpse, your brothers are corpses, your mother’s a corpse, your father’s a corpse, your whole ancestors are corpses!” she snapped back without hesitation

He almost laughed. She wasn’t wrong. His mother was dead, his father might as well be. His grandparents from both sides of the family were already dead. He never had a brother, well, he did have a stepbrother, but that didn’t count.

But I have two sisters! He argued in his mind.

Try as he might, his tongue failed to make a coherent sentence. He muttered disjointed words, words that he wanted to say, but jumbled in his haste. There were so many things he wanted to say, but because there were so many things to say, he couldn’t say a single thing with any effect.

“Well, it’s good that you’re awake. You’ve been sleeping for the past week. We don’t have a doctor, so we didn’t know how to fix you.”

Fix me? Darus thought.

The word sounded so sterile, so mechanical. He recalled the technicians at the base saying they would ‘fix’ something with the same tone. As if talking about an inanimate object, like making a machine working again. He wondered if he was back at the base.

“We all thought you’d die one of these days, but surprisingly you woke up! Guess I was right to fight for your portion of the meal,” Aina said before dropping to a whisper, “The others said there’s no point feeding a dead man, you know.”

Aina spooned one last portion of the stew into his mouth before she called for someone. Just as she left, the previously empty space was swarmed by many people, none of whom he recognized. They were saying something to him, fawning over him, but he naturally couldn’t understand a single word. His weakened body and even weaker mind found it difficult to understand anything with so many people talking over each other.

So he took the easy way out.

He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

And the crowd finally left him alone.

Two mornings later, he was strong enough to sit on the bed. It was a pretty basic bed, made out of a frame of wood with cured leather stretched in the center by ropes. It was light, could be carried by just one person, but was also only strong enough to hold one adult. Maybe two adults if the workmanship was good.

He was placed in a large room, with the other families sleeping just a few couple feet away. As for the corpse, her family was the closest, supposedly out of necessity as they had taken it as their duty to feed him while he was passed out. He found out from one of the residents that if not for Rinia Virell arguing for saving his life, they would’ve just just let him starve to death and bury him in the fields.

He was very glad they didn’t actually bury him. But this made him wonder what happened after the battle. He could only remember up to the moment he knocked his head on the panel when his strider fell. Beyond that, it was all a blank.

In the center of the room was a bonfire that still burned even in the morning. There was a cauldron placed on a bed of stones, arranged neatly around the bonfire. When he saw them pushing sliced portions of pemmican and scoops of beans, he frowned.

So I DID eat the military provisions! No wonder it tasted like shit!

“Oh, you are awake?” one of the daughters of the Virell household, he forgot the name, greeted him when she turned away from the cauldron.

She was gaunt, thin to the point that her arms were more bones than meat. He lived in Ferradan’s Reach, so naturally, he knew of the famine in the countryside. But as he spent most of his time in the fort of Branvar Hold, such famine felt distant.

There was always food in the barracks, and if there was none, the fort commander would’ve raised hell to the officials at the capital. So despite starting out as a lowly soldier, he never had to forgo meals. Seeing her like this made him appreciate food now.

The food tasted like shit, but at least it wasn’t actual shit. Some people at base did call the military provisions ‘dried shit’. But it was full of calories and packed with nutrition. Just a quarter of a block of pemmican could fill his dietary needs for a whole day. If he could stomach it, that was.

“Old granduncle Jine said you only have some bruises and no bones or organs were damaged. Mother said so too. So if you want to go on walks, I can tell my husband and he will help you out when he’s back.”

Ah, she’s a married lady. So young and already married off.

Darus wasn’t being judgmental. He understood that people in the rural regions married early. He had even heard of child brides who had only seen twelve summers. He didn’t understand why families in the outer lands would be so eager to marry off their daughters so early.

He didn’t want to think too much about it. The commoners had their issues, the nobility had their own issues too. Just as he couldn’t understand why commoner girls were married off early, so too they wouldn’t understand the struggles of the nobility. They’d probably think the nobility, with their wealth and influence had it easy, but in truth, it was never that straightforward.

He would know, he was a victim of such problems. Enrolling into the army and requesting a transfer to the border far away from the capital was his solution. He was tired of having to deal with assassins aiming for him on innocent outings or having to share his meals with an attendant for fear of poison in the soup. And worse, the masterminds were often members of your own family.

He accepted the young lady’s gesture with a tired smile. She smiled back and promised to talk to her husband when he returned from helping his mother fix the mechas. Darus didn’t know what a mecha was, but he didn’t want to dwell on it as his head started getting tired. Feeling a little drowsy, he decided to take a nap and asked the young lady to wake him up when her husband returned.

Her husband only returned in the late afternoon. Hearing Rhielle saying that the soldier wanted to have a walk, Irek brought over a long piece of wood, turned and assembled by his mother to be used as the soldier’s crutch when he was ready to walk. Irek lacquered it himself with what remained of the wood lacquer they managed to scrounge up from their broken home.

With the crutch under his right armpit and Irek holding him on his left, Darus walked outside for the first time. His eyes struggled to adjust to the bright afternoon sunlight, having stayed asleep inside the former village chief’s mansion for over a week. With his eyes blinded, all he could hear was the sound of excitement and amazement from the villagers standing next to him.

But when his eyes finally adjusted, his heart stopped. He simply couldn’t believe his eyes!

His strider, the one he thought was completely totalled in the previous battle, was on its feet! Not only was it on its feet, it was striding swiftly along the main street. Even more amazing, it was striding faster and more stable than when he had last piloted it in battle. It felt like he was seeing a brand new warstrider, fresh out of the factory at Thernatus.

But he knew it wasn’t new. The scratches, the peeling paint, the scorched marks, all pointed to this being an old strider. His old strider.

He had bought this strider second-hand with the blood-soaked military merit that he had accumulated for the whole three years of his service. Even when he bought it last year, the strider was already old, at least twenty years old, and much of the components had to be swapped out for better second-hand parts or completely new components. Despite being newly refurbished, it never ran as smooth as this.

The strider halted before the mansion. Despite the cockpit lacking a glass canopy, he couldn’t see the pilot because he could only see the bottom of the torso. He wondered if the base had sent someone to fix and recover the striders.

But when the pilot climbed down from the cockpit, his blood ran cold.

It was the walking corpse of the Virell house!