It was absolute, inconceivable madness. Perry's words were not needed in the least. When faced with an inevitable conflict between brethren, any animal, human or not, will invariably fight twice as hard and three times as violently. No creature wants to see family perish; much less by their own hands. As such, when conflict is unavoidable, each party will strike decisively in an effort to minimize the suffering which will be produced.
Every man and woman on that field before the gates of the capitol fought with delirious abandon. Not a single person gave any thought to the bodies which fell before them. They only cared about one thing: to put an end to the fighting as quickly as possible. Both armies clashed with this mentality. The loyalists were just as remorseful that they had to kill their kin as the dissenters were.
As a result the conflict was heated. No one surrendered or dropped their arms until their heads and corpses dropped with them. We all knew we were slaughtering family; and because of this we pressed on. When one side claims victory the arms will be cast down and the bloodshed will stop. That was the goal these soldiers aimed for; all thoughts of justice, honor, and the welfare of the people left their minds as their souls vacated the mortal coil.
For myself; I fought with enthusiasm as well, however for my own intrigues. I felt no kinship for these people. I did not feel obligated to engage in combat with my whole being. I bathed in blood for Perry.
The frontline pushed ever closer towards the gate, which had fallen to our trebuchets an hour prior, but the endless flood of adversaries pouring forth from the walls was retarding our advance. The smell of grume and sweat permeated the air. The blood-chilling shouts of demented soldiers forced a shiver down my spine. The cries of rearing horse's death throes violated my armet. The crimson trickles which seeped in through the cracks in my armor, through the visor of my helm, lubricated my motion.
The vanguard, of which I was a part of, suffered the greatest casualties. Hundreds fell by the hail of arrows before we even managed to reach the breach in the wall. The city was erected on an elevated plateau, and the only way up was via a broad switchback road or a three week trek around the cliff face. With time a consideration, we opted for a frontal assault…
So many bodies lined the road, so much blood drained down it like rain off of a roof. The ground was slick with viscera, and all about men were tripping over the cadavers and slipping in puddles of sanguine humors.
The woman on my left broke formation to make a thrust at a charging cavalryman off to our flank, and fell to a high-tension ballistae round fired from the walls. The bolt punctured her plate completely and she fell back, impaled against the body of another of our men. The man behind me wailed as an arrow whizzed past my cheek and planted itself into his shoulder.
I deflected a sword strike with the langets of my halberd and countered with a thrust. The woman at the end of my pike fell limp, but my spike did not disengage and I held her body aloft. My muscles tensed and I pulled back, rending free my polearm, but in my clumsiness the pommel of my weapon crashed into the man whose shoulder had been shot. He fell down and cursed, but I pressed on.
My boot caught on the hair of the woman I just killed as I stepped over her cadaver, and I tripped. Lucky that I did; not a half second later another volley of arrows rained down upon the men. The shield wall managed to deflect the majority of the projectiles, but the few men who did suffer casualties tumbled over and rolled down the advance, breaking our formation.
The enemy was quick to react, and the infantry pushed through our line. I got to my feet and fought independently. My axe twirled about my head, sundering heads and crushing armor. The haft, outfitted with full-length langets, parried blow after blow. One woman managed to stab me with a rapier, punching my plate right to the left of my belly button upward at an angle. I twisted my halberd into the back hand, and then twirled it over my head. The centrifugal force applied to the fluke of my polearm punched her helmet at the right temple, and she fell off to the side with force. Luckily her grip constricted in death, which I imagine was immediate, and as she fell the rapier receded from my torso.
I dropped to me knees and clutched my side. Again, I was lucky. At the angle she punched me it was possible that she could have punctured my kidney, severed a renal vein, or sliced the abdominal aorta. By some miracle she managed to miss all of them. Regardless my vision grew dim. I rescinded my grip on the shaft of my halberd and started panting. I underestimated the amount of energy I exerted in that last excursion.
My comrades charged past me, rushing over and around me just like any of the hundreds of other bodies which littered the road. I tried to rise to my feet, but the action alone elicited a cripplingly painful response from my wound and I fell to my hands. My fingers curled painfully, clutching dirt and stone wet with gore. I would not be able to fight much longer, and I could not count on my rabid "brothers in arms" to pick me up and carry me away. It was time to retreat. I was no fool.
Just as I entertained the thought another volley of arrows hailed down. All but one missed me, the one that struck landed in my right shoulder between the plates. My luck had run out, and the excruciating pain coupled with exhaustion caused me to pass out.
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Some people may consider me a lucky individual, if you consider a long life of disillusioned strife to be luck. I place myself in situations which demand my death, and yet by some stroke of some fate I manage to pull myself out of hell time and time again. Of course, it's always mere coincidence; one as rooted in logic as I shun fate and variably inconsistent probability.
I will not deny that I was surprised to have awoken, however. Lying face down in a pool of steaming humor, some my own but most the other's, I opened my eyes. I was face to face with the severed head of a man with short brunette hair and clouded blue irises. One of his eyes had been sliced pretty badly, the gash running down his face, the lower half of the eye peeling back and resting on his pronounced cheekbone.
The din of combat was further ahead, now, but I could still hear the occasional stomp of boots leaping around me. I rose to my knees, clutching at my side and ignoring the pain in my shoulder. I reached around and gripped at the shaft of the arrow, twitching when I accidentally pushed into it. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled hard; I wish I hadn't. The head was barbed and sundered my flesh as I removed it without care. I suppressed the tears but not the deep squeal I produced.
I looked around. I couldn't have been out more than a few minutes; I could still see the frontline. They had pushed back through the gate, but not by far. There were isolated duals going on outside in the road, still, but the main force had pushed into the city.
There were corpses everywhere. It would take days, if not weeks, to count the dead which littered the streets; to assign various body parts to their respective cadavers. The quantity only increased the closer you got to the gate. A quarter of a kilometer ahead of me, where the men were engaged inside the walls, there was a veritable rampart of bodies.
"Absolute madness…" I mumbled. The soldiers mounted the corpses of their fallen comrades only to fall upon them. Half of the men and women had dropped their weapons and were tossing bodies to the side, opening holes in the wall of flesh and steel, so that their brothers and sisters in arms can leap into the fray only to become the next corpse to be tossed aside. Not a single one of them showed any sign of hesitation or remorse. They had lost themselves to the fight.
I unclipped the pouch on my left thigh, filled with a powder concoction of my own make – Sieveshroom spores and a Sanguine Verdure extract, a potent clotting and antibacterial solution – and tapped some of the powder over my shoulder. I undid the bindings on my breastplate and helmet and removed them. The plate peeled off like adhesive, so much blood had seeped into my armor and fused my leather tunic and the padding of the plates. I then pulled apart my tunic and applied the powder to my wound at the side, rubbing it in deep for maximum effect, gritting my teeth.
One of the rogue enemy soldiers still fighting outside the walls took the opportunity to charge and swing at me, and in my agonizing stupor I did not notice in time. Luckily for me his shortsword made contact with my forehead, where some of my diamond was currently being housed in the dermis.
So long as I am able to relent from casting active magic, I am typically able to suppress the mana expenditure requisite for sustained spells required to store, at least, my diamond within my body; so long as I do not actively move it with great vehemence. I am not completely without defense in my pre-liberated state, though it is limited in scope and versatility.
The force of the blow, however, while not strong enough to break my barrier, did knock me over. The soldier must have assumed he killed me - naturally one would when you swing a blade at someone's head and make contact – because he turned around and ran for another target in his delirious bloodlust. I grunted and rubbed my head, a very shallow cut in the epidermis of my forehead burned a little.
I sat up, propping myself with one arm which rested on the body of an unfortunate man who had been disemboweled, and sighed. I heard a familiar shout and gazed off to my left; I saw none other than Perry engaged with the man who had just struck me.
Perry, a skilled swordsman, was still a virgin to the brutal reality of combat. With no stomach for such atrocities he was dismayed and faulting in his form. He parried each blow skillfully enough, but stumbled over corpse after corpse as the man lay into him with a flurry of uncoordinated strikes. It was the furious barrage of a demon being deflected by the angel who did not want to see him dead. Perry would not last long.
I rose to my feet, grabbing the nearest halberd – whether or not it was my own I could not tell – and rushed for the two, cursing in agony. I came from the wild man's flank, and he turned to face me with horror in his eyes, visible as he bore no helmet. I did not relent, and crashed down into his neck with the full force of my axe blade. At an angle his neck sundered, but did not sever. I broke through his spine and the vast majority of his flesh, but a thin strip of skin held it on. His cranium flopped over as he fell, but did not roll away when he landed atop the body of another soldier just like him.
I grunted, dropping my weapon, stooping over, and holding my side, "Why did you relent?!" I shouted at my companion. I looked up into his face, frozen in shock with a gaping mouth and spots of humor and viscera painting his cheeks.
He was gasping for air, and tears started streaming down his disquieted eyes, "What is this…Zien?" He said weakly, in a whisper barely audible over the din of distant combat. I followed his eyes, which surveyed the battlefield and, more noticeably the wall of corpses being defiled at the line of skirmish, "What is this…?"
His nescience aggravated me, and I replied with vitriol, "This is war, kid!"
He fell to his arse, landing atop yet another of the hundreds of bodies scattered about so carelessly. He lifted a hand to his face and cowered behind his trembling, bloody gauntlet, "How…Why…? What is this…? These people are… They are my family! My people! How can they do…this to their own people?"
"What the hell did you expect?" I growled, "That's exactly why they're fighting this hard," I rebuked honestly, "Each and every one of these whelps has been driven mad by their desire to see an end to the bloodshed. Don't you get it, Perry? They are fighting to end the fighting! That is how bloody ignorant we humans are! You yourself should have come to this realization; you ordered it!"
"No… No, I didn't want this." He sobbed, rolling over into a ball. He was pathetic, "No more… They should have stopped a long time ago. Why are they doing this?!"
I stepped over to the boy and kicked him in the ribs with no lack of vehemence. He grunted, sobbed, and clutched his chest, "Remember what you did when you were first inaugurated, Perry?" I inquired between grit teeth, glaring down at the pathetic cretin, "You walked up and down the columns of soldiers, stopping at each and every man and woman! For two days you analyzed each and every last one of these monsters here today."
"Please, stop Zien… Just stop…"
"When I asked you why," I spat, "You replied, 'This may be the last chance I get to see these brave soldiers alive. These people forfeit their lives to my command. I want to see, to know the people who have placed their faith in me, for it may be my last chance…'" I turned around. I grunted in pain as I bent over, planting one of my boots on the collar of the man whom I had just felled. With my right hand I gripped his head, digging into his short black hair with my claws, and pulled. I ripped away the small strip of flesh holding his head to his body, which snapped back violently from the tear, spattering blood into my face.
I turned back around, bent over again, and with my left hand I pulled Perry up by his hair, "Well here you go, boy!" I brought the lifeless eyes of the severed head to Perry's face. Its limp tongue twitched reflexively, "Take a good fucking look!" Perry shut his palpebra tight and cried again like a weakling babe at his mother's teat, "THIS IS HUMANITY! This is what you fight for, Perry! This is WAR! This is FREEDOM! Will you take up arms and put your body on the line? Will you wallow amongst the corpses of the people dying for you and your ideals? You're going to have to choose, Perry: become the animal that you are or die like the pathetic whelp you pretend to be!"
"Stop Zien…" He whispered with even less force, his tears dissolving the spackled blood on his face, "Just stop…"
My eyes bolted. What did I expect? It was madness; the entire battlefield was the embodiment of insanity, "You're mad…" I whispered.
They are mad. The voice in my head echoed.
"I should kill you…"
You should kill him.
"There is no hope for you."
There never was.
"It would be a kindness."
And you are such a kind man.
"No…" My head ached, "No, you brought this on yourself, Perry." I snapped back to reality.
What?
Perry was still crying, still clenching his eyes. I rescinded my hold on Perry and he fell back, opening his eyes and looking up at me. I glared down at him with odium. This is the man I thought capable of liberating me? I mused. I hoisted the severed head, bobbing it in my hand, and then threw it, with all my natural strength at the ground. Offal and grume spilled forth.
"You're going to have to live with it, Perry," I said calmly, looking askance at the skirmish once more. It appeared as though our army had pressed into the city proper. I could only imagine what horrors lay beyond that wall of trampled flesh, "I shall let you suffer your own tragedy. Farewell."
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I turned away from the fight, that morning. I turned away from my sobbing friend. I turned away from the innumerable corpses of Firax soldiers. I turned away from the icy thralls of delirium.
I was the only soldier to abandon his post that day; the only human who did not die in the line of duty or see it through to victory. How ironic: that I, of all people, rejected the sweet embrace of insanity.