Chapter 44
Chapter 44
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 44
Chapter Title: How to Endure
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The faces of the fallen were, for the most part, peaceful.
They looked as if they were sound asleep, their eyes gently closed, as though they might awaken if called.
But they would never rise again. Nor should they.
With a soft rustle, the soldiers recovering the bodies covered the faces of the dead with sheets.
*Whoosh!*
The rain intensified, as if the sky itself were wailing in their stead.
“Damn it all.”
“Forcing an operation on a day like this... No wonder they came back dead.”
“Might as well have just sent them to their deaths.”
The murmurs of a few soldiers, openly expressing their discontent, could be heard.
“J-Jesse!”
Gwen ran toward the body of one of the fallen.
“What happened? Jesse, Jesse! Wake up! Why are you like this!”
The soldiers recovering the body paused, holding back the sheet for Gwen's sake.
A small courtesy, allowing her to bid a final farewell to her comrade.
The casualties weren't limited to the non-combatant engineers.
“You son of a bitch! Why'd you have to die! You were so close to your leave! Why the hell did you have to go and die!”
Begman, the Reconnaissance Team leader, roared as he shook the body of one of his scouts.
The fallen scout's name was Mikhail.
He was Piss-Stain Russell's senior.
“Hmm. You continentals are strange. Why do you grieve? Should you not rejoice when a warrior meets an honorable death?”
A captured barbarian warrior blurted out tactlessly.
“This bastard and his mouth!”
“Fucking piece of shit!”
The enraged engineers descended upon the barbarian, swinging their tools in a merciless assault.
“Gh-Gah! You despicable continentals! Ugh! You don't even know how to treat a prisoner of… Gyaaaaaaah!”
No one stopped the engineers.
With a string of funerals lined up from the barbarians' surprise attack, what did beating one prisoner to death matter?
*Flick, fsssh!*
Carlyle turned his head to see Kudo lighting a cigarette with a flint made from a mana stone.
“Haaah.”
A thick cloud of smoke billowed out.
“Bad feelings are never wrong. Damn it all.”
Kudo took a few drags from the cigarette, then placed the still two-thirds-full stick between the lips of the fallen Mikhail.
In this world, cigarettes were quite expensive, something a low-ranking soldier like Mikhail could never have dreamed of affording.
How Kudo managed to acquire and smoke such a costly luxury was a mystery...
*‘They don’t call it the Blood-Soaked Land for nothing.’*
Looking at the bodies of the fallen, Carlyle was once again reminded that this was a battlefield.
He had braved the enemy's ambush and returned safely with his quota filled, only to find a line of coffins waiting.
It was impossible to feel any joy about returning without a single casualty from his own group.
But the sorrow did not last long.
“It's a shame, but what can you do? Rest well. It was an honor to fight alongside you.”
Reconnaissance leader Begman said this, then covered Mikhail's body with the sheet.
“To Mikhail.”
“To Mikhail.”
The reconnaissance team members surrounding Mikhail's body wished him peace and downed a shot of vodka together.
Carlyle, without a word, also downed the potent, fiery liquor.
The sharp scent of alcohol stung his nose, followed by a burning sensation down his throat.
Soon, a scorching heat surged up from the pit of his stomach, as if someone had set a fire inside him.
How high was the proof...?
It was called vodka, but he suspected it might as well have been pure alcohol.
“Alright, everyone back to the barracks. Kudo, you go report to Sir Helen first. Hand over that barbarian prisoner we brought in, too. Hey! Is that bastard going to die? You idiots! That's enough! Even if you're going to kill him, wait until after the interrogation!”
Begman shouted at the engineers beating the barbarian warrior, then turned back to Kudo.
“Oh, and don't forget to write the report. You're good at everything but that, always skipping the damn report.”
“When have I ever skipped it?”
“What, you punk? How many times have you ever written a report on your own? You might write one for every ten missions, if that.”
“Do you have proof?”
“Well, look at this brat. Proooof?”
Begman and Kudo bickered as if they had never been grieving.
“Ugh! I'm starting to feel a chill after being soaked all day. I'm going to the barracks to warm up by the fire.”
“What's for dinner tonight?”
The other reconnaissance team members also left Mikhail's body behind, heading off to their own tasks.
Just as the scouts had honored Mikhail with a shot of vodka, the engineers offered a simple farewell to their fallen comrades before departing for their respective barracks.
“Thanks again for today! I hope we can go on another mission together soon!”
Gwen waved at Carlyle, then limped away after her squadmate and disappeared.
As always, her face was lit up with a broad, innocent smile.
“...What the hell?”
Carlyle felt like he'd been tricked.
Where had that heavy, somber atmosphere gone?
The people who had been wailing over their fallen comrades just a few minutes ago were nowhere to be seen.
Their return to normalcy, as if nothing had happened, was so complete it seemed bizarre.
*‘Could it be?’*
A sudden thought struck him, and Carlyle's face went pale.
*‘Am I really inside a game?’*
***
Carlyle wondered if this place wasn't just a world that resembled the game [Overlord], but the actual game itself.
That if this wasn't reality, then these people were just clumps of data created by an algorithm, and the scene he had just witnessed was a kind of uncanny valley caused by an error.
Perhaps that thought was written plainly on his face.
“I know what you're thinking.”
Marder approached with a strange smile.
“What do you know?”
“That look on your face just now.”
“What's wrong with my face?”
“You thought it was bizarre.”
“...!”
“I'm right, aren't I?”
Marder said, his expression one of ‘I knew it.’
“You thought it was strange, how everyone's acting like they weren't just grieving. Am I wrong?”
“Well...”
“Don't forget. This is the Blood-Soaked Land.”
“...!”
“It's not like we were always this strange. Our environment, this Blood-Soaked Land, is what made us this way.”
“Ah.”
Carlyle finally understood what Marder meant.
*‘A guilty conscience needs no accuser.’*
Carlyle gave a bitter, internal laugh.
The thought that he had doubted reality and felt a chill at the seemingly illogical scene made him want to crawl into a hole.
“You've probably started to see it, but this is a place where comrades die almost every day. Someone you cried with, laughed with, and rolled in the mud with can vanish overnight. Just like when Derek died.”
“I understand.”
“No.”
Marder shook his head.
“You don't understand yet. Because you haven't experienced it.”
“...”
“Anyway. The hardship, the grief... it only lasts a day or two. When you go through it often enough, you naturally become numb. I don't know if that's a good thing, but what else can we do? It's how we endure. So don't look at us too strangely, little lord.”
“I won't.”
“Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“If you ever go through it? Which you will, soon enough.”
“...?”
“When it happens, just ignore it and keep fighting. That's what I do.”
“Ignore it and fight...”
“If you really can't stand it, get angry instead of sad. Anger is more useful than grief here.”
As he spoke, Marder's blue eyes seemed to hold a compressed, endless rage and hatred for the enemy.
“Hmm. The Butcher Tribe. Haven't seen them before. New faces are never a good sign...”
Marder muttered this, then disappeared.
Left alone, Carlyle replayed the scene he had just witnessed and Marder's words in his mind.
*‘Anger is more useful than grief... Will I become like them?’*
For now, there was no way to know.
Just as Marder had said, he hadn't experienced it yet.
But one thing was certain: he had learned something today.
He had learned how the northerners fighting in this Blood-Soaked Land overcame the grief of losing a comrade.
***
That night.
*Whoosh!*
With the rain still pouring down as if mad, Helen convened a strategy meeting.
“The situation is not good.”
Helen's expression was even more frigid than usual.
“We were able to extract detailed information about the Butcher Tribe from the prisoner we captured today. The size of the Butcher Tribe is...”
“Around 500 right now, I'd guess.”
Carlyle muttered unconsciously.
He already knew everything about the Butcher Tribe.
And he figured that interrogation or torture wouldn't even have been necessary.
Barbarian warriors had no hesitation in revealing their tribe; in fact, they often boasted about it with pride.
“Private Carlyle?”
“Yes?”
“What did you just say? Do you know something?”
“Ah, no, sir. I was just lost in thought for a moment.”
“Focus. I'll let it go with a warning this time, but if I catch you daydreaming during a meeting again, I'll have no choice but to deal with you according to military law.”
“My apologies, sir.”
Helen gave Carlyle a sharp glare before continuing the meeting.
“The Butcher Tribe is a force that has consolidated the smaller tribes we used to face. Their warrior count alone is said to be nearly 500.”
“...!”
The faces of the soldiers attending the meeting hardened.
Fundamentally, the barbarians had no concept of a nation.
They were a people who shared the same culture and customs, but their society was closer to a collection of hundreds of large and small tribes.
In such a society, a tribe with 500 warriors was definitively no longer a minor one.
For Bowden Fortress, which had until now faced tribes of a few dozen, or at most 100 to 200 warriors, this was a formidable opponent.
After all, the total number of personnel at Bowden Fortress was less than 100.
Of course, barbarians had an extremely high ratio of warriors to their total population, so a direct comparison with continental forces would be meaningless.
“The chieftain of the Butcher Tribe, Jarkan, is...”
*‘Bjornsen’s older brother.’*
Carlyle half-listened to Helen, his mind already recalling information about the Butcher Tribe.
Jarkan was an outstanding warrior and a competent commander.
So much so that he was known by the epithet ‘the Cunning Butcher’—a title that hardly seemed to fit a barbarian warrior.
*‘A figure with the potential to become a major player... I think that's what was said. Though he was killed by his own brother.’*
According to the original scenario, Jarkan was fated to be killed by his younger brother Bjornsen a few years later, his tribe stolen from him.
But since Carlyle had eliminated Bjornsen, Jarkan's fate had now changed.
*‘This... I might have just created a more troublesome enemy.’*
It was possible that, at this point in time, Jarkan was a more fearsome foe than Bjornsen would have been.
The proof was in the fact that Jarkan hadn't launched a blind, vengeful assault despite his brother's death.
It meant that, unusually for a barbarian warrior, his reason triumphed over his rage.
“Then what do we do? If the Butcher Tribe has 500 warriors, we can't possibly face them with our current forces. If we keep having small skirmishes like today...”
“There will be no retreat.”
Helen drew the line, her tone firm.