The Paradox of Remembering
When Elze Constanze thought back to the memories of that day, the first thing that came to mind was always this overwhelming sense of desolation.
December 25, 1916. The fact that she remembered the exact date was undoubtedly due to the ironic duality that dates alone could impose.
It had only been two years since the Great War had erupted, shaking the entirety of Europe and its colonial territories beyond.
On the calendar, they were now into the third year, and Verdun was precisely at the final chapter of that long, long battle.
By the end of 1916, Verdun no longer held even a trace of the “humanity” that had defined the first year of the war.
Even on the greatest holiday of the time—the Christmas Day of the birth of the only begotten Savior, a date shared by all Europeans regardless of their faith.
Elze Constanze stood right in the heart of a battlefield where ten full months of slaughter had unfolded.
More accurately, she hadn’t come as a soldier, but as someone who had simply wandered into no-man’s-land between the trenches by chance.
For the moment, she wore a rough German imperial uniform. If anyone encountered her, they would at least return her gaze, but the easiest course was simply to remain unseen.
Witches were not bound by national identity in the first place.
She had merely created a false background to blend into human society more easily, and the nationality at the time was simply that of the German Empire, which still held the city of Königsberg.
Loyalty to the Kaiser? Patriotism for the empire? None of those existed. A mage wasn’t human, so wearing a crown changed nothing.
It would have been far better to have been a mustached Bohemian private rolling across the Western Front instead of a mere soldier of the Kaiser, twenty years later.
*The reek of blood…*
Even through the winter wind, the stench lingered in the air.
How much blood had been spilled on this earth that even scattering it still left such a trace?
Elze wandered endlessly across the blood-soaked soil of no-man’s-land, imprinting every act of cruelty upon her eyes as she watched humans torment one another.
Only later, after the statistics of the war were finalized, did she learn that the combined casualties of the negotiating powers and their allies had exceeded three hundred thousand.
Including wounded, it reached one million. But seeing the number as a mere statistic from far away was one thing; walking the battlefield herself made the scale hit like a physical blow.
Elze had no particular interest in being here. The reason was practical.
*The souls… they’re all gathered here.*
A battlefield where thirty thousand people had died and vanished over ten months carried the very perfume of death.
From the trenches, a head poked out to take a closer look, only to be struck by a sniper’s bullet and fall. Shells exploded from ten kilometers away, ripping bodies apart. Mustard gas seeped through gas masks, and they scratched and clawed until their skin tore. Shell shock drove some to shoot themselves in the head. Waterlogged trenches caused feet to swell and burst, leading to amputation and fatal bleeding. Others charged enemy lines for only a few meters, got entangled in barbed wire, their wounds infected, and died. Hand grenades exploded in trenches, turning men into red mist. In close combat, bayonets drove straight through hearts. Infectious diseases caused coughing fits, blood vomiting, and sudden death.
War didn’t care if the French, Germans, British, Americans, Russians, Austro-Hungarians, Ottomans, or Japanese fought. The humans thrown into the fray had very little choice. They were mechanically told to pull the trigger, toss grenades, bayonet the charging enemy, and smash in their skulls.
Eventually, most became what they had killed—reduced to the same fate. Many young recruits never even managed their first kill before dying themselves.
Even if they had not committed murder and carried no mark of Cain, they could not be free from original sin.
Simply being conscripted as cannon fodder to fill the front line meant they were only one tiny cog in the vast machine of two and a half million men that made up Verdun.
The boundless creative potential of humanity had become one thin blade aimed at human civilization, threading through every cog.
The dying light of the Belle Époque ended in nothing but sin. The warp and weft of fate wove themselves into a dissonant harmony that leaped across the battlefield.
The German Empire leading, France wedging itself in, and then Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, America, Italy, the Ottomans, and Japan following with their own verses in the song of sin.
The assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo meant nothing at all.
Inertia had grown too weak; the cycle of death breeding death had long since completed.
The loop would only break once the cogs named humans were all exhausted.
In hell, the strong do not survive; the survivors are the strong.
It was pure survival of the fittest. The ones who remained were the right ones.
*How ridiculous. They didn’t even know why they were killing each other, yet they could be so fiercely hostile toward the enemy.*
Elze found it both astonishing and deeply moving that humans could wage war with such madness.
Of course, she wasn’t human, but still… compared to ordinary beings, she was something “different.”
That was exactly why she had wandered these hellish fields.
Among the countless souls floating above the earth, some remained unvanished or unabsorbed. From a mage’s perspective, it was like an endless buffet.
To put it another way, she was like a hyena prowling for scraps.
Directly claiming a soul had the advantage of fresh harvest, but it took too much time to kill one by one.
It wasn’t impossible. The issue was that it wasted time and effort. If other mages noticed, she might have to fight for nothing.
Compared to that direct method, the battlefield born of human madness was far more convenient.
As she drifted between no-man’s-land and trenches, she would encounter souls that had died in every conceivable way, lying there in plain sight.
Elze slowly walked toward the spot where she had last felt the presence of souls.
*It looks like a shell hit.*
She approached a crater. Around it lay six or seven bodies torn to pieces, unrecognizable shapes scattered haphazardly.
Legs severed at the knees, blood and intestines soaking the ground, yet it was impossible to tell whose blood was whose.
In the land of sin that had already drunk the blood of countless humans, these deaths would only become mere statistics.
*Already most have vanished. Two barely worth eating, maybe three that still taste good.*
Nausea didn’t even register. At eighty years old, it was too late for such sights to stir emotion.
Life as a witch had made her numb. Ordinary stimuli no longer held any appeal.
Her younger sister, who still firmly believed true love would find her one day, seemed a bit too… optimistic.
The sister who had said, “Let’s go to Verdun,” then stayed behind in Königsberg saying she was too scared to go.
If she hadn’t inherited the blood of a witch, Claudia might have lived a happier life.
The uniforms of the soldiers killed by shelling suggested they belonged to the French.
From her experience, souls were split roughly half French and half German.
Of course, when she wandered the trenches one side had clearly claimed, but that was just a local quirk.
Looking at the battlefield as a whole, over the past two months the souls she had harvested had balanced out in perfect proportion—French and German like gold and silver.
That was why the battle in Verdun had lasted ten months. If one side had been decisively losing, the front would have collapsed long ago.
For a witch, this field was better. The unlimited supply of souls showed no sign of slowing.
It was better than a host suddenly collapsing; it was better to linger on the verge of death, gasping, clinging to life.
Far in the distance, the roar of heavy artillery still echoed.
On the battlefield itself it would have been deafening, but here in the center it was reduced to mere background noise.
“Mmm…?”
In the middle of it all, Elze heard a sound like soft sobbing near the crater where the shell had landed.
It wasn’t an illusion. The voice came from the edge of another crater close by, where she had mistaken the form for a corpse.
*Had they followed the rumor that no second shell falls in the same spot?*
Well, it wasn’t entirely wrong.
Many mistook their luck for not having another shell drop, but the truth was…
Still, she had only ever taken souls that had already lost their flesh and were decaying.
Accidentally encountering a living soul in this place was pure luck.
Elze smiled the way a child smiles at Christmas morning, waiting for the gift under the tree.