The Oldest Memory
My oldest memory is of being wrapped in a dark bundle and carried somewhere—anywhere—by hands I couldn't see. Not one ray of light reached me. There was only darkness, spread out beneath and around me, the whole of my world.
I think I was trembling back then, clutching tight to whatever it was I held in my hand. Clutching it for a salvation that was never coming.
A battlefield is a wave that rises across the land. One man falls, then the next falls, and when he falls, still another behind him goes down in his place. To push forward through that current is to take a raging wave head-on—and no matter how strong the warrior, they will crumble in an instant.
And that attrition was, as ever, the thing that gnawed at them. A soldier strong enough to take ten years to forge could be swallowed whole by the wave in a single heartbeat. In a war like that, was it truly wise to keep building armies the old way?
The fruit of that long agony was me. They made me—a weapon that could take the wave and stand unbroken, or better still, turn it back entirely.
The Demon Race's Decisive Weapon: a human shell packed full of the living tissue of every monster the world had ever produced. The moment I was dropped onto a battlefield, the board flipped, and people fled in such terror that they ran toward a horizon they could never hope to reach.
They called me a monster that had lost its mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. I still hold my reason; I am still human. I simply wasn't fighting for the country called the Empire—that's all.
"So, where am I headed next?"
"The Western Front. You're just about finished now, so you should finally be ready to fight the Hero."
The Hero. A name I'd been hearing since the very first day their hands carved me open and remade me, and a word that set my brain throbbing every time it reached my ears.
I didn't know why that word made my head ache like it did. I could only assume, vaguely, that it was because the Hero was my enemy—as for a precise answer, I doubted I could give one just yet.
"Then off you go. And if you come back with the Hero dead, all the better."
For now, all I could do was walk onto the battlefield and kill the people they pointed me at. If I wanted to live, it couldn't be helped. Not even by me.
First chapter
Latest chapter