Kary could hear the chirping of the birds from afar, warm sun rays hitting her face in disjointed patterns, blocked in part by the foliage up above. Even with her closed eyes, she could still see the red hitting her, the warmth she had so dearly missed last night arriving to cradle her in its gentle arms, soothing the immense pain she could feel emanating from her every molecule, every minuscule part of her screaming in ungodly agony, born from who knows where. Kary certainly didn’t, although it might have been easier to think about… anything, really, without the constant yell from deep within her wanting the pain to stop. But how could she do anything when doing nothing already hurt this much? How could she budge an inch from where she laid if even breathing caused goosebumps to form all over her mostly white skin? Well, the answer to that was quite simple, actually: she simply didn’t move at all! If she stayed still like any other rock easily found around these parts, then the pain should eventually subside, right? Right?! Kary certainly hoped so. It wasn’t as if she had any other idea in mind at the moment. Maybe more would come as time passed and the food within her stomach ended up being fully processed, but, for now, she had all the time in the world to think about whatever the heck she so pleased.

  Of course, after everything she had gone through during a single night, there should be a lot of things in her head, unsolved matters that still required her attentions, things she had deliberately thrown aside in order to focus on not getting killed. She knew for a fact there were things she wanted to go back to, and yet, nothing really came to her mind. The girl just stayed there, staring into the ruffling foliage far above her, past all the shit she had gone through, past all the injustice she had been fighting since the day she was birthed all the way back on Earth, for a moment letting herself disappear into the world, a swirl of nothingness taking over her mind and brain, giving her the time to relax she never had, not when she was an earthling like any other, nor when she had been dropped into this messed up place where nothing ever made sense. Why had she been placed into random ruins inhabited by flesh-hungry monsters? Why did she had to fight as soon as she arrived? Her, an inhabitant of peaceful Earth. Her, who, despite all the troubles she had experienced, never had to (or never had the ability to) retaliate in a physical manner. Forced to fend herself against creatures much stronger than her. At least the people she met after that were pretty nice. She wondered what they were doing right now, with everything that was going on inside this crazy country. Were the adventurers she had met out there exploring other ruins? Or were they killing monsters, racking up money for who knows what? Did the country even allow them to do as they please, considering all the restrictions suddenly put into place, or was everything just concentrated here at the capital? Speaking of the capital, what had happened to it? Was the armed revolution successful, or was the throne successfully protected by those loyal to His Majesty, those held dear enough to the monarch that those who corrupted the minds of the knights were unable to get to them?

  You know, it was almost funny to think that there was any time to relax, any leniency in the gods’ great plans, a singular moment where Kary could simply allow herself to think of nothing at all… though thinking about her lack of thinking did constitute thinking in and on itself, now didn’t it? Anyway. Perhaps she had been wanting it, subconsciously looking for a snippet of time where she could just not be anything, not Kary, the scarred girl, nor Kary, the rescued girl, not even Kary, the adventurer, a deep desire to simply bundle up all these particular facets of herself and throw them in a bin for even a second. How long had she managed to stay like that? A second? Less than that? Who knows. It was definitely not more than that. And, just like that, she had been brought back to the disappointing reality, where she was, indeed herself, her so very sore self, still staring at the leaves above, with no intention at all of changing that any time soon, at least until she felt like she could stand in her own two feet without buckling over, hitting her head in a stray root and have a concussion, and she couldn’t have that, at teal not after just having multiple near-death experiences within the same night. Even if the world needed to turn, even if she didn’t get to let time go by without her, she still needed some time to recompose and start again. After all, no one is impervious to damage, in any shape or form it might come. Hit a vase, a delicate vase, as dainty and precious as human life itself, enough times, and it will inevitably break, its pieces scatter across the ground, its beautiful patters ground to dust and dissolved in between the floorboards. Time and time again Kary fell to the floor, knocked over either intentionally or unintentionally. Not that it mattered, as she broke every single time, and every single time she was rebuilt again, though never complete, never again to be the same person. It was frustrating, it was infuriating, it was saddening to know that the bright girl once named Kary had need buried under the wood, never again to be seen, leaving behind only that grotesque imitation that now walked around… well, not at the moment, who pretended to be her.

  Even if she put on a hard front, even if she tried her very best to not get knocked to the ground again, even if she arranged bullet-proof glass case around herself so as to impervious to everything, closing herself from the world around her, things still got through. She still got knocked over, she still got bumped around at the mercy of others, taken to the brink of reality, the edge of her own sanity, just tethering on the edge of the abyss, until she got pulled to this new, grand world. Back then, she really thought that this was something akin to divine retribution, good, comfortable life at the lands of a noble living by her own desires, in contrast to the shitshow that her first life was. Despite the initial bumps and frankly superfluous twists, it seemed to be going well, y’know. Her relationship with Asteria and her house’s servants were quite nice, to undersell it a bit, she was diligently doing quests for the guild, and, by extension, for the country, regardless of how boring or bizarre the requests seemed. It truly seemed like things were going her way, for the very first time in her long life. She didn’t need to worry about money, food, clothing, even interpersonal relationships seemed to be going well, despite her not being exactly the most talkative human around. But of course things couldn’t just stay like that, now could they? After all, sunny days are always eventually succeeded by storms, unending tempests that refuse to give way to better days, or, at least, that was how Kary remembered it. And so, after giving her time to acclimate herself and make herself comfy, of course whatever deities watching over her would start their little games now. She hadn’t been broken yet, but she could feel the cracks forming, her sanity slowly giving way to the madness of this world, her life being pushed around by beings higher than her.

  While she stared at the nothingness beyond the blue sky, she silently made a vow with herself. She would become stronger. Strong enough that she would be able to whatever she felt like. No bending over backwards, no being at the mercy of creatures beyond her wildest dreams, no getting beaten up to near death by mere pawns. Although she still wanted to travel the world, see all the sights it had to offer her, experience everything it could give her, live like a the flowing wind, at the time she had decided on this purpose for her life she had grossly missed the mark on the desires running deep within her soul. Maybe she simply wasn’t particularly aware back then, maybe this world had finally pushed her enough to understand her self in a much deeper way than she had ever gone through the trouble of. Always surrounded by strong people, always watching from afar as they did their jobs with impressive ease, she had never really stopped to reflect on her own glaring frailness. She was weak. So terribly weak. Even after all this time telling herself that she would be free, that she would be doing whatever she felt like from then on, pepping herself up with a regular routine and some casual chatter with the few people she had managed to get close to, she remained barely stronger than a newborn, a weakling oblivious to their own strength, not even a frog in the well, the king of the pond, oh so proud of themselves, but a mere fly, flying and buzzing around as if it owned the place, a mere serf knowing not the size of the country they live in. Foolishness didn’t even begin to describe her, her lack of forethought and care almost putting her six feet under just like that. A moment of distraction from the cold and harsh reality, a moment of simple happiness and joy and comfort, a moment of what she thought would eventually lead her to the true happiness she so desperately seeker almost lead her instead to her death, pierced by swords and slashed into nothing more than minced meat. How could she have been so foolish? How could she have believed that nothing would go wrong for her, and that everything from then on out would just… work out?

  Still, all in all, she was kind of glad for these monster knights now laying scattered across the dirt surrounding her, even though they did try to ambush her and get her killed for no apparent reason. Sure, her end could have been brought by them and their sharp swords, but she was very much alive, and very much aware of how much of a complete idiot she had been being over these pasts months, taking her life and its easiness for granted, when it really wasn’t. She hated the knights and everything they represented, but she wasn’t going to say that they hadn’t been useful in some way. At least she had been made to realize her own many, many shortcomings in a situation she had the ability to survive. How useless would it have been had she had this breakthrough during a fight she was doomed to lose, a massacre of which she was only a mere victim of, a number jutted down on the records of the nearest cemetery, a mere statistic, remembered only by the few people, so few that she could count them on a single hand, who cared to care for her. What was most important was that she was alive, and, being alive, she could work on the things that hadn’t gone well, the stuff she knew she needed to change, lest a third chance doesn’t come along.

  With a long, slow sigh, drowned by the unceasing chirping birds uncaring for the girl staring at their passage, she tried to move again, not really feeling as terrible as when she had just woken up, though she didn’t expect anything to be much different, since human bodies don’t normally heal in a matter of minutes or hours, or even days, for that matter. Even if it didn’t hurt nearly as much anymore, was it safe for her to get up, knowing so little about the state of her body? Probably not. But then again, Kary wasn’t particularly keen on just staying there, doing nothing except brood all day long, especially after said brooding had led her to the conclusion that the amount of training she had been doing was not nearly enough for what she wanted to achieve in the grand scheme of things. She was but a fly loudly flaunting its dirty wings around innocently, patiently waiting for the fly swatter to come crashing down on her, and she could have that, or rather, she wouldn’t have that in any way, shape or form. That was the one thing she would never budge on, the one thing she would never accept again. To become again a helpless sailor in the stormy waters of destiny, unable to do anything at all to change her situation, helpless against the monsters bombarding the deck with all their might, fully intending to take down the pesky little ship who thought it was able to cross this sea. More than exploring the world, more than making friends and meeting people, what she wanted the most was to be free, unbound by the rules that governed this world, unbridled by the all the wrong, unchained from the influence of the pantheon of gods governing over every last being on this bizarre planet. As such, it would do her no good to just stay still like that, staring into the nothingness above while thinking about these things, instead of just getting up and trying to turn them into reality. Although she didn’t really feel it when she was simply laying motionless on the bloody grass, but, after slowly trying to get up from the position she had fainted on, she was made keenly aware of the still open cuts and still sore bruises, her whole body pulsing dully with pain with her every brisk move.

  Maybe she had just been numbed by her body as it started working on the wounds, but she really hadn’t felt much of anything before, just some background pain, like a migraine that affected her whole body, though now that she had been made aware of it, everything seemed suddenly ten times worse. It was so out of nowhere and so intense that she almost just fell to her butt again, wobbling like a seedling amidst a tornado, moving around like a drunk person, getting close to tripping on the corpses of the Puppet Knights she had killed the night before. Right. She had killed what were once people. Almost forgot about that. Staring down at the fallen monsters, Kary thought that she maybe she was supposed to feel something stirring inside of her, some emotion, some visceral reaction to the very idea of killing someone like her, a human being… or what once was a human being. And yet, she felt nothing. Not even a pang of guilt, a shred of disgust, not even a desire to morn these fallen men. More than anything, she just felt empty, thinking more about what she should be doing in this situation ratter than actually doing anything. Out of respect for what little humanity she still had within her, even though she wasn’t quite sure of its existence anymore, the girl decided that she might as well bury them, a final gift for the dammed who been brainwashed and turned into disposable pawns, a farewell to those who were moots probably quite decent people when alive. Having said that, though, Kary didn’t really know how to do it, having never buried anyone in her lifetime, even if there were some people she met during the relatively small time she had spent alive on Earth she kind of wish she had.

  Of course, first things first, she might want to take the men from inside their steel tombs before moving them to the underworld. Having reached this same conclusion, Kary, knowing barely a thing about armors in general, began her struggle to remove the heavy thing from their bodies, pushing and pulling in a tug of war with herself, the warm sun hitting her back sporadically through the passing clouds as she gradually pulled apart the various parts of the armors, trying her very best not to damage them or accidentally maul the corpses inside. After almost drowning in a pool of her own sweat, Kary was finally able to see the faces of the men who had so persistently tried to end her life, uncaring for their own as they charged at her with all their might. They were young. Not enough to be a child, not even by the definitions of her old country on Earth, but it seemed that they had barely reached that age, just a bit older than the teenagers she coexisted with in school, their faces almost more childish than theirs, with but a little bit of hair growing on their faces. They looked like any other boys she might have come across during her time in the capital, maybe at a street stall, or at the adventurers guild, or even at the merchant’s block. They could have been anyone, faceless beings among the masses, nobodies on the streets, blank pages now torn to shreds under some ulterior motive they most definitely didn’t even have the right to hear, their lives cut short simply because someone had sent them to either die or dye their hands with blood. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for the unfortunate souls forced onto battle, their destiny sent them down the former path, cutting their life short at the price of allowing Kary to carry on with hers for just a bit longer. Such a shame, really, that they had to die, despite having their entire lives in front of them.

  Staring at their bodies while pointedly ignoring the bone spike protruding from the back of their heads, Kary let out a long, dry sigh, wondering if there had been anything she could have done to help these boys live another day, even though she knew for a fact there wasn’t. They had become monsters, and, as such, presuming any rationality from them and trying to negotiate would only lead to the death of the person idiotic enough to try this. Deep down she new this to be true, even without any outside confirmation, and yet… and yet it still felt bad, to stare at the five corpses, knowing full well their entire lives had been whisked away by the power of a higher up, uncaring and unfeeling for their underlings, the foot soldiers meant to be only a deterrent, a way to stop the nobility from intervening with whatever the hack they had been planning to do at the castle. Speaking of which, Kary couldn’t help but wonder what happened at the main street the night before. Were all the nobles who had been attacked dead now, rotting in the pavement while the rest of the armored knights stormed into the palace? Were they successful? What were they even successful ate, for that matter? Were they trying to overthrow the current ruler and install a new power at the top? Considering this whole operation likely took multiple high-ranking individuals to concoct, Kary wondered how they were going to decide who amongst them should be the new ruler. Or were they going to go for a shared ruling, where none of them held more power than the other, whilst at the same holding more power than the entire rest of the population? All this could only happen if the rebellion, coup, whatever you might want to call it, actually worked. With the way peasants had been conscripted left and right without any thought or care about their abilities at the front lines, the girl was of the opinion that maybe, just maybe, the people at the very top of this scheme hadn’t really been able to sway those loyal to the king, instead resorting to brainwashing the people no one important would care should they disappear, the peasants rolling on mud all day long, in order to achieve anything close to the manpower needed to storm a castle.

  Looking at the blue, warm sky above, Kary grew more and more curious by the second, though she was also prudent enough to know that going out there right now was the same as asking to get chased in a game of tag to the death once again, something she wasn’t particularly open to trying. Once had been more than enough, thank you very much. Despite everything, she was growing to be quite fond of this new life, so losing it so early would be just awful all around, both for the fact that she would be dead and because she wouldn’t be able to do the stuff she had already promised herself, with many more commitments to be made in the future, and she didn’t want to have made empty promises for herself. At the end of her life, she would like to look back and feel not the dissatisfaction of all the dreams that never came to be, the promises that were never made to the realm of existence, but all the things she had accomplished, the world she had built from the ground up in this bizarre new reality, her own little world, her memories, her feats, everything she had told she would do, everything she had put out there in this plane. That was what she wanted to see when death eventually came to claim her, not the inherent failures upon which everything was built upon, the frail scaffolding supporting her dreams, but the building graciously sitting upon them, towering, unmoving, her everything put into concrete form. She would get stronger, strong enough to stand on her own to feet against anything that could and would come for her, afraid the chains around her neck had become weakened, afraid the sheep might become aware of its shepherd, the kid put into an alien world just for shits and giggles turning into a genuine threat for the being ruling this world. Whatever happened in the future, the one thing Kary wanted to maintain unchanged was this will to move forward, this will that was crushed down and smeared on the floor since the day she had been born, now finally being given an opportunity to shine. And shine she would let it. No matter the cost, not matter what went down, she would never allow herself to let herself down. Not ever again.

  There in that empty forest, standing amongst beaten and bruised corpses, alone with her thoughts and her pain and the whispers from the wind, Kary clenched her fist, straightened her jaw, enduring the pain from tensioning her muscles a little too hard, she assured herself, that it was not yet time to depart from this world, for there were still way too many things to do, way too many places for her to explore, way too many people to meet. So she couldn’t drop dead just like that, without even giving Asteria an explanation for the mess the capital had turned in her absence. With a sigh, she shakes her head, clearing it from these pesky thoughts, and intend focused on digging a hole where the five men who had tried their very best to bury her here, wondering for a moment how she was supposed to carve a hole without any tools, but she had her hands and plenty of time to waste, since she had already told herself that she was not going back to the streets any time soon. Although Kary had never dug a hole before, the process itself was rather straightforward, and the menial task gave her time to just not think about anything, instead letting the world around her absorb her, take her whole, body and mind, while she worked like a machine, uncaring about the state of her clothes or the pain she was feeling. With her brain turned off, she kept digging her fingers into the dirt, feeling it crumbling under her pressure, the worms crawling through her palms as she removed them all along with the dirt, other small critters fleeing from the underground as it became aboveground in record speed. She could feel the sun on her skin, the warm breath of the midday ball of fire floating far away from this world greeting her with the gentleness of a friendly giant, extending a big, wrinkly hand towards her and the ground, giving her the energy to keep going, to simply doze off and work as hard as she could.

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  By the end of the day, just as the sun was starting to drift away from this portion of the globe, Kary had manage to acquire five relatively big holes, big enough that she could comfortably (well, not really) lie there, and deep enough that she could sit down cross-legged and struggle to get the tip of her fingers above the holes. Staring at the nouns of dirt she had managed to dig out, before embarrassedly looking at the dirty mess she had become, the girl let out another sigh, though this time it was a pleased one, content with what she had achieved. Without further ado, she carried the corpses one by one, lying them there on the ground with their eyes closed, before starting to throw the dirt in big bunchy, almost as if she was fitting a snowball fight with herself, using intend of snow and ice packets of loose dirt. It was deep into the night when she finished, the only thing remaining being the five mounds of dirt on the ground. Admittedly, Kary was quite exhausted, and she couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the best use of her time, especially considering she had done all that right after declaring to herself that she would work that much harder on getting stronger. While what she had done could technically be considered physical training, with all the dirt moving and removing compacted dirt from the ground, she still felt like she had accomplished pretty much nothing during this day, though at least now it should be safe for her to return to Asteria’s house, since she wasn’t able to hear anything other than the rustling of leaves and the footsteps of animals wondering the wild. Although she wasn’t particulate religious, the girl still knew for a fact that gods did, indeed, exist in this world, so she did pay her respect to the deceased soldiers, before trying to make her way back through the same way she had entered, only to realized she had gotten lost, which, after the chase, the confrontation, the fight and the subsequent win, should have been expected, and yet, as the night passed, the girl couldn’t help but get more and more frustrated by her failed attempts at escaping what should have been a skimpy forest made for nobility to enjoy themselves to their fullest.

  The moon hung tall in the sky, its pale gaze following her every move, her hurried footsteps blending in with the sounds of the small critters crawling through the dirt, dazed, tired eyes staring into the dark void that the forest had become, trying and failing to identify whether the rest of its body had already been there. How long had Kary been trying to find the way back? How long had she been running in circles, employing what little strength she had left to move her legs in an incessant chase for a seemingly impossible goal? It shouldn’t be too hard to find where the trees ended and where civilization once again begun, and yet, even after getting high into the trees, even after confirming her exact location and the distance she was from one of the places the woods seemed to thin out, Kary still ran around in circles, cursing silently to herself, all the while wondering if the knights had cast a curse upon her before they died. Considering their nature as killer machines, though, she found unlikely that they would even attempt something as seemingly dangerous and risky like that, especially when they seemed so sure they would be able to snatch victory through more traditional means. Now, of course, everything was simply speculation, for she could no longer ask the fighters what their intent was when trying to get her dead, and she could just be that bad at folioing directions, but the still-working rational part of her mind refused to believe that she needed more than a few minutes to find her way back, even less that she had already spent a good chunk of the night, the time when she had thought she would be already sound asleep at her comfy bed inside Asteria’s manor, walking around, covered in dirt and dried blood, the dull ache from her healing wounds reminding her at every step of the danger she had faced and survived against, something she would quite like to never have to repeat, though, knowing her luck, she doubted it would even take that long for the next life-threatening situation to arrive at her door step. When it inevitably would come, though, she wanted to be as prepared as she could be, which meant that she had to find the exit to this dammed place before she died from sheer self-inflicted exhaustion.

  Thankfully, it seemed that her tired mind really was playing pranks on her fatigued body, as it only took her passing through a place she was sure she had been to before and walk for a few minutes in order to see the thinning number of trees in the distance. For a moment, Kary cogitated jumping in glee, a true showcase of the feeling overwhelming her body for all the world to see… not that there was anyone out there who would see it, or at least Kary hoped there wasn’t anyone around these parts this late into the night. In the end, her tired body spoke much louder than the dopamine directed at her brain, her whole system all but begin her to take a break, to get home and to fall into the graces of whatever god governed dreams and the land they inhabited. Walking slowly, almost like a zombie starved of brains, she made her way back to the property she had come from, slowly retreating her steps while being careful not to faint from exhaustion right then and there. If she were to simply tumble down and fall right then and there, regardless of how close she was to home, Kary doubted her mind would give her the choice not to fall asleep instantly. And so she marched on, with no one other than the moon above watching her pained walk, the oh so languid progress through what once were beautiful flowerbeds, grown and taken care of with utmost respect and love, now only containing fallen flowers and the deep grooved from the heavy footsteps of those once dead set into killing the girl now approaching the place where the frantic chase had all started. To tell the truth, behind the small smile hidden by the darkness playing with her face, Kary was uneasy, scared of the ridiculous possibilities even she had to admit could never realistically happen. What if there were still knights inside the manor, just waiting for her to come back to ambush her? What if the contingent of knights marching towards the big, impotent castle were somehow enough to overthrown the current power, and the people at the top had already begun their attempts at disappearing with anyone who might pose a threat to their ruling? What if, what if, what if, endless thoughts swirled and slurred through her mind, her gray matter pumping out nonsensical delusions as an attempt to keep Kary away from the place it was scared to go back to.

  It was afraid, afraid for its owner, for it knew that place had already put them both into quite the perilous situation. What if it did again? What were they going to do, both brains and muscles pushed to their breaking point? Wouldn’t they just straight up die, then? In that case, wouldn’t it be infinitely better if they just never went there, knowing full well the dangers it entailed? With that, the girl’s brain kept using what little energy it had left to pump out these nonsensical delusions, trying to keep the stubborn girl away from the possible and very real existential threat that loomed over their heads, just out of their reach, just out their sights. Of course, Kary couldn’t care less about what her instincts fueled by trauma kept trying to tell her, instead arriving back at the window through which she had fled just the night before, a time frame so short, and yet so abysmally gigantic that it was tiring to even think about everything that had transpired in it. And so, she didn’t think. Scaling the short wall, entering the still opened window, without caring the least bit about her appearances or clothing, she arrived at her bed, collapsing down with a silly grin plastered across her face, overjoyed to be finally home. For a moment, Kary simply wished for this moment of infinite bliss to last forever, all the way until the last stars died out, their last remains consumed by the ever-hungry universe, and the entirety of reality faded into nothing but the purest, emptiest black. Peacefully, blissfully, she slept, the whole world now meaningless beneath the weight of the dirty blanket sitting on top of her. The entire world could collapse under itself right outside her doorstep that she wouldn’t even react, the needs of her body more important that whatever could happen to the universe.

  And so, she slept… until she didn’t anymore.

  All of a sudden, she was yoinked from the comfort of her bed, the peace and quite that seemed to stretch on forever suddenly stopped by a crushing pressure descending on the entirety of her body, her still groggy mind struggling to comprehend the sudden influx of stimuli, her every sensation melting into a singular puddle of warmth and bizarre comfort, even more so that what she had been just experiencing while sleeping. Although Kary’s eyes remained shut throughout all this ordeal, the girl could still guess who it was that dared to disturb her much needed rest, based only in this uncommon readiness for contact and the complete lack of knowledge about personal boundaries. It would be hyperbolic and borderline wrong to say that the girl had already mastered the mannerisms of the inhabitants of this place, but there weren’t really that many people who would be willing to jump at a sleeping girl like that without harboring some nasty ideas inside their rotten little brains, especially in the home of a noble, without even taking into consideration the almost laughable number of employees working under Asteria. Kary knew for a fact that the few people working here were some of the nicest people she had ever met, especially comparing to some of the toxic waste-personality people she had met during her life, and also knew that there was exactly one singular person amongst the employees who would so unceremoniously barge into a girls room and envelop her in a crushing hug, without a care for privacy, decency or even cleanliness, despite her job as a maid. Of course, the person in question was Marta, the only maid on the manor, whom Kary had very quickly befriended after being given a room within this seemingly excessively enormous house. Despite her drowsiness and sleepiness, the girl could still hear Marta’s words, made into an almost unintelligible mess by the loud sobs coming from her, so loud, in fact, that Kary speculated that, had they still have any neighbors, they might come to the gates questioning why they were making such loud noises so late into the night. Or was it already close to morning? Since the maid still had the decency of keeping the window closed, she couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered much. She was simply happy that someone cared enough about her that they wouldn’t care for the social norms.

  For an unknown amount of time, Kary simply stayed there, sitting atop her bed, carefully caressing the back of the crying maid, eyes closed as she simply endured the frequent jolts resultant from Marta’s tearful hiccups, listening to the unidentifiable mumble coming out of the maid’s mouth. Time passed slowly and silent, broken only by the sounds coming from Marta, the ruffling of clothing and the now barely audible sniffs, until none remained. For a moment after that, silence reigned supreme within the boundaries of that room, stretching time and space to fit its whims, allowing the crushing weight of nothingness to settle in at a time so much could have been said. And yet, not a word was exchanged between the two. And that was okay, for one had already said everything she had to say, and the other, although unable to understand a word of what the maid had told her during her worry-induced outburst and wholly unfamiliar with such a situation, had already extended her sympathies to her friend to the best of her ability, and she was willing to use stay there for as long as she was needed. And as such she remained, until Marta disengaged from her, eyes still red from all the crying, a faint smile adorning her singular face. She stared at the still bloody girl in front of her, the girl her master had brought home for seemingly no reason, the girl she had grown quite fond of, one of the few people she now could call a friend.

  “I’m glad you came back okay.” The maid said, before giving a singular pet to the still siting girl and hurriedly making her way out of the room, hiding from Kary the embarrassment that insisted on creeping up her face, for she couldn’t let the girl see such a side of her, otherwise her whole credibility would go up in smoke! And so she quickly fled the scene, leaving behind a girl half in shock and half unsure about what to do next. She didn’t know how much time had passed since she had managed to crawl into her bed, but, Kary knew for a fact that after that sentimental reunion she would not be able to go back to sleep again, even if she tried. So she got up, leaping from her bed with an energy she didn’t know she had, only to fall back to the ground like a stone, as her legs were still quite tired from running around all night long, and to put such a strain on them right after getting back might have been one of the most stupid actions Kary had ever performed, and she was made keenly aware of this the moment she touched the ground. It was instantaneous, the instant her legs were made to bear the force generated by her sudden burst of energy, they ceased to function, leaving behind a girl who had just face planted into the ground, despite trying her very best not to. Although the pain from the fight she had gone through had been somewhat numbed by the combined efforts of rest and rapid regeneration, she could still feel it ever so slightly, gnawing at her, limiting her, making her life more miserable. Sighing at her own foolishness, Kary got up again, this time carefully and methodically, supporting her sore body with the walls that surrounded the room, making her way down the hallway just as she had done many, many times before while she acted as an adventurer.

  For now, what she wanted to do was to see the damage caused by the sudden riot, and her body better cooperate with her. She had seen what those knights were capable of, and it made her worried that they might have succeeded in whatever wicked plans the masterminds behind them had devised had been concluded with success. Now, she had a pretty good guess on what these plans were, considering their eagerness to get rid of the nobility and the bloodthirst emanating from them as they marched to the palace gates, which only served to make her even more worried than she otherwise would be, although a more well-rested mind might argue that she was worrying too much, putting too little trust into the knights stationed at the palace, almost as if unconsciously desiring the current system to fall. For that, Kary had no answer, and so she gave none. She simply continued to walk, aided periodically by the surrounding walls, until she had reached the front door of the manor, the big, imposing double doors staring straight into her soul, their sheer monumentality enough to make her heart beat just slightly faster as she stared back at it under the light of the rising sun. Not that it was going to stop her. By this point, she had already steeled her heart in preparation for the inevitable bloodbath she would soon witness, and it would take more than a big door to falter her resolve. Ignoring the screams from her body, she painstakingly made her way through the garden before making her way to the street, where she immediately ground to halt, her eyes wide as she stared at what laid ahead, whatever food had been resting on her stomach inching their way up her body as she looked at the red river flowing in front of her. In retrospect, she should have expected something like this, especially considering the proximity of Asteria’s manor to the royal castle, but she still felt like she had the mental fortitude to endure whatever hell would have been waiting for her. She had not.

  Kary wasn’t quite sure what exactly she expected to witness upon leaving the safe confinement of her home, but it sure wasn’t the sea of bodies littering the street, from armored men lying on the floor sporting all forms of injuries, be it blown-off heads, torn members, or holes gouged from their armor, from which blood still crept out of, to people in gaudy pajamas, the epitome of noble pride, cut down and diced in the most gruesomely efficient ways possible. Some had their viscera hanging down from their bodies, others held expressions of terror in their decapitates heads, and there were those who had died by the side, bleeding out after a presumably drawn-out fight, their now cold bodies littered with buts and bruises. Kary saw knights whose heads had been crushed, their helmets dented in such a way that no head could possibly fit inside, others who sported burn marks all throughout their once pristine shiny armor, now dyed black and red. It was disgusting, and even if that was the worst there was, she would still have had to go to a corner to throw up whatever she still had within her stomach. But no, the gods wouldn’t be so merciful as to allow her suffering to end just then and there, with just the destroyed and distorted corpses of once humans, now mincemeat, bodies thrown carelessly into the grinder, tossed aside in little disgusting chunks, their eyes never again to shine with human purpose. At least the people she saw on the street had been able to put up a fight, one that seemed to be pretty equal-sided, from what she could gather just by glancing at the littered corpses. But inside the now wide-open gates of the castle just ahead, oh gods, it truly seemed like hell had descended on this land, for a true land of the damned had been created within this very capital, at the very center of it, in fact. If there had been some struggle from the nobles on the fight outside the castle, the tale told from within its insides were that of a massacre, pure and unadulterated, open wide for anyone to see, bodies upon bodies of knights piling up the ground, their many liters of blood making their way down the street and mixing with those of the fallen nobles and mind-controlled knights, a truly astounding defeat for the invading forces, and a testament to the skills of those truly loyal to the royal family.

  It was disgusting, wretched, and so, so much more that Kary couldn’t even begin to describe, or rather, she couldn’t, for there were no words in her vocabulary that could describe the way she felt. There was no way to think of everything that had transpired in this very place without feeling the disgust inherently attached to it, the feeling of helplessness, the inherent knowledge that there was simply nothing that she could have done to change this outcome. And so, Kary simply tried not to think of it, instead running back to the manor she had just gotten out of, her feet moving on their own, adrenaline fueling her sore legs to keep on going as the bloody images the girl had just witnessed kept on tormenting her mind, despite her desperate pleas to be left alone. Why had she thought to go out and see the bloodbath left behind? Why had she thought it would be a good idea? What good would that even bring her in the end? Was it curiosity, morbid as it might have been, or was it a lingering desire to truly understand this whole mess she had been forcibly thrown into? Whatever it was, she shouldn’t have gone out, and, even if she had, she should have gone back the moment she had seen the littering corpses on the street, their bodies cold and drained of life, marred and blemished on every single possible way. She shouldn’t have looked beyond, she should have never even entertained the thought of seeing what had happened beyond the fights she had seen breaking out just the day before. But curiosity had gotten the better of her, and now she would have to forever live with those memories ingrained in her mind, never to be forgotten, never to be washed away by the waves of time, forever there, reminding her of the cruelty and depravity of humanity. She ran, and ran, and ran, until she was at a remote spot on the back of the manor, clutching her stomach, her eyes teary as her mind refused to give her even a moment of respite. Although she tried to be brave, tried to hold the feelings of disgust and fear within her, they inevitably overflew, and Kary suddenly saw herself staring at the ground, at a puddle of murky water with little somethings in it. She felt disgusted at herself, at humanity, at everything that had led them to this point. But she could not dwell on these thoughts, for her straight had all but run out, her still recovering body completely spent after all the physical exercise it had suddenly been forced to go through. And so, just a little after Kary found herself a nice tree to lean against, her consciousness promptly left her, leaving behind a tired and bruised body, at last allowing it to get the proper rest it so desperately needed.