Once, humans were the only people in the world.

They built a magnificent civilization, and although they warred against each other, it was nothing compared to what would follow.

Everything changed when wizards discovered summoning magic, which they first used to pull creatures from another world.

These creatures looked mostly like regular animals, but usually bigger and sometimes with unfamiliar patterns to their skin or fur.

Dwarves and elves also came through the summoning portals.

These were mostly pioneer expeditions, and they shared their knowledge of magic with the humans.

However, once the doors opened, monsters came through—and the worst monsters of all were demons.

Demons bore a horrific power: when they killed someone, they got stronger.

The demons who killed the most people quickly became generals and leaders of smaller armies of demons. Before many years had passed, three great Demon Lords rose and conquered their own kingdoms.

Humans fled from their own civilizations toward the south, away from the demons.

There were many fewer resources in the south, but the demons didn’t seem interested in chasing them. The humans tentatively built new kingdoms and worked hard to survive in a more hostile corner of the world than the bounty they’d once known.

News quickly spread that the three Demon Lords had made a truce with each other so that no competitors would ever rise among them. Demons were heavily regulated concerning who they could kill, unless they were very weak to begin with, so the Demon Lords would have no new competition.

Non-demon monsters lacked this power of growth, but they grew stronger when they lived in the lands stagnated by demonic influence. So, mostly, monsters stayed in demonic lands.

The farther one got from the demon lands, the safer one was.

So long as they kept their distance, humans were fairly safe.

Humans reforged an empire, and the Imperial Knights were known as righteous heroes who protected the weak.

One of the greatest Imperial Knights lived several hundred years after the Demon Lords made their kingdoms. His name was Ajax, named after an ancient hero.

Ajax was said to have not even a single character flaw.

People said that he’d never uttered a lie, not even as a child, nor had he ever struck another person out of anger, but only raised his sword to defend those who cannot defend themselves.

He was rumored even to be a friend to the emperor himself.

So it was a great mystery when Ajax took his wife and young son and left the capital, going to live in a village to the very far south.

Gossip quickly spread across noble society that Ajax had been putting on a front his whole life, that he was actually a cruel and selfish man who had used his position to take whatever he wanted, and that the emperor had exiled him upon learning the truth.

But Ajax lived a good life as a village farmer until he died several years later.

He left behind his wife, son, and his newborn daughter.

About 10 years later, his son Achilles was sixteen, and was unfortunately a useless boy.

The village was small, and everyone was supposed to work hard to help everybody else.

There are few resources in the area, so farming was very careful work and a single animal getting sick was a great tragedy, because if it died, nobody could eat its sick meat.

Achilles hated working.

Though he was proficient in tending to vegetables and animals, he didn’t enjoy doing it, and often shirked his duties.

He preferred to practice with a “sword.” It was really a stick that he swung in sword drills he’d invented.

All of this exasperated his mother

“I know you want to become an Imperial Knight,” she said, “but you would’ve needed to start at the age of ten! You would’ve needed to be at the Imperial Academy six years ago!”

She said fate had decided he was to be a farmer, so it was his duty to be the best farmer he could be.

Achilles was to work hard so that when he was a man, he could marry a good girl and have a good family with her.

Achilles hated hearing this!

He was ashamed that, even though his father had been an Imperial Knight, that he couldn’t follow in his footsteps.

He had no idea why his father had left the capital to live in this village, nor why he’d chained up his sword and kept it in the cellar, nor why Achilles wasn’t allowed to touch it.

Achilles told himself every day that he simply needed to practice in his free time, so that when he was a man he could leave for the capital.

By then, he’d have developed his own fighting style. That would take the place of the training he would’ve received at the Imperial Academy, and have the advantage of being unique and original!

There were some other children about his age in the village, and none of them liked Achilles very much, because he didn’t care about the things normal children liked to do.

He didn’t enjoy dancing on festival nights, nor going into the woods and throwing rocks into the stream.

No, whenever Achilles had free time, he trained.

Their village was far from the demon lands, about as far away as one could get in the country.

Because of this, there were few monsters around. Usually, when news of monsters came, they were attacking a town a couple of days away. Small villages like theirs had little for monsters to capture, except maybe livestock.

But one day, as Achilles was practicing, he saw a man limping down the road coming toward the village.

The man clearly needed help, and Achilles ran to his side.

“What’s wrong, Mister?” he asked.

He’d thought the man was perhaps old when he saw him and how slow he was walking, but as he got closer, Achilles saw that this was a man in his forties, holding a traveling cloak around him which was stained dark in places.

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“Orcs!” said the man. “Orcs killed almost everybody in the two villages just north of here! I’m sure they’re coming here also, and then going even further south! Run, boy, and warn everybody!”

There were no villages farther south.

Theirs was the last one.

Achilles’s heart froze with fear for a moment, but then he felt a tremble of excitement.

Monsters were coming!

He would defend his village with the other men!

Their village was larger than the two to the north. Surely, the men of those villages would’ve weakened the orcs and they would be in no shape to attack this village!

And of course, there wouldn’t likely have been anybody in those villages who would know how to use a sword like Achilles did.

Achilles led the man to his house, where his mother was grinding grain.

“Achilles!” she exclaimed when she saw him. “What on Earth is going on? Who is this man?”

She quickly understood the truth, seeing the bloodstains on his cloak, and laid the man down and prepared medicine for him. She listened quickly to everything the man said, her face pale.

“If only your father was still alive!” she said to Achilles. “He might’ve been able to save the other villages.”

Excitement filled Achilles. “But I have his sword, Mom! And I know how to use it! I can help defend the village. We’ll fight them off, I’m sure of it!”

His mother looked as though she wanted to slap him.

“We can’t fight them!” she snapped. “You’ve never seen orcs before! You don’t know what they do to the villages they attack! An orc stands much taller than a human, and they have enough strength to cut through a shield! Even a normal soldier would have a very hard time surviving a fight with an orc. Only an Imperial Knight would have any hope of beating one.”

Achilles had never seen his mother like this. He felt fear again, but pushed away.

“I’ll go tell everybody else,” he said. “Then we’ll decide what to do!”

He turned and ran away, even as his mother yelled at him to not do anything stupid.

Achilles ran to the other men of the village and told them what the injured man had said.

To Achilles’s astonishment, none of the other men wanted to fight.

They all looked as terrified as his mother had, and they talked among themselves about how there was nowhere they could go close by, how they would need to go Northeast and try to get to a larger town defended by actual soldiers.

Achilles wanted to yell at them that they were being cowards, that if they created an ambush and used a good strategy, they could surely defeat the orcs.

What his mother had told him about the inhuman strength of orcs seemed foolish.

How could a creature be so powerful they could break through a shield? If there were truly monsters like that so close by, Imperial Knights would’ve wiped them out. Most monsters were only about as dangerous as wolves.

At least, that’s what Achilles had heard from the people who came through town from other places and talked about the monsters and interesting things they’d seen.

Shortly after Achilles had spread the news, all the adults came together in the biggest house in the middle of the village, and they tried to figure out what they were going to do.

The injured man said the orcs were several hours away, that they wouldn’t arrive until night.

Achilles tried to tell people they should fight, but no one would listen.

They all treated him like he was an idiotic child.

Eventually, it was decided that the women and the children would immediately flee, while the men would prepare a barricade and made it look as though they were defending the village from the orcs when they came.

Hopefully, the orcs wouldn’t immediately go searching for the women and children.

The men would then flee in a different direction, and hopefully lead the orcs away and outrun them.

After all, the orcs had just destroyed two villages. They must be exhausted.

Achilles decided he needed to take the role of the man of the house and help his mother pack everything up.

They didn’t have much.

When they got to wherever they were going, they could fit all their belongings within a small city apartment.

Achilles’s mother said that he’d once lived in a large house in a city, but he couldn’t remember that. They’d left the capital when he was only six, after all.

His sister, Diana, had never lived in a city at all. She’d been born in the village.

Being ten years old, Diana was bright and glowing and full of life. She and Achilles had golden curly hair, like their father, not like their mother’s prematurely gray hair, which had turned that way from stress.

Diana understood that monsters were coming, but she didn’t seem to register the gruesome aspects of everybody being murdered.

She did understand that they were being driven out of their home, and this made her cry.

But Achilles gave Diana a tight hug and told her he would protect her and their mother, no matter what.

He said that everybody in the village was going too, so they weren’t really leaving anything behind. When they moved somewhere else, it would just look a little different, but they wouldn’t have really lost anything.

Diana calmed down after that and returned her brother’s hug.

However, Achilles wasn’t allowed to stay back with the grown men to barricade the village and pretend to defend it. He argued with his mother for a long time, loudly, until she grabbed him by the shoulders.

“This is the moment you show me you can be a man!” she snapped. “Show me that you can protect our family as your father protected us. Come so that nothing will happen to us. Do you understand what I need you to do, Achilles?”

Achilles understood that, on some level, his mother was treating him like a child. She was making what she ‘wanted’ him to do sound more appealing.

But he also understood that what she said was true.

It wasn’t as if the other men of the village even intended to face the orcs. They only wanted to give the impression they were going to defend the village.

Achilles might as well be with his family so that he could protect them on the road.

So he agreed. “All right, Mom. I’ll stay with you and Diana.”

They put their belongings in a cart and had their four goats pull the cart. Achilles’s father’s sword was at the bottom of all their belongings, for his mother said he couldn’t touch it.

Achilles carried his practice sword instead, which was a heavy stick. It would do the job better than nothing.

They traveled on a side path in the forest along with the other women and children of the village. Trees loomed over them, their leaves orange and red as the season turned to fall.

The wind whistled through the trees, bringing sounds like footsteps nearby. For the first time, Achilles felt uneasy.

But the enemy never appeared at the back of the path, and they walked four hours until the middle of the night.

However, Achilles had a scheme.

He couldn’t just leave the other men of the village. If somebody just provided them an example of courage, surely they would be inspired to defend their village.

They could destroy the monsters, and would never let them kill anybody again.

So that night, when his mother and sister had fallen asleep by their fire, Achilles snuck to the cart which carried their belongings.

He held his breath tensely as he rummaged—and finally felt the cold, heavy object at the bottom.

Achilles wiggled the sword free of the cart, its sheath chained to the crossguard so tightly that it didn’t even rattle.

This was the first time he’d held it.

Achilles couldn’t draw it, because the chains were welded shut. However, it was his father’s weapon.

It would be a better weapon than a simple stick, and Achilles believed his father’s noble spirit would bless him through it.

The travel from the village had been agonizingly slow. The path was narrow, not intended for carts drawn by goats and pigs. When Achilles sprinted back down the path, he hoped it would be much faster.

But Achilles hadn’t accounted for the oppression of isolation in the dead of night. Though the fat moon was high in the sky and provided trickles of light through the swaying tree branches for Achilles to see by, it felt as though the darkness hid a thousand predators, each with their eyes fixed on him.

Could Achilles fend off a wildcat? What about a wolf or a bear?

No… probably not a bear.

Achilles swallowed hard and tried simultaneously to keep his footsteps quiet and to run even faster. Once he caught up with the men of the village, they’d have strength in numbers.

But despite how fast he traveled alone, Achilles was surprised when he glimpsed the dancing glow of fire light ahead.

It hasn’t even been an hour, he thought. What’s going—

He skidded to a halt in the middle of the path, because the hulking shadows he barely saw coming around the bend at the furthest edge of the path weren’t human at all.

More than a dozen tusked, two-meter-high figures lumbered along the path, grunting and barking at each other.

Clad in tattered animal hide, they wielded torches, shields, and huge axes that were like cleavers in their green and meaty hands.

All the weapons were covered in fresh blood.

Orcs had killed all the men of the village, and Achilles was now standing under moonlight, easily visible to them.

They were coming for the women and children.