As I approach, I carefully study the remains of the battle. As far as I can see everything and everyone is still more or less in the same positions that I saw them being cut down, with the absence of the bandits of course.

Before getting closer, I circle the whole ambush site, but find no trace of the bandits. Trying to figure out where they went or came from by their footsteps is an exercise in futility. I’m just not adept enough at tracking anything that doesn’t barge through the forest like a small mountain.

When I’m satisfied this whole small forest is empty, I slowly make my way over to the caravan.

The wagons stand unmoving in the fading light, the two mages still slumped where they fell, two blobs in the twilight, lifeless. The spearmen and workers lie scattered, their faces frozen in the rictus of death. My gaze drifts, unbidden, to where I know the most brutalized of the bodies lies, the spearman who had tried to flee, only to be ravaged by the bandits.

Honestly, that body is what worries me most. I'm sort of certain I can deal with just seeing dead people, but I don't feel there's much left. Like what I imagine happens when someone gets hit by a freight train? Thankfully I've never seen that either.

I'm tempted to just ignore the body, but then I'll constantly feel like there's something at my back. So resolutely, I walk up to the corpse. One shuffling, halting step at a time. Like I said, resolutely.

Halfway there, the shape of the mound starts to resolve itself, and I involuntarily gasp. I thought it’d be bad, but once in a while, reality is worse than anything your imagination can conjure up.

Deep gashes crisscross what used to be the fabric of his shirt and the skin beneath, each telling the tale of an uncontrolled strike. The most haunting part is the face—or what’s left of it. It’s been so brutally disfigured that his identity has been wiped clean, leaving just a mass of blood and tissue that no one would recognize. One eye socket is the only thing recognizable, a hollow void, gazing into nothingness. The remnants of his jaw dangle loosely, as if frozen in a silent, eternal scream. Just how far did they go to leave even his skull like this?

I should be repulsed, should feel an urge to look away, to throw up, but weirdly I don't. Instead, I find myself analyzing the violence with a detached curiosity. The man isn't going to get any more dead or hurt because of me staring, but I can't help feel some form of discomfort that has nothing to do with the state of his body. It’s like I'm doing something I'm not supposed to, like peeking when someone is changing.

What drove the bandits to do this? I can't fathom why they needed to keep stabbing so long after it was necessary. It feels like they reveled in tearing the body apart. Are they really that lost, or are they driven by some kind of drug? At least the poor guy likely died well before he had to endure any of it.

Then, my gaze catches on something that shatters my reverie, something so unexpected it sends a shock through my system. It's not the visceral damage that does it, not the blood, the innards or the torn flesh, which are hard to even associate with a human being. It's the soldier's hand, or rather, what he's clutching in his stiff fingers—a crude, handmade toy, unmistakably fashioned from scraps. It's far from fancy, but there's a heartfelt, homemade feel to it, like something a child would create. Did he pull it out in his last moments?

The realization hits me like a physical blow, and I'm suddenly, violently ill. I stagger back and double over, dry heaving into the underbrush. I haven't eaten since before the ambush, and so it’s all nothing, but even so I can’t stop. My stomach spasming like it’s trying to kill me. Even so, the anguish is worse.

It's not the gore that has undone me. It's the humanity, the reminder that this mutilated form at my feet was once a person. One that had a wife, children. Ones that cared enough to give him that figure, and that he cared enough about to make pulling that out his last act in life.

I suddenly feel a seething hatred for these bandits, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s somewhat akin to learning of those US airstrikes that killed more children than insurgents, only to have them shrug and say ‘collateral damage’. Only it is ten times worse.

As I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, a bitter laugh escapes me. Is this going to be a thing? I see or do things that should make normal people weep, and I'm fine. I see something commonplace, something that reminds me that people have lives, and I break.

I wonder if this is related to the books I always read, the games I played? In stories, people that die are always shown dying like puppets. Seeing people die when transported to some fantasy world is almost expected, even if the brutality of it is beyond what you usually see.

What the books never reveal is who gets left in the dust when that 'Stormwind Guard' falls. The realization that they have families and lives outside of that brief moment you see them before their demise is… well, it's heavy.

I push myself up from the ground, still reeling from the shock of the discovery. My mouth tastes like bile, and there's a jitteriness in my limbs that wasn't there before. The emotional toll of everything that's happened today is catching up to me. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the image of the figure clutched in the dead man's hand. "Move, Emma," I mutter to myself, knowing that I cannot afford to linger long.

I make my way over to the wagons, my steps hurried, trying to get through this as quickly as possible. The mages present the best opportunity for information. Or at least, so I’d expect, though that may just be my preconceptions speaking.

I’d expected this to be easier, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t see what happened to the mages from further away, but the one whose wagon I’m now standing next to has a crossbow bolt protruding from the front of is face, a gruesome ruin where his face once was.

At that, I first check the other mage, who fared a bit better—or worse, depending on how you see it. He’s been hit in the stomach and is pinned to the wagon by the projectile. His face is stuck in a mix of confusion and pain. Remembering how focused they looked while steering those wagons, it’s possible they didn’t see this coming at all.

In what I consider a completely misplaced realization, I focus on the fruit juice in my second stomach, and the world slows down around me. Aside from everything happening like two to three times slower, I can see the rest of the world just fine. I can really only see this being an asset in a fight…

Uh, yeah. Asset in a fight. That would have been damn useful thing to realize before I almost got myself killed fighting that bandit. I don’t imagine it’d help me dodge a crossbow bolt fired at me without notice though. My body still moves just as slow as normal.

Well, I guess better late than never. I can’t say I look forward to testing out how much use it will be, but at this point I’m almost certain that an opportunity will present itself sooner rather than later. This world has it out for me.

Once again, searching the bodies feels mechanical somehow, a necessary process I'm unsettlingly adept at. The mages’ rough, but elegant blue wool tunics, though sullied by the violence of their ends, represent a large upgrade from my current dress. But I have no idea how to get them off without being either really rough with this guys poor body, or… fuck no, I’m definitely not pulling the other one over that head. If it doesn’t get hooked on the bolt it’ll be covered in bits of brain matter, and if it does… don’t want to think about that.

My imagination is quickly catching up now that it’s seeing all this gross shit up close for the first time, and I find myself able to imagine much, much worse things than the current state of that man's head. Gotta love being imaginative sometimes.

For some reason, the mages appear to be missing their boots. So are the rest of the workers and soldiers, even the brutalized body is barefoot, and I imagine it’d have taken some effort to tug off his boots without accidentally taking a leg with it. Are these bandits truly so desperate for boots that they’d bring them all along?

I'd laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all if the situation weren't so profoundly grim. Guess I gotta inject my own humor into my story.

Yes, the violence I've witnessed—and perpetrated—will probably haunt me. But I'm still here. And I'm not a gibbering wreck. I take another look at the ruination all around me and decide that I should feel very proud of that.

As I sweep my gaze over the scene, I realize that I can’t leave things like this. I buried the fucking bandit, am I going to leave these guys to slowly rot? Who knows how long it’ll be before someone else comes by? While the small roads are pretty well traveled, the larger ones the wagons took are pretty empty.

I groan at the idea of burying these 6 bulky guys. It would be so much easier to leave them. But I can’t. Just not wired that way, even though I often wish I was.

I’d just tell other people about them if I could, but… one, I couldn’t explain it in the few broken words of the language I know, and two, I very much doubt any of the farmers that live close enough would be happy to venture out here to bury a bunch of guys they probably don’t even know.

That does leave me with the question of what do do about these bolts though. I'm not going to bury a man with a bolt lodged in his face.

I find myself stripping off my newly washed clothes. While I’d gotten sorta used to finally being clothed again, I’m not going to have it get dirty now that I finally have it clean again. The dress and shirt pile up beside me, a little monument to practicality over propriety. This feels fucking insane, am I really going to try to this?

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I know myself a bit though, and if I let myself, I’ll just stand around here for an hour waffling before I finally commit myself anyway, so I might as well get on with it now.

I approach the mages body with a reluctant sort of resolve, reminding myself why I'm doing this—respect for the dead, an inexplicable need to handle things properly, even if 'properly' involves a grisly task I've never imagined undertaking. The bolt, lodged deep in the mage's stomach, seems to mock me with its solidity, as if it knows the challenge it presents.

I crouch beside the body, the metallic odor of blood filling my nostrils. It's a bitter smell that I've become uncomfortably familiar with in this world. I take a deep breath, trying to suppress the rising bile in my throat. That causes a moment of wonder. I guess disgusting things do still cause this reaction if I actually need to touch them. Fucking inconvenient now, but a relief too.

There's a moment of hesitation, a brief second where I again contemplate the sanity of my actions. But that moment passes, overridden by a dogged, stubborn streak in me that refuses to back down from a challenge, no matter how stomach-turning.

I climb on top of the wagon’s seat, and move over to the side of the mage. The bolt is stuck fast to the wood behind the man, and when my fingers slip around it’s edge, it feels like it’s going to stay there forever. I slowly increase the force I use, until I feel the bolt moving. The sensation of flesh giving way under my hands is unnervingly soft, I’m thinking about how strange it feels, when the bolt suddenly gives way under my increased force. It's not the gentle release I hoped for, but a sudden, violent expulsion.

The body shifts with the motion, an arc of decomposition accompanied by the heavy clatter of the bolt falling to the ground. But it's the splash of viscera, wet and unexpected against my skin, that shatters any semblance of composure I had. For a moment, the world narrows down to the feeling of warmth and weight against my body, and my stomach lurches violently.

I scramble back, and mute the urge to throw up by sheer willpower. I stare at my hands and forearms that got the worst of it, wondering what the hell is even covering them. I suppose it’s a small blessing I couldn’t do this by sitting right in front of the man.

Clearly, any hopes I had of putting that tunic to good use have been thoroughly dashed. But the fuck am I going to do about this? I won’t be putting my existing clothes on like this either.

Whatever, I shake the worst of it off my hands, and jump of the wagon to proceed to the next mage. Might as well get this all over with before thinking about how to solve this new problem.

I’m finding my reasons for feeling like murdering these assholes that did this change with every step I take. Killing these people is an insult against my morality, but forcing me to go through this is an insult against me. It doesn’t matter one whit that that wasn’t even close to their intention. It’s kind of crazy how much it feels like my coworkers messing something up that I told them would go wrong, them doing it anyway, and me having to clean up the mess. I’m not sure if that means that I’m just unreasonably aggressive towards my coworkers, or that I somehow consider this to be similar to fixing a stupid bug someone else introduced.

Huh. I look at my disgusting hands from fixing the last problem, at the next bolt, still lodged in the mages head. That someone else introduced there, and that I have to take out when I really, really want to make them do it themselves, but can’t because they already fucked off somewhere safe. That does sound eerily like a problem I’ve had before. The actuality differs of course, but the semantics don't.

Shaking my head, and jumping on the next wagon, I hold the mages body back with one hand, while I grasp the bolt lodged in the mage's skull with my other. My fingers clench around the shaft, slick with the turd sandwich from the last one, and blood that's turned tacky with time. It's a surreal image. The absurd thought flits through my mind that there's probably not a YouTube tutorial for this. I pull, expecting it to slide out smoothly like a sword from a stone, kinda like the last one. The bolt doesn't budge, and the force of my effort pulls the body slightly toward me despite my attempts to hold it back. A viscid, sickening sound escapes as the fabric of what once was a person shifts against the wood of the wagon.

I curse under my breath, a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush running on repeat as I make another attempt. "Bloody hell! What the flaming fuck was that? I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy—even a cockroach with a grudge would have better taste!"

My hands reach out towards the bolt once again. This time, I'm not just pulling; I'm trying to twist, to coax the bolt out of its fleshly sheath with as little force as possible. The logic is sound in my head, but the reality is messier. My grip slips the first couple of times, slick with blood, forcing me to grit my teeth in frustration and reset my posture.

The second attempt requires a strategy—foot braced against the edge of the wagon for leverage. I pull again, harder this time, and twisting the bolt, my face twisted into a grimace. There's a moment of resistance, a moment where I'm sure I've miscalculated and this will end in disarray. But then, with a sound that's more a pop than a squelch, the bolt comes free, showering me with an assortment of blood, skull and brain matter.

With the bolt finally free, I stand there, panting, the macabre trophy in my hand much lighter than I feel it should. Something this light has no right to pierce a head, or get this stuck in it.

My gaze flits over my body, noting and being a little disgusted by this further damage to my cleanliness. Maybe it would have been better to wear the dress, then I could have stripped it off afterwards.

I sigh, a deep, long-suffering one that relieves a bit of my frustration. Well, I guess from here on it can only get easier.

The universe throws me a bone, and it actually is. I tug the two bodies down from their perches, and after subjecting them to a careful search—which gains me exactly nothing— I drag them over to the side of the road, where I put them close together side by side. I’m too tired and frustrated to make this an individual grave. God, I don’t even know if people actually get buried here. Maybe they usually get burned? Whatever.

I look back at the remaining bodies. There’s the mangled one, which… I will leave for now. Then there’s the guard and worker sprawled against the second wagon. And the worker that attempted to get the guard's spear, but was cut down.

I’m suddenly anxious about the state of the guard that got a bolt to the gut, but when I rush to him, the bolt has mercifully passed clean though, and ended up somewhere in the mechanism of the wagon behind him. I really did not want to try and yank out another one. It’s quickly getting dark now.

Dragging him and the two workers to the pile takes but a few minutes. Just like the mages, they have nothing of value to me either, having been thoroughly stripped by the bandits, and I suddenly wonder at the idiocy of coming here. Of course the bandits would have taken anything the men had, that was the whole point of their attack after all.

Oh well. I slowly turn to face the source of my deepest uncertainty. The mutilated guard. The thought of moving him, of potentially watching the body fall apart before my eyes, fills me with a dread that’s hard to swallow. It’s not quite a physical thing, I feel like I’m past the disgust.

A quick sweep over my body tells me that yes, I’m past the disgust. People are really going to need to learn how to use relatively clean things like bullets here. I’m sure it’s something about the size and relatively slow speed of these bolts that makes them create such a mess.

What I’m instead worried about is the very banal thing of picking up any pieces left behind. Dragging bodies is heavy work and I just don’t feel like I can be bothered to pick up any pieces any more.

Surprisingly, or perhaps mercifully, my fears are unfounded. While the body is indeed in horrific condition, it holds together pretty well under the careful steering of my hands. Human bodies are surprisingly well put together. By the time I have him with the others, darkness has fully claimed the sky, and the stars gaze down indifferently upon my great work.

A pile of bodies...

I can still more or less see by the light of the moon, thanks to a much sparser canopy here than in the deep woods. Forcing myself through the motions, I find another large piece of bark to use as a shovel, then heap the bodies with the lovely layer of loose soil and leaves that covers the floor of each forest. It’s not quite like being buried in the earth, but it’s infinitly easier on my poor tired muscles, and all I can manage right now.

When it’s finally done, I sit down on my ass, and just enjoy the silence for a minute. I tense as I imagine that that is the moment that I’ll inevitably hear some sound, but relax again when nothing comes. The night is silent and empty.

I struggle up once more, and make my way to where the mutilated one originally fell, then reach towards the small figure that fell out of the man’s hand. I stop, and look at my gore covered hands. That’s just wrong. It’s the only clean thing in this whole place. Damn it, might as well do this properly. I walk back to where I dropped my clothes, and grab the shirt, then wrap it around my hand and place the sorry little figure on top of the pile of dirt.

I choke out the words that came to me before past a lump in my throat "May your soul find peace in the embrace of the eternal light, and may your name be whispered in the winds of memory. Let the spirits of the ancestors grant you rest in the arms of the earth, and solace in the hearts of those who remain."

Then I burst out in tears, sinking to my knees and heaving great, hacking sobs. I don’t even know why I’m crying. Whether I’m upset at their deaths, my own killing, my current state, having to do this, or at the world itself. No matter the reason, the tears keep flowing until I have nothing left.

When they finally stop, exhaustion clings to me like a second skin, pulling at my muscles with leaden fingers. Covered in the remnants of death and conflict, I'm acutely aware of every speck of foreign matter on my skin, every droplet of blood that's dried to a tacky residue.

Fuck me to hell and back, I’m going to need to get away from here. I don’t think the bandits will be back if they haven’t already, but sleeping here is just downright foolhardy. I struggle up, and briefly contemplate just lying straight back down.

But instead I put one foot in front of the other, picking up the bundle I’d made of my belongings. It’ll get dirty, but I don’t care at this point. Just have to make sure the food is safe. Holding the sword, with everything else slung over my shoulder, I drag my sorry ass along the road in the direction the wagons were going before their unfortunately demise.

After struggling forward for a while, I make my way up to another small hill, and the edge of this forest.

Beneath me, just a few kilometers away, I see torchlight, and what amounts to a large town.

image [https://pub-43e7e0f137a34d1ca1ce3be7325ba046.r2.dev/Group.png]

I’m bitter and sad, and I really do not feel like walking all that way, so I instead drift in the direction of what I imagine is a small farm which for some reason has light shining from their windows.

I don’t know how accurate my knowledge of this time is, but I thought people went to bed with the sun, so why someone would make a fire now escapes me. It’s convenient for me to navigate by though, and in short order I’m standing next to the farmhouse.

Sounds are drifting from inside. Apparently these people are still awake and having a discussion. I don’t really care, wouldn’t understand what they were saying anyway, and move towards the one small barn they seem to have.

I debate just laying down somewhere in the fields, or along the side of the road, but I… I’m incredibly, unreasonably afraid of sleeping outside today. I know sleeping here is foolhardy, dangerous as hell, and incredibly likely to get me discovered, but it all seems so irrelevant compared to my burning need to feel human for a bit, to sleep in a house, in a structure.

It’s been only a day since I left my cave. I said goodbye to Ronain just this morning, but so much has happened it feels like years.

I open the door of the barn carefully. It makes a low creaking sound, but not enough that anyone in the house could have heard it. Inside is dark, and smells like animals. There’s a snort from somewhere to my right, but without the light of the moon I have no idea what kind of animal made the noise.

There’s a ladder though, which reminds me of haylofts being a recurring feature in these kinds of stories. Without thinking about it much more, I stumble my way up, and when I find the surface at the top stable enough after some careful probing, I roll over on it and instantly pass out.