I died.

More accurately, I was killed.

I spent 10 of my far too short 18 years of living dedicated to hunting down the King of Darkness.

It's not like I had a strong sense of justice or anything.

I was born in a poor village. My father worked as a guard stationed there, and from him I learned sword-fighting. I was a very quick learner, if I may say so myself.

It wasn't like he was particularly passionate about having me learn how to fight either. It was just that self defense was necessary at the time due to the existence of the King of Darkness.

Don't get me wrong though. We still had fun during the lessons. Half the time we were going at it seriously, the other half we were fooling around, having fun with it. My mother also sometimes watched us during her spare time.

Most of the time, some other children in the village joined in for the lessons. There were times spent having friendly spars with my friends.

Mm... Despite the worries concerning finance and danger, I still managed to have a relatively happy childhood.

Well, the danger was still there, of course.

We all knew, but, aside from hearing horror stories about the various ambushes at all kinds of places, be it villages or cities, we never actually experienced it for ourselves.

We knew the danger, but we never really were aware of it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

That's why, one day, completely out of nowhere, the village I was borned and raised in was completely eradicated.

I was one of the luckier folks.

Aside from some scars, I had no permanent injuries or disabilities.

Also, I wasn't alone.

Though my parents were gone, I still had my friends. Virina was one of them.

Still, along with many other orphans and left behind parents, we went the the nearest town to seek shelter.

My memories of those time had faded greatly, so I won’t go into detail, however, there, we learnt about a school meant to raise soldiers to slay the King of Darkness. With few other options for us, Virina and I both enrolled in that school.

I was 8 at the time and she was 6.

There we met many other of our future companions. Owan, Allis, Wespia, and Zerkes.

In a nutshell, a lot of things happened and we ended up going after the King of Darkness by ourselves.

I shall refrain from diving into those details for the time being.

In any case, with our party of 6, we engaged in battle with the sole King of Darkness.

It was 6 vs 1.

And if you remember from the first sentence...

I died.

And we failed.

Or, at least, I thought we did.