I have no idea what day is today. We have been fighting hordes and hordes of low undead and the occasional warrior-undead. I would be angry remembering what I heard when I got to the field camp if I wasn’t so tired.

A while ago when we just had been deployed we had to be on the carriage for a full day before we reached the joint base we had with the Maka Kingdom army. When we reached there we were given a detailed explanation by one guy that looked like he was from the church, but at the time I just ignored it.

“We can’t really give paper to everyone anymore so I will be explaining things so please pay attention.” He says while a group of soldiers gathered around him.

He used one of the talisman Boss uses when he needs to speak with a lot of people and began to explain.

“This summoning circle is the worst kind of circle you can find. It’s a massive one reaching even where we are now, and it’s a recharging type, so any time you kill or defeat an undead inside the circle, the energy used to summon it will just go back to the circle and be used again while their remains just vanish.”

All the soldiers were astonished but it’s not like we had any choice but to fight.

“Don’t worry, you only need to hold the lines until we find the center of it. Also no undead will spawn near here. They can only spawn near the center of the circle.” The guy who explained things to us said.

Which takes us back to the present. The unit I am in is in charge of cleaning duty as we say. Lots of low undead, numbering in the thousands reach the outskirts of the camp constantly, day and night and we along with some other teams have to defeat them so the other units in charge of investigation and high undead extermination can just ignore the small fries. Occasionally a warrior undead appears and we actually have to fight, but besides that, it's just repetitive boring work. Low undead can be killed by children with a stick. The problem here is numbers, there are too many and they don’t stop coming. We probably spend 14 to 15 hours per day defeating the little shits just to sleep on the ground and start everything again later. And not even at the same hours as before. Sometimes we stayed up all night other times we worked like normal. At least there is food,water and a magical toilet near here we can use. Shame we can’t go to the small village just 1km away from where we are.

Our commander died fighting a stray medium undead that Aria killed later so now Arnold of all people is in command as he is the only one qualified to do so. At least while he has been in command no one died yet. We are having a small talk during the few breaks we get while the sun is still out.

“Lucia, how long have we been here?” he says while biting on a piece of meat.

“No idea, the last guy who knew flew a few days ago. But it feels like at least 4 months.” I say while drinking some milk.

“I want to advance but the people above think it’s a bad idea. It will be a bad idea to stay like this for more time.”

“Your blessing?”

“Yeah, our chances of victory are decreasing by the day.”

“Hey, it’s not our fault. All we can do is to try our best while following our orders.”

“Can you take command for a day or two while I go make my case to the army?”

“Do you really want me to command our unit against an enemy that can’t die?” I ask with an evil smile.

“Now that you said this. It’s probably the worst move right now to do this.”

He probably remembered the only tactical practical lesson we had where we had a mock battle against each other where we each commanded a small unit like the one we are right now. My strategies involve going straight to the throat of the enemy and if that doesn't finish the battle we will probably lose as in my book. As long as you are alive and not missing anything at the end of the battle, any damage is temporary damage. You can’t charge the undead, and I have no idea who their leader is.

“Kids, it’s probably better to sleep now. The next wave will not come until a little later.” Aria says to us.

“We are not kids but whatever, you are probably right.” Arnold says.

I just lie down and sleep. This is one of the skills I learned here. How to sleep at will.

And so our days continued like that. Fighting low undead until we had to sleep and continued the next day with the same. Until one day.

We were fighting undead since the sunrise and the sun is almost vanishing right now. During our battle we received instructions to open a path to the city behind us and we did. We advanced creating a lane free of undead that had at least 1 km. A bunch of carriages full of armored soldiers passed at full speed through the space we created and we could hear something besides the sound of battle from them.

“WE FOUND IT, WE FOUND THE CENTER. WE CAN END THIS!” one of the armored soldiers on the carriage was screaming to everyone. The morale went up ten fold after that. The next day everyone received the attack plan on how we would finish this break.

A group of high level soldiers from both the kingdom and the Purple Dragons would blitz the entire undead army and go straight to the center while other units would close off the circle little by little as well take care of the undead.

Looks like there is a way to prevent the summoning circle from working but it’s only temporary and costly. Doing that would make the undead stop spawning and if everything went right, the blitz group would be able to close the circle before everything spawns again on top of them.

We, as a unit, were on fire. We had a few hours of sleep we could use and then we could advance.

“Yes this is good, our chances of winning are going up.” Arnold said to me after relaying our orders in the morning.

“How far do we need to go?” I ask.

“As far as we can. In the worst case scenario we will have advanced our front line and could move our base. But there is a problem…”

“What?”

“Aria is requested to be part of the blitz team. And it’s not optional”

“What?” She screams.

“If you don’t, we don’t get paid.” Arnold explains.

“Sons of bitches!” She says with an angry face.

“Aria, just go, you mostly use your magic to kill undead than to heal us. The last thing you healed was a spider bite.”

“You say it like you don’t want me here. What are you planning?”

“This has nothing to do with me. This is from the Boss itself, if I could, I would keep you here, but after everything I had to go through, I want at least some payment.”

“Don’t worry, if things go bad we just run.” I say.

“Ok, but don’t do anything bad while I am away.”

“Like what?” I ask. There is nothing to do here.

“Nothing, just take care.”

With that she leaves our unit and the rest of us begin to group. The other members of our unit are all a bunch of cowards, I don’t think of them as part of our unit, they are just people who are there. The only reason they didn’t run away is because Arnold taught them how to kill the undead with the spears they have without the need to even move most of the time and now, because of this, they will get paid for the job. They just cluster together in a circle with backs to each other and walk around if needed. The undead go straight at them and they don’t need to do anything. They don’t defeat that many, but they do enough. Me and Arnold on the other hand jump into the field and clean enemies right and left.We probably killed 100.000 undead each if not more, the warrior undead count is 5 to me and 3 to Arnold. Whoever loses has to buy something for the winner.

We gathered our supplies and chose someone to guard and move them and the rest will start the cleaning. And with that we, meaning me and Arnold, will mow down undead while the rest of our unit moves and defends our supplies while moving forward with us in case we need water or food.

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A big light spell is used on the undead some distance from us opening a path and that is our signal.

Both of us begin to advance. I am in the front while he is a little far back using the bow. He didn’t lose many arrows so we still have a lot.

For several minutes I just swing my sword from the left to the right while walking around and he is just firing at the things out of my range and while we advance he can recover most of the arrow he uses. Then we reach the area we were told to block at the very minimum. When we reach there we discover why.

Hundreds of medium undead. These are stronger than warrior undead. The warrior one still only needs one hit to die, they just have weapons. These ones actually need to be dealt damage. Our great soldiers make a barricade with what they find in your supplies and Arnold gives up on the bow for now. The undead are not moving but we both feel that at any moment they will come.

“I guess our bet is over.” He says to me.

“Yep, it will be too hard to count how many more than you I will defeat.”

“Shut up, we both know that the only reason you were in the lead before is that I went to sleep.”

“And how is that my fault?”

“...”

“...”

The other members of our unit are starting to fear us more than the undead in front of us. I can feel it.

We both drink some water and Arnold finally uses his magic. He creates a big stone wall with two exits that lead to where me and him will stay. This didn't cost that much mana for him but it’s not exactly free.

“This thing will hold out for at least two hours.” He says.

“I hope so.” I answer.

We both take our places and throw rocks at the undead so they will start coming towards us. It’s better to take care of them here and now than to wait to see if they will move or not. There is a chance they go towards the center of the circle and we can’t have that.

They begin to run towards us but only one or two at a time can go through the holes and they can’t climb each other and go over the wall as it is 6 meters tall.

As they come we need to hit them two or three times for them to be defeated. Arnold is using the old stab and bash, where he stabs the undead with the spearhead then bashes the head with the other side repeating to and not stopping as the undead don’t stop.

Me on the other hand is using the first three basic moves I made for my dancing style. I am pretty much spinning in place while cutting the undead. Each full turn makes the next move stronger and I don’t get dizzy anymore from it. On the first spin I do a horizontal cut from my right to the left, then after I do a 360 I make a diagonal cut starting in the ground and going up, from the right to the left side then on the next spin while my sword is still up I start to spin in the opposite direction while making another diagonal cut this time from my top left to my bottom right.

We keep doing this for what seems like an eternity and stopping when we need to take a breath where he closes the holes for a few seconds. Usually while we drink some water or even eat some bread. Fighting does nothing to our stomachs for some time now.

Night hits, and we are finally finishing things, we had to go to the other side of the wall after it was remade to finish the job as the undead stopped coming not long ago. Then we both hit the last ones we could find. The night sky and the moon are providing us with good light so we can see almost as much now as we did during the day.

“These were the last ones, we won.” Arnold says while trying to catch his breath.

“Want to go after the big ones now?” I ask.

“Nah, they are probably too weak.”

We both start to laugh a little.

“Let’s go back, the other members of our unit deserve some rest.”

“Yeah, I deserve some rest.”

We come back to our temporary base. There we drink, eat and use our bath stones. These stones have a spell on them that make you clean as if you had bathed. It’s not as refreshing as a real bath, but at least you get clean. These stones use little mana, but they use yours so you need to be careful. At the same time we see a big pillar of fire on the horizon. Arnold hugs me for some reason.

“It’s over, they did it, that is the signal.”

“Really!? Oh yeah, bath here I come.” I say excited.

The other members of our unit start to pray or something, we ignore them as we commemorate our victory. But then…

“Shit!” Arnold screams. “Everyone to the ground!”

And we just do. A big explosion near us happens, our supplies are blown away along with some of the soldiers.

“Everyone, run!” He screams.

“But not you Lucia, you stay or we all die.” In a really low voice only to me.

The other soldiers run using the dust screen made by the explosion.

After the dust settles down a little we both see it. The enemy Arnold was sensing. An advanced Undead. This is the third strongest type of undead that exists, only after a perfect revival undead and an immortal one. They maintain their human size but are leagues above in strength in relation to a high undead. They also have weapons, armor and the ability to use magic along with the Mastery of the weapon they hold. So they are not mindless beasts.

“Lucia, I am only going to say this once. If you can’t figure out how to use your big sword right now we are all dead.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Let’s go, there is no time to lose.”

We both stand up. I drop down my sabers as they will probably do nothing. Until now I have been using only my own strength in my blows and slashes. If I concentrate a lot I can do some massive damage using my greatsword, but that requires me to be in a state of mind I can’t duplicate consistently. I need to be extremely calm or full of anger to the point I can’t control myself as far as I know. Neither one of these is available right now.

We both run full speed towards the undead. Luckily for us he doesn’t have any armor and we can’t sense any mana from him, but he has a sword. Also he is all bones, so that means we have to crush him, slashing away will not work.

Without magic I am a little faster than Arnold so I make the first hit, I do a running horizontal slash towards his head where the undead actually has to stop the blow with his sword and both arms. Arnold took this opportunity and accelerated himself with a spell and stabbed the undead sending him flying and chipping his bones on the ribs a little. We both run towards him but as he hits the ground he gets back up almost instantly and while we are running towards him he tries to hit my head with a vertical cut. Arnold jumps in front of me and blocks the hit with his spear. I could hear the clunk sound it made. I take this opportunity to make a swing at him using my sword and he is sent a few meters away.

We continue to do this where one becomes the bait so the other one can get a clean hit. Little by little we are breaking his bones, Bash on the ribs, a slash on the head, a stab in the legs, we are hitting him everywhere. We perfected this strategy in these last few years so we could fight stronger people, at least together. But something we were not expecting happened. The undead started to use magic. We couldn’t feel any mana from him at all before and now he is making fire rain on us.

“Get behind me!” Arnold screams.

I run full speed to his back while he prepares some kind of spell. He started to create domes of stone around us, and not just one, I counted 6 at least, all of them at least 2 meters thick. But even that was barely enough. The impact of the undead’s spell was really strong, we could feel the stone breaking and the ground shaking. When it looked like it stopped we were hit by an explosion inside the dome and sent out of it.We were both pretty badly hurt, but at least nothing was broken.

We stand up and put up our guards. The undead appeared in front of us at high speed and cut Arnold in the chest ignoring his armor sending him to the ground with me being unable to move at that moment.

I see him coming towards me and my life begins to flash before me. This time I really think I am going to die. Everything that happened began to play in slow motion in my head. How I was born, when I was abandoned, the days in the camp, the training I had, my relationships with the people around me. I start to miss them, but then something hits me. What all the times that I was able to use my sword to its maximum potential had in common. I was using mana on it, even if I didn’t know or feel like I did.

I begin to make a magic circle in the hand I am holding my sword while I begin to swing my sword at the undead. His cut is coming straight to my brain so I start to fall on my back while keeping my feet on the ground to dodge it.

By a hair his cut missed and now it’s my turn. I put all my strength and mana on this. I hit him in the ribs blowing him away into bits, and soon after he vanishes like any of the other undeads.

I fall to the ground. I was going to shout that we won but the second I looked at Arnold, my head was filled with worries.

“Arnold, answer me!” I shout while checking him.

“Can you stop shouting, I am not deaf.” He says.

“You are bleeding!” I shout again in panic.

“Don’t worry, that is the blood I lost already. I closed the cuts with a spell.”

I remove part of his chest plate to check if is telling the truth. And as he said, it is.

“Why did you do that?”

“I have to check. If you died I would kill you.”

“Then can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Come closer.”

And I do.

He then gives me a kiss. I don’t stop him, I am stunned. And can do nothing. I don’t know how to feel about this.

He then lies down again.

“Why did you do that?” I ask in panic.

“Next time I almost die, I want to have at least kissed a girl.”

“But why me?”

“I can’t see anyone else here.”

“Idiot!”

“If you excuse me, I will now take a nap as I am out of mana and energy. Watch my body please.”

“You are not dead yet…”

Then we stay there in silence. He is sleeping and I am trying to figure out my emotions. My two sides are conflicting right now.

A few minutes later a group of knights finds us and we are transported to Papyria.