We all stood together at the far end of the clearing holding our swords in our shaky fists. Sgt. Asshole had pulled them out of the air and shown us individually how to hold the unfamiliar hilts and reinforced the proper stance. Then, a dense fog had flowed out from the forest, and when it cleared, a line of practice dummies had been standing in the formerly empty space looking as if they’d always been there. After a half hour of getting used to the feel of our blades slashing and piercing the homespun wrapped sawdust forms, he declared us ready, only adding that the rats would be lower to the ground and to be prepared. Then, the fog rolled out again from the darkness between the trees, and so here we stood, waiting to kill.

Waiting for the killing to start is always the hardest part, I repeated in my head like a calming mantra that appeared to be defective. My sperm-donor dad had taken me with him a few times to hunt rabbits and feral hogs before the drinking got so bad and he drank himself to death. Or into another woman’s arms far away. Nobody knew.

Or cared.

That memory had slipped into my head like the slow, silent tendrils of the fog, appearing unbidden out of the gloom of the days of forest past and settled in my mind, filling blank places with its cold damp that seems at first soft and harmless until it makes the mold and rot seep in. The memories were getting more numerous and more complete, but the slow, piecemeal way they came gave the illusion of peacefulness that the content itself belied.

Soft sounds began to be heard from the slowly thinning mist. My pulse increased some and I wiped one sweaty palm at a time on my homespunned thighs and adjusted and readjusted my grip, telling myself not to clench; the sword isn’t a foreign object, my brain mimicking Asshole’s instruction, it’s an extension of my two arms, part of me. The sword-that-is-me will keep me alive.

At first, it was the sound of rustling leaves in the cool, fall breeze, but soon enough, high pitched squeaks began to sound. I adjusted my feet, and then scolded myself for letting the nerves get to me. It’s only a few rats!

And then they came.

Someone squeezed off a bit of scream as the first noses poked cautiously out. The whole line took a surprised step back; together, like we’d practiced, like it was a drill. Then, I firmed my stance again, and my fellows with me; we thought we’d been prepared.

We were wrong.

The sharp pointed noses were not the centimeters from the ground where we’d been looking, but nearly a foot farther up. Thick whips of whiskers wide as my hand from wrist to fingertips waved the clinging fog away, and then the beady black on black eyes saw us standing there.

The first one, the size of a bulldog, raised up on its haunches and studied us. More of them came and huddled around it whiskers bristling like spider legs, beady eyes latched onto us and the two groups just stood there, each shocked by the presence of the other, wondering what exactly to do about it.

The rats decided first.

The big one, most likely their leader, let loose a shrill squeal and as one the others surged forwards, much faster than any of us had been expecting. The screamer among us—the kid, I was pretty sure—let loose again, this time holding nothing of it back.

But none of us ran. I don’t know why. Strength in numbers, I guessed, though the rats had that on us. I sure wanted to retreat, and I expect that the rest felt much the same, but we stood our ground. 

Until we didn’t.

It was the two gnomes that broke ranks first, but not like I would have thought they’d have done it, if I’d have even had the presence of mind to think about them at all. They didn’t run. Not in retreat, at least, they surged forward with their little swords that would have looked like bowie knives in my hand, but were long enough in theirs to qualify as short swords.

In a second they had leapt the intervening space between the two groups and began to slash and hack like things possessed. There was no rhythm and little form to their swings, but blood and rats spilling guts out of gaping wounds began to fly around them. I was gobsmacked by the ferocity of their response, but the scenario didn’t afford me any time for shock, because the vanguard of the rat army had come and before I was ready, they were among us.

Like the gnomes, I just swung low to the ground, more scythe than sword, but effective for all that. At first. Because, the rats just kept on coming, their overwhelming numbers would have defeated our guards even if we’d have remembered anything of our lessons. Soon enough, some slipped past my wild swings and began to climb my legs.

Now it was my turn to scream. There’s just something about a horde of things climbing on you that trips some evolutionary trigger. I dropped my sword, it’s length of blade useless in such close quarters and I began to punch one with my left while my right hand scrabbled at the wooden sheath at my side, while I began to babble in a high-pitched squeal, “EQUIP! EQUIP!”

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I didn’t even have the presence of mind to remember to tell SCHEMA what to equip, but maybe the system took pity on me, or maybe my clawing fingers finally found purchase, but either way, the crude rusty knife was in my hand and shortly after in the side of a rat which had almost reached my face.

The middle part of the battle was a blur, as battles often are. I clearly recalled the beginning and vividly recall how things ended, but I’d have to go back and view my video record if I ever get the urge to know exactly how the middle went. I never have; I probably never will.

The end of it came suddenly when the largest rat flowed smoothly from where it had remained upright at the rear, marshalling its rapidly dying army to its feet. Its beady black eyes locked with my panic-widened ones and it ran straight at me. I don’t know if it thought it would go for the fiercest fighter, as my vanity would have it, or the weakest link, as was the more likely case, but in less time than it takes to say it, it was leaping from the ground straight for my throat when, out of nowhere, the kid’s shining blade cleaved it cleanly in two. I had just enough time to begin to marvel at the two halves of the king rat, the momentum of its head half still carrying it to where it would thump wetly into my chest before the jarring thunk of the kid’s sword sliced like a scalpel through the meat of my thigh and buried itself in my right femur, where it caught, the nearly severed halves of the thick bone binding it like a woodsman’s axe.

I don’t know who was the more shocked; probably me, since I was literally in shock, but when my eyes tracked up from the blood-stained blade that my mind refused to acknowledge to his face, the kid’s eyes were wide with it, and his face white with the shock of what he had done. That was about the time my right leg decided it was time to take a break, (har har) and my left one agreed, and the next thing I knew, I was on my ass surrounded by chopped rat corpses, their blood and effluvia seeping effortlessly through my homespun breeches.

Careless of the gore, my momentum carried me over onto my back and all I could see was Sarge’s massive form reaching for me and all I could hear was someone screaming as I felt a tug, and then another, as he jerked  the kid’s sword from the bone of my leg. I wish that asshole would stop screaming, I thought, but then realized it was me making all that noise when his massive fist took up all my attention, a thumb the size of a cucumber deftly flicking the stopper out of a red vial, and pouring it into my open mouth, making me choke, but spreading its glorious numbing warmth down my throat and to my leg.

Then, the kid took his place next to me, he hit his knees, bloody hands held out towards me, but he never touched me, like he was afraid to get blood on me, and I barked out a laugh at the ridiculousness of the thought. That opened the floodgates, and all I could do was laugh. Great loud guffaws that rose from the pit of my belly like I’d drank them in with the potion and was vomiting them out.

The kid’s face turned from shock to surprise at that, but then his pale skin flushed pink with embarrassment that quickly turned to anger. “Stop laughing at me! Why are you laughing at me?”

And all I could do was sputter out “your hands! Your hands!” between gasping breaths and booming laughter.

Sarge gently, almost tenderly, but firmly grasped each of the kid’s arms at his shoulders and pulled him up and sat him to the side, which the sight of that massive ork lifting the kid, well, like a kid set me off again, and tears of laughter ran down my cheeks and dripped into my ears.

Then Sarge was behind me, a hand under each arm as he pulled me smoothly up from the ground, my turn to be sat on my feet like a toddler. I stumbled a bit and almost fell again, but his grip remained strong and I steadied, favoring my right leg from the memory of the wound when the reality of it had already passed on to wherever wounds went after the precious red potions took them away.

When he was sure I could stand well enough on my own, he rounded on the kid—and the rest of our team, who had gathered owl-eyed behind him—and said, “Let this be a lesson to you, situational awareness is key in any battle, whether with swords or plasma rifles, friendly fire is no joke! Luckily, I was here, and luckily we have plenty of LIFE potions, and good luck or bad, we have come to expect at least one of you morons to hit another!”

Then he turned to me and told more than aske, “you’re Okay now, aren’t you? Those potions work fast, and I used a Medium rather than a Minor, so they work quick. Now, it’s time to clean what you killed, do you think you can handle that?”

I thought about it for a second, and I looked around the field at the masses of rat bodies, flies already beginning to feast. I gave a shaky nod, and then followed it up with an equally shaky “yes.” Then, just like that I was pissed off at the weak sound of my voice, and I put some steel in, “Yes. Let’s get this over with.”

And so we did.

Later, as our grumbling stomachs somehow overcame the charnel gore and the offal smell enough to let us know we none of us had eaten anything that day, and we sat around the fire together like long-time comrades and ate our rats on a stick, and boasted about the rats we recalled and how we’d ended them, and some of us introduced ourselves, and told little painless snippets of who we’d like the others to believe we were, and I remembered other times with other soldiers around other not-exactly-regulation flames and other not-exactly-standard-rations that we’d killed and cleaned and cooked together, thinking that we were no longer individuals, strangers, but fellows and a team. There is just something about killing together, or maybe not the killing, but the surviving that knits people together into a unit that, at least at the time, seems indivisible.

It’s not.

It was me who began to pull back. Saying less and watching more. Not exactly disengaging completely, not rejecting these tentative offers of friendship, but not believing them, either. I caught Sarge looking at me and saw his eyes fill with that knowledge we shared that only soldiers know, and I was the first to draw back from that, too.