Chapter 2: The Soldier's Mask
The impact was like a runaway carriage hitting a stone wall. The transformed creature once a man, now a mass of twitching muscle and obsidian-tainted rage slammed into the resurrected man with a guttural roar.
"Such... strength," the man hissed through gritted teeth.
Reacting on pure instinct refined through a thousand lifetimes of combat, he didn't reach for a power that wasn't there. Instead, he lunged for a discarded, mud-caked blade lying near the riverbank. He brought the steel up just in time to catch the creature's jagged claws. The metal shrieked under the pressure, sparks flying into the rain as the two forces clashed.
"AARGH!"
The creature's breath was a foul miasma of rot, its eyes glowing with a frenzied, purple light. But the man beneath it was not a common foot soldier. Even in a weakened, unfamiliar body, the soul of the Great Immortal was a fortress.
"It's not so easy to kill me," he growled.
Bracing his back against the mud, he coiled his legs and kicked upward with explosive force, shoving the transformed human backward. The creature stumbled, its balance lost in the slick sludge. In one fluid motion, the man vaulted to his feet, gripped the hilt of the scavenged sword with both hands, and spun.
The blade whistled through the air, cutting through rain and flesh alike. A clean, silver arc followed the swing, and the creature's head was lopped from its shoulders before it could let out another cry.
The body fell to its knees, the black blood bubbling for a moment before the light in its eyes extinguished forever. The man stood over it, his chest heaving as he fought to draw oxygen into lungs that felt far too small. He looked up at the sky, the freezing rain washing the grime from his face.
"That was dangerous," he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. *This body... it is frail. And this place...
He looked around at the mounds of corpses, the dark river, and the oppressive, magical weight in the air.
"I can breathe. The air is cold, but it is untainted by the Final Ash. Does this mean... this is not the world I left? Or perhaps, is it the world I left, but before the end?"
He closed his eyes, focusing inward, searching for the familiar anchor that had guided him through the Great War.
"Where is my System?"
He whispered the command in the sanctuary of his mind. *System. Initialize status."
Silence.
"System! Respond!"
He looked at his wrist, then his palm, searching for the glowing geometric mark that signified his connection to the cosmic interface. There was nothing but pale, scarred skin. The void where the System should have been felt like a missing limb.
"Strange. Why is the mark not responding to me? Without the interface, I am blind to this world's laws. I am just... a man."
"What... what is the meaning of this?"
The voice was shaky, high-pitched with terror. The second soldier, the subordinate who had watched his leader turn into a monster and then get decapitated, was huddled several yards away. His legs had buckled, and he was staring at the resurrected man as if he were a demon wearing a human's skin.
"Are you really a ghost?" the soldier stammered. "Or a human? What the hell was that just now? The Leader... he turned into a... and you..."
The man turned his head slowly, his gaze so cold and piercing that the soldier instinctively flinched.
"If you had fought in as many battles as you claim to have seen," the man replied, his voice devoid of emotion, "you wouldn't be asking such stupid questions. The dead rose, and the living changed. Believe what you want to believe. It won't change the fact that I am standing, and he is rotting."
The soldier swallowed hard, his survival instinct finally kicking in. He saw the way the man held the sword not with the clumsy grip of a conscript, but with the casual lethality of a master. He noticed the uniform.
"Who are you?" the soldier demanded, though his voice lacked conviction. "What's your rank? You... you're wearing our colors. Let me see your Identity Card!"
*Identity card?*
The man frowned, looking down at himself for the first time. He was indeed dressed in the standard-issue quilted gambeson and iron-studded leather of a common infantryman. He reached for his waist and felt a small, rectangular piece of wood and brass hanging from a leather cord.
He unhooked it and brought it close to his eyes, narrowing them to read the rain-blurred script.
Name: Quinn
Unit: 4th Infantry, Vanait Camp
His breath caught. "My name... it is the name I carried before I became the Immortal. A name I haven't heard in eons. Quinn. An identity card for the Vanait Camp. But how? This body is not the one I died in, yet the world has provided me a place within it."
He was snapped back to reality by the sound of splashing footsteps.
"A misunderstanding! A total
misunderstanding!" the soldier cried out, his fear suddenly replaced by a desperate hope. He scrambled to his feet, wiping mud from his face. "So you're from the same camp as me? From the Vanait contingent? I thought you were a spirit from the mound! You must have been buried alive by mistake after the last skirmish!"
The man Quinn didn't correct him. He tucked the card back into his belt and let the sword's point drop to the mud. "Something like that."
"What's going on here?"
A third voice boomed through the darkness. Another soldier emerged from the gloom, clutching a long spear. He looked older, his face etched with the weariness of a long campaign. He had been sent out from the barracks because the first two had been gone far too long. He looked at the headless corpse of the Leader, then at Quinn.
"Why are you lot standing around in the rain?" the spearman asked, his eyes lingering on the carnage. "And who is this?"
The subordinate soldier jumped in before Quinn could speak. "It's nothing, Sarge! Just a stroke of luck. We found someone who was still alive he was buried under the pile, must have regained consciousness just now. I'm taking him back to the camp to report in."
The spearman grunted, his eyes suspicious, but the cold was too biting to argue. He didn't care much for the dead leader; in this war, men died every hour.
"Is that so?" the third soldier said, turning back toward the faint orange glow of the camp fires in the distance. "Well, let's move. The weather is getting colder by the minute, and the demons love the chill. If you're alive, you're useful. Move it, soldier."
The three of them began the trek back, leaving the headless monster and the secrets of the riverbank behind. Quinn walked in silence, his hand resting on the golden box hidden beneath his damp tunic. He was a ghost in a dead man's boots, entering a camp he didn't know, in a time he didn't understand.
But as he looked at the flickering lights of the Vanait Camp, one thing was clear: the Great Immortal was back, and this time, he wouldn't wait for the world to end.