Chapter 10: Tears and Song Of The Southern Bloodline

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Tears and Song Of The Southern Bloodline

Victor noticed the others entering into the mouth. He did not stop them. Then again, he couldn’t even if he wanted to.

As if in agreement, no one made a sound within the beast’s mouth.

It would not be until several hours later, when they were sure it was over, that Kiki and a few other Barbarians forced the stiff jaws of the beast opened.

Light entered the mouth first. It was weak and grey, filtered through dust in the air that hadn’t finished settling.

Then came the smell.

Victor had thought the inside of the beast was the worst thing he’d ever breathe. He was so wrong.

What crawled in through the widening gap now made the lizard’s throat smell like a spring meadow by comparison.

It was rot, mixed with copper, and something sweeter underneath that made his stomach lurch before his mind had even processed why.

The other Babarians that managed to have survived this tragic end, stepped out one at a time.

No one said a word. No one needed to. The glum was evident on their faces.

First came the shock, one woman wailed, as she broke down crying.

Like the others, Victor stepped out curiously—into what used to be the Mallet Arena.

But this could not even be called an arena anymore. Just a field of the dead.

The insects were gone now. Vanished just as suddenly as they’d come.

But what they’d left behind didn’t even look like a battlefield.

Battlefields, Victor had always imagined from the game’s cutscenes, had a kind of order to them.

Bodies usually fell where they’d stood.

One could say that there was a shape to the carnage.

But this... no, it had no shape.

Limbs lay separated from the people who’d owned them, and in the grey light it took a moment to understand that some of the shapes on the ground weren’t bodies at all.

They were just red terrain, wide dark stains where people had simply stopped being solid or organized.

Victor sighted a hand, still curled around the hilt of a sword. It sat alone on a patch of churned dirt six feet from any arm that might have owned it.

Flies, the smaller usual known ones, had already found the openness of the wounds.

Their persistent buzzing was a smaller, gentler echo of the sound that had filled this place hours ago, and somehow that felt worse.

Victor could no longer hold it in. He barged to the side. Nothing of actually substance came out.

Just bile and spit. But it provided a bit of relief to his insides.

A few barbarians looked his way, but nobody blamed him.

Babarians were a people that never shun away from war or blood. In fact, they embraced it. But none had seen a sight so nauseating and pitiful.

These were once their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunties and uncles. Their family.

Their tribe.

Popo tore himself from Kiki’s helping hand, staggering forward.

Then stopped.

He’d found Dago. Or rather, what the insects had left of him.

He was curled where he’d fallen, throat opened, chest a hollowed ruin where they’d fed straight through the ribs to get at the flesh underneath. His eye sockets were open, fixed on nothing.

Popo dropped to his knees beside him, and this time Kiki didn’t pull him back.

He reached out with a hand that hadn’t stopped shaking since the mouth had opened, and closed Dago’s eyelids with two fingers.

It reminded Victor of the way one would close a door on something they weren’t ready to look at anymore.

"I told him," Popo said. His voice barely carried. "I told him he’d come home to his father. I promised him."

No one answered him. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound cheap against what was in front of them.

Dying to the Basalt Dragonic Lizard was one thing.

And this was another.

One was considered a glorious ascension to the welcoming embrace of the ancestors and the other was just sad disgraceful butchering.

Kiki stood a step behind Popo, sword loose in her hand, her usual sharpness had gone slack at the edges.

Victor watched as her eyes moved across the field the way they always did.

She had a unique skill — Cataloguing.

Which always helped her assess and get that advantage in battles. That was why Victor’s observation of the fallen beast back then really amazed her.

Except now there was nothing left to assess. No threat to name, no plan to make.

Just counting the dead, and finding the number too large to hold onto.

Victor stood apart from both of them, and for once in his life, there was no joke waiting behind his teeth.

This is... this is supposed to be a game.

This thought rang in his mind again and again. As if trying to find some form of comfort that was not there.

But his eyes told him otherwise. His nose and all his other senses crawled with the slap of reality his old world always taught.

And no matter how he tried to rationalize it, this was a new reality.

Victor thought back to the forums that managed to talk a little about Dungeon Conquest.

Hundreds of posts, hundreds of players, laughing about grinding this exact starting zone for loot.

"Mallet Arena’s a joke, you can farm it in ten minutes. You can get easy XP and even equipments after the massacre."

None of them had ever smelled it or truly seen it. He wondered what those shut-ins would have done if they were met with this sight.

His eyes moved without permission to where Utada had fallen. What was left of him, anyway. The black-needle wound was still visible through the wreckage of his back.

Somewhere behind Victor, a few barbarians had began to hum lowly.

Somewhere else, someone had started, very softly, to sing.

It was a low, mournful thing in a language Victor didn’t recognize but understood anyway.

The kind of song built for exactly this, for a people who buried their dead often enough to have practiced grief.

Victor didn’t sing. He didn’t know the words, and even if he had, his throat wasn’t working right.

He just stood there, tears falling down his eyes, in a slaughter house that used to be an arena, in a body that used to be a stranger’s, and understood.

He really understood, for the first time since he’d woken up here, that this was not a game.