A Distant Reverie

Chapter 23

Her body collapsed atop of the stony ground with a loud thud.

"Shirogane...!"

Voices. A bunch of them. Muffled. Noel could no longer make out the words, but she could still sense their urgency. Her eyesight was beginning to fail—the figures in front of her were a blur, moving about erratically.

I'm tired...

Her eyelids were heavy. Unable to resist the urge, she finally closed her eyes. After a brief lull, she was no longer atop of the cliffside. Instead, she found herself back in her office during the dark hours of the night.

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She was hunched over. Her head was pressed against the cold surface of the wooden desk. The drapes of the windows were open, allowing a glimpse of moonlight to leak in. A dim candle in the corner of the room offered some somber incandescence, just enough to illuminate the set of papers before her.

Noel laid still. Wordlessly, she stared at the writing ink and quill to her side. She was supposed to be composing letters. Fifty in total. It was the reason why she was still up, despite the soreness in her bones and the dull, pulsating pain at the back of her head. Yet, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't muster the strength to pick up the quill. She was no stranger to writing letters. But today, the task felt overwhelmingly arduous. Instead of words, the blank sheets of paper before her were covered in dark blots. Messy and unintelligible, the ink blobs smeared the pages like blood stains.

I...

The nightmarish scenes flickered in her mind. Sights and sounds that she never wanted to experience again. One by one, they bubbled from her subconscious, forcing her to relive the hellish events.

Stop it...

Their haunting screams echoed. Some cried in a fit of panic. Some screeched as they lost a part of their body. Others wailed unintelligibly as they were gruesomely torn into pieces. Noel never knew how horrifying it was to hear veteran soldiers lose their composure. She remembered their confident gazes, steadfast postures, and unwavering resolve. None of those were on display as her soldiers floundered about in fear. Chaos permeated the battlefield, amidst the cries of her men being brutally split apart by monsters.

They were ambushed. The scouts somehow missed them—the monsters emerged too quickly, in numbers too great to be ignored.

Noel screamed out an order to form squares. It was simple formation in the textbooks—one that even children can follow in mere seconds. But amidst the bloody chaos, it was damn near impossible. Her command went unheard, falling on deaf ears as everyone around her scrambled for themselves. Noel screamed, screamed, and screamed again, desperate to command some semblance of order. At the same time, she swung her sword. Mindlessly, she swung. Whatever moved in front of her that didn't look human, she swung. Somewhere along the line, the cries of her men finally stopped. The movements stopped. Noel finally stopped. Her breathing was laboured. A stringent metallic taste danced on her tongue. Her throat was hoarse, a burning sensation lingered in the back. All around her, humans and monsters alike were mixed in a sea of corpses.

The cleanup was even worse. The gaze of her fallen men seemed to follow her wherever she went. Their vacant, lifeless eyes glared at her accusingly, as if to protest about her shoddy command that led to her gruesome deaths. Noel couldn't bear it. In the end, she ordered some of the survivors to attend to the dead.

I can't do this anymore.

The haunting screams that she fought to drown out grew louder. They cursed at her in derision, taunting her command, lamenting their deaths, begging for answers. Noel couldn't give it to them, as she had an endless number of questions herself. How did they get ambushed? Why didn't the scouts notice anything? Was she overconfident? Did she overlook something? Why...