Pain.
It's a fascinating thing. In movies, the protagonist takes a round, grits his teeth, digs the bullet out with his fingers, washes it down with half a bottle of whiskey, then picks up a gun and goes on to wipe out an entire division. I used to believe that as long as your willpower was strong enough, pain could be endured.
Now I just want to say: utter, absolute bullshit.
I felt like someone had stuffed me into a tumble dryer running a dehydration cycle. Every bone in my body was groaning under the strain.
A dull, deep, and stubborn agony radiated from somewhere in the back-right depths of my body, like some unreasonable brute was slowly stirring a red-hot blunt knife inside me. Every breath, every heartbeat, tightened that pain one notch further. It hurt so much I didn't even have the strength to groan.
Besides the pain, there was cold. A kind of chill seeping outward from inside my body, the sort you can't warm up no matter what you do. I seemed to have some rough blanket over me, but it felt about as useful as a wet newspaper, completely unable to stop my body heat from bleeding away.
Where the hell was I? Hit by a car? Or did I black out drunk and tumble down a staircase?
I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were as heavy as lead plates. After what felt like exhausting the strength of my entire life, I managed to pry them apart to a narrow slit.
My vision was blurred, swaying in a dim red glow. The air was thick with a pungent mixture of machine oil, ozone, and disinfectant, threaded through with a faint but persistent stink of blood. In my ears was a huge, rhythmic roar, vibrating hard enough to make my teeth chatter.
I seemed to be… on some kind of vehicle?
"He's awake!"
A raspy voice sounded beside me, carrying the relieved excitement of someone who'd been holding their breath for too long.
I forced my eyes to shift, and saw a familiar, hard-edged face leaning in close. It was the big bruiser of a captain, Kairen. He'd removed that terrifying half-face helmet, revealing a complete face battered by wind and years.
His jaw was heavy with stubble, dust and soot clinging to it. His light-colored hair was cut extremely short, and there was a fresh bruise on his forehead.
The dim red emergency lights cast uneven shadows over his features, making a face that already looked like granite seem even more like some statue hauled out of an ancient temple.
He looked at me. The wildness and confusion from before were gone. So was that later, spine-crawling awe that had made my skin prickle. Instead, what he wore now was… something complicated, mixed with worry, concern, and a trace of cautious restraint.
The moment I saw his face, the missing pieces of my memory burst open like floodgates. Those soldiers dropping to their knees. That atmosphere so wrong it felt unreal. The way they'd stared at me like I was looking back at them from the throne of a god…
A shiver ran through me. Then it tugged at the wound in my back, and a sharp spike of pain nearly tore a scream out of my throat.
"I… what happened to me?" I tried to speak, but my voice came out hoarse, like a busted bellows. My lips were cracked and dry, and every word felt like someone was planting a boot on my spine and grinding down.
"My lord, don't move." Kairen's voice was low and steady. He lifted a hand as if to hold me down—then abruptly pulled it back halfway, as if even touching me would be some kind of desecration. He only said, with extreme solemnity, "You've been injured. We're on the transport shuttle back to the Adeptus Arbites precinct-fortress. Medical staff are already waiting for you."
Injured?
I lowered my gaze. I was lying on a narrow pad made of some unknown material, with the rough, gridded deck plating of the cabin directly beneath it. A gray blanket covered me. My plaid shirt had been removed. My bare upper body was wrapped in thick bandages, and a large section of them was soaked through with blood, turned into a harsh, dark red blotch.
The last fragment of memory clicked into place.
…
It happened after those lunatics finished their inexplicable kneeling ceremony in front of me.
Honestly, I had been completely at a loss. When Captain Kairen—the same big brute who'd been eyeing me with suspicion and scrutiny the whole time—was the first to drop to one knee, hold his weapon across his chest, and bow his head to me, the very first thought that flashed through my mind was: Is this some kind of etiquette? Or is "bowing to the VIP after a battle" just their local military tradition?
Then every surviving soldier, every last one of them, followed suit.
In an instant, a whole crowd of people in all kinds of gear were kneeling in front of me. The scene was so solemn and ceremonial it looked like a coronation.
And there I was—wearing a plaid shirt—standing in front of the "throne," hands and feet at a loss, wondering if I'd wandered onto the wrong set.
I tried to say something, anything, to break the sheer weirdness of it. Something like, "Brothers, you really don't have to," or "We don't do this in my country," but when I opened my mouth, not a single word came out. Because in the eyes they lifted to look at me, I saw something I couldn't understand at all—an emotion tangled from awe, fanatic devotion, and a kind of grateful dependence that comes from surviving catastrophe.
That look made my skin crawl. It felt like I was a new species of monkey being gawked at in a zoo, and this particular monkey had just performed a one-minute levitation act in midair.
Thankfully, the standoff of awkwardness didn't last long. They soon got up, re-formed their unit, and kept moving toward the extraction point.
But everything had changed.
They no longer treated me like a "prisoner" who needed protection but was also kind of in the way. Instead, they guarded me like a living idol that could walk.
They packed around me so tightly I was practically sealed in the center of their formation. Captain Kairen, walking ahead of me, even deliberately slowed his pace so I could keep up. And two soldiers behind me kept their weapons ready at all times, like they were prepared to throw themselves into any incoming fire from any direction.
To be honest, being escorted like the center of the universe by a group of armed-to-the-teeth tough guys did provide a kind of unprecedented, completely fake sense of safety. Earlier, I'd had to watch my step constantly so I wouldn't trip over a corpse. Now I felt like I could walk this blood-soaked path with my eyes closed, strutting like it was a runway.
But the feeling it brought wasn't enjoyment.
It was a deeper panic.
The more they acted like this, the more my nerves screamed. What the hell had I done? All I'd done was watch them argue with thin air until they nearly killed themselves, then I couldn't help yelling at them a few times.
How did that suddenly flip some bizarre "cult of personality" switch? Did this whole group collectively develop battlefield stress psychosis? Or were they some fanatical religious military outfit, and the couple of times I yelled just happened to match their secret initiation slogan?
Why were they so afraid of me?
Because I had some kind of power they couldn't comprehend?
As someone raised under civilized education in a normal world, it was genuinely hard to explain things to these people—who looked high-tech on the outside but were superstitious to the bone. I couldn't help thinking of those stories about engineers in underdeveloped regions of Africa being treated like "priests of the sun" and worshipped—because they were there to service solar base stations, and those stations granted "divine power" like long-distance voices and delightful little videos.
Sure, the shaman's dancing looked stupid, but the fear in the eyes of the people around me—people who clearly looked like they could fight—was absolutely real. I couldn't understand the world they were seeing, and that unknown was more terrifying than any lunatic holding a gun.
In that high-pressure mix of tension, confusion, and a tiny sliver of being flattered, my attention inevitably slipped.
My brain was already crammed full of two questions—Why are they looking at me like that? and How do I explain I'm really just an ordinary person?—to the point that I gradually stopped noticing the scattered gunfire and explosions around us.
After all, if the sky fell, these "zealots" would hold it up for me, wouldn't they?
(End of Chapter)
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