Book 1, Chapter: 23

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h t t p s : / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / t r a s h w i t h g l a s s e s

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I remembered when I was just a little kid, swinging a wooden sword up and down all day to build up the right muscles and memorize to an instinctual level the way of the sword. I was marveled by everything warrior-like, the rituals, the action, the armor, the weapons. My father. He was my hero.

"One, two, three", my father instructed while I bashed my sword against his, trying to get through his defenses and failing miserably. "Hahaha, good, good! But your footwork can be better. Like this!", in one second, he swept my leg and I fell down on my bum.

"Ouch!"

"Did it hurt, Ike?"

"It's Strike, of the Bloodstain Clan!", I replied proudly, quickly getting up with a toothless smile. "And it didn't hurt at all!"

"Hahaha, good!", my father ruffled my short-cut hair, and my smile grew even wider.

He personally trained me, he was the one who gifted me with my real obsidian sword, then too big for me to use properly, so I trained with a fake one.

"One day, I'll be a warrior just like you!", I promised.

"I know you will, son", my father said, kindly smiling.

And then he showed me what war really meant.

My father took me to a battlefield for the first time when I was but six years old, one of the many conflicts that happened all around since the gods vanished. The horror shook me right off my fantasy. Real sword clash, real blood, real entrails and torn-off limbs, real blood magic, real destruction.

Corpses for dozens and dozens of meters, hundreds of vultures circling the skies above and feasting on the blanket of death below. The ground turned into a giant deathly swamp that had soaked blood, fesses, and urine from all those victims, and the air smelled accordingly. Some unlucky ones were still screaming in agony and pain on the battlefield, while others suffered in the medical tents.

Instinctively, I grabbed my father's hand as I started to hyperventilate, and with my other hand, I grabbed my chest, which seemed to be shirking, getting crushed by the invisible hand of terror.

My kind father with an easy smile, however, seemed to be nowhere, and he swapped my hand away, and stepped forward, digging his sandals deep into the disgusting mud.

"Let's go. This is an important step in your training."

I followed my father, my head turning from one side to another as every movement, every sound scared me, and I could swear that at any moment, a crazed soldier would jump from the field of corpses and slash me into pieces, and I would become just another butchered cadaver like so many around me.

That didn't happen. But we did find an enemy troop still alive.

It was a human man, whose skin turned almost snow white because of blood loss. He had a terrible gush on the side of his belly, and he could barely keep his entrails from spilling out with his own hands. My father grabbed the man by his helmet, and exposed his throat to me.

"Kill him", he simply said.

"I- I can't…"

"Slap!", my father hit me on the cheek, leaving a burning mark on my face as I fell on my side. "Kill him!", he shouted, frowning and pushing the man's throat closer to me.

"I can't!", I screamed back, trying to crawl away from all of that, only to be pulled back to the scene by my legs.

"If you can't even put a man out of his misery, how can you become a warrior who will fight in the front lines?!", my father shouted at my mud-covered shaking, and small figure.

When I couldn't force myself to reply to him, having never seen him that scary before, much less being able to simply slash that man's throat open, my father clicked his tongue, and grabbed my hand himself, but not in a carrying way, it was painful, and he forcefully made me grip onto my sword.

"Aah! AAAHH!", Noticing what my father was about to force me to do, I started to scream, and cry, and try to pull my hand away as hard as I could, but it was useless as I couldn't make my father's muscles bulge a centimeter.

Still holding my hand, he pulled my sword off its sheath in my shield. He put its black obsidian blade against the barely conscious dying enemy. Then he moved my hand to the left as fast as and roughly as he could.

The skin and muscle of the neck of that man were cut clean, and I could see his windpipe gurgling on its own blood as he tried to breathe through the hole under his chin. The jugular pulsed at the same rate as his heart, and spilled blood with surprising power, showering me with red.

"Splatch!", my father let go of the dying man, and it fell right on top of me.

As I stood there, completely immobile, eyes wide, covered in mud, shit, and blood, I could feel the soldier's life, his heat, leaving his body, I could see his muscles spasming, his eyes turning up inside the skull.

"This is what being a warrior means. Never forget it", My father said, looking down at me, then a simple shadowy figure against the setting sun. "One day, you will be sent to a prestigious magic school, and there you will learn how to cause even more death, more than anyone else. For if you want to be accepted, son, you have to work harder than anyone else…"

*

Alone, I reached the storeroom bone doors, lacrosse stick in my hands. From inside, I could hear the screens of a girl. I tightened my grip on the tool, imagined it as a sword, and pushed the doors open.