3 The last war of Humanity (3)

on the monsters, which turned their enemies to ashes as soon as they touched them. However, despite their resistance this was not enough. The group slowly succumbed to the numbers, as the huge jaws of the monsters closed on one of the warriors, deforming his armor and tearing him apart alive.

Even as the other two warriors were executing the monsters, knowing it was too late, the witch who was with them invoked a forbidden spell when a black and shiny flame condensed into three small beads in her hands.

She looked in the direction of Mars and whispered something with half a smile on her sorry face, almost as if to apologize for having gone before him, then when she clapped her hands between them, the spell was triggered, turning the witch's body into a huge, deafening and blinding explosion of cursed fire that would incinerate all her enemies with her.

Then the flames began to dissipate, revealing a crater of vitrified stone.

Mars clenched his fists and teeth in front of the scene. Why did survival almost always mean being the one to watch those around him die before his eyes?

He had long since stopped memorizing the names of those around him. Most of the time he just gave them numbers to remember them by. It was more convenient, and it was much easier to forget their faces once they were dead.

In fact, he had long since learned to lose interest in others. Because taking an interest in them inevitably brought with it the risk of liking or becoming attached to the other person, and that was something he didn't want to do. Unfortunately, despite his efforts, he had sometimes failed in this task, and many times he had made connections with other people or unintentionally memorized their names.

But even so, even when he tried to ignore others and treat them as disposable numbers, sometimes it was not enough to avoid the pain he felt watching someone he had become familiar with die before his eyes. Especially when they had tried to be kind, patient and warm to him despite the fact that he behaved like an asshole in order to keep them out of his way.

And every time it happened he felt his heart die a little more.

This had been particularly evident when 43924 died. This stupid girl had sacrificed herself, and she had done it to save his life. But did he even ask for someone to save him?

Because he had survived since the beginning of this war, and while everyone they met ended up dying, he had unwittingly ended up memorizing too many names and faces that he would have preferred to forget.

During his dreams at night, he could sometimes see their anonymous faces twisted by fear and pain in his dreams, breaking the fragile torpor of his rest on the rare occasions when he was able to find sleep through the effects of powerful drugs that calmed his tortured mind. But the tiny doses of the drug, which at first had been enough to give him deeply, peaceful rest and bring him welcome and life-saving relief, had lost their effect on his mind, even at doses that would have killed anyone other than himself.

That was also one of the things he hated. Just like this doomed world and this stupid war against demons and monsters.

Fate is sometimes unpredictable, but he is mostly a cocksucker! The day he was summoned to this fucking world of Yvelmore by the sorcerers -like every other human on Earth-, who could have guessed that he would survive long enough in this cataclysmic war to witness the end of the world?

Not him anyway.

He still remembered that banal and ordinary summer day. After having emptied a few bottles of Scotty Bolder to help him drown his sorrow caused by his last love break-up, he had put his underwear down to enjoy a porno in order to get revenge. But right in the middle of a hot lesbian scene, he disappeared in a kind of painful blinding flash, and when he opened his eyes again, he found himself in another world, but without his underwear.

It wasn't exactly an ideal start.

It could have looked like any generic premise of an Electronic Arts game, except that where he had landed 14 years earlier wasn't exactly the kind of place that would appear on a travel brochure for a nice vacation or in the list of <50 worlds to visit>, except perhaps starting at the end of the list.

The world of Yvelmore was a cursed and dying world.

An unknown cataclysm had struck this world, destroying the barriers that isolated the material world from the immaterial dimensions. Since then, whole armies of monsters, demonic creatures and other totally insane things had come to claim this place as their new playground.

The different nations, kingdoms and empires of this world, despite their armies, their guardians, their saints and their super-powerful sorcerers, had all fallen one after the other. A decade had been enough to see them all destroyed. And when that happened, the few survivors fled, seeking refuge in the eastern end of the great continent, in forgotten lands. They had sought hiding, taking refuge in the old cities.

The group that Mars had followed had found refuge in a fortress city dug into a mountain. They had hidden the smallest traces of their presence with the help of powerful spells that the wizards who accompanied them had woven, superimposed on each other. They had succeeded in making their presence undetectable to creatures with the sharpest magical senses, but that was not enough.

He didn't know how, but after many years the demons had found their tracks. Perhaps they were not even there because they had searched for them, but simply because there was nothing else left to destroy, who could tell?