4 Chapter 3

"A nightmare?" My father asked incredulously from the opposite side of the kitchen table. I had just given both him and my mother and abridged version of my past life in the form of a terrifying and traumatic dream.

I knew it would be hard to believe at the very least, but I felt I had no other choice but to give it a try and see what would come of my efforts. I did not just expect them to up and believe me then provide me with their full support, but I had a few idea for how I could convince them. Future events that may or may not happen were not something I could use to my advantage, but there were many other lessons learned in my past life that could support my claims.

Top among them were the things I prided myself on and those were my combat skills. Picking up a wooden spoon from the table left over from the meal I had finished roughly fifteen minutes ago, I start twirling it about my fingers as if it were a knife. Between my fingers, over and around my knuckles back into my grasp, simple parlor tricks like these that would take the average person weeks or months to learn were now being performed by a six-year-old.

"Amoran continent, Matthias empire, capital of Mathis. Nestro continent, countries Nestral, Estel, Limba, Croa, and Karth. Capitals are..." like that, I started listing all nine inhabited continents of the world, their major powers, and the capital cities of those powers starting with our home empire.

What farm-bred six-year-old would even have access to such geographical knowledge?

Before I was even half of the way through, though, my shocked and awed mother interrupted me with, "How can you possibly learn all of that from a dream?"

"Not just that, but THAT," my father adds, pointing directly at my hand twirling the spoon. "I can accept learning places on a map in a dream, especially if you'd seen a map somewhere and it reappeared in your dream, but THAT takes time. Even if you had seen someone doing something similar and it showed up in your dream, your hand should not still be capable of it after waking up. I mean… you have always been a little on the clumsy side, Hugo."

I was honestly somewhat surprised that they had not picked up any changes in my speech or the fact that I had a mixed accent from my previous life of traveling. Then again, the story about my dream had been a long series of events finished with a display of physical ability and then knowledge. It would be strange for something simple like my speech to be at the forefront of their curiosity.

"I learned it from my dream," I reply softly, stopping my twirling and letting the spoon fall to the table where my eyes were lowered. "Even if I was only asleep hours… I experienced years of life and growth and lessons learned. It felt… so real. I experienced watching you two die, years of self-induced harsh training, years of struggling to make a name for myself, and then went to actual war before dying.

"I don't know if life will really play out like in my dream, if the town will be raided at all, but I… I don't want to leave it up to chance," I finish in a choked voice, feeling the stress of an entire lifetime bearing down at me as I looked up at my parents with what felt to me like a haunted gaze.

Nobody said anything for a long while as my parents looked back and forth between each other and myself, but finally my mother broke the silence by asking, "What… what do you want us to do? We can't just go around telling people our son had a nightmare we think is an oracle from the gods. People… even if they believed us, you would probably end up taken away from us to be raised in a temple somewhere."

I was silent for a moment as I wondered if they were truly believing me or if they were just eliminating possibilities. Then, I recalled the words I had spoken to myself while walking back to the farm. "We don't need to do much," I reply hesitantly.

"We have two simple choices," I go on when both of them just look at me while waiting for me to continue. "We can leave, sell the farm and move to a city somewhere and find a new livelihood. Or, we can gather together a group of people we trust. Our enemy is a disorganized mob with only an advantage in numbers, this is something we could easily overcome with skill and tactics."

Nodding his head slowly, my father asks, "So we just go around town to all our friends and tell them that if they dont want to die they come to the farm and start running weapons drills? Sounds simple enough. Oh, wait, how do we convince them to take us seriously?"

Even though the future enemy numbers in the hundreds, I knew that all it would take to change the future was a few dozen people skilled with a weapon and able to follow orders. The question remained, however, of how we would get those few dozen people. Rather, those few dozen extra people since my father and many men like him had already tried and failed to protect the town.

I already intended to try and put together some of the older kids and teens from town for just such a purpose, but even with a year or two of training we would be hard pressed to make the difference I wanted. We needed young adults of malleable minds and good morals who would be able to handle witnessing a grown man being torn apart without losing their morale. That, in itself, was an impossible order.

Sighing tiredly as if I was already suffering from the future defeat, I say, "We don't need much. There are already at least fifty assured fighters among the men and women of town, but that was only enough to hold out for a couple of days. My personal goal was to prepare my body for combat with spears and archery, weapons with reach that will remove threats at a distance, but we'd need at least thirty archers on top of our front lines just to halve their numbers in those few days."

"You… really are different, aren't you?" My mother asks hesitantly, scanning every inch of my face as if trying to be sure that it was really her child she was talking to. "I just noticed, you don't lisp when your say your R's anymore. And you have an almost proper city accent, but you still shorten your words like people in town."

Nodding my head slowly much like my father had done a few moments ago, I say, "Even if this is an entirely different world from the Hugo in my dream… I've still become that Hugo. I lived his life through his eyes, witnessed his terrors and shames, experienced his agony. But… I don't want to be him and live his life, I want to be ME and do things better than he did. I… but I can't do that without your help."

The kitchen was silent once again as my parents became lost in thought, probably struggling to comprehend the situation we all found ourselves in. Even I had to admit that all of this seemed purely impossible, but somehow I was here with the memories of a past life and could not refute myself. All I could do was hope that my parents would accept my warnings and help me in any way they could.

At length, my father finally spoke saying, "If you're right, then we could always take the easy way out and just move on somewhere else. I have friends from the military of decent social status to help us set up a new farm somewhere else, but then… if you're right… we'd be leaving everybody else to die. That just leaves a bad taste in my mouth just considering it. Worse still, my six-year-old son is asking me to let him fight what even he thinks is a losing battle."

"The only thing I need to train is my body," I rush to reassure him, realizing that the most detrimental person to the situation might be denied the right to take part. "There's still roughly two years before the raid and it'll take place soon after the fall harvest, it's spring right now. Right? That's more than two years, I have plenty of time to strengthen myself enough to use a bow or wield a spear. I'm already strong enough to use most basic staves."

Looking distantly at the spoon on the table I had once been twirling about my fingers, my father nods once to himself before getting up from the table. "Show me," he states simply, walking out of the kitchen.