Change - Part 7

"Hm?" Nila prodded for him to continue.

"When a battle is over, a first man's thought should naturally be for the dead. Before victory can be celebrated, one must take account of what one has lost. But the First King, he doesn't even mention the dead. He mentions the game," Oliver said, frowning. "What does he even mean by that? Is the battlefield such a distant thing for him, that he doesn't worry about the consequences? That can't be right. He's a man expected enough that he was the forefather of a nation. If he didn't care about his men, they wouldn't have followed him."

"…He doesn't sound like a particularly nice man, when he speaks of the battlefield as a game," Nila said with a shudder. Her experiences of battle were traumatic, to say the least. Every time she'd been forced to take to the field, she'd done so needing to protect something that was precious to him, more so than her own life.