Chapter 2

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The Zalderians are here.

The commanders are dead.

The holdout has fallen.

The trebuchet is destroyed.

The last of the Eldrich border guards shivered in fear as they were carted away by the Zalderians as prisoners of war.

War.

---

Dehydration is rough.

Reynold never thought that he would say this, water is... everywhere in the cities that Reynold has been through in his life. Since all humans needed water to survive, the cities always had a consistent and reliable water source, it was a necessity.

But now, in the middle of the desert, there was no reliable and easy way to access water. Quite a predicament for a human indeed.

What made dehydration even worse, other than the fact that Reynold is carrying Kalderium, a heavy ore, is that there always seemed to be a glimmer of hope. Reynold would travel for an hour or two and see an oasis in the distance containing a huge pool of beautiful, thirst-quenching, fresh water, but the closer Reynold seemed to travel to the oasis, the farther it would seem, and at one point, it would vanish out of sight and disappear completely. Reynold has heard of this phenomenon before, a mirage.

The feeling of this loss of something that you desire most is crushing. The anticipation fills you when you spot it, and eventually, the disappointment crushes you when you realize it was another mirage. It sucks.

---

It was another few hours until Reynold spotted something else. It wasn't an oasis, and it was not anything related to water. It was a plume of.. smoke?

As Reynold neared the plume of smoke, he gained more and more hope, the plum was not disappearing, it was not a mirage. Perhaps it could even be a home of some type, perhaps some underdeveloped shack in the middle of nowhere. It couldn't be a city, since interstellar solar power is already in widespread use among the major nations, but for all Reynold cares, it could be the burnt remains of a long-ago broken house, the only thing that matters is some sort of water.

Nearing the scene, Reynold realized: it is not a home. It is not a home of any sort, it wasn't even the remains of one. It was some type of... battlefield.

There were corpses of people everywhere, some are burnt and some seem to have wounds in them, many bled out to death, they wore the same disgusting cloth that Reynol found himself in, but in much worse condition, caked in dirt and blood. The scene did not freak Reynold out, he was used to these types of things, being 500 years of age, after all, he had seen quite a lot, but some things did catch his eyes. Among some of the dead soldiers wearing the disgusting clothes, one of them held something interesting, a... gun?

Reynold moved closer to the soldier and picked the gun-looking wooden stick away from his cold hands. He inspected the weapon and concluded that this was some sort of predecessor or prototype to the modern-day gun. It utilized gunpowder, the symbol of a lower nation.

All of the major nations used vacuum-powered guns and ion cannons as part of their military, but some of the lower, weaker nations still used the ancient weapons, as they were much cheaper and easier to use. So this was a minor squabble between two weak, minor nations. Seems inconsequential.

Another thing caught Reynold's eye, on one side of the battlefield, there was... a contraption. It looked like some type of sling. Reynold knew from all of the histories he studied about weapons, that this was a trebuchet, and it was used in the ancient wars between two human kingdoms, as a capital, strong weapon. But it should not be here. It was outdated and weak, it was ANCIENT weaponry.

Even in the fights among minor tribes and "nations", these "siege weapons", and I say them in quotes because they are too weak to be counted as true siege weapons, were not used.

Perhaps this was a fight between barbarians that somehow learned of the composition of gunpowder-guns, and utilized them to claim territory? But what type of barbarian "society" still uses this underdeveloped weaponry? These types of toys were long replaced with far more powerful, faster, and destructive 'ion cannons', this weapon is a RELIC of the past! It is outdated not once, not twice, not thrice, but quadruplice, and quadruplice is not even a word! They were outdated by gunpowder cannons first (Pre-reconstruction Humanic Warring Ages), the tank (Pre-Space-Age wars), later the missiles (Post-Nuclear-War Disaster), and finally by the beautiful ion cannon.

Reynold was not familiar with these older wars, but he had indeed, of course, been alive through them, he remembered the terror of the nuclear missiles, threatening to kill all those existent on the Terran home-planet of Earth.

Reynold snapped back to reality after drifting off about all of these weapons. He embarrassingly decided that temporarily taking a gunpowder gun was a good idea for self-defense, since it seemed like this is barbarian territory. He also searched around in the items of the dead soldiers and found quite a bit of water filled in strange-looking... containers that were enough to last him for a week.

He nonchalantly moved away from the battlefield with his newly acquired gun, without a cent of sympathy for the dead soldiers that he had robbed. It was not something for him to worry about, it was merely good luck that he ran into them and got water.

Water certainly is nice.