Twenty-five years old. An age that should have marked the threshold of stability, the starting line of what people called a "proper life." But for Dilan, it was just a number driving another nail of failure into his weary skull.
He was the failed product of empty promises: a degree supposedly guaranteeing a future, government assurances of millions of jobs that vanished like smoke in the chaos of politics.
Life had ground to a halt in his cramped apartment, surrounded by pitying stares from family and whispered gossip from neighbors, louder than any bomb he'd ever imagined.
"Be patient, son. Everyone's fate is already written," his mother said over the phone, her voice thin, weary, carrying the weight of shame she had no choice but to bear.
"Written to keep me unemployed, huh, Mom?" Dilan shot back one lonely night, bitterness thick in his voice. The silence on the other end was heavier than any shout.
Courage—or perhaps just desperation—came at two in the morning, when the internet was his only window to a world that seemed to offer choice.
The glow of the laptop painted his exhausted face. Articles scrolled past: wars, foreign volunteer programs, foreign salaries that seemed almost mythical.
Ukraine. A name distant and abstract, just a collection of dusty images and the echo of explosions on a screen.
Armed with self-taught English from pirated movies and nerves born of utter stagnation, his fingers typed. He filled out the online volunteer application for the Foreign Battalion.
One click. A desperate escape shrouded in false romanticism.
The acceptance came too quickly, too easily, as if the universe itself wanted to nudge him out of existence. A three-year contract.
The digital signature burned at his fingertip. He imagined adventure, paychecks, heroic tales. He did not imagine the stench of blood and gunpowder.
***
Hell did not start with the first gunshot. It began with the realization that modern war was a cold, bureaucratic machine.
Brief but brutal training at a base filled with blank faces—faces like his own: refugees, thrill-seekers, the wounded in every shape.
Their instructor, a veteran named Ivan, with pale blue eyes that had seen too much, muttered words that etched themselves into Dilan's mind:
"You think this is a game? This is slaughter. Artillery is king, drones are the eyes of the king, and you…" Ivan scanned them one by one, "are the cattle."
Those were the last words before he left for the frontline.
Two years passed, measured not in months but in the friends lost, the tremor of the earth from every incoming 2S19 Msta-S, the nights spent shivering in waist-deep water in the trenches.
The illusion of romance shattered the first week at the frontline.
Paychecks arrived late—or not at all. Internet connections were a joke, just enough to remind them that life went on elsewhere, oblivious to their suffering.
He was sick of it. The vague pangs of homesickness became a gnawing ache, eating from the inside out.
He missed the aroma of his mother's cooking, his father's rambling about football, rainstorms that didn't carry the threat of shelling. He wanted to go home.
But the three-year contract was a cage of iron. "Not finished yet," the officer at the base said flatly. "Go home now, you're a deserter. No pay. No papers." He was trapped.
That day, they were stationed in a shattered village in Donetsk, too quiet. A deceptive calm.
Dilan, along with three others—Dmytro from Lviv, a talkative young man always showing photos of his daughter; Ghost, a silent American constantly sharpening knives; and Marko, their thick-mustached squad leader—were on watch in the second floor of a half-ruined factory building.
"I'll get Diana a pink bicycle when I get back," Dmytro muttered, staring at a nearly-dead phone. "She wrote a letter to the angels yesterday asking for it."
"Maybe the angels forwarded it to hell instead," Marko muttered, eyes never leaving the binoculars. "Shut up. Something's coming."
But the warning came too late.
BOOM!
The first blast wasn't the loudest—but it was decisive. A hiss, a shockwave that tore through the wall beside them. Artillery fire. Not ordinary gunfire, but a coordinated rain of iron. The king was collecting his taxes.
"Down! Everyone down!" Marko shouted.
The world turned into sound—a deafening cacophony, cracking concrete, high-pitched screams, confusion. Dilan couldn't distinguish reality anymore.
They scrambled down into the rubble that had once been a lobby. Dust choked mouths and eyes.
BOOM!
The second explosion hit closer. Concrete shards whistled like bullets. Dilan felt fire-hot pain in his thigh and shoulder, his body thrown aside.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Dmytro's voice cut off mid-cry. He tried to lift his head.
Through the reddish-brown dust, he caught a glimpse of Ghost trapped beneath a huge concrete slab, only a faint twitch of his hand moving weakly.
Marko tried to pull him free, then a third blast—a deep, solid roar—swallowed them both, turning them into shadows that vanished amidst the debris and flames.
Then, a relative silence. His ears still rang, but the world around him was eerily quiet.
Only the crackle of small fires and the sizzling of hot metal remained. Dilan lay there, gasping. Pain crawled through him, sharp and searing from his thigh to his shoulder.
Blood flowed warm, staining his tattered uniform. He tried to move, but his body no longer felt like his own, disconnected.
He was alone. Dmytro, Ghost, Marko… gone. Devoured in an instant by something unseen.
The brutality of modern war: death from the sky, impersonal, efficient, total. No bullets fired from a gun, no faces to hate. Just coordinates on someone else's screen far behind the frontlines.
His head felt heavy. Amidst the ringing, another sound emerged. Familiar. He had heard it in videos online before leaving. A soft hum, like a giant bee.
Through the broken ceiling, he squinted at a patch of gray sky.
Hovering there, calm like a vulture with unblinking eyes, was a drone. Black, small, four propellers spinning.
Its lens—its gaze—locked onto him. No emotion. Just a camera recording a single living target.
In that silence, a strange surrender washed over him. Fear evaporated. Only deep, naked regret remained.
Father. Mother.
Only an hour ago, during a rare signal break, he had sent a brief message to his mother. Just three words in their native tongue, words only she would understand fully: Pak, Buk… Kulo tresno. Father, Mother… I love you.
A confession feared too late, wrapped in teasing familiarity.
Their faces appeared in his mind with vivid clarity. His mother's tired but warm smile. The creases in his father's eyes as he hugged him at the airport, anxious but trying to be strong.
The drone still hovered, as if granting time. Or merely capturing a final frame.
"Forgive me," he whispered to those faces, blood trickling from his lip. "Forgive me… Dad, Mom."
Then, from the tiny drone, something was released. A small cylindrical object, falling silently, like fruit ripening on the tree of death.
BOOM!
***
Consciousness returned not with an explosion, but with cold. A different cold than the trenches of Ukraine. Dry, harsh, brushing across his skin.
Dilan groaned. His body ached everywhere. Yet the burning, stabbing sensations in his thigh and shoulder… were gone. Only fatigue and stiffness remained.
He opened his eyes, slowly.