"You lot are going to repent for eternity!!"
The stranger raised a halberd into the air with a single, effortless hand.
Hiroshi flinched.
He stared at the man. Or rather, he stared at the towering wall of muscle and steel. Even the professional bodybuilders he'd seen on TV didn't have frames this massive.
Glint.
And that halberd.
He'd seen weapons like that in historical movies, but they were always polished, cinematic. On the other hand, that one looked like it had been forged in a nightmare rather than a workshop. It wasn't just scary; smeared with layers of grime and dark, tacky blood suggested it had seen far more than just a film set.
It made his stomach turn.
What a bad dream. Must be the expired ramen last night. Hiro thought.
He gripped his sweaty palms and forced his body upright. Every joint protested with a dry, grinding.
The extra moisture in the air—thick, cold, and smelling of ash and iron—hadn't let up since he'd woken to the dream. His ribs throbbed where the Halberd Man had kicked him out of his stupor earlier.
Shit….what is this surreal dream?
He rubbed his side unconsciously, wincing at the flare of pain. Also, the stinging headache was still there—a pulsing hammering against his skull. With every pulse, flashes of alien memories scorched his brain: a hand-slicked grip on a sword, the weight of a visor, and faces he didn't recognize but somehow missed.
The grief and guilt that rose in his chest were heavy and suffocating. A haunting sadness that didn't belong to him, yet it felt more real than the mud beneath his boots.
"Move!"
Rattle.
The chain jerked forward again, nearly pulling Hiro off his feet.
The Halberd Man had finished his "fiery" pep talk and was now dragging them deeper into the woods. The iron shackles biting into Hiro's wrists were painful, but they were nothing compared to the migraine from earlier. For the last few minutes, he'd been clutching his head, convinced his brain was actually melting.
Thank God the pulsing had stopped, but the situation hadn't improved.
Hiro glanced at the men trudging around him.
Their shoulders brushed against his whenever the line shifted. It was....weird. Hiro was an average-sized Japanese man, yet somehow he was eye-to-eye with these guys. Were all these Westerners just short? He tried to remember that one movie—the one where they fight over a gold ring and the short guys living in the hobbit-holes. They were Westerners too, right?
More importantly, why did I become a prisoner in this dream? He wondered.
Thud.
Hiro bumped into the back of the man in front of him.
The Westerner. This one had dirty blonde hair that hit his shoulders and a face "to die for"—mostly because the man looked like he wanted to kill Hiro on the spot.
Hiro swallowed hard.
His throat felt like he'd been swallowing sandpaper, but he forced a polite, managerial smile. It was the same smile he used when a customer complained that their burger was "too round."
"H-How are you, Mister?"
Hiro mustered the best English he could remember from high school. He even gave a tiny, instinctive bow, despite the chains.
Silence.
The blonde man's glare intensified, he let out a low, guttural grunt and snapped his head back toward the front.
Okay, definitely the wrong country, Hiro thought. And definitely a dream.
He had to be dreaming, right?
He looked at the mud caked under his fingernails and the terrifying, blood-smeared halberd swaying in front of the line.
Any second now, he told himself, even as the cold wind bit through his thin clothes. I'll wake up.
Soon, the alarm on his phone—the one with the annoying chirping birds—would go off. He'd wake up in his cramped apartment, put on his suits, and complain about the inventory shipment being late.
Swoosh—boom.
A shell whistled overhead, ending in a bone-shaking thud that sent a geyser of black mud into the gray sky.
"Ack!" Hiro yelped.
His shackles rattled violently.
He stayed curled in a ball, waiting for the dream to end. Instead, he felt a heavy, oppressive silence. He looked up to find the entire line of prisoners—and the halberd man—staring at him with a mix of annoyance and genuine absurdity. To them, that was just a background noise; to Hiro, it was the end of the world.
"It's you again!!"
The Halberd Man growled, noticing the chain snagged in the mud. He turned, his massive frame blotting out the sun.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The rhythmic heavy-metal stomp of those steel boots triggered a primal alarm in Hiro's brain. His ribs screamed in earlier pain. He scrambled to his feet, his 21st-century social conditioning overriding his terror.
"I-I have no excuse! Please forgive me!" Hiro blurted out, snapping into a perfect, practiced 45-degree bow.
What the?
Hiro tilted his head, still bent at the waist. He was certain he'd just apologized in his native Japanese, but the sounds that had left his throat were different—archaic, and heavy with words he didn't recognize. As if his mouth was a radio tuned to the wrong frequency.
"He has finally lost it," a whisper drifted through the ash-choked wind from the blonde man beside him.
"Ugh!"
A massive, gauntleted hand suddenly seized Hiro's collar, hoisting his bowing torso into the air until his toes barely scraped the muck.
"You've been acting like a witless cur since the trenches broke," the Halberd Man hissed. The smell of incense and old blood wafted from his armor. "Have you forsaken your commander's honor!? Have you forgotten God's oath!?"
Hiro's eyes went wide, staring into the glowing, narrow slits of the man's visor.
Sweat soaked his shirt, clinging to his skin like a cold shroud. He cursed his upbringing—his family had visited both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples; now, in the face of this zealot, he didn't know which God's name to scream.
"P-Please... I really don't know what you are talking about, Sir," Hiro stammered, he didn't care about language anymore.
His hands instinctively clasped the bulky, cold steel of the man's vambraces. He wasn't being choked, but the sheer pressure of the man's presence felt like it was squeezing the oxygen right out of his lungs.
Rattle.
The Halberd Man's grip tightened.
Hiro could see the man's gauntlet trembling—not from weakness.
He was restraining something that boiled within him.
"Are you seriously saying that to me?" the giant whispered, his voice vibrating through Hiro's chest. "After everything?Even his blood wouldn't be dry by now."
Thud.
Hiro hit the mud hard.
The Halberd Man threw him to the ground, The giant's hands shifted on the shaft of his steel.
"Sir Reinhardt please stop!"
A voice cut through the heavy air from behind Hiro.
Tap—Tap.
A man with brown hair stepped directly between Hiro and the Halberd man. He gave Hiro a brief, unreadable glance before fixing his gaze on the steel visor.
"The King has guaranteed our safety in honor of our Commander's sacrifice," the newcomer said, his voice steady. "Or have you forsaken my Commander's honor?"
The air seemed to freeze.
Hiro watched the staring contest—blue eyes against steel visor.
"Don't preach about honor to me," Reinhardt grunted, the sound echoing like grinding stones inside his helm. He turned his attention back to Hiro, his shadow looming large. "I'll let it slide. For now."
Swoosh.
He spun on his heels with a violent clatter of plate armor.
Reinhardt moved so fast the wind of it whipped Hiro's hair across his face. The halberd didn't fall on his neck, but the threat remained etched in the air.
Sacrifice? King? Commander? This dream's script was too elaborate.
He still couldn't make sense of anything that was happening, but his five senses were screaming at him. The copper tang of blood in his mouth, the grit of mud under his fingernails, the bone-chilling cold—it was all too vivid. This was truly different from any dream he'd ever had.
A nightmare.
Rattle.
The chain jerked harsher now, nearly throwing Hiro off balance.
Splat.
Hiro stepped into a deep puddle, the dark liquid smearing his boots.
Splat.
Hiro didn't even care. He just trudged forward. The nightmare will be over soon, he told himself. It has to be.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
O merciful Buddha. O Jesus. O Shenlong.
He chanted to every God he could remember, wishing for the nightmare to stop so he could finally start his morning shift. He thought of his troublesome tasks, his juniors who had somehow become his shitty superiors, and that even shittier yearly raise. He felt a sudden, strange surge of gratitude toward his real life.
Compared to this, he would give anything to be squeezed against a train door by a sea of salarymen again right now.
"What's wrong with you, Einar?"
The brown-haired man's face leaned in close to Hiro's, his expression pinched with a mix of genuine curiosity and worry. His blue eyes searched Hiro's; looking for a person who was no longer there.
Hiro tilted his head, his modern brain struggling to process the name.
Einar? Who was—
"Ugh."
A sharp pain throbbed through his skull again, silencing the thought.
He clutched his head, but as he looked at the man, his peripheral vision caught a streak of fire. A blazing stone boulder, the size of a small car, screamed through the forest canopy above them.
Swoosh—Boom.
It slammed into the earth just meters behind their line. The impact sent a wall of thick dust and jagged debris washing over Hiro, the force of the shockwave nearly buckling his knees.
He felt himself tipping forward, his face inches from a muddy puddle, until a firm hand gripped his collar and yanked him upright.
"Einar! Einar!"
Please, stop shouting! Hiro thought. My head... He couldn't hold it back anymore. The pressure felt like his skull was being splitted apart.
Flash.
A blinding white light washed over Hiro's mind, and the rhythmic hammering returned, more violent than ever. But this time, he didn't fight it.
He couldn't.
He let the images drown him.
'Einar Vane. Royal Knight. Failed Duty. A Penance.'
A barrage of information and cold facts stormed through Hiro's mind, overwriting his memories of inventory lists and train schedules with the weight of steel and the scent of holy oil.
He gaped. Is this what they called Lucid Dream?
Hiro forced his eyes open, his face hovering mere inches from a murky puddle.
"Who... who is that?"
Reflected in the muddy water was a young man with a black hair. But it was the eyes that stopped Hiro's heart—red, glowing irises that burned like embers in the muck. He didn't have those eyes.
Hiro reached up, trembling. He touched his cheek.
Rough. He didn't have this face.
He turned his palm over.
Calloused. He didn't have this hand.
He let his hand drop back into the puddle.
Undeniably Cold.
"That's... me?"
Splat.
The hand on his collar suddenly released him, shoving his face straight into the freezing muck.
"Guah!"
Hiro scrambled to raise his torso, spitting out a mouthful of gritty sludge.
Ptui.
It tasted like a mixture of iron and filth. He was certain there was no other way to describe it; the taste of realization.
"This wasn't a fucking dream!"
Swoosh—Boom.
Another projectile screamed overhead, slamming into the earth behind them and triggering another miniature earthquake. Hiro didn't think; he just scrambled, desperate to get as far away from the impact zone as possible.
Rattle.
The iron chain snapped taut, jerking him back into place like a dog on a leash.
"Honestly, Einar. I knew you were frustrated. But I'm fed up with your sudden antics," the brown-haired man sighed, looking down at him with weary exhaustion. "I thought the water might actually wake you up."
Hiro looked around, breathless. None of the other 'Westerners' had even flinched at the explosion or the shaking ground. They just stared at him with that same tired, annoyed expression—the look of his workers who were halfway through a double shift and just wanted to go home.
What is wrong with these people? Hiro thought, his manager's brain reeling.
The brown-haired man grabbed Hiro and shoved him back into the line.
"Stay in the line, Einar. We're almost at The Fortress."
The man pointed forward with his shackled hands. As if on cue, the rest of the prisoners began to move.
Through the gaps in the dense, twisted canopy, a massive stone fortress loomed against the horizon. The sky was painted ashen, bathed in cold, sickly moonlight, Hiro watched dozens of blazing boulders arc through the air like comets.
They weren't just random shots.
They were a bombardment, slamming into the castle walls with relentless fury.
It had been happening the entire time he was panicking.
And now, he was being marched straight into the impact zone.
Swoosh—BOOM.
"Aw, fuck!" Hiro yelled, ducking instinctively as the ground groaned again.