"Oh, Woman... oh Jenrya, Goddess of the Canals, grant us thy essence of strength!" The priests, draped in long crimson-dyed leather, sang praises.
"Oh Twin Goddess Nerpyotl, grant us thy light!" sang the ones in yellow and white. Together, they stood behind the thick, armored soldiers, the common lesser men, and the children, continuing their praises to the three. "Praise the twins, o my soul! Worship thee to her holy names! For all the lordships under thy command, I worship the three and the first!"
The old men, their faces covered by long, flowing silk, raised their voices alongside the few women scattered among the ranks as the soldiers readied their weapons.
Do they fight? was the first question that came to Akira's mind as he looked back. He only found the barefooted priests trembling in fear and agony.
"The Harvest shall commence."
Without delay, as the growls of the approaching monsters echoed off the walls, the soldiers remained stationed in their formation. The 500 men were divided equally into three major groups.
The first team was led by Malrvr the Speedster. They were responsible for quick, precision strikes and taunting the creatures with overwhelming sensory tactics, herding them as they wished. The monsters, who relied purely on instinct, were easier to manipulate this way. Akira wondered if it was these mindless beasts that had hunted humanity to the brink of extinction.
The second group, under Klein Judieas the Superior, was responsible for slaying the slower, more durable monsters that could absorb massive amounts of damage before falling.
The third group was commanded by Haveth. Stationed in the rear with the children and the priests, they provided back support, responsible for intercepting any monsters that managed to bypass the initial formations. A few men in the ranks muttered to each other about how this defensive role was the safest place to be during a Harvest. Overhearing this, Akira's heart started pounding. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, though he couldn't tell whether it was from the relief of being safe or the sadness of missing out. Either way, Akira was relieved.
Among the three groups, there was one man who did not fit into any formation: Murad Xie Ryukzen III, the Legacy. His crimson eyes scanned the newly opened gates, awaiting the horde. The soldiers often praised the Chief King as their true first line of offense.
Growl...
Sweeping from the depths, monsters crawled out as if the darkness itself had taken shape. As the bipedal horrors lurched forward, the lesser men and soldiers gripped their weapons tighter. Akira, as short as he was, found a high enough vantage point to watch their arrival.
Just as the old books described, the first of them walked slowly toward Murad Xie. Its eyes were like the people of the Sanctuary—deep and devoid of light. Its body was fleshy and covered in thick, human-like hair, but patches of brown, black, and white filled its joints. Jagged bones pierced out of its spine. That detail wasn't taught in school. Akira wondered if those were its own bones, or if it was an accident from a messy feast that resulted in bones piercing its flesh.
Above all, the monsters came in three types, each identified by a common trait: the snout.
The first one to emerge had the snout of a pig, known to the lesser men as a Gritmaw, or Guttapig. The learned teachers in the school often talked about how Gritmaws used to be the easiest to kill and harvest, but now, they were the most intelligent and trickiest of the creatures. One by one, more Gritmaws swarmed out. One leaped directly toward Murad Xie. In an instant, Murad sliced it in half with his giant claymore.
"The least smartest," Murad murmured.
"Team 1, Malrvr, charge!!" Murad let out a battle cry, and the men engaged. The vanguard slaughtered the endless horde of Gritmaws. One soldier from the Sanctuary could kill at least twelve in a single charge; despite the starvation within the city, these front-line soldiers were fed to the brim.
Slowly, the second team engaged with the tankier beasts. These monsters, whose snouts resembled a cow's, were called Mawtorus. Akira couldn't get a clear look at them, as they were fewer in number and quickly crowded by Klein the Superior's heavy infantry.
But what fascinated Akira the most was the way the Repellers fought. Roste stood high on the watchtower, shooting down several monsters with his gun, while the soldiers on the ground parried the heavy attacks—especially the crushing nails of the Mawtorus and the snapping bites of the Gritmaws—using their broadswords as offensive shields. In their other hand, they swung smaller blades attached to their waists via black, flexible wires. They spun these blades and hurled them at the monsters, often slicing a neck, blinding an eye, or directly piercing a heart before yanking the bloody weapon back.
The arsenal of the men in the back differed slightly. Team 3, under Haveth, had access to "repulsor flares"—a gadget said to have been developed by Klein himself. It produced a blinding light, similar to the radiance of the Goddesses, meant to stun the monsters. Akira had one strapped to his waist, but he had no idea how to use it.
"What do we do?!" Akira shouted at Deinne, who was standing below, intensely analyzing the fight in front of him. Getting no reply, Akira persisted until he finally grabbed the older boy's attention.
"No one knows! Use your brain and figure it out! The soldiers have no time to train us even when it's peaceful. They can't waste precious energy over some damn kids," Deinne snapped.
Akira understood that much. Conserving energy was vital; it was why Akira always took the shortest path home from school, and why sleeping twelve hours a day was standard practice. But throwing new recruits into a harvest without basic training? Akira couldn't quite wrap his head around it.
Amidst the bloody slaughter of the monsters, even though his legs trembled with each step, Akira approached the fighting men. When a soldier shattered his sword, Akira handed them the fresh blades they needed to continue the fight. It was expected of him to aid others—that was what his mother had taught him. But he wouldn't let anyone know that he was secretly imitating what Deinne was doing on the other side of the formation. Akira went around collecting the broken, rusted metal shards from the ground. The soldiers thought he was just clearing the path, completely unaware that Akira was hoarding them in the relative safety of the backlines.
"King's Stash," he called it. It was a hobby he had kept since he was five, when his mother first introduced him to the legend of the Great King Xaine. Even though his mother revered the name, she would always hesitate whenever she spoke of him—disgust filling her face, her hair seeming to grow greyer and her cheeks redder with anger.
The harvest raged on. Murad Xie crushed the new swarms, while Malrvr's team forced the beasts toward the canals where many drowned. Those that didn't drown were executed on the spot with long spears forged from high-grade scrap by Dicardys himself.
"They must not evolve to swim," the soldiers would mutter before driving their spears down.
Klein the Superior's team once again proved their namesake; no amount of Gritmaws threatened him. Klein's true strength lay in his extreme precision, landing critical strikes using martial arts originally taught only to members of the Ryukzen clan. It was a rule broken exclusively for Klein, who was taught the "Ryu Fighting Arts" directly by Murad Xie.
Seconds became minutes, and minutes bled into hours. The men fought the horde for three hours straight. Slowly, the number of monsters thinned. A few of the creatures retreated back into the dark gates, while others that bypassed the vanguard were slaughtered in the rear as they tried to rush the Sanctuary. The soldiers were growing exhausted, the brutal weight of their armor increasing alongside the stench of sweat, undigested food, and the intestinal juices of both men and mutant pigs.
Seeing the monsters fleeing and the ground covered in bountiful bodies ready to be harvested for meat, Murad Xie pulled back. He commanded the giant men holding the gate chains to slowly close it, while the second team rotated forward to push the remaining monsters outside.
"It's over, and we didn't have to do a thing!" Akira threw both his arms into the air, gripping his weak scavenged blades.
But the happiness and satisfaction in his eyes only lasted for a few seconds. He turned, looking to climb back to the highest point on the bridge. He wanted to see Roste again, maybe Klein, and definitely not Haveth. To his utter dismay, the watchtower was gone. It wasn't obscured by the mist of blood, nor was Akira blinded by the chaos of the harvest. The tower had simply collapsed.
What made it collapse? Where did Roste go? Is he safe? Seeing the massive gates finally close, Akira had no reason to hide in the backlines anymore. He saw Klein cheering with his men. Maybe it was Akira's time to help Roste, just like Roste had helped him earlier. Akira slid across the icy floor and broke into a dead sprint. As he rushed toward the collapsed metal wreckage, he accidentally shoved past several soldiers, but their thick armor absorbed the impact like stone walls.
One of those walls was Haveth. Akira had not wanted to find him. They locked eyes for a brief, terrifying second, Haveth's face as deranged and hateful as his attitude, but Akira quickly scrambled through the thin gaps between the armored men before Haveth could grab him.
With a loud screech, the heavy gate locked shut. The men rejoiced, drawing their carving knives to tear through fur, leather, and flesh, filling their pockets. They did this without realizing the grave error they had made. The soldiers had fought with perfect coordination, anticipating the monsters' movements based on the shouted instructions from the watchtower guards who could see into the dark. But the warnings had stopped.
By the time Murad Xie realized something was horribly wrong, it was too late. The stench of the monster corpses didn't smell like fresh meat; it grew incredibly vile and rotting. He urgently called out to the watchtower, but to his shock, the tower was a pile of ruined scrap. The men who had been standing guard, Yura Oki and Roste the shooter, were nowhere to be seen.
Likely killed by the monster, Murad Xie thought. "Find the High Guards! Fix yourselves in position and be alert! The monsters haven't been wiped out yet!" Murad proclaimed, smashing his giant claymore into the metallic ground, sending a terrifying shiver through the ranks.
Meanwhile, the men harvesting the corpses felt a sudden, strange sickness. Aaron Krovnic, the Butcher and loyal executioner to Murad Xie, backed away in absolute disgust. The slain corpses were emitting a miasma—a black, slimy liquid that moved independently out of the torn flesh.
And then, the corpses stood up.
Even though they lacked the raw strength of their former selves, the dead and un-beheaded beasts were able to walk the earth one last time. This horrific behavior was entirely new. It was never noted in the ancient books, the religious songs, or the mythos. This was the first, but it would certainly not be the last.
"A monster that can come back after death?" the Butcher cried out. Aaron Krovnic, a man who had slaughtered over five hundred Gritmaws and executed two hundred humans, was completely horrified. Ironic, he thought to himself.
One of the reanimated monsters lunged at the shaken Butcher. With a massive, sweeping slash to the head, Murad intercepted it before it could harm his executioner.
"RISE!!" His thunderous voice alarmed all men and beasts alike. "Brother in Adam, now is not the time to wet yourself," Murad said, pointing his bloodstained claymore at the undead Gritmaw. The blade dripped with the black sludge and the matted hair of his enemies.
As Akira finally approached the fallen tower, he was met with a horrific sight. Throughout the entire harvest, Akira hadn't seen a single man fall in the backlines, though he had heard the grim reports of casualties as soldiers dragged amputated arms and legs away to feed to the Dain. But this was his second time seeing a fully intact man lying dead, submerged in a pool of blood that was still steaming against the freezing floor.
Tears dropped from Akira's eyes. "I-I couldn't save him... Mom," he mourned. It was an act of genuine grief that no one else would have offered in this entire Sanctuary.
But the dead man wasn't Roste.
Akira heard heavy, agonizing breathing coming from within the collapsed wreckage of the tower. He quickly crawled inside and found Roste. His clunky brown hair was matted with sweat and blood. His left hand was intact, but his right arm was brutally broken and mangled.
"I'm gonna live as a cripple, aren't I?" Roste wheezed as he noticed Akira crawling toward him. Seeing the face of a crying boy—a scene he truly believed didn't exist in this bunker anymore—gave Roste a strange, desperate sense of happiness. "Why do you cry?" he asked.
"B-because you are hurt," Akira replied. His eyes filled with so many tears that his vision blurred, his cheeks flushing red in the cold.
"People don't cry for someone... do they?" Roste huffed, gritting his teeth through the pain.
"No, they don't... sniff... but you are a good man," Akira said. "My mom taught me... I must save many good men... and good men mustn't be hurt."
The boy's raw innocence cracked something deep inside the hardened soldier's heart. It was the first time in centuries that a person in the Sanctuary had been met with unconditional love.
"I wish you hadn't come here," Roste said hesitantly. "I sought to die alone so my body could feed children like you. But you had to make me want to cling to my life... what are you, an incarnation of our God?" He let out a weak, bloody laugh.
Before long, a warm, fragile hand touched the man's shattered arm. "People shouldn't eat another just because they fell... or are useless. Everyone should love each other... and I should love everyone. Even the bad people who yell and try to kill you... as long as they are humans," Akira murmured, holding onto the broken hand as if his sheer will could heal it.
Does this child think he can heal me? Roste thought. But as he glanced into the innocent, naive eyes of the boy, he finally understood what that strange light in his eyes truly meant. It was far brighter than anything the Goddesses could conjure. It was the light of humanity—something they had all lost.
Eventually, the sound of heavy boots echoed as another man entered the collapsed tower. His hair was a luxurious crimson with strands of yellow. Klein Judieas the Superior arrived at the scene. He looked down and saw Akira, the child, holding onto the broken man's hand. Akira's cheeks were tracked with cold, dried tears, but he had fallen asleep. He didn't snore, but the steady, warm rhythm of the boy's breathing was enough to heal a broken man's heart... and maybe his soul. But not his hands.
"This boy is strange, isn't he?" Roste whispered to Klein. "He slept over my broken hand, and now it pains me even more. I don't think a single muscle has been healed."
Klein let out a quiet laugh, shifting his gaze from the sleeping boy to Roste. "What did you think he would have done?"
Roste laughed back, the sound wet and exhausted. "You are a lonely man, Klein... This boy must live. Train him to be as strong as you." Roste's eyes suddenly turned deadly serious.
"He may truly be The Last of Us."