Chapter 423
A boy whose face he knew well.
A boy who had always been behind him when they decided to follow the outsiders through the fog.
A boy who had been part of the small gang he formed when they were still learning to crawl on the soil of their village.
But the body sitting before him now was no longer the same body he remembered.
Both of the boy's arms were gone, vanished from the shoulders, leaving only two stumps wrapped in dirty cloth stained with red that had already darkened to black.
The wounds were still too fresh, still too wet, still too real to be dismissed as nothing more than a nightmare.
And on the face that once always wore a wide smile when they chased each other through the rice fields, there was now only one eye remaining.
His right eye was covered with a thick bandage that wrapped around to his forehead.
The bandage was just as filthy as the one around his shoulders, and on one side it still seeped with a yellowish fluid Xavier did not want to imagine.
The boy sat silently.
He did not move.
He made no sound.
He only stared blankly at a point on the cart's roof with his tired left eye.
As if the whole world had stopped meaning anything to him.
As if everything he once had, everything he once loved, everything that had once made him want to keep living, had vanished together with the two arms that were no longer attached to his body.
Xavier did not remember when he began to move.
All he knew was that suddenly his body was already beside the boy.
Suddenly his hands were already gripping those narrow shoulders.
Suddenly he was already shaking him gently but insistently.
He wanted to ask.
He wanted to know.
He wanted to understand what had happened to his friend, to his little gang, to the other children who had once shared every foolish adventure with them—adventures that could only belong to those still too young to understand the meaning of fear.
But no words came out of his mouth.
Only the repeated motion of shaking.
Only eyes that pleaded silently.
Only a trembling body holding back thousands of questions that threatened to burst out all at once.
And the boy—his childhood playmate who now had only one eye and no hands at all—slowly turned his head.
His weary left eye moved, searching for the source of the disturbance that interrupted his emptiness, until it finally met Xavier's gaze, wet with something that had not yet fallen as tears.
"What exactly happened after I collapsed? Who attacked first? Did the central wall break immediately?"
Fhuuuuh!
"Answer me. Don't stay silent like this!!"
With emotions still in chaos from what he had just seen, Xavier forced himself to look behind him.
He did not know what pushed him to do it—whether it was a premonition or merely a foolish urge to make sure there were no more surprises waiting for him.
But when his gaze fell upon four figures sitting together in the corner of the cart, when his eyes caught detail after detail of the bodies he had known well since childhood, Xavier felt his chest squeezed by something far more painful than any physical wound.
Those four boys his age—the members of the little gang who had always shared every laugh and every tear—now sat in silence with broken postures.
The first sat hunched over, both hands clutching his stomach wrapped in a wet bandage, his face pale like a living corpse.
The second leaned his head on a friend's shoulder, his eyes tightly closed while his lips kept moving as though praying or muttering in delirium.
The third simply stared blankly at the floor of the cart without blinking, his body occasionally trembling violently for no reason.
And the fourth—the most tragic of them all—sat with his head lowered, and through the strands of his tangled hair it was clearly visible that half of his face had turned into a horrific burn scar.
Xavier could not move.
He could only look at them one by one, trying to reconcile his memories of the cheerful faces that had accompanied every childhood adventure with the horrifying sight before him now.
He remembered how they used to run through the rice fields during harvest season.
He remembered how they used to swim in the river despite their parents' warnings.
He remembered how they used to burst into laughter whenever one of them fell from the guava tree.
And now, inside this cart that trembled along the rocky road, beneath a sky that was beginning to grow cloudy as if rain would soon fall, in the middle of a line of refugees who did not know where they were heading, his four best friends sat silently with bodies shattered by something that should never have been experienced by children their age.
Something even the darkest nightmare could never have imagined.
Something that might remain carved into their memories forever, even until the day they grew old and died.
And when the four of them simultaneously lowered their heads, when their eyes fell together upon the dirty wooden boards of the cart, when not one of them dared to meet Xavier's gaze, something inside Xavier's chest shattered.
Since the moment he awoke, he had tried to hold back every question.
He had tried to control every emotion.
He had tried to appear strong in front of friends who had suffered far more than he had.
But suddenly he could no longer contain it.
His mouth opened.
A hoarse voice escaped from his dry throat.
And for the first time since waking from his five-day coma, Xavier asked.
Not with anger.
Not with accusation.
But with a tone that sounded almost like a plea—like a prayer, like a final hope that there was still an explanation that could make everything make sense.
What really happened after I lost consciousness?
What did the Obrim Dynasty do to all of you?
Where are the others?
Where are the ones who are not in this cart?
The questions poured out without pause, beyond his control, impossible to stop even though he knew the answers might hurt far more than silence.
"Don't smile at me like that. That is not the smile of victory."
Xavier was still frozen, staring at his four friends sitting with lowered heads behind him, still trying to process every horrifying detail of their shattered bodies, when a gentle yet unmistakable touch landed on his left shoulder.
He turned quickly, a reflex that remained from his early days with the defense forces, and found that the boy who had been sitting beside him had now moved closer.
The boy who had lost both arms.
The boy whose right eye was wrapped in a filthy bandage.
The boy whose body was now only the remnants of what had once been whole.
He was smiling at him.
Not the joyful smile from when they used to play together.
Not the triumphant smile from when they successfully stole a neighbor's mango.
But a bitter smile that could only be born from someone who had seen far too much horror in far too little time.
A smile that said he was still alive—yes—but what kind of life it was, even he did not know.
And with that bitter smile still lingering on his pale lips, with the single remaining eye looking at Xavier with meaning, with the two bandaged shoulder stumps shifting slightly as if trying to do something that could no longer be done, the boy began to tell the story.
His voice was hoarse.
Sometimes it broke.
Sometimes it disappeared completely when he reached certain parts.
But Xavier listened with every part of his being.
To be continued…