The adrenaline ebbed, leaving behind a hollow, trembling void. Kael's knees felt weak. The world, which had narrowed to the space between him and the wolf-helmed knight, rushed back in with a nauseating roar. Men were still dying, screams still tearing through the rain-soaked air, but the immediate threat had passed. He was alive, standing in a pocket of stillness carved out by two corpses.
Marius, the grizzled sergeant, was already moving on, bellowing orders and shoving men into gaps in the line. The battle was far from over. But as he passed, he gestured again with his chin. "Take it," he repeated, his voice rough. "Spoils of war. He won't be needing it."
Kael looked down at the dead knight. The man's arming sword lay half-submerged in the bloody mud. It was a beautiful piece of work, even to Kael's untutored eye. The crossguard was elegantly simple, the fuller ran clean and deep down the blade, and the pommel, a heavy steel wheel, promised a perfect balance. It was a weapon made for killing efficiently, a stark contrast to his own crude, mass-produced blade.
His hand still ached from using his own sword as a hammer. He knelt, his knees sinking into the filth beside the man he had killed. He wrapped his fingers around the sword's grip. The leather was cool and damp. It felt heavy. Not just its physical weight, but something more. A history. A cost.
He had to force his fingers to close around it. As he did, a memory, unbidden and unwelcome, surfaced with perfect clarity. Loop twelve. He had been on the receiving end of a sword just like this one. He remembered the precise, almost delicate way the knight had angled the blade to slip between his ribs, the cold, sharp pressure, and the final, explosive agony as it pierced his heart. His hyperthymesia didn't just give him memories; it gave him sensations. He could feel the ghost of that phantom wound even now, a cold spot under his ribs.
His breath hitched. He was holding the same instrument of death that had ended one of his many lives.
He pulled the blade free from the mud. It was heavier than his own, the balance point further down the blade. It felt alien in his hand, a tool for a trade he was only learning through the most brutal apprenticeship imaginable.
His eyes fell on the knight's coin purse, still attached to his belt. Marius was right. This was survival. He needed coin, better equipment. This was the grim economy of the battlefield. Yet, reaching for it felt like a violation. It felt like admitting that Finn's life, that this man's life, was now a transaction he had profited from.
He did it anyway. His fingers, clumsy with cold and shock, fumbled with the clasp. Inside were a handful of silver coins and one gold piece, a small fortune to a conscript. He pocketed them, the metal clinking softly against his leg. The sound was obscene.
He stood up, the new sword feeling like a lead weight in his hand. He looked across the trench. The tide of the cavalry charge had broken, dissolving into pockets of vicious melee. The Baron's forces had punched through, but the cost had been high. The trench was now a meat grinder for both sides.
Suddenly, a face in the chaos snagged his attention. A soldier, fighting with a frenzied desperation, his helmet knocked askew. Kael recognized him. His name was Borin. A stout man with a wife and two young daughters in the capital, a fact Kael knew because Borin had shown him a crudely drawn picture of them in a past life, a life where they had shared a watch together for three weeks.
In that timeline, Borin had died of a camp fever, a slow, miserable end.
Kael watched him now, a vibrant, fierce warrior, full of life and rage. He saw Borin parry a blow and thrust his spear into an enemy's gut. He was a good soldier. He was fighting for his family.
And Kael felt nothing.
The emotional connection he should have had, the memory of their shared conversations, was there. He could recall the exact sound of Borin's laugh, the way he spoke of his daughters' antics. The data was perfect. But the feeling was gone, scraped out of him and replaced by a hollow, ringing void. He was too full of Finn's death, of the knight's death, of his own seventeen deaths, to have room for anything else. Borin was no longer a person. He was a data point. A face in the crowd he happened to have a file on.
This realization was colder than any blade. His curse wasn't just killing him; it was killing his ability to see the humanity in others. He was becoming an archivist of ghosts, and the living were starting to look like ghosts, too.
He looked at the fine sword in his hand. He looked at the coin in his pouch. He looked at Finn's still form, a small, sad shape in the mud. He had survived. He had even profited. He had gained a better sword and a bit of silver.
All it had cost was everything.