By a friend

"I want to create a world where humans and monsters can coexist peacefully!" That is the last line I ever read from my favorite manga. Ever since then, I haven't had the time or the opportunity to flip through its pages. I reminisce about those times when I am having a hard time, as a reminder of what I am fighting for. A reminder of why I have to see these battles through.

Clad in my shiny armor, I walked out of the armory with my battle axe in arm. As I moved onwards, I ensured I had already laid the foundation for my death. To walk into battle every day is to accept that you might not be alive to see the fruits of your effort. Indeed, on the battlefield, one's life is a mere statistic, it's up to fate to decide whether it becomes part of the dead or those who are yet to die.

Every one of the combatants in my squad, all those who were fighting the battle with us, and perhaps even those we were battling, were aware of this fact. Yet no one let it weigh them down. We'd joke about it over booze in the evening. And on such a time, when we were heading out, laugh around about how we'd share the spoils of war, or those of our lost comrades.

It was as if death had become part of our lives.

It was part of our lives.

I have witnessed newcomer combatants straight from the village struggle to accept how the rest of us are rather carefree talking about death or arguing about who inherits what when someone dies. But over the next few weeks, when half of the new troops have been wiped out in battle, they understand that it is just our way of coping with the losses. They then slowly assimilate to our way of life. This cycle repeats every three months or so.

Just the other day, I was talking to one of the combatants of the newest recruits. He told me about how things were going back at home. I was relieved to hear that they hadn't changed much. He told me about the promise he'd made to his sister to attend her wedding this coming fall. He was hopeful, he said, that the war was going to end before then and that he'd make sure to attend. Amid the conversation, I remembered a friend of mine, who had once shared such a story with me. I couldn't remember his name, though.

I couldn't remember his name because I had shared such a conversation with so many others as well. Those who spoke of dreams, peace, ambition, career and education. It was great to have those dreams but their lives had been cut short. Their ambitions were reduced to but a fragment of my memory—fragment I will take to my grave in battle, or one that would haunt me for eternity if I survived.

We wasted the night drowning in glasses of beer as the young man chatted about how beautiful her sister was, and how she'd been lucky to be betrothed to a man she loved. If he'd been sharing the story to the others, I strongly suspect that the story would have been turned to a joke about who'd get to keep the sister. I guessed that the man she was betrothed to was also serving on the frontline of the battle. Was he fighting to return to the woman he loved?

I remembered I had one of those.

But I had forgotten about her.

How could I have forgotten about her?

I pushed the thought at the back of my mind because I didn't want to appear a passive listener to the young man. After all, he'd gone out of his way to share his ambition in our hopeless reality. I gave him a few nods to encourage him. It was all I could do to support his impossible dream.

Of course, I didn't tell the young man anything about what had been going through my mind. I only smiled at him and courteously requested a wedding invitation.

By a friend