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“Things really aren’t looking good right now,” Sheryl said. She was lying on the ground with her two coal-like eyes staring up at the ceiling. Her sticklike arms and legs were splayed out, and her rocky body seemed more like a composition of pebbles than a solid boulder. “I…, I don’t think we can win.”
Stella’s gaze turned as cold as ice, her eyes narrowing into sharp slits. “You can’t give up so easily. Vur’s soul depends on us. His soul is our home! You’re going to let invaders waltz into your home and take everything you own?”
“I really want to do something, I really do,” Sheryl said and bit down on her lower lip, “but I’ve already been shot four times! Look at me; I’m a pile of pebbles now. It’ll take weeks for me to recover.”
Stella sighed and turned her head away from Sheryl towards the chunks of green rocks on the ground. “I understand Sheryl getting shot by arrows because she’s a giant sun in the sky, but what happened to you?”
Zilphy tried to sit up, but more rocks fell off of her body, so she lay back down. “I overexerted myself,” she said. “There’s only so many punches and kicks I can do, you know? In the end, I’m just a gust elemental.”
“How are Mistle and Deedee doing?” Stella asked. She flew towards the window and squinted at the plains outside. The faint sounds of shouting drifting in, but nothing could be seen except for a few dust clouds on the horizon.
Mervin flew beside Stella, touching his shoulder against hers, and was slapped away without being able to say a word. But oddly, there was a smile on his face afterward. “Deedee’s still going strong, and Mistle’s really helping out. Those two make such a great team. Why aren’t they the ones who’re married?”
“Hey! You take that back, you dumb beansprout,” Zilphy said. More clumps of rocks fell from her boulderlike body, but she tackled Mervin anyway and collapsed on top of him, preventing him from moving. “Deedee’s mine!”
“Fairy,” a voice said, causing the group to stop squabbling. Stella turned around, and Breeze emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room. He sighed and sat down. “Since most of myself was already absorbed by that thing you call Chompy, I couldn’t do much. I possessed half of the army and had them fight each other. About half of them died, and the other half is on their way here. I’m too tired to do anything else.” And with that, he dissolved into a puddle of goop that crawled back into the corner.
***
Ralph exhaled and raised his head up to look at the sky. He wiped at the imaginary sweat on his forehead and inhaled through his nose. Ever since he became a blood soldier, his sense of fatigue had disappeared. He didn’t get hungry or thirsty either. He could march to his death without complaint, so why was it? Just why did he feel like he couldn’t go on much longer? He was buried waste deep in a swamp that had appeared out of nowhere. The army had just managed to stop killing each other and was marching along the plains when, without warning, the first line of soldiers sank into the ground. Now, everyone was marching waist-deep in a mixture of water and earth that was more solid than liquid, and they were sinking with every passing second. It was hard to call it marching. At what point did marching become swimming? As a villager, he never learned how to swim before dying and becoming a blood soldier.
“Keep pressing forward, men!” Lord Briffault shouted. “Every person they slow, every area they transform, those elementals are using up tremendous amounts of mana. We all already know that we’re not the finest soldiers. There’s nothing special about many of us, and we all lived lives as noteworthy as grass, but when you can’t scrounge up the quality, you can overwhelm the enemy with quantity!”
Ralph wasn’t sure if Lord Briffault’s speech was supposed to be motivating or not. The contents of the speech were depressing but sound. And the way he had shouted it was filled with an air that could only belong to nobility. However, words could only do so much for an army that had unlimited stamina. It’s not like they had any morale to lose or gain in the first place. They had a mission to do whether they liked it or not, and once it was done, they’d go back to being dead. He liked being dead. He didn’t have to do anything: didn’t have to march through swamps, didn’t have to murder innocent souls, didn’t have to wear underwear. Life was better than death when he still had a normal body, but now that he was like this, death was infinitely preferable. Were the soldiers who had been swallowed by the ground earlier already dead? Maybe he should let himself sink into the swamp. But what if they didn’t die? Were they stuck underground, unable to move, being pressed in from all sides, forever surrounded by darkness and their own thoughts?
Ralph shuddered. Right, it’d be better to march on. As one of the soldiers near the front, he was one of the first to see the castle walls. They were ridiculously high, even higher than the lord’s of the previous territory he lived in while he was still alive. To scale something like that, one needed a siege machine. Or a really, really long ladder. The castle was still far away, but it towered in his sight like a mountain. Wait. Why was there a castle in someone’s soul in the first place? Did that even make any sense? He turned around while lifting his legs repeatedly to keep himself from sinking into the mire. “Lord Briffault, there’s a castle up ahead.”
“A castle?” Lord Briffault’s face looked as dumbfounded as Ralph felt. This was the strangest soul that he had invaded yet. Normally, souls were an empty plane with a wide white floor and easy target in the center. He’d rush down the person with his fellow soldiers and taint the world red, and his mission would be over. But this soul was like another world, a world that wanted to kill him, that is. The sun, air, and ground wanted them dead, and now there was even a castle they had to conquer? Could they do it? Was there really no such thing as a soul magician? If a soul magician existed, then this would definitely be the kind of soul they’d have.
“I want to go home,” Ralph murmured, and the few soldiers that heard him nodded in agreement. He raised his head and stared at the castle walls. They were covered in vines or were those roots? They had thorns, so they were probably stems. A glint caught his eye, and he squinted at one of the windows of the castle’s guard tower. Was that where the genie lived? Did genies have wives? Ralph swallowed down his unease and willed his feet to march forward.