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"Back From the First War"[/align

"You're so lucky that they brought you back home!"

Or was I? A year of training and then a year of fighting had taught me the thrill of battle, the sensation of victory achieved when an enemy is killed, and the rewards of staying alive after each battle. On the flip side I had also learnt the despair of some of your closest friends dying, the fear of meeting the same fate soon, pain of both mind and body combined in a day or in many consecutive days. The leader of everything was fighting the most – none could match her record of killing half of an entire army in one battle, and rumors of deals with demons to get her power had been great and still were – they had not discovered where the leader's body was, or if there even was a body (which most doubted there was). I personally had never gotten to see the leader in battle, probably due to the fact that she fought alone and in the far reaches of the land we had claimed.

Now, the war had ended. The US had ordered for us all to be dragged back to wherever we came from, as unharmed as possible. The bastards that took us away from the camps stole our weapons and broke them beyond repair. All our bonds with each other were crashed into and torn apart by the conclusion of the first war. There had been small-scale battles with the men who were taking us away, and some clans had killed the men and temporarily escaped, but in the end we'd all been rounded up and dragged off. Our culture had been ripped into millions of tiny pieces by bullets and burned to less than ashes in gunfire.

This was not the end.

We swore it wasn't. As they claimed our lands once more and took us away, as we hid from them, we made a blood-pact – every one of us in the army of twenty thousand – that we would not let this be the end.

I had returned from the war with a broken arm, a few broken toes (not surprisingly), a couple of relatively recent gunshot wounds that were almost entirely healed thanks to our superb healers, bruises, and muscle sores. Thanks to special helmets reinforced with diamonds we'd mined as part of training, nobody in the whole army had suffered head, neck, eye or face wounds. We could return to battle immediately if we needed to (although most would likely prefer to heal first) without serious impairments. Well, anyone who wasn't already dead could.

While I healed I spent six days out of school. The first day I got back was quite difficult.

I hadn't had any friends before, but now that I'd returned alive from a large-scale war, at sixteen no less, people were surrounding me all the time. My instincts told me to kill them all – sometimes I even held up my arms like I had a gun and almost thought I had one before realizing that this wasn't the war anymore…it was actually a disappointment. Loud noises caused me and the many others who had been involved grab some sort of 'weapon' (like a pencil) and look wildly around, which shocked the other students. But we didn't care.

My old buddy Sean was finally able to get a chance to talk with me about the war. We'd both been fighting, but he had been in Squad Bloodhawk so we were far from each other. Sean told me about his group's route to the Meade River in Alaska. "We took a less-dangerous route, but it was still pretty hard to get around. There's a ton of lakes up there!"

I asked him if he ever saw the leader. "Yeah, I did," Sean said. "She's really beautiful, even when she is covered in blood and rags like she was after one of the battles in the Yukon."

"Whoa," I said. "That sounds really cool. Is she really as talented with weapons as they say?"

"Yeah, it's…godly!"

"Don't use that word," I hissed. "You know how we reacted to that word and any forms of it in the Army, and I still hate it."

"Sorry," Sean said. "But seriously, it was crazy cool! The leader only appeared for that battle and then she went back with some guy who looked kind of like her one night. We couldn't see anything, but it was like they could somehow and they just walked off into the blizzard. They weren't even cold."

I wondered about that for a bit. "They could have just been spirits of powerful warriors of the old ages."

"It didn't seem like that," Sean said. Then he shrugged. "But I guess you can never tell anyway. If they were spirits, they were the most omnipotent spirits that could possibly have ever existed."


My last class of the day was History. In class, instead of whatever we were learning at that point, the teacher held a discussion about the war. Students asked us questions about our world and our experience in the war. All six of the students who had been fighting, including me, stood at the front of the class for this 'questions-and-answers session'.

The first student to ask a question was an honors student who sat in the front. "Was just 'anybody' accepted into the army? Or were there requirements?"

A fellow warrior from Squad Requiem answered that – his name was Cakliel in the war and William outside of it. "If you weren't serious about joining you were sent back with a group of other people who were also kicked out of the recruitment.

Also, if you were physically incapable of lifting five pounds with your stronger arm, you were not allowed to be one of the fighters, and if you could not answer a simple logic problem you were sent back."

A jock asked a related question. "What was the logic problem?"

I answered that. "They were different for each person so that nobody could give anyone else the answer."

"How many people were sent back?" asked a member of the Drama department.

"It is said that about a hundred or so were sent back in total, if all the separate rumors are averaged out," Sean replied.

The next question was from a popular girl whose hoop earrings could have worked as handcuffs. A boy from some squad up north (he seemed to have a runny nose) eyed them and snorted. The girl asked, "Is it true what they said about them all listening to garbagey metal and worshipping the devil?"

All of us standing up front frowned at her. "Metal is not garbage," we said in unison. "And nobody worshipped anything because we were trying to stay alive at the time," added Sean. Two or three people went "yeah".

When History was over the teacher called us up to his desk. "When I was in the war we lived each day in fear of being killed and could hardly sleep for fear of being stabbed in the throat. We watched our companions die around us, some having their heads blown apart and others having them blown off. Starvation was a constant threat, and most letters to or from our family were destroyed before the recipient could read them. Was it the same for you?"

We nodded. Sean stated, "We were sure that we were going to be killed; we were taught that luck is only a misnamed coincidence in our favor and to sleep with a knife and a handgun in our hands and our helmets on at all times."

"Our enemies and allies within the army died in equal numbers each battle," I added.

Cakliel said, "One of my closest friends, who you knew as David and who I addressed during the war as Lukitath, had his arm torn off by shrapnel. As he screamed, someone shot him in the throat, through his entire head. The bullet popped out of the back of his head and the screaming stopped. All I could hear on the battlefield was a strange gurgling – he was choking on his own blood. I took one of the mini-vacuum tubes from a healer and drained his throat of blood. The gurgling stopped and he told me what to tell his older sister if I made it out alive. But," and Cakliel's voice cracked now, "He…he never managed to finish saying it."

The history teacher wasn't surprised. I nodded to Cakliel. "A man from Squad Sancrosanct, with whom my sqad, Quell, worked closely with in July, was hit right in the 'worst spot possible' with a grenade. Later, when he went to go to the bathroom, he started screaming and then there was a gunshot. Another guy looked in and said that he'd committed suicide."

"There were a lot of suicides when they started trying to bring us back," Sean said. "More than half of a fellow squad committed mass suicide when they saw troops coming in the distance. The remaining ones slaughtered each other after reaching some agreement about it and the troops that had come to bring them home were so shocked that many of them threw up nearby and a couple fainted. It was a gory mess – and somehow we still managed to be hungry after that."

"That sounds about right for a war," the teacher said. The last bell for the day rang. "It looks like it's time you guys set off. Oh, don't forget these," he said.

The teacher handed us each a metal tube. He winked and hobbled out the door.

The metal tubes had the DragonPrint on them.

The symbol of the army. We were going back to war.