Luke blinked hard, willing the scenes and the sounds from all around him to disappear just as abruptly as they had appeared.

Maybe one of his enemies had slipped him something in the party. Maybe the reporter had hit thrown something at his head to make sure he wouldn’t do anything to her.

Nothing changed.

Explosions sounded out from all around him. To his left, people were screaming for backup. To his right, someone was crying out for his mother. He was slumped on a mound of dirt that rose behind him, and another yellow mound hid most of the battlefield from his vision and covered half the yellow ball high up in the sky.

The air smelled of smoke, blood, and shit. He had read once that there was a lot more of that last one on battlefields than one might expect, and it seemed to be true.

He looked down and saw the neat hole in his stomach. It was a fatal wound; he should know. He had inflicted similar ones so many times that he’d lost count.

A man with a grimy, youthful face and a shock of blonde hair appeared in his vision. He was wearing the same gray uniform as Luke. At his belt, multiple small grape-sized balls were present, along with what looked like a couple of two-feet long, hollow metallic tubes.

“Come on! We have to go, or we will be overrun!” He shouted, and the urgency in his tone made Luke snap his eyes away from the strange objects and try to get up.

No matter how much he tried to deny it, he was here, now, and the best course of action seemed to be to go along with everything that was going on and get to someplace safe first. He hadn’t seen the enemy on this battlefield yet, but he wasn’t too curious about them, either. The gaping hole in his stomach told him all he needed to know about the danger they posed, so with an almighty effort, he pushed off the mound and staggered to his feet, cursing all the way due to the pain that lanced through his body.

How can I even move with this wound?

The blonde guy arrived at his left and offered his shoulder for support. Luke put his weight on it with a grateful grunt. Weakness had followed on the heels of all that pain, so he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get far if he had to walk alone.

They moved to the side, going past the mound before heading in the direction right behind where Luke had woken up. Each step sent agony coursing through his body, but he gritted his teeth and tried to lose himself in the rhythm of their footsteps. He focused on nothing but the patch of ground where he needed to put his foot next, and using a trick that had helped him immensely whenever he had been injured, he filtered everything else out so that nothing would distract him from the effort of pulling out each and every ounce of strength from his battered body.

“We’re almost there!”

A hint of relief had entered blondie’s tone, but he suddenly sucked in a sharp breath as a shout erupted from somewhere nearby.

“Roach! ROACH!”

Huh? Does that guy have a phobia or something? Why is he shouting about cockroaches in the middle of a battlefield?

Blondie whirled around. Luke turned with him too, as the other option was falling to the ground, and the creature that his gaze fell upon was pure nightmare fuel.

A ten-foot-long, three-foot-wide massive cockroach was skittering along the battlefield right towards them, sidestepping the bodies on the ground with ease. The way its numerous legs moved, one darting forward after the other with a ghastly synchronization straight from hell, sent a chill racing down Luke’s spine.

He’d always prided himself on knowing when to fight and when to run. Never in his life had he frozen when his legs should be taking him far away from a dangerous situation, but now, he stood paralyzed as the monstrous thing reached within a few feet of them and reared up on its hind legs, exposing a horrific underbody and a dark mouth lined with rows of teeth. Its pincers looked sharp enough to shatter stone and Luke suddenly knew what had caused the wound in his stomach.

He fell on his ass, staring, after blondie shrugged him away to free his hands. It looked like there was no way he could feel any more shock, but as he stared at his companion’s actions, a gasp escaped his throat and his mind went completely blank.

With a practiced motion, blondie reached for the hollow tubes at his belt. Pushing his hand into them, he drew them out and pointed at the cockroach.

He gritted his teeth and twin sprays of blood shot out of the ends of the tubes.

‘What good will that do?’ he thought, wondering whether the guy was just putting up a bold front and he had run out of bullets, or whatever was supposed to be shot forth from the weapons.

At the last moment before those crimson sprays of blood reached the roach, they transformed.

It happened in a flash. One moment, they shone brightly in the midday sun, and in the next…gouts of flame appeared where they were and flew straight into the cockroach’s mouth.

It closed its mouth and fell to the ground, and a high-pitched sound keened in Luke’s ears. It took him a moment to understand that it must be the thing’s scream, as it turned around and fled a second later.

“Close call,” said blondie, putting back the tubes and wiping the sweat on his forehead. His face was drained of blood, and there were bags under his eyes, now.

The man had just used magic. Magic! And he was pretending as if he had done nothing out of the ordinary?

Holy shit.

Luke couldn’t stop staring at him. The guy helped him up, again, and they set off once more, but during all of that, Luke kept looking at him as if he expected horns to pop out from his forehead.

“Don’t look at me like that. That’s the first time it worked! I’ve been practicing in the evening, every day, but I still hadn’t caught on to the trick. In that moment, I suddenly knew what to do! The captain is right. Only in battle does our true potential come forward. But I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I’d failed…”

A shiver ran through him, and Luke finally looked away. It was then that he saw the bodies of roaches littering the field. In his single-minded determination to get away from this place, he had managed to ignore their shining, gigantic bodies or the colorless blood pooling beneath their carapaces.

His thoughts came slowly, so he couldn’t even process what everything he was seeing meant. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Just as the darkness hovering around the corners of his vision was about to swallow him whole, he felt himself being placed on a semi-hard surface.

A pretty face with red hair tied into a bun swam in his vision.

“Go get healed, soldier. I’ll take care of him,” she said, but her words sounded as if they coming from far, far away.

He closed his eyes, and as the darkness pulled him under, one final thought came to him.

Please, God, I know we have our differences, but can I just go back to my life? But if that’s not possible…well, it might not be so bad to be able to see magic again, ‘cos damn, it looked cool…