I woke up feeling like I got beaten by furniture.
Everything hurt.
Back. Shoulders. Neck. Pride.
Morning roll call was quiet.
Too quiet.
Patrol survivors stood in a short line.
Very short.
Captain read the report:
"Minor border contact. Random raider harassment. One supply cart lost."
Random?
They went straight for the grain cart and left right after.
That wasn't random.
That was an objective.
I kept my mouth shut.
I enjoy breathing.
After formation, I found Rin near the water barrels.
He looked like death with mud on it.
I said, casual voice, "Hey, yesterday… did you see anything weird in the fight?"
He squinted. "Weird like what?"
I lowered my voice. "Like… text."
He stared.
"Arlan, I saw an axe trying to split my head. That's what I saw."
"No floating words? Prompts? Anything?"
He put a hand on my forehead.
"You got hit too hard."
Great.
So either I'm special or concussed.
Both bad.
I ducked behind the supply shed and tried again.
"System. Define War Objective."
Nothing.
"System. Why can I see orc prompts?"
Nothing.
"System. Are orcs running quests?"
Pause.
Then:
[Route: Survival]
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"You are the most useless thing in my life and I was raised by disappointment."
No response.
By noon I got assigned cleanup duty again.
Lucky me.
Back to the burned road.
Ash, broken wood, dead horses, metal scraps.
I worked with two laborers and one guard who hated sunlight.
While lifting a charred wheel frame, I saw a metal tag wedged underneath.
Blackened, but intact.
I palmed it fast and slid it into my sleeve.
Didn't look like human military tags.
Too angular.
Too clean.
Too… categorized.
Could be nothing.
Could be everything.
"Hey!" the guard barked.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
He pointed at my hands. "What'd you take?"
My brain sprinted.
"Bent strap buckle," I said. "For repairs."
He held out his hand.
I gave him a random twisted piece of iron from the ground.
He looked at it, grunted, tossed it back.
"Don't steal pay-scrap. You want extra lashes?"
"No, sir."
He walked off.
I did not breathe for like ten seconds.
Back in camp, things got weird.
Three gray-robed officials arrived at the gate with officer escort.
No banners. No unit patch. Fancy boots.
People whispered: Guild inspectors.
They went straight to evidence piles from last night's dead.
No delay.
No questions.
One of them snapped at a quartermaster:
"All hostile artifacts are to be sealed. No unauthorized handling."
Hostile artifacts?
It was a battlefield, not a museum.
Another inspector held up an orc bracer with tongs like it was plague metal.
"Contamination protocol," he said.
Then they boxed everything and left before sunset.
Fastest "inspection" I've ever seen.
Not suspicious at all.
I kept my head down and did runner duty until evening.
On my last delivery route, I passed inner training yard.
My half-brother was there with two instructors.
Clean uniform. Controlled breathing. Palm strikes.
One strike hit a practice post and the wood cracked down the middle.
Instructor nodded. "Good control. Keep channeling through first coil."
Must be nice.
He glanced over and saw me carrying water buckets.
No reaction.
No nod.
No insult either.
Just nothing.
I was less than background noise.
Again.
That night, I locked my bunk, pulled out the metal tag, and cleaned it with cloth.
Under the soot was engraving.
Not words I fully knew, but symbols I recognized from the half-scroll.
A row of marks.
Then one repeated symbol near the edge: split horn over a line.
I set the tag down.
Did breathing cycle.
Short inhale.
Hold.
Exhale through teeth.
Again.
Again.
By the twentieth breath my scars started burning.
By the thirtieth, the tag felt warm.
I frowned and touched it.
White-red static flickered in my vision.
Not my system style.
Different.
Rougher.
Like a cracked overlay.
Three broken lines appeared above the tag:
[ …MERIT LEDGER… ]
[ …RAID UNIT… ]
[ …SYNCED… ]
Then it vanished.
I sat very still.
Heart pounding.
Hands shaking.
This was real.
Repeatable.
Structured.
Not random battlefield madness.
I whispered, "System, confirm external interface."
Long pause.
Then:
[Query denied.]
I laughed once, low and tired.
"Cool. Thanks."
Then the usual:
[Route: Survival]
Of course.
I leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
Official report said random raid.
Guild said contamination.
Orcs said objective complete.
And I had a stolen tag that talked in broken system text.
Yeah.
No way this war was what they said it was.
Not even close.