I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 44: The Lost

Dain dropped to one knee. He stayed there, his broadsword planted in the dirt like a crutch, his head hanging between his shoulders. Sweat was freezing in the lines of his scarred face.

Lyra lay on her side, three meters away, her left hand pressed against the new wound on her shoulder. Her right hand still held one short sword. She wasn’t getting up.

Revan stood over the dead creature. His legs were shaking so hard the vibration traveled up his sword arm. Black spots multiplied across his sight.

’Move,’ he told himself. ’You can collapse later. Not yet.’

He turned toward the far side of the battlefield where Lord Voss had been standing during the entire second phase of the fight.

Cassian was exactly where he’d been when his creature had abandoned him to merge. His thin, elegant blade was sheathed and his hands were clasped behind his back in the posture of a man observing a moderately interesting theatrical performance.

There was a single drop of dark fluid on Cassian’s pristine coat sleeve, and he was looking at it with an expression disgust.

Behind him, the guard with the crushed calf had stopped screaming. He was lying in the mud, his face gray, his hands clamped around his own leg. Another guard — the one the merged creature had thrown by the shoulder — was crawling toward him on his elbows, one arm hanging wrong.

Revan let out a heavy, tired sigh.

’No one died. Good enough, I guess.’

Revan retrieved Volkar’s sword from where he’d driven it into the dead crystal. It took him three attempts to stand properly, and when he finally got his fingers around the hilt, he had to lean against the dead creature’s carcass until his vision stopped swimming. The black blade was undamaged, which was more than he could say for anything else.

***

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Over there, Dain was already busy with his work.

He checked the cart, checked the chains, checked the cargo monster’s restraints. The kind of post-combat routine a man develops after doing it a hundred times. His hands were steady even if the rest of him wasn’t.

Two guards standing. Barely. One was the man with the crushed calf — he had tourniquet his own leg with strips from a dead man’s coat, but his face had the gray-white pallor of shock, and he wouldn’t be walking again without a stretcher of his own. The other guard had been thrown by the merged creature — dislocated shoulder, possible cracked ribs. He was sitting in the mud, cradling his arm, staring at nothing.

Mirael lay on the stretcher, still unconscious. The buckle straps the guard had secured during the fight were the only reason she hadn’t been thrown off when the cart was rammed. Her broken arm was swelling visibly, even through the splint. A thin line of blood had dried at the corner of her lip — she must have bitten her tongue during one of the impacts.

Lyra was upright but barely functional.

She’d cleaned her short swords and sheathed them.

Meanwhile, Silvia and Cassian were discussing the next route they would take.

Revan sat on the frozen ground with his back against the dead creature’s carcass. He’d stopped trying to stand. His ribs had made their position very clear during the last thirty seconds of the fight, and arguing with compound fractures was a losing proposition.

From where he sat, he could see the entire bone field.

It looked different now. During the approach, the remains had been shapes at a distance — helmets, rifle barrels, belt buckles. Abstract. Easy to process as scenery. But now, sitting in the middle of it with three dead creatures bleeding dark fluid into the same dirt where human bones lay scattered, the details were harder to ignore.

Revan’s eyes drifted to the nearest cluster of remains. Three bodies, or what was left of them. The bones were calcified white, fused to the dirt by years of mineral deposits. But the fabric — scraps of it — had survived better than expected. The Dead Zone’s lifeless air had mummified the cloth instead of rotting it.

Bleached colorless, brittle, but intact enough to read.

A military uniform. For some reason, Revan only just noticed this detail; perhaps he had been so scared earlier that his vision had blurred.

Regulation cut. Double-stitched seams at the shoulders. Reinforced collar meant to sit under a gorget. The kind of tailoring that came from a Crown-contracted armory, not a back-alley outfitter.

He leaned sideways, slowly.

Teeth clenched and pulled at a strip of fabric half-buried.

The cloth tore at the edges but the center held. Faded stitching.

A crest.

Even through the blur, he could still see the pattern. He couldn’t make out the exact design, But the thread pattern was raised — embroidered, not printed.

Intrigued, Revan muttered, "Interesting."

The weapons scattered among the bones weren’t scout-issue either. Heavy broadswords. Tower shield fragments. A collapsed crossbow mechanism that had been military-grade before the Dead Zone ate the tension cables. These people had come prepared for a fight. Full kit. Full armor. Full expectation of resistance.

"Dain," Revan called out.

The Marshal was still at the cart, tightening a chain link with his good hand.

"You should look at these uniforms."

"Busy," Dain said without turning. "Wheel mount’s cracked. If this axle splits on the next kilometer—"

"Come take a look at these. You’re not going to like what’s on them."

Something in Revan’s tone made the old soldier stop. He let go of the chain, straightened up, and walked over.

His steps heavy and radiating pure annoyance at being interrupted.

He crouched beside the remains. Looked at the fabric. His expression was flat — the professional disinterest of a veteran who’d seen enough dead men to fill a census.

Then his gaze caught the collar.

He reached out with his good hand and brushed dirt from the metal pin underneath. Small. Tarnished black. But the shape was still legible — a tower with crossed swords behind it.

Dain’s hand stopped moving.

His jaw shifted.

"....?"

"...Shit."

’shit?’ Revan’s brow furrowed. He had fully expected the Marshal to recognize the emblem, but he hadn’t expected him to swear. If a man like Dain was cursing, didn’t that mean they were in serious trouble?.

"What is it?" Revan asked. "You recognize the insignia?"

"Twelve years ago," Dain said. His voice had dropped to something low and thick, like the words were heavier than they should be. "Twelve goddamn years."

He stood up slowly. Looked out across the bone field — the hundreds of remains stretching in both directions along the rail. When he turned back to Revan, his face had aged five years in ten seconds.

"7th Battalion. Royal Garrison. Heavy infantry detachment. Three hundred men. They were sent here as a security escort for some research expedition."

’Research expedition?,’ Revan repeated. ’Wait, hold on. Why am I completely in the dark about this research bullshit?’

"Three hundred men," Dain continued. "Full company strength. Provisioned for six weeks. They marched into the Dead Zone on a Tuesday morning and the last communication came three days later. Routine check-in. Nothing unusual.After that—they vanished.

He crouched again. Picked up the tarnished pin, turning it over in his fingers.

"The Crown launched search parties. Three of them, over the next two years. The first one covered sixty kilometers before the commanding officer decided the risk outweighed the mission and pulled back. The second pushed further — eighty, maybe ninety kilometers. They swept the area in a grid pattern for eleven days. Found absolutely nothing. No equipment, no remains, no sign that three hundred men had ever set foot in this wasteland."

Dain set the pin down carefully on the dead soldier’s chest. A small gesture. An old habit, maybe.

"The third search party was smaller. Volunteers. Thorne’s son was among them." Dain’s voice went flat. "They didn’t come back either."

Revan sat with that for a moment. Three hundred soldiers, then the search parties on top of that. Hundreds of men swallowed by the Dead Zone, and the Crown — with all its resources, all its manpower, all its institutional desperation to recover the bodies of its own — had turned up nothing in two years.

But a half-dead group of survivors stumbling along a rusted rail line had walked straight into the graveyard on their first day.

"Dain, that doesn’t make sense."

"I’m aware."

"The search parties. Dozens of soldiers, grid sweeps, weeks of coverage. And they didn’t find this? He gestured at the bone field around them. Hundreds of bodies. Spread across both sides of a rail line. This isn’t exactly hidden. We practically tripped over them, And Why didn’t they just follow the rail?" Revan asked.

"It’s a straight line. You put your feet on it and you walk. A child could do it."

"Of course they followed the rail," one of the guards said from behind the cart. The one with the dislocated shoulder, cradling his arm, half-listening. "Three search parties and none of them thought to walk along the bloody tracks? What were they doing out here, sightseeing?"

Revan shot him a deeply irritated glare, a visible vein bulging on his forehead. "Hah?"

The guard instantly fell silent and awkwardly cleared his throat.