The Glancing Knife
When you are in an actual battle, you aren't concerned with taking notes. You don't memorize every move, every word spoken. You just survive. You know who your friends are, you know who your enemy is, that's it. No room for anything else, your full concentration needs to be in the here and now. So no, I don't know who shot first. I don't even know who attacked with what. I just know that the smell of blood was heavy on the air, mud was churning beneath my boots, and I was swinging like a madwoman. I was out of ammo. Hell, half my unit was; those of us able to conserve were mostly relying on hand-to-hand and saving the ammo back for emergencies.
The field was a mash of bodies, both strewn about on the ground and tangled in a mess of violence. Knives flashed, slashed, and squelched when they connected with a target.
I don't even remember why we're fighting at this point. I just want to live. A good sign of victory in any given thing is that you live through it.
It's funny how time seems to slow down right when something inevitable happens. You notice things you didn't have the luxury of noticing before. The sun starting to set in a myriad of colors. The cool breeze gusting through the battlefield. How many of the bodies on the ground are wearing your country's colors. Just how the sun is glinting off the knife heading for your face. I braced myself for the loss, the death.
And it never came.
We stared at each other in stunned silence. His knife had deflected as if the air itself protected me. But that couldn't be right. Forcefields were the thing of science fiction. Only one thing on God's green Earth protected me— this is the person I'm supposed to marry. My meant-to-be. Soulmate.
"Uhm…"
Time doesn't freeze when Hell has broken loose. A fight was still raging around us, and yet we were unaffected for a moment. Stunned. And then we breathed, and the mass of bodies was there again, shoving us, separating us. Just as quickly as he had been there, he was gone, and I was fighting for my life again. Hoping to live. Hoping we both would live.
But when has war ever been kind?