Chapter 99 Side Chapter: Kuro

After leaving her master Valdel, Kuro went back to her village. The village Kuro was from was near the borders of the Reschbeauch kingdom, and a few miles away was a village from the neighboring kingdom Serbek.

When Kuro reached her village, she couldn't help but tear up when she saw the ruins of her once happy village. It would seem that the dead bodies of the villagers had disappeared, most probably taken or eaten by the animals or monsters in the vicinity.

Kuro already knew that this was inevitable. She knew that this was what she was going to see. Yet deep down in her heart she wanted it to be different. She wanted it all to be nothing more than a bad dream, a misunderstanding. She wanted to come back home and see her mother cook her favorite meal. She wanted to once again see her father coming back home from a hunt. She wanted to see the children playing around, dreaming of the future they will have.

Yet now that she returned, the little wish she had shattered before her very eyes. The houses were nothing more than broken pieces of wood, the fields have long been burned, and the smell of filth was all over the place. There were no longer any bodies present in the village, but Kuro all ready decided to dig up graves for them. She wanted to give the dead a proper funeral.

Kuro looked around the village but saw nothing similar to a shovel, so she decided to dig the graves with her bare hands. She thought that was appropriate seeing as she was the only one alive.

Kuro went up a small hill near the village and started digging one particular grave up there. She planned for the other graves to be underneath the great tree. The reason why she dug this grave up the hill, was for that one brave warrior who tried his very best to protect the village. He was a human adventurer who wanted to become a great adventurer that the bards would sing tales about.

Unfortunately his adventure had ended in this village, protecting the innocent villagers. Kuro thought that such a great adventurer should have the honor of being buried on the highest point near the village. There was no other deeper reason to the thought except that Kuro's race believed that making a grave for someone on the highest point was the greatest honor.

Kuro then started to dig using her hands, at first it was a alright, but then the deeper she dug the harder it got. She wasn't even halfway through and her hands started to bleed a bit. Still that didn't stop Kuro as she continued digging. A few hours pass and it was already evening when she saw that she was only halfway through.

Kuro then looked at her hands and saw that they were dirty and bleeding. She went to the nearby river to clean her hands, it stung a bit but she was able to properly clean her hands. Once she was done cleaning her hands, she looked at some of the empty houses, looking if there was still some medical supplies left, but as expected there were none. So instead Kuro used some leaves to cover her wounds. Once she was done she picked up nearby herbs and got herself some wood and made a fire. She took a pot from one of the houses and started cooking.

It wasn't a very decent meal, but this was all Kuro could afford to make at the moment. After eating, Kuro went into one of the houses that still had a roof, and cleaned it up for a bit, so that she could sleep in it.

While she was cleaning she noticed that the house she entered was that of her childhood friend Rika. She knew this was Rika's house because of the scarf that she found while cleaning. This was the scarf they made as friends, since it was hard to get wool in the village, they needed to share the scarf they knitted.

It was Rika's turn to have it... Kuro picked up the scarf and gently hugged it as she remembered her best friend's smiling face. As she remembered that face of hers Kuro was about to remember something horrible, she then stopped thinking about it, and pushed it onto the back of her mind. Kuro wanted the memory of her friend to be the one where she was smiling, not that horrible memory at the end.

Kuro used the scarf as a blanket as she slept through the night, remembering the happy days she had with her best friend.

...

The following day she continued to dig the grave of the fallen adventurer. After a few hours of digging she was finally able to finish it. It wasn't deep enough for a human to fit, but it was deep enough for the broken shield she found. This shield was that shield of the adventurer, it would seem that to the slave traders that shield of low quality and had no use for them.

Yet seeing that shield made Kuro remember that bright young adventurer.

"This might be a crappy wooden shield now, but once I grow famous it's going to be the first shield of the great adventurer Kyle. A shield that would be able to protect hundreds."

He was so happy when he told this to the children who kept on teasing him about his shield. After placing the shield down into the grave she dug, Kuro started to fill the hole she made with dirt. Kuro then knelt down in prayer for the village's hero.

"Thank you Kyle... I hope in your next life you have that grand adventurer you always wished for."

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Once she was done praying, Kuro stood up and bowed in front of the grave she dug. She then placed five stones on top of one another, after doing this she went down the hill towards the great tree.

'There are more graves to dig.'

Kuro planned to bury whatever possession of the dead villagers she could find below the ground. This was another belief of her race, they believed that these things could help guide the soul through the afterlife and onto their next life. It was going to take a while even if the graves weren't that deep, since Kuro had nothing else to use but her bare hands.