The bullets were still flying.
They screamed past my ears like metal ghosts, tearing the air apart, splitting the sky into fragments that would never fit back together. Each shot carried intent—cold, precise, final. Somewhere to my left, a man was shouting. No… begging. His voice cracked mid-sentence, swallowed by gunfire. Somewhere to my right, someone stopped making noise altogether, as if the world had simply decided he no longer deserved sound.
Everyone was afraid.
I could see it in the way they moved—jerky, desperate, clumsy. Fingers slipping on triggers slick with sweat. Eyes darting everywhere, searching for threats, for exits, for miracles.
Everyone except me.
Or maybe I was afraid too—just too empty to show it.
I stared at my hands.
They were shaking.
Not violently. Not uncontrollably. Just enough to remind me they were still attached to a living body.
They were red.
Not scratched.
Not bruised.
Soaked.
Blood clung to my fingers, warm and sticky, settling into the lines of my palms like it had always belonged there. It seeped beneath my nails, dried at the edges, turned dark where the air touched it. I rubbed my thumb against my skin, half-expecting the color to fade.
It didn't.
I didn't know whose blood it was anymore. Enemy. Ally. Innocent. The difference had died somewhere in the last two years, buried under rubble and unmarked graves.
"I… what am I doing?" I whispered.
The words felt foreign in my mouth, like a language I'd forgotten how to speak. They disappeared instantly, drowned under the roar of gunfire and the thunder of artillery.
My rifle jerked in my hands as I pulled the trigger again.
And again.
Bullets poured out like rage I didn't remember earning, each recoil punching my shoulder, my chest, my bones. I was screaming—my throat burned, my lungs screamed for air—only later did I realize the sound wasn't the battlefield.
It was me.
"MOVE! MOVE!" someone yelled in Russian, his voice sharp with panic.
I didn't move.
My feet felt rooted to the broken concrete, as if the ground itself had decided I belonged to it now. All I knew—the only thing I knew—was the rule carved into this world in fire and steel:
Kill the man in front of you, or die by his hands.
There was no third option anymore.
World War Three didn't begin with nuclear fire.
That was the cruel joke history would choke on, if anyone survived long enough to write it down.
The threats were there. Everyone knew it. The buttons were ready. The missiles waited like chained gods, humming quietly in underground silos. The world stood on the edge of extinction, staring into the abyss—and blinked.
Instead, the nations made a promise.
No nuclear weapons.
Every nation agreed.
They shook hands. Signed papers. Smiled for cameras.
They said it would save humanity.
What it really did was condemn us to something slower. Something uglier.
Machines replaced mercy.
Algorithms replaced judgment.
Drones replaced borders.
Cities didn't vanish in blinding flashes of light. They died slowly—block by block, street by street—under endless sieges that lasted months. Hunger crept in before death. Fear before hunger. Madness before fear.
Two years.
Two years of nonstop war.
The geography of the world changed so much that old maps became fiction. Coastlines shifted from bombardments. Rivers rerouted through craters. Capitals burned until their names lost meaning. Nations shattered, merged, collapsed, and reformed like broken glass under pressure.
And people like me?
We became tools.
I wasn't a soldier.
I never dreamed of wearing a uniform or dying for a flag. I never believed in borders drawn by dead men. I didn't wake up one day hating the Chinese or loving the Russians.
I didn't care who won.
I was hungry.
That's all.
When the war swallowed everything—jobs, homes, safety—morality followed soon after. Money became the only language left, and survival its only religion. And the military… they spoke both fluently.
They didn't promise honor.
They didn't promise glory.
They promised payment.
Enough to eat. Enough to survive. Enough to not end up on the streets, ribs visible through skin, hands stretched out, begging strangers for scraps like a stray animal.
So I signed the contract.
Not as a soldier.
As a hired gun.
A disposable one.
"CONTACT! CHINESE UNIT, EAST SIDE!"
The shout ripped me back into the present.
Training took over where thought failed. I raised my rifle, moved forward through smoke and debris. Rubble crunched beneath my boots—concrete, metal, bone. The air burned my lungs with every breath, thick with dust, oil, and something metallic I didn't want to identify.
Across the ruined street, shadows moved between collapsed buildings and twisted steel.
Chinese infantry.
Their armor was scorched. Their movements were sharp, disciplined, efficient. They advanced with purpose, not panic. Professionals.
They weren't afraid either.
Or maybe they were.
Just like me.
Our eyes met for a split second through broken scopes and drifting smoke.
He looked young.
Too young.
His helmet sat crooked on his head. His hands trembled slightly as he adjusted his grip. For half a heartbeat, the war disappeared. There was no Russia. No China. No contracts. No flags.
Just two men standing in the ruins of a world that had failed them.
My finger froze on the trigger.
Then his weapon lifted.
And something inside me snapped.
I fired.
The recoil slammed into my shoulder. The shot cracked the air open. His body jerked violently, then collapsed, hitting the ground with a sound that echoed far longer than it should have. His helmet rolled away, spinning until it rested at my feet like a question I refused to answer.
I didn't cheer.
I didn't cry.
I just kept firing.
"How many?" someone asked behind me.
I didn't turn.
I didn't answer.
Because I didn't know.
I stopped counting a long time ago.
Dozens?
Hundreds?
Numbers stopped meaning anything when faces began to blur. Every death looked the same in the end—eyes wide with shock, mouths open mid-breath, disbelief frozen into flesh. As if none of us could accept this was how our stories ended.
From the last two years, I remembered almost nothing clearly. Just fragments. Broken memories stitched together by nightmares.
A man choking on his own blood, whispering a name I'd never hear again.
A burning convoy lighting up the night like a false sunrise.
A child's shoe lying in the middle of a battlefield, untouched by fire.
Sometimes I wake up at night reaching for a rifle that isn't there, my heart pounding so hard it feels like it might burst through my chest. Sometimes I hear gunfire and realize it's only my own heartbeat echoing in my skull.
Sometimes I wonder if my hands will ever feel clean again.
"Why do you keep fighting?" a Russian soldier once asked me during a ceasefire that lasted all of ten minutes.
He was older. Scarred. His eyes had the same hollow look as mine.
I laughed.
It came out dry. Broken. Almost painful.
"Because hunger is worse," I said.
He nodded slowly.
He didn't argue.
None of us did.
Another explosion threw me off my feet.
The world flipped sideways. Pain exploded through my ribs. My ears rang like shattered bells. Dirt filled my mouth, gritty and bitter. Blood pooled beneath my cheek—mine or someone else's, I couldn't tell.
I pushed myself up, coughing, gasping for air.
In a shard of shattered glass among the rubble, I caught my reflection.
I didn't recognize the man staring back.
His eyes were hollow.
His face older than his age.
His soul… exhausted.
"This is my life now," I muttered.
Not a hero.
Not a villain.
Just a man surviving one trigger pull at a time.
Above us, drones hummed like mechanical vultures, circling endlessly, watching everything. Somewhere far away, men in clean rooms moved pieces on maps that no longer matched reality and called it strategy.
And here I was—knee-deep in blood, screaming into gunfire, praying not to die today.
Not because I loved life.
But because I was too afraid of starving to death tomorrow.
I tightened my grip on the rifle.
"Kill," I whispered.
"Or be killed."
The battlefield answered with thunder.
And deep down, in a place I didn't want to acknowledge, a darker thought took root:
If this war never ends… maybe neither will what it's turning me into.