We returned to base when the sky was still undecided between night and morning.
The sun didn't rise properly here—it leaked through the clouds like a reluctant witness, pale and sickly. The base sat behind concrete walls and rusted wire, a place meant for storage, not living. Men moved in lines, not because they were disciplined, but because habit was the last thing holding them together.
Inside, the air was thick. Sweat. Oil. Old blood that never quite washed out of the floor.
Payment was handled the way everything else in this war was handled—quietly, efficiently, without ceremony.
A clerk sat behind a steel desk. His uniform was clean. His hands were steady. He didn't look at faces, only numbers.
"Confirmed kills?" he asked.
"Eighteen," I said.
He typed.
No pause.
No reaction.
A screen flickered to life in front of me.
200 euros per kill.
Food rations approved.
Housing continued.
That was it.
No words about bravery.
No acknowledgment of death.
Just arithmetic.
Eighteen people.
Eighteen days.
I stared at the number, waiting for my stomach to turn, for my chest to tighten, for something to happen inside me.
Nothing did.
Then I noticed another line.
Outstanding survival credit: 526 days.
Five hundred and twenty-six days.
I could live freely for nearly a year and a half without killing another soul. Eat. Sleep under a roof. Exist without begging, without stealing, without lowering my head.
In another life, that would have been freedom.
Here, it was meaningless.
Because survival credit didn't buy choice.
It only postponed starvation.
The war didn't care how many days you had stored. It would still come for your body. Still drag you back to the front. Still demand blood in exchange for breath.
I stepped away from the desk.
Behind me, someone laughed.
"So we're rich now," a man said.
The sound echoed briefly.
No one answered.
We were moved again almost immediately.
Italy.
The name once meant art, history, beauty. I remembered pictures from before the war—sunlit streets, old buildings, people sitting outside cafés as if time itself respected them.
What waited for us now was something else.
Italy wasn't destroyed.
It was humiliated.
Dead bodies lay everywhere—not hidden, not buried, not mourned. They rotted in open streets, slumped in cars, tangled in doorways as if they'd tried to crawl home and failed at the last step. The smell was unbearable, sweet and thick, clinging to the back of the throat. You couldn't escape it. It soaked into clothes, hair, memory.
Crows and dogs moved freely among the dead.
No one stopped them.
Women were treated like objects—pulled by the arm, pushed into corners, traded, discarded. Some cried. Some screamed. Some stared into nothing, their bodies moving while their souls stayed somewhere far away.
I saw one woman standing in the rain, barefoot, staring at a wall smeared with blood. She didn't react when men passed her. She didn't blink.
She was alive.
I wasn't sure that mattered.
Wounded soldiers filled what used to be hospitals—buildings with shattered windows, broken lights, floors sticky with dried blood. There were no proper medical facilities anymore. No anesthetics. No time.
Men screamed as limbs were cut away. Others lay silent, their eyes fixed on ceilings that no longer existed. They weren't treated like heroes.
They were treated like waste.
Too damaged to fight.
Too expensive to heal.
Too alive to ignore.
I heard a medic mutter, "Better if they just die."
I didn't argue.
In this place, death looked merciful.
That night, I lay on a narrow cot, staring at the ceiling.
Five hundred and twenty-six days.
That number circled my mind like a curse.
I didn't need to fight anymore. Not for food. Not for shelter. Not for money.
And yet… tomorrow, I would still pick up a weapon.
Because the truth was simple and unbearable:
The war wasn't paying us to survive.
It was paying us to keep going, even when survival was no longer the reason.
Outside, gunfire echoed through ruined streets. Somewhere nearby, a woman screamed. Somewhere else, someone stopped breathing.
I closed my eyes.
"How long will I last?" I whispered.
There was no answer.
Only the sound of a world dying slowly, and the quiet realization that I was still walking inside it—not because I wanted to live, but because stopping had become impossible.
Tomorrow, I would fight again.
Not because I needed the money.
But because this war no longer allowed anything else.
And that was the deepest cruelty of all.