My mother pushed me, hard, and I flew from the cliff, through the air, and fell into the ocean.

All I could see were bubbles popping violently here and there. I hurried to get my head above water.

And then… I saw it. I saw the exact second that the three-headed dog leapt at my parents.

“NOOOOOOOOOOO!!”

The current took me, but I kicked the whole way.

When I finally found myself on the shore, the sky was already dark.

Huff… Huff…

There were other survivors from the village there too. But some of the dead villagers had washed up as well.

The sky had already returned to its normal color.

I had no idea what had happened.

But I wanted to see my parents again, more than anything. I hurried back to the cliff where I had left them.

There were bones lying all around. It looked like reinforcements had arrived from the castle to drive the monsters off.

When I arrived, I found strips of flesh, and the skeleton of that monster. Knights and adventurers were carrying it off.

I was able to piece together what had happened.

“Well, good thing it had already taken a beating…”

“Yeah, otherwise we probably couldn’t have beaten it.”

The adventurers and knight were bantering when they noticed me there

“What’s with the brat? Should we grab her?”

“Wait. We are in demi-human territory.”

“What are you talking about? The area lord is dead, didn’t you hear?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Anyway, leave her alone. You know what would happen.”

They all split and made room for me to pass.

Then I walked to the edge of the cliff and saw what had become of my parents. I started shaking and sobbing.

“NOOOOOOOOOO!”

How much time had passed?

By the time I knew what I was doing, I had already made graves for my parents.

“Don’t forget to smile. Be nice to the others.”

“She’s right. When you smile, everyone smiles.”

“Right…”

They had given their lives to save the other villagers, and they had entrusted the survivors to me.

I’d show them… I’d be good to everyone! I wouldn’t let their deaths be in vain…

If I just stayed there crying, my parents would be upset.

“I won’t cry any more. I’m going now…”

I started walking back to the village.

“Uhuuuuhh….”

“Daddy… Mommy…”

The villagers that had run for the ocean had formed a crowd. There were many more children than adults.

“Is that Raphtalia?!”

“Yes.”

“Did your parents make it?”

An old man who had been our neighbor asked me. He looked concerned.

I tried as hard as I could not to cry. I shook my head.

“Oh… That’s…”

He was unable to find any words. He must have known that anything he said would make me cry.

“It’s okay. My parents told me to cheer everyone up. “

“Did they? You’re such a strong girl.”

“Hee, hee.”

Was I laughing?

It’s fine. If I cried, my parents would be upset.

“Everyone!”

I shouted to get everyone’s attention, and all the eyes of the crying children were on me.

“I know that you are all sad. I am too. But would our parents and brothers and friends want us to stay here and cry?”

Everyone seemed troubled by my words. They were twisting their faces up.

I put my hand on my heart and stepped forward.

“To all of you that think our loved ones haven’t died, I ask you how would they feel if they came back to our village and found it like this?”

Right. This was everyone’s village. We couldn’t just leave it how it was.

My dad, and the lord, had always said that the village was a family that we all made together.

“I know how sad you are. Believe me, I know. But that is all the more reason to rebuild. I mean, we’re a family!”

Yes, father had always said so. He said to treat the rest of the village as if they were part of our family.

So I would do it. I would take care of them all, just like father had said.

“Right? Please?”

I did all I could to summon a smile.

“Raphtalia…”

“Raphtalia, aren’t you sad?”

“Why are you smiling? Your father died!”

My smile weakened at their exclamation.

I wouldn’t cry… If I started crying, I’d never be able to stop…

“Right… I’m… not… sad.”

I can’t cry. If I started to cry, no one would be able to comfort me.

“Oh…”

“Look at how hard this girl is trying! Come on everyone. If she can do it, we can do it!”

“Yeah!”

“Okay!”

“You’re right, Raphtalia! I’ll do my best too!”

Keel had been crying, but he turned to me, invigorated.

“Yes!”

The lord had given our village a flag. It had been a present, and a symbol of the town. Just then it fluttered down from above and fell before me. It was like it was agreeing with me.

That was it. It was a sign, a sign that my parents were watching over us.

I picked up the flag, and the other villagers brought over a large pole for it. We attached the flag to the pole.

“It’s a sign from heaven! Let’s work to rebuild our village!”

“Yeah!”

And so everyone decided to try and rebuild.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

I was instantly awake. I was inside of the tent we had set up.

My house had burned to the ground—most of ours had. So we were all sleeping together in a large tent

I think I might have been dreaming.

“Hey, did you hear that voice?”

An older man was rushing over in my direction.

“Raphtalia, you were screaming.”

“Was I?”

I needed to smile. If I didn’t, it would worry the rest of them.

“I’m fine! It was just a bad dream.”

“Okay… well… don’t overdo it.”

“I’m fine! Thank you though.”

Father. Mother.

I’m doing my best, I promise…

The next morning we decided to leave the completely destroyed houses the way they were for now and focus on repairing houses that we could live in sooner.

We also put some people in charge of making graves for the bodies that had washed up on shore.

The adults were all focused on rebuilding the town, and all the children were doing what they could to help.

But we were getting worried about the food supplies. They might not hold out.

We had discussed sending fishing boats out to get more food, but the sea was very rough, and we decided it best to save that for later.

“What now…”

We all counted the survivors.

There was only one quarter of the village left alive.

Even still, one of the older men said that we had made out as well as he could have hoped for.

“It’s just like Raphtalia said. We are all still alive.”

“Yeah!”

What I hadn’t known then was that all our efforts were going to be tossed aside mercilessly.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

There were some scummy-looking men wandering through the village, and they were pointing their swords at a group of adults.

“Hey!”

“Who are you guys?!”

“Ahahah! I’d heard that there were still some demi-humans alive here. Guess it was true!”

“Yeah, and this area isn’t protected. We could probably make some good money!”

“Yeah! Argh!”

One of the older men stepped forward and yelled at the attackers.

“The lord of these lands will never forgive you for this behavior! There are castle knights still in the area too!”

The nasty-looking men all smiled at once.

“What do we care if your dead lord gets mad? And besides…”

Swipe! It happened quicker than I could see. It happened before I could understand what was going on.

The old man’s stomach was split open. One of the bad men had cut him with his sword.

“What the…”

“Ahaha!”

“Can’t you tell? We are the castle knights!”

“They haven’t figured it out yet, have they, Boss?”

“Nope!”

“AHAHAHAHAHA!”

The old man fell over in a pool of blood. He didn’t even twitch.

The pool of blood was spreading. Soon it was at my toes.

“Ah! AHHHHHHHHH!”

Suddenly everyone was panicking. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran.

“Don’t let them escape! Kill the old ones! We can sell the women and children, so don’t run them down!”

I can’t really remember what happened next.

“Noooooo!”

“Calm down! Take that!”

“Ugh….”

Someone had a hold on my hair. I felt like someone had hit me, and then nothing.

A week passed. I continued having dreams of my parents’ deaths.

They caught me, and sold me into slavery.

The first owner seemed nice. He just wanted me to act as a servant, but then he sold me, and I still don’t know why.

The next one…

“Take that!”

“Ugh…”

Why? Why did they treat me this way?

He was a fat man and looked like a bad man. He kept me in the basement of a large house, in a town I’d never heard of. There were animals there. They were just like me… Ugh… Apparently this man had bought Rifana before he’d bought me.

Every day, whenever he felt like it, he would hang me from the ceiling in chains and beat me with a whip. He hit me until I was bloody. Then he would keep hitting me.

Whenever I tried to stop him, or tried to protest, the slave curse on my chest would burn me. The pain from the whip was driving me crazy.

But I wasn’t going to give up.

I’d bare it, for my parents, and for everyone in the village that hadn’t made it.

So I wouldn’t give up.

“Raphtalia…” Cough.

“It’s okay... It’s okay. We’ll make it back to the village.”

When I reunited with Rifana, she was already sick. Even still, the man never stopped hitting her.

“Yes… We… We’ll… make it…”

What did this man want from us? Did he just think it was fun to beat us with a whip?

“Ha! Why are you still having dreams of a better life?”

Slap! He hit me again, and I felt blood trickle down my back.

I felt tears well up at the pain.

“Yes! Scream from the pain!”

“Ahhh!”

After that point, things got worse. He started to torture me.

I was finally free, and ragged, but I crawled over the muddy floor to go take care of Rifana.

He brought us an awful stinking bowl of soup. It tasted like mud. It was our only food for the day.

“Huff… Huff…”

I slowly fed it to Rifana. That was one more day of life for her.

It would be okay. We had to make it back to the village. Everyone was waiting for us.

“Hold on… I swear I’ll help you.”

There were latticed iron bars that ran almost to the floor. I realized that if I took a rock from the wall and used it to dig out the foundation under the bars, then we’d be able to wriggle under them and escape! It just had to work.

“Thank you.”

“Yes! We’ll meet everyone again!”

My mother and father had told me to take care of everyone.

The other villagers were sure to save us.

Sadeena would definitely rally the others to come save us. All we needed to do was survive long enough.

“You… remember that…day? Raph…ta…lia…”

Rifana was shivering. She was stretching out her hand to the ceiling.

“You remember… that… lord’s… flag?”

“Yes… yes!”

I grabbed her hand and squeezed it hard.

I remembered. That flag had given us hope.

I missed those quiet days… those days when nothing was wrong.

But those days were gone.

So I had to bring them back. It was up to me.

Cough! Cough!

Three days passed.

I could hear his footsteps coming close.

“Raphtalia…” Cough!

The horrible time was starting again. I’d caught Rifana’s cold. But I was going to be fine.

I slid a pile of wet straw over the hole I was chipping away under the bars.

“…”

Rifana wasn’t answering me.

“Rifana?”

The man opened the door to the stable where she was and touched her.

“Guess she’s dead. Ugh, what a pain.”

He lifted her body roughly by the shoulder and muttered to himself.

Rifana hung there, her eyes empty and cold.

“Damn, and it was almost time to return her too. This is a breach of contract!”

Then he kicked her body, like she was just a toy.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later. Apparently there was a class of people that entertained themselves by buying demi-humans as slaves and then torturing them.

That’s what we were, just slaves sold to satisfy that man’s personal whims.

“Heee?!”

What? What? Rifana?

No… It couldn’t be.

I reached out a shaky hand to touch her.

She was so cold, so cold! I couldn’t believe it.

No… Rifana!

I was sad, angry, terrified… hopeless.

I had so many different emotions stirring inside of me.

Why? Rifana hadn’t done anything wrong!

“It’s because you won’t stop crying at night! She couldn’t get any sleep! This is YOUR fault!”

“No… Ugh…” Sniff… “Rifana…”

The man strung me up and started to whip me. He hit me even longer than usual that day.

But I kept my eyes locked on Rifana the whole time, and I couldn’t even feel the pain.

“Oh hey, you’re always muttering about some village, aren’t you?”

“…”

I didn’t have to answer him. Everyone was waiting for me.

“Apparently that village was destroyed a while ago. Here’s proof.”

He held out a crystal ball.

A beam of light came out of the crystal ball and projected an image of the village on the wall.

It was worse than the village I knew. It was destroyed, and there wasn’t anyone there.

The flag was tattered and burnt, and the ground was littered with bones.

“Oh yeah, I heard you saying that you were the person who supported everyone in that village. Apparently everyone left it to rot and ran away.”

“Ah…”

The man flashed a smile. He had never seen me cry, never seen me blink. He was enjoying this.

“Ug…. Ugh… Wahhhh!”

Something inside me snapped.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

My mother and father had entrusted the village to me, but there was no one left.

Then what should I do?

There was nothing left for me.

“Cry! Cry harder!”

The pain was so intense I thought I would go crazy.

The dreams I had every night were starting to rot my brain.

They were of the last time I saw my parents. It got even worse.

I was a bad kid because I hadn’t saved the village. They hoped I never smiled again. I didn’t have the right to live.

They kept whispering: Die… Die…

They were… right. I would never smile again.

I didn’t want to.

Because I… Because I broke my promise…

The man finally sold me.

Either that or the time had run out on his torture game.

“This is horrible. This is way under what she’s worth. Damn.”

“C’mon, she’s on the verge of death. I can’t use her in this condition, so I’m going to have to subtract lost time from the price.”

“I understand. Yes.”

A fat man dressed in a nice suit bought me. He was different from the last slave trader to manage me.

What would my next owner be like?

“I’m sure she could have been treated a little better…”

The new owner gave me medicine and food.

Cough! Cough!

“I don’t think she will last very long.”

The owner said as he put me in a cage.

So… I finally wasn’t worth anything to anyone.

My parents were gone, and my village was gone. It was like the world was telling me to die.

It hurt. I wanted to die. I wanted it to be quick.

I don’t know how much time passed. I was just staring through the bars of my cage. Many people came and went.

And then…

“This is about the cheapest I can offer you.”

The slave trader had brought a young man to my cage.

“The one on the right has a genetic disease. He’s a rabbit. The one in the middle has panic attacks and is a raccoon, and the last one is a mixed-breed lizard man.

“They all have their share of problems.”

The young man was negotiating with the slave trader. The young man met my gaze for a minute.

His eyes were sharp enough to kill. He looked angry.

I gasped.

His eyes wandered to the other two slaves. His eyes were scary.

He was filled with hate, more hate than the man that whipped me.

It looked like he hated the whole world.

If he bought me, I’d probably die in a day or two…

“She has panic attacks in the night. She’s a lot of trouble…”

Were they talking about me? I couldn’t tell.

But in the end, the young man bought me.

The spell to register as a slave always hurt. I hated it.

But I was sure this would be my last owner.

Because I… I didn’t have much time left.

A little while later, the new owner gave me a knife and made me kill a monster.

It was so scary, but if I didn’t do it, the curse on my chest burned.

We left the weapon shop, and my stomach started rumbling.

He was going to yell at me! I shook my head; I wanted to tell him that I was fine. I was fine! So don’t be mad at me! Don’t whip me!

Sigh…

He just sighed.

Was he angry?

He just walked off and brought me to another shop. They were selling food there.

I think I had seen the shop in town before.

“I’ll have the cheapest lunch you’ve got, and she’ll have the kid’s meal that that kid over there is having.”

“What?!”

I had been gazing, envious, at what that other kid had been eating. Then my new owner just bought it for me? I couldn’t believe my own ears.

Everyone outside of my village was supposed to be evil, weren’t they?

“Wh…Why?”

“Hm?”

“You looked like you wanted to eat it. What’s the problem? You want something else?”

I shook my head.

“Why are you feeding me?”

Because, ever since I’d become a slave, no one had treated me this way.

“I already told you. You looked like you wanted to eat that.”

“But…”

“Just eat it. I need you to be healthy. If you stay skinny like that, you’re just going to die.”

Die…? I would die. I was sure to die… Just like Rifana. I’d die of the same disease.

“Here you are.”

The waitress set a big, elaborate meal in front of me. There was a flag sticking out of it.

What I had been envious of, only minutes before, I now had for my own. I hesitated. I bet that when I went to eat it, the young man would throw it to the ground and laugh at me.

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

He looked at me, confused.

“Can I?”

“Yeah, hurry up.”

Yes. He would probably destroy it all. I slowly reached my hand out.

I looked quickly over at him.

He didn’t look like he was going to do anything. I touched the food.

I pulled the little flag out and felt like I’d accomplished something. I felt like, as long as I had that flag, I didn’t need anything from anyone. I felt like I was back in my village. I felt like it was the very same flag, the one that we’d lost.

I held tight to the flag as I ate the food. It was so delicious that I found tears streaming down my cheeks.

If I cried, he’d yell at me for sure. I tried to wipe them away without letting him notice.

“Is it good?”

“Yes!”

No! I’d accidentally answered him, and he’d seen that I was happy. He would punish me for sure.

“Good.”

That’s all he said. I couldn’t understand.

I held tight to the flag. I felt like it was filled with… something.

Compared to the flag our lord had given us, it was very small and very cheap, but it felt like it contained all that I’d lost. It felt like it wanted me to remember something important.

I turned to the young man.

He looked just as angry as ever, but something was different.

What was it? His face and voice were so scary, but was he really a nice person?

I had so many doubts.

A lot happened that day. He gave me medicine, and made me walk to all kinds of places.

But there was one major difference.

The dream that had been haunting me was different.

“Raphtalia…”

My parents were standing on top of the cliff.

“Father! Mother!”

I ran to them with all my might.

I wanted to see them. I wanted to stay with them.

I shouldn’t. I knew that I shouldn’t, not in front of them, but I felt tears filling my eyes.

“It’s okay… It’s okay…”

“Don’t cry. Be strong.”

“Ugh… But…”

I kept crying, and my parents just held me and rubbed my head.

“We are always watching over you.”

“Yes. Please, be happy.”

“But…”

“You’ll be okay with him…”

Then I woke up.

I couldn’t believe it. My new owner was holding me, and rubbing my head.

He wasn’t a bad person. He wouldn’t play with me, wouldn’t hurt me.

He was clumsy and rude, but he was a good person.

He didn’t have any money, but he still gave me medicine, bought me food, and prioritized my equipment over his own.

Then, I finally found out who he really was.

His eyes were dark and filled with hatred and sadness.

He was violent, angry and vulgar. He was scary.

But he understood pain, and at his heart he was kind.

Yes, he was the person that Rifana and I longed for… the Shield Hero.

The Shield Hero bought me all kinds of things.

I had lost everything, but now I was surrounded by treasures.

“Hee, Hee…”

The Hero gave me a bag, and I smiled as I filled it with the treasures he’d given me.

There was the ball. There was the broken knife. There were lots of things. But the most important one was that flag.

And there were many things that I couldn’t put into the bag.

I felt healthier, better, and stronger.

“Here, eat up.”

“Okay!”

Rifana, can you hear me?

I’m fighting with the Shield Hero.

You’d never believe it.

I had a dream that night too… a good one.

Rifana, she was standing right in front of me. She was smiling. I told her everything that had happened. We talked about all kinds of things.

“Raphtalia, keep your chin up!”

“I will.”

“Lucky you! Fighting with the Shield Hero!”

“Heh, heh… Jealous?”

“Ahaha! A little!”

In my dream, she looked happy and peaceful. She was smiling at me.

“I’m watching out for you.”

“I know.”

“Let’s go back to our village, where the flag is.”

“Yes! I’ll see you there!”

I hoped that my parents were watching me from wherever they were. I wanted them to see me rebuild it all.

I wanted strength. I wanted to be strong enough to take care of the bad people that wanted to hurt us.

The world was so cruel and hard. It was filled with darkness and evil, but I wasn’t going to give up.

I didn’t want to lose anyone else.

I’ll get stronger, enough to protect my parents, to protect Rifana. Yes, to protect Mr. Naofumi.

I could do it. And so I continue on.