Of what happened after this, I remember almost nothing.
Only fragments still show up in my dreams now and then. With no connection, in no order.
So what I write here is pieced together from what people told me afterward and the few scraps of memory I have left. I'm no longer even sure whether I really saw any of it.
The fear vanished.
At the edge of death, like a tide quietly going out. The terror that had bound me so tightly disappeared without a trace.
In its place, a voice at the back of my head.
Kill. Mow down everything in front of you, and live.
That was the signal.
The person I was got shoved far back, behind my own body. As if someone had snatched the reins from me.
All I remember is the feeling in my arms. A strength I had never known flooding into them. My well-trained body began to move on its own, without waiting for my will.
I was swinging a spear. Someone was screaming. In a bestial voice, as if his throat would tear. I only learned long afterward that the voice was mine.
Where I went, how I moved. How many I faced. I can't recall the order or the number, not one thing.
There was only the sense of the threats in front of me disappearing, one after another. I didn't feel scared. I didn't feel pain. I didn't feel anything.
When I noticed, the soldiers who had surrounded me were gone.
No—that wasn't it.
They had fallen.
At my feet, covered in mud, one after another after another. I was stepping over them as I went forward. Somewhere far away, I watched the rain-soaked mud turn a different color.
I tried to stop it. Deep in my heart, I screamed desperately. Stop it, no more, please stop. But my body wouldn't listen.
I was no longer me.
My whole body was soaked with cold sweat and the blood of others. Where the sweat ended and the blood began, I couldn't tell anymore. Tears of terror were running down my cheeks. Looking like that, shouting something, I just kept sweeping my blade forward, and forward. Without grasping what I was doing.
Only the voice at the back of my head kept repeating: live, live, live.
How long did I go on like that? I had no sense of time.
Suddenly—there was nothing blocking my way. The spear I tried to swing cut through empty air. It was that lack of resistance that finally brought me, just a little, close to coming back to myself.
I was heaving for breath. My arms were heavy as lead.
And I looked at what was in front of me.
What had I been doing?
When I came to, in front of me—lay the fallen banner of the Imagawa headquarters.