They advanced on the site where the enemy was supposed to be gathering for a full push towards the front line, knowing full-well that they would likely have to dye their hands in the blood of civilians as well as the soldiers that would normally be arrayed against them. The elves, or rather, the elves and plantoids loyal to the ever-crumbling despotic state run by the massive tree in the distance, were getting more and more desperate, and only recently had irregulars and even random civilians started coming out of the woodwork (in some cases quite literally) to deal blows to the Darksolian forces here and there.

They were soldiers, but even they didn’t want to kill these people. Sure, their job was to lay waste to their foes, but there was something altogether wrong about killing these people. Ironically, it had been simple enough before this point, mostly because all of that killing had been done from above, or from very far away. It was different to kill a violent civilian up close and personal, and as this damn war went on everyone began to wonder if that which they had desired was really what they should have wanted.

It was so much easier before, back when the only foes were other humans, or when they were dealing with fanatics and zealots and genocidal or tyrannical regimes. Yes, they served an utter bastard, but he cared for his people and loathed the idea of letting them suffer. That was why he was so focused on making massive undead legions, after all. What better way to protect an entire nation than by sending uncountable numbers of bodies that nobody cared about to act as a wall of meat, bones, and metal?

War was different than he had expected, and now he was about to do something he had never dreamed that he would be forced to do. As he and his fellow soldiers advanced, they heard a terrible silence in the air, which was quickly followed by the stench of blood, gore, and viscera. He could only hope that someone else made it to the field before he and his comrades could, taking all of the inevitable death onto themselves.

He wondered who or what would be willing to go down that dark road, but his pontificating was ceased when he ran into the back of the man in front of him.

“What’s the holdup?” he asked, hoping that he would be told that they were turning around.

The man in front merely pointed towards a clearing before averting his gaze from whatever he was seeing while trying to stifle his instinct to vomit.

“You don’t want to see….” Was all that came from him, and it was more of a mumble than a fully audible sentence.

Against his better judgment, he moved forward, a part of him dreading what he already knew would be a horrific scene. And once he breached the near wall of people in front of him, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

It was not a clearing with a floor made of foliage or dirt that laid itself out before him. Instead, all he saw, for what seemed to stretch on for far too long, was a floor made of mangled corpses that had been shredded beyond any kind of reasonable level. Based on the fragments of metal and leather and cloth and wood and bone that mingled with the carpet of the dead, he knew that these were the foes he and his group were sent here to kill.

Still, though, intel had only placed the enemy force at around ten thousand at most. This, though, was far more than that. Even with their bodies shredded and mutilated to such a degree, this far exceeded such a total in terms of dead, and that estimate of ten thousand included the main bulk of the enemy force, which was made up almost entirely out of civilians.

In what he later would realize was a moment of cold, callous, and calculating clarity, he realized that the number of civilian dead among this miniature sea of gore made up less than 5% at most. The rest, therefore, were enemy combatants that actually deserved to be called as such. If this was the number of enemies dead, not counting the massive bulk of civilians that would have accompanied them and likely fled the field, then his entire force would not merely have been routed, but outright exterminated had they arrived to find an intact enemy force.

That still raised an alarming and terrifying question.

“Who the fuck did this…?”

One of his officers ended up asking the million-dollar question, and it was answered when someone realized there was a lone figure amidst the sea of mangled parts and torn organs. The figure stood in the middle of the mass of death, seemingly unaware that it now had an audience. At first, the mix of ravaged inner material and fluids that covered most of the figure’s form made them impossible to identify, but someone managed to see something that no one else could.

“Kain…”

At that name, the figure’s head instantly turned to look over its shoulder, and everyone caught a glimpse of the man’s face. Stained in blood and gore, the chiseled features that he bore were known to all, despite how the residue of battle attempted to hide it. Unlike the portraits, statues, and posters, the man before them, though tall, muscled, armored, and imposing, looked rather… sorrowful. Almost like he, the self-professed ‘Big Bad Evil Guy’ that he claimed to be, had been forced to do something that even he considered to be too evil for his tastes.

But no one could figure out what could have made him look like that. Surely he enjoyed the slaughter, for that was a well-known trait of his. Surely he enjoyed tormenting his foes, as that was also a well-known trait that he made no attempt to hide. So, then, the question remained; what could have caused him to look so…. Sad? Unhappy? Disappointed?

Well, they would get no answers from Kain himself, as he rocketed into the air and out of sight before anyone could muster the courage to ask him why he looked so down.

“Maybe.. maybe he didn’t kill enough of them?”

“Maybe there wasn’t enough of a challenge?”

As he looked out over the mass of torn meat, shattered bone, rent cloth and leather, and broken metal, he felt like he had an idea of his own as to why Lord Kain was so down. He wouldn’t say it out loud, though, for fear of ridicule. After all, there was no way someone who was willing to, in his own words, “Shoulder the evil of all things and bear the weight of the sins of his nation”, would be disappointed with himself for not scaring all of the armed civilians away so he didn’t have to kill any of them.

Maybe, just maybe, Kain wasn’t nearly as unrepentantly evil as he wanted everyone to believe. After all, he did stop using Agent Orange when there was enough of an outcry. If he was truly evil, and unrepentantly so, he wouldn’t have caved or found, let alone used a less cruel alternative. He didn’t think Kain was really that bad. He just needed to keep up appearances, for old times’ sake.

After all, there were those who only did what he wanted, and did so for the good of the nation because he put himself up as a pure evil being that had some nefarious and twisted plan for world domination where everyone would be a slave or whatnot. Some people just wanted to watch the world burn, and the best way to deceive such people into keeping the world from burning of their own volition would be to deceive them into thinking that their actions would lead to their desired result when, in fact, they wouldn't.

Or at least that was his take on things. Whether or not Kain actually thought this way was beyond his pay grade.