The Hero's Conundrum/Chapter 5

I woke up at our camp and the first thing I did was ask for Bansao’s corpse, but as I tried to get up Joseph held me back. He looks worried, he told me to relax and lay back, that he needed to tell me something, something bad. He didn’t have to tell me, my leg is missing, they had to amputate it to prevent the infection from spreading. I tried getting up again and again Joseph tried to hold me.

“Leave me be” I shouted.

I got up and Sammael brought me some clutches he made for me. I’m not much of a warrior without a leg and the worst thing is that the infection was not contained. I have a fever and there are no antibiotics to cure the infection. If I don’t find something to cure my leg I’m going to die, but at least my legacy will continue, I have very high hopes for Sammael. I always thought that I was going to die in battle or of old age, but not like this, in bed because of an infection? No, it is not fair.

There has been no sign of Bansao for days but my men are prepared, we know he is waiting for us to let our guard down. The men went to look for food and antibiotics for me, I wanted to go with them but they told me to stay and rest. Now I feel like I’m a burden, no body let me do anything. I refuse to die in this bed, I’m burning up but I can still be useful, I’ll show them. I escaped to the woods to get food but I move too slowly with these crutches and this fever, where are my special abilities now? Where is my speed now that I need it? Damn it, I’m too slow to catch anything, there are some hares I stood there quiet with my bow and arrow but I’m shaking too much because of the fever. I shoot and I hit a hare, I did it. When I’m about to take it someone grabbed me from behind and told me;

“Stay still and listen to me, there is something you need to know, stop trying to kill Bansao, he will keep coming back, there is no stopping it. He has too many people and your best chance is to keep moving.”

“Who are you” I asked, trying to get loose from him.

“There is no time for questions, there be enough time for that later.” He replied.

“I don’t know if you noticed pal, but I don’t have much time, I will die any second.”

“Don’t worry about that, you’ll be fine trust me, listen, I’m sorry but there is no other way and you will find out the truth soon enough. Right now you need to go back to the camp and tell them to move, Bansao is on his way.” He pushed me and ran away, I couldn’t follow him on my condition. I went back to my camp and as soon as I woke up, I told Sarah who came to bring me something to eat, that we have to move, so we did. On our way I saw a tree with the word truth, carved on it but I kept moving with the crew. I needed to rest, the infection is really bad now and they had to carry me the rest of the way, this is humiliating. I fell asleep from the fever and I had a weird dream, there was a war and I was the leader of one of the sides of the war. It was like a rebellion against our king, even though the dream was like a fantasy movie, it felt too real.

After the camp was set up, I lay on my bed, they know I’m going to die anytime now. I don’t know who that man was, but he was wrong I don’t have time, he kind of sounded familiar. Later at night when everyone went to eat I sneaked out to the tree I saw earlier and at the roots of the tree was a book with the word truth written on it by hand. It has a bookmark so I opened the book, it was an English-Vietnamese dictionary and on the bookmark was underlined the Vietnamese word, ban sao which translates to clone. Clone? Is Bansao a clone? Whose clone? That means that every time I kill him someone send another clone, but there has to be a limit on how many clones there can be. What that man said is true, there is no defeating Bansao. I need to go back to the camp to warn them, but I can barely move, I think this is it. Am I really going to die of an infection? He told me I had time, I guess he wasn’t right about that, everything goes black and then silence.

Suddenly I’m walking but once again covered in blood with a knife in my hand, what the hell is going on? I need to go back to the camp. I have to warn them not to engage in a fight with Bansao, it’s meaningless and . . . wait, how am I walking? I have both legs, is this a dream? Am I dead? No time for that now, I have to get to my people and come up with a plan, we need to find the source of the clones and obliterate it, that way he won’t come back. I cleaned up and the knife is missing . . . again, when I got to the camp there was no one there. They must have moved already, but this is strange there are no traces of a camp ever been here, how did they do that? There are plants here that look like they have been growing for a year, they also left no trail for me to follow either, so I decided to go to the previous camps, starting from the first one. On the way I saw someone walking covered in blood and he looked like me. I didn’t understand what was happening. I decided to follow myself, as weird as it sounds. There’s someone else here so I hid, it’s my men, but something is wrong, why are they at the first camp place? Some of the men there have already died, they saw the other me, helped him and took him to the camp just as I remember.

I get it now, this is a dream about the time they found me, but why this seem so real? I’m seeing everything I remember from an outside perspective or maybe I’m dead, they say that when you die, your life flashes before you. Well I died and I’m seeing my life all over again, but I still don’t remember what happens before the day they found me. I need answers, I’ll go to them and I’m going to tell them what happened, well if they can see me. I just found out about Bansao being a clone, so we can attack his clone supply early on. When I was reaching them, someone grabbed me and said “Don’t do it”, I turned around to hit him by instinct but he dodged it, to my surprise it was Sammael.

WTF?