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Prologue – Long live King Nicholas, rest in peace(s) Private Boris!
🕑 Added 2023-10-14 14:10:29 +0000 UTCCONTENT WARNING: Modern warfare, of the World War I kind, and the horrible things that come along with it. It's nothing too explicitly graphic, and it'll be contained to the prologue chapter.
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8 January 1916
Mount Lovćen, Kingdom of Montenegro
“…and it’s another tie. Uhm, c’est égalité!”
“Mon Dieu! Is that what those French guys would say?”
“How are we managing to constantly get ties? These cards must be cursed or something…”
Despite often being represented as a matter of endless glory and heroic struggle, war is mostly an idle affair. Especially modern warfare, as this small group of Montenegrins and their missing French allies had quickly found out, mostly consisted of being bombarded and praying to God that a shell wouldn’t separate you into little chunks of meat. Such high ideals of “defending the Motherland” had sank into the muddy holes that revealed themselves when the snow melted. The newly-revealed frozen corpses of their comrades from last year didn’t help morale either.
Now it was snow season again in Lovćen, the namesake black mountain of Montenegro. Dead men tell no tales when they’re buried beneath the snow, neither do living men like to tell tales when their behinds are freezing on the highlands they were forced to occupy. The artillerymen busied themselves with bombing Austro-Hungarian fortifications on the border or Austro-Hungarian ships off the coast. Meanwhile, the infantrymen protecting them were busy playing cards while sitting on the ground and smoking their precious few cigarettes.
Their goal, at first, had been to capture the nearby port town of Cattaro in which one of the fleets of the Austro-Hungarian fleet was based. However, with the help of naval seaplanes doing reconnaissance, the cannons stationed on Lovćen had been knocked out one by one. French High Command, who had sent cannons to capture the town, had given up on the plan and pulled out of the country entirely. Now all that was left was a bunch of Montenegrins lazing about, waiting for the moment when either armistice would come or they’d die. Either way seemed equally good to the men by this point, as long as this whole ordeal was over.
“…forget it, let’s not play another round. Give me a light.”
“Here you go, mate.”
With yet another round of tablić ending in stalemate, the crowd of infantrymen dispersed to do their own thing. Among them was Private Boris Borisović, a man of no note except for the cap he had looted from a Bulgarian private. He still wore the cap on his head, as a warning for any future enemies of what’d happen to them if they approached him (even if the guy he had looted the cap from had died from an artillery strike and not the hands of Boris). His rifle was taken from the same soldier as well, a Mannlicher M1895 which ran on looted ammunition. This breaking of uniform codes would have been an issue if not for the fact that the officers, like their men, were beyond caring at this point. All men had unkempt faces, unkempt uniforms, and unkempt souls beyond repair.
Boris huddled next to a concrete bunker, one which had been destroyed during yesterday’s duels between batteries of artillery. With a lit cigarette perched atop his lip, he participated in the national pastime of Montenegro: napping. Come Heaven or Hell, nothing could stop Boris from closing his eyes and falling asleep…
…nothing except for an artillery barrage.
Bloody cabbage-eating German dogs… His naptime had been interrupted, and Boris was angry. Could you please try to kill us at a more convenient time?! He aimed his rifle towards the coast, towards an Austro-Hungarian ship he could barely see from the coast. One lone shot was fired from his rifle, to be lost somewhere among the countless trees of Montenegro.
Regaining his lucidity bit by bit, Boris noticed that this barrage wasn’t quite the same. It was intense, batteries off the coast and on the land uniting to turn the mountain into a scene which would fit right into the Book of Revelations. There was an explosion going off everywhere he looked, he heard someone screaming off in the distance, pillars of earth erupting from every corner... A scene, so chaotic, with men running around, looking for cover which had already been destroyed, Boris looked for a bunker nearby only to find concrete rubble. Somebody’s disembodied hand flew by him, then he saw a man’s shoe buried under the ground, and then he himself flew up and then down, back down to the earth where he’d soon go to.
Laying on the ground seemed like a bad idea with so many men running around like headless chickens, so Boris used his legs to help him get up. Taking a second look, he realized he didn’t have legs anymore. One had completely flown off, the other was barely attached to the rest of his body. Boris would have thrown up if not for the fact that the organs needed to throw up had thrown themselves up from his body and onto the ground.
Boris quickly reminisced about the card game he was having. Then his last cigarette. Things were so calm a few minutes ago. Now they were calm again, his eardrums had been ruptured along with his legs. Somehow his sight remained, long enough to see the blue tinge of an Austro-Hungarian infantryman’s cap approaching him.
Boris instinctively raised his hand to ask for help but, alas, he was now a broken man beyond repair. No doctor on the frontline could reasonably save him quickly enough. Thankfully there was mercy left on this world, at the end of the barrel of the rifle now pointing towards his head. Pity had been taken by his enemy, one which Boris would appreciate if not for the fact that his mental and physical faculties were rapidly deteriorating.
Pvt. Boris Borisović closed his eyes, ready to take a nap for one last time. His brain managed to produce one last thought: I wish I had been born in more peaceful times…
BANG!
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Here beings my next writing project that I announced I'd do a month or so back, Maid from Hell! I do not have a set schedule for writing or publishing this one yet; preview chapters will be uploaded on to Patreon (or another site if I have to escape from Patreon) as I work on it whenever I have free time to work on the John Brown. I'll publicly publish it whenever I have had enough preview chapters, which probably won't be for a while.
I'd love to hear your feedback as we go along, as this one will be a bit different compared to the John Brown Isekai in terms of general tone and setting. Having a popular and well-liked piece of writing outside of the John Brown Isekai is my main goal right now, and I one day wish to branch out to different genres outside of isekai (like a semi-historical semi-fictional fully-batshit story about the "basest" [not to be confused with "most based", that is the opposite] Chinese warlord Zhang Zhongchang that I plan to make a cover for soon and actually write one day).
Hopefully you'll enjoy this story as well, and I thank ye all for your continued support.
