The fabric curtain of the tent rustled softly as it was lifted.

Spades clamped a hand over Bai Liu’s mouth and whispered beside his ear, “They’re here.”

Bai Liu’s gaze shifted. Through several obstacles in his line of sight, it landed on the shoes of the person who had just stepped into the tent—a pair of finely made costume shoes.

Spades’ judgment had been correct. The people who had come in were indeed his teammates.

Someone’s muttering voice came through. “Spades actually left the corpse he snatched here? What the hell?”

“Judge, what do you think?”

The Judge swept his gaze around the tent and said, “He’s most likely planning to use this place as a base.”

Hidden beneath the bed, Bai Liu narrowed his eyes.

This version of The Judge’s voice was a mechanical, synthesized AI voice, yet it was extremely close to a human voice. If one did not listen carefully, it would be impossible to tell.

But Bai Liu had worked on technical interfaces related to this field in games he had developed before, and one of those voices had been almost identical to The Judge’s. Bai Liu recognized it at once.

This man was using a synthesized voice in front of his teammates, not his real human voice.

Bai Liu immediately lifted his head and shifted his gaze, trying to see The Judge’s face, but Spades’ restraint from behind him tightened. In the end, Bai Liu still managed to glimpse The Judge’s face as he walked to the bedside.

It was a face with very little that stood out. Even for a professional player like Bai Liu, who was highly skilled at memorizing facial features, he would have to stare at it without blinking for two or three seconds before he could barely commit it to memory.

And even then, Bai Liu could not be certain that he would immediately recognize The Judge if they met again in a crowd.

This person’s features were ordinary to the point of being blurred.

Just like his voice, his face carried a strange sense of wrongness because it was too “normal,” too “balanced,” as if it had been artificially adjusted.

The Judge did not remain by the bed for long. He quickly led the other team members away. “Spades may have found a better base and abandoned this original one...”

“But he didn’t even take the corpse...”

“...He probably saw a better one on the way, a corpse judged to be worth more points, so Spades threw this one away. It’s not the first time he’s done something like this. Last time, against the Kabbalah Guild...”

The group left the tent while discussing the matter.

Spades, however, remained motionless. He pinned Bai Liu’s shoulder down, as if waiting for something, and made no move to crawl out from under the bed.

“Another group is coming,” Spades said.

The moment his words fell, the tent curtain that had just closed was lifted again. Through the gaps between the objects beneath the bed, Bai Liu saw several pairs of panicked military-green rubber shoes dragging a stretcher into the tent.

On the stretcher lay a mass of flesh.

Or rather, a human shape that could only be described as a mass of blood.

This “mass of blood” had lost all four limbs. Thick, half-coagulated blood gushed from his mouth, so much of it that his entire face was obscured. Blood kept spraying from the severed stumps of his limbs, and the inside of the tent had already been spattered with it.

One soldier tried to wrap bandages tightly around the cross sections of the limbs to stop the bleeding, but the effort was futile. The blood merely changed from a fountain into a stream, showing no sign of stopping.

The soldier’s voice was bleak and panicked. “...He’s still alive! When the medics cleared the battlefield, why didn’t they take him for treatment? Why did they leave him there to be blown apart like this by the enemy’s finishing shells?”

“He could have lived!”

As he said this, the soldier was still pulling the bandages tight around the stumps with all his strength, trying to stop the bleeding by force. Because he was straining so hard, his voice trembled.

The other soldier’s voice was much steadier, though it was still heavy with grief. “...Haven’t you noticed? Lately, when we clear the battlefield, we keep finding more and more living people.”

“...There are more and more wounded on the battlefield, but the medical supplies clearly can’t keep up. We don’t have enough resources to save them, and leaving them there damages morale, so command is preparing to...”

The soldier tightening the bandages to save the man asked in a strained voice, “So they simply won’t save these people and want us to collect them as corpses instead? That way there are no wounded, only martyrs. Is that it?”

The other soldier fell silent.

The first soldier let out a sharp, cold laugh. “A replacement metal plaque for a martyr’s merit. Something those officers can buy wholesale for less than five cents, and they think that’s worth a human life?”

His questioning grew stern, but there was a sob buried in his voice. “Guy, the corpse lying on the ground was eating with us yesterday. Sleeping with us. Collecting bodies with us. Writing letters to his mother and his fiancée. Do you think a martyr’s plaque is worth his life?”

“...I don’t think it is,” Guy answered sadly. “But Alex, this is war. The value of our lives isn’t decided by us. Even our corpses are not ours to control.”

Alex finally released his hands, which were trembling from exertion. He collapsed to the ground and murmured to himself, “...Yeah. This is war. Isn’t this exactly what those high-and-mighty officers want? Corpses that can attack.”

“No emotions, no value, not even a need for life.”

The blood had stopped flowing from the stumps of the corpse on the stretcher.

He had been dead for some time.

Guy held the dazed Alex and let Alex’s head rest against his shoulder. “But there are no corpses like that in this world. So we are humans fighting a war like corpses. We shouldn’t have humanity anymore.”

“Alex, don’t have feelings for other corpses anymore. It’s too painful.”

Alex gripped Guy’s shoulders tightly, buried his face there, and sobbed without making a sound. “I can’t, Guy. I can’t. I’m not a corpse.”

“I can’t stop feeling sympathy, doubt, hatred, and love.”

Alex’s face was streaked with tears. Through Guy’s bloodstained shoulder, he looked at the corpse on the ground—the blood-covered body whose face could no longer be recognized—and asked in a daze, “Guy, do you think that if corpses really could move and fight forever the way those people want, then no one on the battlefield would ever be wounded or die again? Would they only need body-collecting soldiers like us?”

Guy stroked Alex’s hair and sighed, as if he thought Alex was being foolish. “You won’t even turn twenty for another month. These aren’t questions you should be thinking about.”

“What you should be thinking about is how to survive on the battlefield.”

Alex lowered his head against Guy’s chest.

Then he suddenly looked up, wrapped his arms around Guy’s neck, and kissed him.

Guy was not shocked by Alex’s action. Instead, he yielded and leaned back onto the bed, letting Alex kiss him in a frantic, delirious attempt to vent his emotions.

It seemed this was not the first time this had happened.

The two men stripped off each other’s bloodstained clothes, staring at one another with ragged breaths for a while. Alex seemed to be suppressing and restraining emotions and desires he should not have. He braced himself above Guy, his waist trembling.

He knew that doing this was wrong.

But he no longer knew what was right.

Sensing Alex’s resistance this time, Guy, who was lying on the bed, raised a hand to cover his own eyes. He tried to keep his tone light, even faintly teasing.

“Hey, kid. Relax. Everyone has a proper way of using condoms. Tom in the next tent can use up ten boxes of Mars condoms in a month at the brothel in town.”

“We’re just doing this...” Guy paused. “Just like going to a brothel, understand? Of course, it’s not exactly the same. It’s just that neither you nor I want to go to a brothel, so we use this way to vent...”

Alex still kept his head lowered and said nothing.

“God!” Guy suddenly cut himself off.

He lowered his hand and stared blankly at the blood-spattered ceiling of the tent, murmuring in a daze, “What am I saying to you... Alex, you’re still a child.”

“You shouldn’t be in this place, doing this kind of thing with me at a time like this... I’ve corrupted you. God will punish me.”

Guy tried to push Alex off him.

“Then God should punish me too.” Alex lifted his eyes, red from crying. “Because I only want to do it with you. I can’t control it. I can’t imagine doing this with anyone except you.”

“You are the only person in this place who makes me feel that I’m not a corpse.”

“I love you, Guy.”

Alex pushed the stunned Guy back down onto the bed.

They rocked violently on that simple, steel-framed little bed, as if they might turn into the corpses beneath it in the very next moment.

Spades, who had been concentrating on listening to the main plot only for it to suddenly shift into an adult channel he could not understand, looked bewildered.

“...?”

Bai Liu, who had also been focused on the plot and realized halfway through what was about to happen, fell silent.

“...”

So Guy and Alex were actually lovers.

Although Bai Liu had read many strange research reports and knew that, in certain harsh and special environments where women were absent, the proportion of male homosexuality would sharply increase.

It was not because these men were necessarily born liking men, but because in such cramped, high-risk environments, it was difficult for them not to develop a special dependence—something beyond friendship—on comrades they faced day and night and entrusted with their lives.

The most direct manifestation was that, in environments like this, many men would be inclined to form intimate relationships with the men around them, including sexual relationships.

So Bai Liu had anticipated that he might encounter such a situation in this instance.

He simply had not expected it to happen under these circumstances.

The steel frame at the foot of the bed shook violently, occasionally knocking against the back of Bai Liu’s head as he watched with calm eyes. With only a wooden board separating them, the small tent was filled with fierce entanglement, panting, and all kinds of erotic words.

If Bai Liu had been alone, he would have been perfectly capable of shamelessly crawling straight out from under the bed.

But... once a certain someone’s presence was added to this kind of situation, everything became...

After confirming that small movements would not disturb the two people above them, Spades leaned close to Bai Liu and asked in a low, serious voice, “Is what they’re doing related to the main plot?”

Bai Liu turned to face Spades and said calmly, “Not very. At most, it explains the relationship between these two NPCs.”

“Why are you asking?”

“Oh.” Spades nodded as if he understood. “So that’s how it is. Just now, when you heard that Alex was about to put it into Guy, I felt you tense up a little and try to move away.”

“I thought it was something closely connected to the main plot, and that you wanted to listen carefully.”

Bai Liu: “...”

Spades looked at Bai Liu in confusion. “? Why did you turn red?”