After that, I don't have enough details to really matter. Every few hours, I'd hear gunshots at various distances. It wasn't until the second day out of the cave that I started to set up ambushes and traps out in the woods of the island, not that I knew it was an island at the time. I don't remember how I got food and water at this point, but I do know I didn't go hungry or thirsty, and did still need to eat and drink. Having not done so for two days in the cave at the beginning wasn't fun.
Anyway, ambushes. I'm not sure exactly why no one had thought to use them before, or if they'd tried and failed, but I started coordinating ambushes on the gunners. Rather than using mob tactics to run out their bullets, we'd have scouts figure out the direction they were walking and find a good spot to hide, usually up in trees with thick trunks at first, to ambush gunners and kill them before they could shoot once.
It didn't always go well, and my ability to coordinate has never been that great, so people quickly took the role of coordinator from me and I just became another random soldier, who just happened to start the assassination program. I'm not really sure what we called it. If I named it, it was probably dumb, as my ability to name things has never existed. I'm not one to call things by their real name, most of the time, anyway, so I probably just called it what it was: Ambushes.
Many people died. We didn't have any training in anything we were doing, so scouts often died before they could get information back to us, or people failed to hide well enough, or hundreds of other failures from our inability to perform our tasks. I, personally, never got shot anywhere, but some of my ad-hoc team members did. We didn't have defined squads at this point, so I don't remember anyone from these early days, but around half our ambushers died, and a little less than that for our scouts.
Ultimately, our absolute losses were less than using mob tactics, but we had a higher percentage of people die at first, which made some people uncertain about our operation. We still didn't have any base of operations, yet, so we didn't exactly have anyone to complain to beyond each other, so it wasn't really an issue. Those that lived did better at their job and got used repeatedly, when they could be found, and it wasn't long before people had our jobs down enough to not just fall over and die. Probably three weeks. I forget and keeping track of time was not a priority when a new group of three gunmen would seemingly apparate out of nowhere every hour or so.
Point being, in the grand scheme of things, we went from a slightly more than 50% mortality rate using ambushes to under 20% in just a few weeks as people became competent at what they did and specialized rather than just doing whatever they felt like. It got to the point that we were able to actually organize stuff that wasn't surviving and killing.
Construction of the first houses was very shaky. We didn't have real tools, all out axes being battle axes instead of wood cutters, so we quickly gave up on wood cabins and just made stick, leaf, and mud stuff for a long while. I don't remember it raining the first few months, so it wasn't a big deal, but we were able to have our own little houses, even if they were pretty bad.
With a town starting, we had better communication lines put in place. We were more organized, but raw organization wasn't able to get the mortality rate below 15%. I don't remember the exact figure, but it was somewhere between 15% and 20% of people still died when they went out to deal with gunmen. Other small tows were put up in other places, as well. Wherever people felt the need to consistently camp became a small town that gained its own communication network, with communications between towns about what was needed and stuff.
We eventually got stable enough to start giving people proper training. Well, as proper as a group of teenagers who had only ever seen combat for a few months could do. Maybe a year or two. As I said above, keeping track of time was not a priority and wherever we were was somewhere that basically didn't have seasons, at least not ones large enough for us to have a defined winter and summer. I assume being on an island helped with that. I've never actually looked up the mechanics of that. Luckily, it wasn't too hot or I'd have died pretty quick. My body has never been good in the heat.
Given how long I'd been doing what I'd been doing, I was one of the better ambushers. Others were better at hiding and various people had more reasonable weapons to hide with, but I was the best at both hiding with and using greatswords for ambushes, so I gave some pointers to newbies who wanted to also use greatswords. It wasn't an official teaching position, nothing was really official in any capacity yet, but I'd help my allies between ambushes.
At this point, ambushes became routine enough that there's not much of a point to describe them unless something unique happened. It would just be padding to extend the story beyond what's really needed to get the point across. I don't really remember the people I met around this time well enough to write any conversations, anyway, so I'd just be, in broad strokes, describing setting up and executing almost identical ambushes hundreds of times.
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But there is one more important one. It was around year 3, maybe 4 or 5 I don't know, that I slipped up for the first time during an ambush and got caught in the side of the stomach. I hid well, wasn't seen until I'd come out from behind cover. The lead of the three gunmen walked past our ambush spot, into range of our furthest man and the second in line had just entered my visuals, so we engaged like we usually did, since up until now, we'd not had reports of these three walking any significant distance from each other. I decapitated my target, only feeling a slight bump from my edge alignment not being perfect to go between his vertebrae without contact, but good enough to go all the way through just fine.
Our closest man was supposed to take on the third, but they were too far back. For whatever reason, he'd lagged behind significantly compared to what reports said, so our closest man didn't have visuals on him when I popped out to kill the second. He got a shot off on me before the closest popped out and ran to finish him off. I don't know what was hit, beyond somewhere on my lower left side, but it took me out for a long while. Luckily, non-lethal. I don't remember what troubles I had during recovery, but I was taken to some other town where people had built up supplies for medical stuff. They distributed stuff, sure, but they had the biggest stockpile of medical stuff.
Some enterprising people had figured out how to get log cabins made, and being such an important town, this place had the most of them. I was taken to a small cabin up at the top of a small hill and to my surprise, my nurse was the first person I recognized from real life. A friend from before the isekai, not that that term was widespread enough to be the name we used for what had happened to us or even known by me at the time, who I'd gone to church camp with. I tried to talk to her pretty much as soon as I got there, but she didn't remember anything from before her being transported to this hell island, which was a fairly common thing. It was the minority, but you'd be hard pressed to go a day without seeing someone who had been memory wiped.
While she took care of me, I filled her in on what little I knew of her life from before. After the however many months of recovery it took to get back to full capacity, I decided to stay stationed here, since a friend was here. We talked a bunch and became close. I even moved in with her in her little cabin at the top of the hill and helped out occasionally with injured people that were brought in, if I wasn't out on assignment when they were brought in.
As far as I remember, I never had another major issue like that again. If I did, it wasn't as important to me as meeting my future wife and have forgotten it.
At this people, log cabins were becoming the norm. More and more people were beginning to survive, rather than die in their first few hours on the island, so our population was booming, even if it was actually only a few thousand of us across the whole island. It was also at this point that it actually became common knowledge that we were on an island. Up until now, I just figured we were somewhere in, like, central South America or something, though I guess, looking back, we didn't have the bug problems we would have had if we were.
We also started actually keeping track of time, so I can have more accurate - if still inaccurate because of memory inaccuracies - time spans between events. My future wife and I began dating, officially, a little over three months after time started being tracked to any meaningful degree. Beyond the guy at the beginning, she's the only one I remember to any real degree, and even then, my old age at the end had my memories fading and my real brain doesn't spend all day thinking about my time on the island, so my memories have faded significantly.
But she was great. I miss her, a lot. I usually keep myself busy enough to not think about it, but when I have nothing to do, or when a song hits just right, I can get pretty sad. Not having her around hurts, even more so when I know the reason her real self pushed me away was because I confessed to her. This is more after the story of my time on the island, but fuck it. I want to write about this now.
I didn't mention any of this to her, but after I confessed my love for her back in the real world, she stopped hanging out with me. Heck, she stopped going to church camp altogether just to avoid me, so I stopped going to avoid making her uncomfortable and unwilling to go to an event she obviously loved going to. It wasn't until recently I worked up the courage to reach back out to her and she confirmed that that was the reason why and told me to not contact her again. It hurt, but it's been years. I'm not sure I'll ever get over it, but I'll live. I miss her a lot, especially the version of her I actually married. Her real self and I were good friends for a few years, but I never knew her real self as much as I did my wife.
She was great. We didn't spend every waking hour together, since I had the duty to deal with the gunmen and she had the job of healing people. After I think two years of dating, we officially got married, not that there was really anywhere to document it or any reason to. We had three kids I can't remember very well anymore. Them moving out was really bad for my ability to remember them into my real life. I do remember that my youngest, a daughter I can't remember the name of, once told me to not die when she was little and I had to go out on an ambush. Not sure why I remember that so vividly.
She was standing behind her mom's leg. This was the first time I'd been called on after she'd been born, and while explaining what I had to do and that I could die, she told me, "Don't die," and ran up to hug me. One of the few events I remember in detail alongside the first few days.
I also took up proper teaching for greatsword ambushes in town. For many, many years I was the best in my weapon of choice, in terms of ambushes. They set up duels and tournaments and stuff for melee-on-melee combat, and I wasn't very good. I was more focused on the actual job that needed to be done and didn't compete beyond the first few. I probably couldn't teach anyone anything anymore, but I'd always have a group for decades. I gave it up when I was somewhere around 60. 30 years of proper time had been tracked, anyway, and there had been around 5-7 before then.
