Indiana M. Pasta

Moving on from her encounter with Alger, Alice goes to the War Archives to detail the history of Naib's military service, including why he left.

The files obtained are short and almost useless: Naib had "deserted in cowardice" during the war. It is only through the archivist's help that she finds another clue: a comrade nicknamed "Gunner."

"Gunner" was another deserter, around the same year Naib left. Naib had left in combat, while Gunner abandoned his post. The only two in their mercenary company to do so.

The archivist recommends Mr. Hawkins, a quartermaster from the Gurkha Corps that may be of assistance. When Alice mentions Naib to him, he is shocked, then laughs, fondly reminiscing on Naib's skill as a scout. But that wasn't the only notable thing about him.

Naib once had a partner, none other than Gunner, who was a sniper that aided him during scouting. Almost a year before Naib deserted, Gunner did. His motive was war-weariness. Many of the other mercenaries coped through the horrors with cruel jokes and numb humor, but Gunner couldn't. Every shot he fired took a life. Naib tried to convince him otherwise, reminding Gunner that their salary was for their families. But Gunner remembered every shot. So he quietly left without his friend.

Naib changed his mind a year later and followed Gunner's footsteps. Why? The English had manipulated the Gurkha Corps, praising they were better than their fellow locals, promising decent pay, while giving them a fraction of an English soldier's salary. But most soldiers ignored this open secret so they could ignore the horror of war that followed it. Most. Not Naib.

Naib had loathed the inequality but would uphold it for his family and his people. Only for the war to change and Naib, now partnerless, to be given a kukri. Now he had to take a life a day.

The campaign? A pacification campaign. The English tasked the Gurkha Corps with "pacifying" native soldiers, dispossessed landlords, peasants and grain porters forced to bear arms for the first time.

Naib could not stand this, writing in is diary, "The Gurkha blade can never be turned against one's own countrymen."

So instead, he walked into battle with nothing but his bracers. He was punished for cowardice and quietly left afterwards.

Alice ends the letter with mixed emotions. Naib had sacrificed so much for his mother but, to remain true to her and himself, he had to sacrifice everything with desertion. Then, he would have to travel to a foreign country that exploited his own, where he would send letters promising his safety, pretending he was still the war hero.

Naib's Seventh Letter provides a disturbing new context for his war trauma and for the tragedy of Game Nine.

Here, we lean more about Naib's war trauma and how he slowly lost the few connections he had among his comrades. We already knew of Alger, who lost his leg and was disqualified from the military (Naib Sixth Letter), but now we meet Gunner, who abandoned his post in disgust. Gunner, who dealt in the trade of lives, could not stand how many of his comrades could treat it like it was merely another trade. He is already forming a foil to Alger, a soldier who was discharged for injuries. In a way, moral objection is treated like an injury, but one inexcusable, the same way shell shock couldn't be comprehended. The idea that both moral and psychological trauma are inexcusable injuries persists across Identity V. They are seen as indicative of a physical and mental weakness, the same way a disability is among the social Darwinists.

Alice's blind spot for trauma continues. In spite knowing Naib's motivations for remaining in the military, she assumes he did not "understand" the meaning of guilt or human cruelty until the Gurkha Corps were tasked with killing Naib's own people, something we've known has haunted him since his Eleventh Deduction.

Alice has an incredibly romanticized, distanced perception about war, no doubt compounded by Naib and Alger's race. Naib's hesitancy to Gunner's desertion was due to not comprehending the weight of war, but comprehending it too well. He knew the cost of leaving, how it impacted his family, how it impacted himself. He carefully weighed the cost of his soul, until the cost was too great, and he sacrificed any hope of material or social gain for morality's sake.

Naib's act of pacifism adds a tragic element to his life in England. We know from Alger that he had to go into a grim life to make ends meet (Naib Sixth Letter). Sure, they were not his countrymen, but he was no longer in war, either. They were not combatants. Though he took great effort to save his people and make his moral character known, to survive in a foreign land away from home, where he was yet again a brute in the eyes of the English, he had to embrace exactly what the army tried to carve him into. Some of these tasks we know, such as Naib searching for Murro (Murro Seventh Letter), though, we all know how that turned out.

Speaking of, in Game Nine, too, we saw Naib kill, lie, and trick his way through a Manor Game of players who could've seen him as a friend or ally, out of the idea that he was nothing more than the monster from the war that he was though to be, that he thought himself to be. In his mission, one that he thought would allow him to return, he lost himself (Naib Third Letter).

Naib put a grand trust in beliefs: dignity, honor, patriotism, that others saw as mere poppycock. Part of his tragedy, alongside succumbing to internal turmoil, unable to break free of what others saw himself to be, was that even after Game Nine, others saw him as someone who didn't "understand" turmoil, didn't "understand" compassion.