Ironwood

[Trigger]

9: Lectures
I am in the lobby, on one of the chairs in the corner, and I have nothing to do.
The front desk took everything I had, bloody clothes included. The only thing the man behind the desk gave me in return was a phone. That, and the uniform, are the only things I seem to own.
I’ve never owned a phone. Never had a need. Few people do. Information querying can be done at terminals at home, and talking to people… well, not many people needed to talk to me.
The phone is a thin rectangle with rounded edges. The rectangle flexes if I put my strength into it. One side is textured for grip. The other side is smooth and touch-sensitive.
The thing has very few features. It has a call and text feature, a notepad, and a library of documents.
Not one document in the library stands out as something I should read first. I’m certainly not in the mood for literature. So I ate, and now I sit here in the lobby, waiting. An hour early, I am here simply because I have nowhere else to be.
A gray room, with features that are purely practical. It’s cold and bland. And I wonder why.
Within minutes, I am joined by two others.
“Axe?”
“Panoply. And?”
“Lanceford.”
I stand to greet the two. They are the two recruits that came from military families, those that are already Refactored.
Before anything else, I approach Lanceford and offer a hand. He shakes it readily.
My name is odd, and so is his. By all rights, I should be named Axe, and he should be Lance. The suffix has a specific significance – we are both the eldest children of our households, and default successors.
Some families don’t go for this naming convention. Rampart Hydro has no decorative in his name, simply because his parents didn’t want to use it. But the families that to use it are making a statement – “this child is to handle things if we die”.
Lanceford is a tall, skinny teenager with a receding hairline and oddly large eyes with telegraphed focus. He stares without any shyness or concealment, and does not avoid a return stare.
He’s wearing the Night Legion’s black uniform and insignia. Panoply is wearing the Flame Legion’s colorful outfit.
I am in the dark red of the Blood Legion.
“Axe, why’re you here?” Panoply asks.
“Turns out, I’m Refactored.”
“Turns out?”
“Orphan. Today has been a day of discovery.”
“You never bothered to check who your birth parents were?”
I sigh, and sit down on the lounge chair. “Yeah.”
Lanceford sits to my right. Panoply plops down on the chair opposite me in the circle of waiting chairs.
I don’t want to vent to strangers, so I decide not to.
They, however, disagree with my selfless silence.
“Have you ever watched movies about the military?” Lanceford asks.
“A few.”
“Remember the one where they put a blanket over a sleeping guy’s head and beat him with soap-weighted socks?”
“Vividly.”
“And all the recruits always despise each other.”
“Every time.”
“You might get some of that. But the two of us were born and raised in the Legions. I swear to you, neither Panoply nor I will fuck with you. Any advice we give will be genuine, and we will keep what you share to ourselves. And we expect you to do the same for us.”
This comes from nowhere, and hits for effect. I sit, processing that for a moment.
“You’re willing to burn effort on me because I’m Legion by birth?”
“In large part, yes.”
“See, that’s the issue,” I finally snap. “I went my whole life without caring about the people that conceived me. They made me, and died, and that’s it. Now they’re suddenly all anyone cares about. Why am I skipping Refactoring? Legion parents. Why did Blood Legion want me? Legion parents. Why am I getting help from you? Legion parents. And all these parents ever did was pop me out, give me an edgy name, and then chose to go off and die. I don’t even know why it pisses me off so much, I know I sound like an utter asshole, but it all makes me so wildly angry.”
“First of all,” Panoply says, “You’re recovering from shock. There are remnants of the drugs they ran through you in medical. You have a fever because the Refactoring refresher is kicking in and your genetic code is being re-written by a massive viral infection. And you’re undergoing the biggest change of lifestyle you’ve ever gone through.”
I blink at her. Right. Good point.
“Second,” she continues, “the Legions share one philosophy, and it’s that we don’t die for anything. We die because of mistakes. We die because we are killed. But we don’t die for anything. When a soldier dies, it’s an error, a mistake to be corrected, not a sacrifice to be made. So however they die, your parents didn’t die for a cause – they died because of a fuckup.”
Lance’s eyes snap to her. “13 years. Blood legion. Fuckup.”
Panoply frowns back at him. “The Burning. Must be.”
The two turn to me. I listen in silence.
“One of the greatest hits the Legions ever took was 13 years ago, when an orbital warship opened fire on the Blood Legion. The nation responsible no longer exists. The skies are now under Black Fleet’s total control. You’ll hear more later.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” I mutter.
“Thirdly,” Panoply continues. “Did you write home yet?”
“To my family?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
She points to the front desk. “Go there, and ask for mailing. Write to your family. Lance and I will think through what we need to tell you.”
I manage a smile, and get two fist bumps out of them.
“Thanks.” I stand. “I’ll be right back.”
They begin to whisper as I leave.
To my request, the front desk hands me a pen single piece of thick paper – a telegram sheet.
I stare at the sheet, suddenly realizing in horror that I am in trouble.
My parents will ask the Guards for details about anything I write. The Guards will realize that my recruitment process is non-standard – instead of spending months at Central undergoing Refactoring before being accepted into a Legion, I am immediately being recruited and assigned. The Guards will come to the inevitable conclusion that I am already Refactored. They will find out about my blood parents. They will learn that I am going to the Legion that killed them.
Will the Guards explain this to my parents? They have no reason not to.
So, how to handle this. Lying? Not a good idea. Omission?
Let’s try that.
I address my parents, my siblings, and Cat.

To Ironwood Estate, Ironwood Terr., Northern Reach, Valley.
Mother, Father, brothers and sisters, friend,
I have been accepted and am now being processed.
I’ll be too occupied to write for a while. I will try anyway.
All is well.
Axeford Ironwood

The back of the telegram card has a picture on it. It’s the under-construction megastructure beside the Central Palace. The text under the image says ‘Central, Throwing Ourselves At The Sky: Orbital Launch Accelerator, To Be Completed in 665.’
So that’s what that monster of a structure is.
I hand the card over, and watch it get thrown into a box of other mail. Nodding to myself, I return to my fellow recruits.
The two have their phones out. They both offer them to.
“What’s this?”
“Get your card.”
I pull the phone out of my chest pocket, and offer it out.
The two touch their devise to mine. Screens blink as names and addresses are added to my empty contact list.
“Neat.”
“Now, listen,” Lance begins. “While your body is undergoing modding, you won’t have time to do anything by eat, sleep, shit, and exercise. But afterwards, when your body stabilizes, you’ll be given some choice in what you do with some of your spare time. This is very important – do the absolute most difficult electives you are offered. It’ll suck. You’ll suffer. But it’ll be the best thing you can possibly do.”
“How do I know which electives are easy and which are difficult?”
“Green, yellow, red. Swimming, running, strength training – green. Impact hardening, pain control, adrenal control, joint development – red. Everything will be labeled.”
I nod. “Fine. What else.”
They keep talking, alternating speakers. I open my phone and start filling my notepad. They talk about very practical matters – what to do, and what not to do. I don’t question it. They were born into the Legions. Even if they’re only now joining as recruits, they’ve seen this process all their lives.
An hour disappears.
“You will change,” Panoply explains, tirelessly talkative. “Your personality, your mannerisms. Your body will settle into a new an unfamiliar chemical balance. It’s critical to understand that that’s what’s happening, and to actively work through it. It’ll be a lot like being a teenager again, with all the new hormonal and adrenal changes in your body making your mind work differently.”
Beside me, Lance stands up. Panoply glances behind herself, and follows to stand. I mimic them.
The Blood Legion appraiser walks across the lobby. The cast is gone from her hand. Pushing the doors open, she steps out just long enough to look around, then tuns back inside and walks up to us.
“Names, recruits.”
“Lanceford Night.”
“Panoply Flame.”
“Axeford Ironwood.”
“Cards.”
We fumble out our phones, and offer them to her. She taps her own phone against ours. My screen flashes with the word ‘ORDERS’.
“Recruits Night and Flame, make your way to your respective Legions. Figure out your own way. Recruit Ironwood, your life will be more boring – you’re traveling with me. Questions? Night and Flame, dismissed. Ironwood, remain.”
Panoply and Lanceford turn, and walk out of the lobby and into the evening.
The Blood Legionnaire watches them leave along with me, waves for me to follow. “After me.”
Outside, we wait on the stairs to the gray building.
I wait. The Legionnaire yawns.
I’m tempted to ask questions, by my gut tells me she’s not open to chatter, no matter how bored she looks.
“Ah.” The Legionnaire suddenly starts down the stairs. I follow. A lone man walks out of the traffic – clearly a Blood Legionnaire, and one with an obvious leg injury and a crutch.
Without a single verbal greeting, the two bump fists.
“Rest well.”
“Will do,” the man replies.
I follow the woman as she heads for the bus station. Our destination is clear, and I’m entirely unsurprised when the bus drops us off by a train station.
The train’s destination plates read “Blood Legion”.
Settling into a cabin, we sit in silence until a few minutes later, the small passenger train drifts into motion.
Finally, the Legionnaire guiding me speaks.
“I was 5 meters from your mother when she died.”
Here we go again, I think. I can’t help it.
“We are very difficult to kill,” she continues, and I believe her. This woman, even through the loose uniform, is an obelisk of muscle with no consideration for aesthetic. Only her face is recognizable as clearly human - the rest moves like an assembly of hydraulic pistons. Her survivability is not under question in my eyes.
“Very, very difficult to kill. Your mother was hit directly by a Direct Feed beam from orbit. I was 5 meters to her right. Lost an arm, and a leg, and half my face and torso. I never knew Ironwood could burn.”
She looks away from the window.
“You will be getting preferential treatment from me. From many people, really. Because we all feel guilt, even a decade later. But you will hate us for this, because our guilt will manifest in very painful ways, for you.”
I grind my teeth. This morning, I learned that my birth parents were Blood Legionnaires. Since then, they seemed like the most important people in the universe. Except that all they did was make me, name me after a geometric quantity, and die. I know I’m on shock and in drugs, but hearing the Legionnaire before me speak just fuels the emotion. I don’t care about how much sense the anger makes – I’m just angry.
I am not permitted to remain illogical and unreasonable.
“Your response to this information has been anger, from beginning and until now. Do you understand why?”
“Drugs and shock.”
“Then listen. Listen, because unlike other military-family Recruits, you lack the knowledge that comes with being raised in the Legions, and you’ll be playing catchup. Yes, you are currently in lingering mental and physical shock. Yes, your body is still processing the drugs you were given in processing. But we have determined that it is in your nature to react as you are reacting now. And the good news is that your aggressive automatic reaction was largely what made you a viable Legionnaire candidate. You’re responding to shock with anger, and this is very useful.
“So, here’s your first lesson. You must always be extremely self-analytical. If you are angry, you must know exactly why. If you are stressed, you must comprehend every single factor causing you stress. If you can’t sleep… you get it. You must not let emotions just happen because they feel good, not without fully comprehending their source. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Then demonstrate. What was making you most nervous in the interview earlier today?”
I blink, then close my eyes. My mind blanks, so I open them again and look through the window, at the city flashing past.
The Legionnaire reaches over and turns off the cabin lights. We are left sitting opposite each other in darkness.
“Before I was… notified of my lineage, I was most concerned about the political officer.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t going to lie if asked about my loyalties.”
“You dislike the Central government.”
“In the same way I dislike shitting. It is an unfortunate necessity that must be controlled and kept to a minimum.”
“So you said before. And you hold this opinion because you were, in school, shown the failings of governments in history, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You were, then, taught about the Valley’s system of governance?”
“Yes.”
“And did you think what you were taught was a lie?”
I frown. I’m starting to understand. I know what she’s talking about, and I knew these facts all along. But I did not understand.
“You knew this intellectually, but you did not comprehend. The Legions do not exist to defend the Valley. For that we have the Guard and the Black Fleet. The Legions exist to:
“First, hold a sword to the governments neck, and to sever it when needed.
“Second, to maintain peak practical combat readiness and relevance.
“Third, to apply military force beyond the Valley’s borders where it benefits the Valley.
“Fourth, to serve as a template in case of war.
“The political officer was there to veto fanatics and extremists. To create psychological pressure and to trigger reactions that our equipment could register off of you. But they were never there to weed out anti-government sentiment.
“Because the first, core mission of the Legions is to overthrow the government when and if we deem it necessary.”

[Trigger]

10: Blood
About half an hour into the Legionnaire’s lecture, my eyes glaze over and my mind blanks. There’s only so much information that a Human mind can take in and process in a day, and I reached that limit back at the gray building.
The Blood Legion soldier sitting opposite of me catches my inattention instantly. I am not berated or told to focus. I’m simply given drugs – a pill with familiar effect.
I was wrong. The Human mind is a magical thing, when high on mental accelerators. I am filled with clarity – Crystal clarity. For a minute I work through the last hour of lecture, re-processing and re-absorbing it, before focusing on the Legionnaire.
She begins to speak once more. About the changes I will be undergoing. About the possible assignments I may be given. About the Legion’s history, and the history of all the Legion’s. She seems to have well-defined curriculum in her mind that she’s going through. In the darkness of the unlit cabin, I stare out the window, and listen as she speaks on and on.
Then, suddenly, I wake up. The door to the cabin is open, the lights are on, and the Legionnaire is shuffling in with two trays in her hands.
“Woah.” I take one of the trays form her, set it on the wall-table, and rub my eyes.
She begins eating, without a word. I down the glass of water on the tray, and begin to eat as well. Potatoes, meat, vegetables, bread, cheese, egg. I do not discriminate. I am wildly hungry, just as I was the last two times I ate, back at the gray building.
I’m also sweating. My uniform is soaked. As I eat, I keep having to wipe sweat from my stinging eyes.
“Something’s wrong,” I finally say once the food is gone. I hold my arms out before me, watching sweat drops form on the skin.
“Go to the dining wagon, and drink as much water as will fit into you,” the Legionnaire orders.
I stand, sway, and walk out. In the hallway, I look right, then left.
“Left,” comes the word from the cabin.
I shamble off to the left.
Crossing through the tunnel between wagons, I enter the chow wagon. It’s too early for many people to be awake, and I am left alone as I begin to drink. And drink. And drink.
Judgy would be impressed. She drinks like this too, after a day of work. Like the horse, I take in water like nothing is more important in the whole world than the next gulp.
I realize I have a terrible fever. My skin burns to my own touch.
Suddenly, I want nothing more than to be back home, in my bed.
I shuffle back to the cabin, mentally blank. A bed is all I want.
As I walk, I catch a glimpse of light in the darkness outside the train window. We’re passing tall structures that are only defined, in the night, by signal lights.
The row of towers passes by as I watch, still.
When they’re out of sight, I shamble back into the cabin.
“Did you see the towers?” the Legionnaire asks.
“What were they?”
“Surface-to-void Direct Feed cannons. Part of the Ring. The Legions are at the centers of layered fortifications that start hundreds of kilometers away from the actual fortresses. We’re well inside of this Ring, now, which is why you see the guns.”
“Are these Legion or Guard assets?”
“Guard. Legions do not handle defense. But we to use the Guard’s provided security for bases.”
“If we, Legions, move to perform our primary directive, will the fortifications turn against us?”
“No,” se says simply. “Because every Guard has served in the Legions, and has, alongside us, been tested in real combat. The difference is that for Guards, it’s enough to have killed and have been shot at once to qualify. At the Legions, we wage war constantly. Every deployment, Guards join us for their trials, and then leave. For them, it’s often their one and only true battle in life. For us, it’s a work week. But thanks to this, we have an understanding. And when we move, they will not obstruct us.”
I’m tempted to ask a question I immediately recognize as stupid. If the Guard won’t resist an overthrow of the Central government, why must the Legions have strength? But of course reality won’t be as convenient, and a government that needs overthrowing will almost certainly build up military strength to preserve itself.
The Legionnaire pulls out a device, and clips it onto her card. She leans over and presses the flat edge of the device to my forehead. Her card beeps.
“Good fever,” she concludes. “You’ll be done in a day or so.”
“This is the Refactoring update?”
“Yes. Once the viral infection is settled in and working through you, we can move on to the next stage.”
I nod, and slump.
“Sleep,” she orders.
“What is your name?” I ask, my eyes closing.
“Violence Blood. I’m a squad leader.”
“Sometimes I question our naming traditions,” I mutter.
“Why?”
I can hear myself slurring. “I’m named after a tool and a type of tree. Your name is about as edgy as a blender. What does one have to look forward to in life, when they’re named after what they should be?”
“And yet the tool is joining the Legions. And I have an expanded adrenal gland because I struggle to get a good anger and adrenalin response in combat.”
I finish slumping into a horizontal position, and curl up, suddenly shivering. I feel horrible.
“Why ‘blood’?” I whisper, half asleep.
“Because we can bleed more than any other force in the world. We are very hard to kill, Axeford. And when we do die, we shed ten drops for every one of ours.”
I fade out.
After what feels like no time, I am called away.
“Axeford.”
“Mmm?”
“Look outside.”
I sit up, and look out the window.
We departed at 28,00, an hour after sunset. Now it’s 02,00 – the depths of the night.
The train is at a surprisingly steep incline. Dark shapes rush by. The only light is from the planet’s ring – reflected light that’s barely present so close to the equator.
When a section of tunnel engulfs us for a few seconds, I realize we’re coming up a mountainside. The dark shapes outside are peaks and ridges, vast yet near the elevating train. The train tracks have been blasted into the slopes, through stone and onto bridges, making for an even and linear incline. There was no change of transport between the base of the Valley and these mountains – the same train aims to take us all the way to the Legion.
Then, suddenly, there’s light. We pass through what seems oddly like a castle wall. There are buildings behind it. The untouched mountainsides are suddenly replaced with carved out shelves, and stone balconies covered in structures. Snow covers the roofs and land.
The buildings disappear out of sight, but the purity of nature never returns – scatterings of artificial terrain are scattered between the clumps of structures. Quickly enough, the train is rushing past an ocean of structures.
It’s unlike any city I’ve ever seen. Layers and layers of walls separate the slopes and mountaintops into isolated segments. The buildings are carved into the slopes, with walkways built over vast canyons. Everything is brightly illuminated, even at this time of night.
Gray structures, snow, electrical lights, stone bridges, metal towers. It all grows and intensifies, until finally the train slows.
We glide into the second-largest train station I’ve ever seen. Like at Central, the tracks split into countless parking spots. We divert to the passenger station, but I see dozens of cargo loading stations and parked cargo wagons off to the side.
“Why is all this in the mountains?” I wonder as we walk down the train’s hallway towards the exit.
“It’s near the border, and no one else wanted this land. No point taking up good Valley space where people can farm.”
“This seems costly to build.”
“It was. But there are benefits. You’ll see.”
We step out onto the passenger platform. I see a few others are leaving the small train, but largely the cabins seem to have been empty.
The air is terribly cold. I realize I’m short on breath – we’re high enough that I struggle to breathe. My fever is back to boiling my skin, and it revels in the cold. My clothes freeze instantly.
I look around, but there’s little to see – it’s a massive logistics station built into the side of a mountain, and barely anything is visible beyond it, save for tall comms towers.
I spot someone, though. He’s short, clearly military-modified, and visibly old. He stands nearby, watching us.
Violence heads straight for the old man.
“Violence.”
“Old man.”
“Brought us a recruit?”
“Axeford Ironwood.”
“I’ll take over from here. Go, your squad has been bored.”
Violence glances at me, and marches away.
I watch her go, then turn to the ‘old man’.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello, Axeford,” the old man says with a smile.
“I am at a disadvantage,” I note.
“My name is Blood,” the man says.
I panic. Flat out, on the spot, I freeze in place as my mind locks up.
My mother’s name is Ironwood. No first name. She was the direct successor of the Ironwood family, with my father marrying into it. The matriarch before her was Ironwood, and the patriarch before that was Ironwood as well.
Before me stands what I can only think of as the supreme commander of the Blood Legion, and the patriarch of the Blood family as a whole.
My lockup is resolved by own exhaustion. I close my eyes.
“Patriarch, I have no idea what the protocol here is.”
“Not to worry, it’s all quite casual here,” he assures me. “Come on, let’s get you washed and warmed up.”
He’s not wearing more than I am, I note. His unmarked uniform is just as light, yet he seems unbothered by the cold.
Blood leads me off the train station and across one of the bridges to a nearby slope. I get a good view of the surroundings – the buildings themselves are never more than two floors tall, except they go down into the mountain they’re on, and are stacked in terraces on the sleer slopes. The density of the city is wildly deceptive – it feels like a village, but is in fact a metropolis.
“Like the view?” the Old man asks.
“It’s beautiful.”
“More so in the day. Though you may get tired of the nature after we start running you through it every day.”
I group of four fully armored Legionnaires marches past us. For the first time, I see Legionnaires in full gear, and I slow to stare.
Guards wear armor on their bodies as a second skin – an exoskeleton that locks onto their bodies directly. But it turns out that armor is light – at least compared to what I see now.
The four look like they are their armor. They don’t wear it – they are it. With every move, plates move as if skin. There is no noise, no clatter of plates as Ironwood slabs glide over one-another.
And that is what the armor is made of. Ironwood, shaped and petrified into a wildly complex fibrous alloy.
Their feet to not crash against the stone of the bridge – their footsteps are silent except for crunching snow. There is no heft or weight to their motion, despite the gigantic weapons on their shoulders. The weapons are large guns that reach up way past the tops of their heads like flag poles. One of them actually has some sort of flag flapping on their riffle’s barrel, well overhead.
Their helmets are all sharp edges, like the bows of seagoing ships. The visor slits are numerous, yet narrow and entirely opaque to my eye.
Seeing the four walking tanks makes me see some contrast. The vast majority of all the people I’ve seen on this base so far were not military-modified. The people working at the train station, the people walking on the terraces ahead – most of them are normal people, not the chiseled forms of artificial muscle like Violence or the Old Man.
“How many combatants are there in the Legion?” I ask.
The Old Man’s eyes glance back at me, a different color now than when I first saw them.
“We are roughly 10,000 combatants. But, of course, for every combatant, we need 20 supporting. Engineers. Workers. Builders. People who construct and create and enable. Good people. They do a lot of good work. The Legions can’t exist without them, just like the Guard can’t exist without the Valley’s towns and people. They’re the ones that built this city. We just live here.”
“What is this place called?”
“The whole city? We call it Home. Those not from the Blood Legion call it the blood pit. Do you really like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I repeat. “I’ve lived my whole life at the base of mountains, but I’ve never gotten to really go far into them.”
“I’ve seen your profile, from the recruitment,” Blood says. “I really could not be happier with your family. They’ve raised you well, and you genuinely love them. I’m so glad.”
“You knew my parents, too?”
“Not well, not before they died. I’m the one that decided to send you to that orphanage. We don’t like to raise children here, you know.”
“Why not?” I’m all out of anger, and now I’m just genuinely curious.
“What possible prospects do you have, if you grow up in the Legion Home, surrounded by it, seeing it all your life? Almost every child would join.”
“That’s bad?”
“Very. Axeford, do you know how the Guard works?”
“Roughly. Cells, families, right?”
“Guards are deeply truly invested in one thing – the protection and wellbeing of their home and people. They protect. They guard the flock. There are filled with genuine rage when something threatens their territory and town. They live in pride that by holding their bunkers and patrols and installations, they guard the others and each other. Each anti-orbital gun in the Valley, each fortress and bunker is a Guard family whose pride and business is maintaining their installation, so that if danger comes, they are ready. And of course they raise their children to be Guards too. And that is well, because it makes for a kind and committed defense force.”
“And the Legions?”
“We exist to kill, Axeford. We go out to destroy, to crush, to do harm. We do not protect the Valley in any way that matters. You are here to see he world, I know that. You will see it. You’ll see the dirt and horror that exists outside the Valley, and you will help set some of it ablaze, because that is now your job. We do not do menial work. We do not spend time cooking or cleaning. We spend all of our time getting better at killing and destroying. That’s why we need so much support. And that’s also why you were accepted into the Legion, Axeford.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Your response to stress was anger. You were mentally ready to throw hands with the interviewers, to punch out that political officer if it came to that. Not consciously, but your physiological responses were all there.”
“I’m here because I have anger issues?”
“Not anger issues. You… Sorry. Understand something, Axeford. I did not come to meet you because of your parents, but because I meet every recruit we get like this. Despite how it seems, you will not be treated differently because your blood parents died here. And no one will claim that you belong here because of your heritage. So please to not take it as a pun when I say that you have a very focused vector you develop under stress.”
“A vector,” I repeat.
“It’s a term we use. A feeling, a concept. A direct line that must immediately be pushed to secure victory. You realized you were stuck in life, so you broke out to join the Legions. You were pressured in the interview, and your response was to turn into a razor – you were utterly focused in that interview. If not for that performance, if not for those responses, you would not have been permitted into the Legion. Understand?”
I am filled with relief.
“I understand.”
“Though you did get a bit of favoritism from Violence!” the old man suddenly laughs. “Did she tell you she had to fight the Black Fleet appraiser for you?”
“She did not.”
“What do you think about that?”
“About what? Joining the Black Fleet?”
“Not joining, in this case.”
The idea is so absolutely alien that is brings no emotion.
“Going to space? I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Many young people dream of it,” the Old Man says. “You saw the accelerator at Central, right? In a decade, the Black Fleet will be a real powerhouse. We’ll all be dirt-bound scum compared to it.”
“So we adapt,” I say.
He smiles. “Good thinking. This way.”
We’re on the terraces now, walking up and down stairs, past the windows and doors of various buildings. There’s a familiar scene behind the windows we stand beside – it’s a gym full of Legionaries.
“Go in, shower, and trade in your uniform. I’ll wait here.”
“Isn’t it cold?”
“Go,” Blood repeats.
I open the door and go inside.
Legionaries are working at weight machines. At the ring in the center, two men are beating the lights out of each other with punches that sound like hammers.
I walk past it all, and into the changing rooms in the back. Here I pause to watch what the others do.
There’s a machine here that seems to issue uniforms. Dirty uniforms are thrown into a bin – underwear, socks, pants and tunics, everything goes into the endless pit beside the issuing machine. I catch people tapping their Cards against the issuing machine, and realize the size of the uniforms issued is selected that way.
I strip, throw my frozen clothes into the bin, and walk into the showers.
As I steam under the hot water, I can’t help but glance around at the Legionaries showering in the open space around me. None or inordinately tall, but each one looks like an anatomical model of a body builder, without skin, and with all the muscles woven out of steel. The skin covering them seems transparent as their muscles roll around under it.
The women have no breasts. The men have nothing hanging between their legs. The only difference between the genders is the faces, and a barely perceptible difference in proportions.
Having showered, I plop my way out through the air dryer and back into the changing room. The machine beeps when I tap my Card against it, and a folded stack rolls out into my hands.
I dress, and walk back out through the gym.
The Old Man doesn’t look even mildly cold. He leans against the railing overlooking the canyon we occupy the slopes of. At my approach he turns, and smiles.
“Better. How’s the fever?”
“Still burning up,” I confess.
“I know it sucks,” the Old Man says, “but, well, it’ll only get worse.”
I laugh. For the first time in what feels like weeks, I really laugh.
“There it is,” the Patriarch smiles. “It’s the only way to get through hard times. Find reason to laugh.”
“Where are we going?”
“Supplies. Are you memorizing the way?”
“Trying to. A bit of a maze, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. Go in there, and ask for bedding.”
I do as I’m told. A man checks my Card, then hands me a sack – a pillow, a blanket, and sheets. He also hands me a rolled-up mattress that I stuff under my free arm. It’s large and awkward, and I struggle to pry the door open on my way out.
“One more stop,” Blood says.
We end up having to travel a good distance now, using a small tram that connects clamps of buildings through the mountains and coves.
The station we get off on is immediately odd. It’s well-lit but empty. The plaza beyond is a flat circle carved out of a mountain peak. There’s a strange pyramid of glass at the center.
“Give me that,” the Old Man says, taking my bag and mattress. His fingers are inhumanly strong, rigid, and hot to a point where even my fever-heated skin burns at their touch.
“Go in there, tell them you’re there for a pickup.”
I march across the wide plaza, to the pyramid. Two Legionnaires in full armor stand at the entrance. They do not move as the doors open before me on their own.
Inside is dark, yet oddly cozy. At a table at one end of the sparse space sits an elderly woman.
“I’m here for a pickup,” I say.
“Card,” she says, standing. Her posture is straight, and her uniform is identical to my own in everything but cut.
I hand her my card. She scans it at her terminal, looks at the screen for a long time, then leaves the room.
She’s gone for a few minutes. When she returns, two metal featureless cylinders are in her hands. She hands both of them over to me.
“What is this?” I ask.
She looks up at me, then points at the cylinders. I look at it, and realize that I am wrong – the thing does have features. It’s a line of text.
‘Arma Blood’.
There’s only so much I can take in a day, and I decide to count this moment as a continuation of the day that started with my interview. I don’t need to read the other urn’s inscription, but I do anyway. ‘Lance Blood’.
Great. Excellent.
“Thank you.” I walk out.
Blood waits with my bedding in hand.
“Why?” I ask.
“They don’t deserve to be in that cold place, not when you’re here. Come on, we’re heading to where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”
“Barracks?”
“No. Not yet at least. You’ll see.”
We get on the tram. I hold my blood parent’s ashes. The Patriarch of the Blood Legion holds my mattress and sheets. It’s the 2nd of the week.
For a while, I sit in silence, processing as the mountains and buildings pass by outside.
“Are you looking to get married?” Blood asks.
No event or question can surprise me right now.
“Not particularly.”
“Well if you want to meet some real ladies, visit the Shield Maidens when your mods settle in. Very strong and beautiful women, I’m sure they’ll like you.”
“What do they do?”
“Heavy infantry. Same as the Heavies, just with a different aesthetic theme.”
“We go for aesthetics here?”
“Oh, ho-ho, you don’t even know. You know we’re named the Blood Legion, right? We have a theme, and every squad and every battalion has a personality, and even every squad and soldier has a style they develop. It’s all about having personality to channel your will. Looking good is important!”
“Right. Hmm.” I consider. “I haven’t seen any tattoos.”
“Our skins don’t hold them. But you don’t need tattoos to look unique. We do that with your mods.”
“Right,” I remember. “Because aesthetics matter.”
“It’s good you agreed to the cosmetics right away,” he says. “It’s easier the sooner you do it, and you need it.”
“I do, don’t I?”
“If you want to interest the Shield Maidens, sure,” the Old Man chuckles. “But, listen carefully young man. No matter what, before you go after one of the ladies, make sure to add her as a contact with your Card and check her profile.”
“Why?” I ask, confused. There’s any number of reasons that I can think of.
“We’re one big family. Many times, that’s literal. Both your parents are from Legion families. Anyone you meet here might be a blood relative of yours!”
“…Thanks,” I say, genuinely. I hadn’t thought that through. It makes sense – by blood, I am from the Blood family. Any woman I meet here has a good chance of being a cousin to some degree.
“Come on,” the man says, getting up. “We’re here.”
This is clearly some sort of residential district. The slopes are still steep, but the buildings are spread out as if for privacy. The buildings are no longer stone either, despite being built atop stone foundations at often go dozens of meters downwards, parallel the cliffs. These are log cabins that seem no different from normal homes of various sizes, except that they’re built where only high-altitude trees should grow.
We walk up and down passages, past cabins and homes. When Blood stops, it’s unexpected and sharp.
“In here,” he turns his head at the cabin we stand before.
It’s near the ridge, overlooking the chasm from as high as seems possible to build. It’s a sizable yet compact cabin, with its back end seemingly sinking into the stone. There’s a chimney, some sort of large side-shed, and a row of large windows.
All the windows are covered up with shutters and nailed shut.
“This does not look like a military barracks,” I note as I break through the waist-high snow towards the doorway.
“It’s not. Those on their 2nd decade of service can get one like it. This is a family-sized one. Your parents worked hard for it.”
“Right,” I grunt as I reach the door. “Whole lot of killing to be done to get a place like this, huh?”
“More than you can imagine.” The Old Man sidles through the passage in the snow behind me.
I reach the door, set down the cylinders, and clear out enough snow to pull the door open. It pings at my Card, and I pull the heavy wooden thing open, careful not to knock my blood parents over.
Inside is dark and utterly cold. The lights flicker on reluctantly.
“What’ve we got for heating?” I ask, setting the cylinders down on a dust-covered table.
“Fireplace,” he tils his head. “Dust off a spot for you bed.”
I find a broom, wet it, and scrub out a spot large enough for the mattress. The Old Man lays the mattress out, then drops the bag atop it.
“Give me that,” he says, taking the broom. “Go start a fire.”
The fireplace is central to the house, with all the rooms except the bathroom and closets getting at least a corner for the stone column. It is the stone heart of the house, and without its warmth, the entire building is frozen solid.
I throw in wood that’s so ancient it splinters on impact. Equally ancient matches barely light as I get a fire going as well as I can in my current condition. I pile in wood until no more can fit, then close the metal door to the fireplace, and finally look around.
This home had never been lived in. Maybe someone cleaned it out, but to me, it seems like it had never been occupied for long anyway. I roam around, noting the suspiciously empty room left of the furnace. The room to the right of it has a bed, and was clearly the bedroom. The little 3-room cabin seems to have almost no history – just age, and dust.
They did not own it long before dying.
When I get back to the bedroom, the Old Man is finished with the broom – the wooden floor is clean, and so is the lone cabinet in the room. The empty bed has the thin mattress on it. Even the bed’s footboard and headboard have been dusted off. It’s a thorough job, and I am impressed.
“Make your bed, and sleep,” the Old Man says. “Tomorrow, by 18,00, be at medical for a checkup." He offers me his Card, and I tap it. The screen of my Card flashes with orders.
“Understood,” I respond to the official tone.
“Good. Sleep,” he repeats. “Welcome Home, Axeford Ironwood.”

[Trigger]

11: Motion
I feel no urge to laze about in bed when I wake up. I used to like to do that – to just lay there, looking out the window. But the windows here are boarded up, the room smells wrong, and the house is still cold despite the furnace’s overnight efforts.
A resolution settles in my mind as I get up. I will not be a banal personality defined by complexes about my parents. Yes, I am of Legion blood. Yes, I will be treated differently for being a war orphan. All I can do is let it roll off of me.
“Good morning,” I say to the two cylinders sitting on the dust-covered table in the main room.
I realize I have some time. I need to be at medical by noon, and it’s still only 10,00. 8 hours to burn, yes, but there’s also plenty to do. First, adding fuel to the fireplace, lest I freeze to death. Then…
What did Violence say about introspection?
I focus on what I’m feeling. There are two pressing issues, and one ancillary emotion. Issue one, the house is in a terrible state. Issue two, I’m hungry. Ancillary emotion, I’m deeply excited to go outside and look around in the daylight.
Time to start the day.
First, inventory. I need to clean the place, and for that I need tools. There’s a door in the main room leading to the side-shed. I unbar it from the inside, and step into the abandoned workshop.
There’s almost nothing here. Not even basic tools. There’s a mop, but it has been eaten out and turned to dust long ago.
It’s also cold here – the workshop is insulated, but further from the central fireplace and receives little of the heat.
I go back inside and begin to rummage. There’s really almost nothing of relevance – some jewelry, some medals, and a scattering of weapons that clearly don’t belong to the Legions. Nothing useful.
For a minute, I warm myself against the raging fire in the fireplace, building up heat. Then, I step out of the house.
The path I carved through the snow yesterday is almost gone to the win and snowfall. I shove my way through and onto the narrow cliff road, and look around.
Woah.
The sun rises to the left. It shines into the canyon between the mountain ridges I’m on. It’s one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.
It’s also really cold. I look back, noting the number on the house. Then I turn down the road, to the tram station I arrived on before.
As the tram carries me to he nearest center of civilization, I tap away at my Card. There’s a list of things I need, the first of which is a warm coat and gloves.
I get off at the same town that issued me bedding yesterday. It’s the only supply point I know of.
The supply station is a lively place, with several counters handing out items to lines of Legionnaires and support personnel alike. I get in line.
“Next.”
I inhale as I stare at my Card.
“Oh for the- tap here,” the clerk interrupts.
I tap my Card against his terminal, transferring the list over.
He frowns at his screen, then looks up at me.
“What is all this for?”
“I came into possession of a cottage yesterday,” I explain.
“Huh? You’re a Recruit?”
“Yes.”
“The cottage is your parents? What, did they quit the Legion and leave it to you?”
I consider. “In a way, I guess.”
“What the hell do does that mean?”
“It means they died about 13 years ago, and the house has been sitting abandoned since then. I arrived tonight, and need to clean out 13 years of dust, and un-board the windows.” I point at his terminal. “That’s what that’s for.”
“Oh.” The clerk’s dementor warps from contempt to seriousness. He taps away at his terminal, clearly verifying the story. “Address… I see it here. Have you eaten?”
“No?” Now I’m confused.
“Go have breakfast. Come here.” He gets up from behind the counter, wand walks to the front of the supply station. Stepping outside, he points across the chasm and the bridge crossing it. “See that big row of windows? Great buffet. Go there, eat, then head home, I’ll meet you there. Go.” He slaps me on the back, and walks back inside.
I am left standing alone on the narrow road.
Calm, Axeford. Be calm. Let it flow over you.
I head for the buffet.
It really is a good place, and stuffed to the windows with people. There are actually tables and people eating on the balconies outside, and on the roof of the building. How they tolerate this cold, I do not understand, but I suddenly remember that I forgot to ask supply for a coat.
Yet again, I eat as if I had been starved for weeks. I take in more food than I’ve sometimes eaten in a day. The menu is bland, but I like it that way. There’s even dessert – pastries with jam inside.
“Recruit?”
I turn to look at the Legionnaire.
“Yes?”
“New here?”
“First day.”
He sits down at the table opposite me. He’s in full armor, his helmet hanging on a hook on his belt. His rifle settles against his shoulder. As he grabs his fork, I note the effortless ease with which he controls his armored hands. There’s no awkwardness despite the full plated shell covering his fingers. Somehow, he maintains traction and perfect control of the metal fork.
“What’s your schedule today?” he asks, and begins to shovel food.
“Medical at noon… that’s all.”
He rumbles through his food, chewing.
“What?”
“That medical trip will take you out of life for a dozen weeks or so. Be ready.”
“The mods. Right.” I begin to eat, thinking that over.
“Right,” me mocks. “Listen, it’ll be the worst few weeks of your life, especially towards the end. So listen, and listen well. When they tell you to run a kilometer, you run two kilometers. If they tell you to carry a rock, and you think you can carry two, you carry two. And if you stop moving, you best start moving. No laying down, no sitting, you hear?”
“I understand,” I obediently agree.
“You fuck this up, and you’re totally done. If you slip up, your body will fail, and the whole process will get aborted, and you’ll be discharged in a snap. Also! Don’t be afraid to use your new lymph nodes, adrenal and hormonal glands, and all that other fun stuff. Your body won’t let you overdose, and the more you use them, the better they’ll develop.”
“How do I use my glands?” I demand. “Make myself panic?”
“It should feel a bit like… like flexing every muscle in your body, just a bit. Might be different for you, though. You need to find the feeling and make it familiar.”
“And I should use them as often as I can?”
“You ever date a girl with a stronger sex drive than you?”
“Uh, no.”
“You should feel like you’re perpetually drained of any ability to generate anything with your body. All the time. The more you maintain that state, the better off you’ll be in the long term.”
“Right.”
We eat in silence.
“What’s your name?” the man asks, standing with an empty tray.
“Axeford. You?”
“Brace. Good luck.”
“Thanks.” I stare at my empty tray, then stand and go for seconds.
When I make my way back to my cabin, I find it entirely transformed. The snow has been cleared off of the narrow front yard. The windows have been cleared of boards and nails, with the nail holes neatly patched and painted over. Some of the windows seem distinctly new.
When I open the front door, it does not creak. I smell oil.
Inside is a squad of people armed with brooms and mops and vacuum cleaners. The table has a neat row of likely empty air cans. The refrigerator and cabinets are opened and emptied out. Someone’s legs are sticking out from under the sink. Three people are scrubbing way in the bathroom. The fireplace seems to gleam around thoroughly filled and patched cracks.
“Legionnaire,” someone says, and all eyes turn to me.
“Holy shit,” I say.
They laugh and smile.
“Uh, supply,” I say, addressing the man from the supply station. “What do I owe you?”
“It’s what we do,” he says, leaning on his mop. “Look, this would’ve taken you days to work through.
I vigorously nod. I had no idea what I was getting into, but seeing the amount of work they’re doing puts the project into perspective.
“Right, you’re better off using those days on what matters. Leave things like this to us, especially if it’s time-consuming. You’re about to be really busy anyway.”
“Right. Right.” I nod. “Wow. Thanks everyone. I really appreciate it.”
The single-syllable cheer that hits me sounds like an angry exhilaration more than a word. It’s somehow coordinated and simultaneous, and makes the windows shake.
I nod and close my eyes, fighting some strange emotion.
Right. That’s what I forgot. I look around and spot the two cylinders on the table. The table is clean, but the urns are where I left them.
What did Patriarch Blood say? They don’t deserve to be in the cold?
There’s a flat shelf on each side of the fireplace, just under the ceiling. I grab the cylinders, stand on a chair, and set the two down on the warm stones overlooking the room.
“Why there?” the man from supply asks.
“It’s warm there,” I explain.
The sudden quiet that appeared with the question vanishes as quickly as it came, and the cleaning continues.
With so many people in the three-room cabin, it’s cramped beyond belief. I realize I’m in the way.
“Go to medical,” the man suggests. “They’ll take you early, I think.”
“Should I?”
“Go.”
“Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Plan Clerk. We’ll finish up, and I’ll stop by to check on things while you’re away. I’ll see you around. Go, son. And… good luck.”
Now I’m properly emotional. I take his hand and look him in the eyes.
“Thank you,” I repeat, with all the emotion my voice can fit.
“Go,” he says a third time.
I go.
My Card has my orders, and the address – Recruit Center, Medical. To get there, I have to change trams twice. Fortunately, there’s not much climbing to be done.
Recruit Center occupies an entire segment of a mountain ridge. It’s a series of structures and fields carved out of stone and flattened for human habitation. It’s surprisingly close to the edge of the Legion base, with nothing but slopes and forests off into one direction.
I follow my Card’s direction through the Recruit Center, and into Medical.
“Name?”
“Axeford Ironwood. I’m early.”
“DOC!” the front desk shouts. “RECRUIT’S HERE!”
The doctor is a tall, thin man in all white. Even his gloves and boots are white. He glares down at me.
“Arm.”
He stabs me with a big needle – right there in the entrance hall. He then retreats to a terminal in his open office. I try to follow, but get shouted at.
After some staring at his screen, he sighs.
“Your fever is down, and your blood shows almost full conversion. Good enough. Come with me.”
Instead of going further inside, the doctor leads me outside. The Recruit Center is a building wrapped around a central plaza – an exercise square with a track around the perimeter. Here, I get my first look at the other recruits.
I am repulsed, and I am horrified.
“This is your last chance to back out,” the doctor says. “Become a clerk, or a support engineer, or an armorer, or a cook. Become anything but this.”
Under the cross-armed state of a uniformed Legionnaire, four recruits run around the track. Though, not run. They shamble, and they hobble, but they do not run.
They seem to have no muscle or fat. They are hairless skin on bone. They can’t weigh more than a three dozen kilograms – not with so little on their bones. Their uniforms sag and flap, finding nothing to hang on to.
These four look like they can barely move – and yet they drag themselves around the track, sweating and heaving. If they’ve eaten anything in the last week, it doesn’t show.
“So it’s almost a full ‘ship of Theseus’,” I mutter.
The doctor jerks and looks at me.
“Skin, muscle… bones?”
“Bones,” he confirms. “And cartilage. And most organs. You will be shitting out your bones, sweating out your skin and fat and muscle, and throwing up your lungs and guts. Your eyeballs will peel like sunburnt skin. Your eardrums will fall out. Forget about hair – your genitals will disappear completely until they regrow in their new configuration.”
“How often do you have to do surgery to untangle the new growth?” I wonder.
“…What did you do before coming here?” the Doctor asks.
“Lumberjack,” I say.
“Ironwood… bioengineering?”
“For trees,” I confirm. “First time seeing it on people.”
“You are a biologist, and yet you still want to do this?”
I nod.
“To answer your question, yes, surgery almost every day. Your cardiovascular and muscular systems will need to be re-arranged as it grows back in.”
“Right.” I watched as one of the Recruits collapses. I fully understand what’s going on, now.
“Well?” the Doctor asks.
“I’m ready.”
He reaches into a pocket, and pulls out a big round pill. I take it from him, and look it over. There’s a lot of text on it, and I catch a glimpse of my name and citizen number.
“This is it?” I ask.
“This is it. The Fundamental Pill. It’s your next 10 years of suffering, and it’s an extra 10 years added to your lifespan.”
I’m surprised at that. “Life extension?”
“We don’t advertise it. But by joining the Legions, you do not lose 10 years of your life. You serve 10, and you gain 10 more.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Eat it. Now, where I can see.”
It’s large, and hard to swallow. A nurse brings me a glass of water as I choke the thing down.
I wipe my lips, and look at the doctor.
“Your Card.”
I give him my Card. He taps it with his own.
There are no new orders. But the Card has a new timer. A timer for 587 million, 792 thousand seconds.
A 10-year timer.
“Go,” the doctor says, pointing out to the exercise square. “RUN!”
I break into a sprint.

[Trigger]

12: Decomposition
I run out onto the exercise square. The soldier overseeing the four Recruits takes one look at me, and points at someone off to the side.
“Take him.”
Another Legionnaire steps out of the shadow to wave me to him. I re-direct my run to him.
“Uniform off.”
As I strip, the man opens a box. He pulls out a stack of thin circles, and begins to unceremoniously slap them on my body. When he’s done, my torso and limbs are speckled with dozens of the white circles. They stick to the skin, though without any recognizable glue such as tape would use.
“Uniform on.”
I dress.
“Run with me.”
The man is in full armor, and as we break into a jog, he snatches up his gigantic rifle. I can’t say much about the gun – I don’t know anything about firearms. All I know is that it’s much too large.
He’s not taller than me, but he must be double my weight – and that’s without the armor and weapon. In gear, he leaves visible dents in the ground behind him.
Yet he is silent, and utterly graceful in his run. I marvel at the elegance of his motion, and immediately feel the inadequacy of my own body.
I began to pant.
“You have heard the threats and disclaimers.” After minutes of jogging, he’s not even winded as he speaks. “Now I will provide a different kind of motivation.
“Over the next five weeks, you will lose all your fat and muscle. This will happen whether you exercise or not. In five weeks, no matter what, you will be a skeleton with skin on it. This is an inevitable consequence of the Fundamental Pill you just took. You did take it, right?”
“Yes,” I pant.
“Good. Now, what this means is that you’re on a five-week timer. You have five weeks to accomplish one critical task. Five weeks, to build a foundation for the body you will build afterwards.”
He slows his jog, then comes to a stop. I double over.
“Pushups.”
I go down on all fours.
“One. Your body will no longer build up muscles. Two. You will not grow stronger as you work out. Three. Every day you will lose muscle. Four. No matter how much you exercise and eat. Five. Every today you will be weaker than yesterday. Six. However! Seven. You will instead build what we call cord catalysts. Eight. Pathetic. Get up.”
I crawl my way off the ground and stand before him.
The man reaches for his neck with an armored finger, and pulls pack the tall skintight collar of his undersuit, exposing his neck. The neck is a weave of those unnatural Legionnaire muscles that looks like steel cords.
“I do not have a single normal muscle in my body, and neither will you. Instead, we have what we call cords – a designed, engineered, and modernized form of muscle. They have incredible power density. They can generate electric potential. They permit conscious thermal control. They reinforce your cardiovascular system – including the heart – to a literally superhuman degree. They store energy in place of fat, and with a rapid return that no normal human can match. Run with me.”
I run.
“Cord muscles are originally grown around cord catalysts. Every catalyst you develop will become the core of a cord muscle group. At a bare minimum, you need one catalyst per critical group. If you manage that much, you will be able to become a Legionnaire. You will manage this. I will ensure it. I will not be responsible for another failure on our watch. I will not permit another cripple to be escorted out of the Legion Home.”
“However! There is opportunity here for you! If one cord catalyst is the minimum, then more is better. Much better! Developing several cords will result in several muscle clusters operating together. This is critical. With one cord, you will have the strength of a Legionnaire. With two, you will have double the precision of motion, double the dexterity, and double the fineness.
“Growing in new cords after Foundational modding is almost impossible. It would require another total regrow. It just doesn’t happen. So you have one chance, just one single chance, to set your upper potential.
“Your nature and genetics no longer dictate what your limits are. You will set those limits yourself. Right now. By doing this. Stop.” He points to an exercise frame. “Pullups.”
I jump up for a bar. One problem – I don’t do pullups. I never have.
“One. ONE DAMN IT. Stop.”
I release the bar, having failed to do even one pullup.
The Legionnaire pulls out a pill, and gives it to me. I swallow it without question. It takes a minute for the drug to kick in, but I recognize it when I feel it.
Liquid Fire. Woah.
“Pullups. One. Good. Two. As your body deteriorates, we will force you to work at the very limit of what you can possibly do in that specific moment. Three. The bio monitors you wear now will tell us exactly what that limit is. Four. It will overtax you. Five. To compensate, your withering body will grow cord catalysts. Six. The longer you operate at that limit of excursion, the more cords you will grow. Seven. However, as you will learn, the body is the strongest part of the human. Eight. Your mind will resist. Nine. You will want to rest and relax, instead of sweating and vomiting and suffering. Ten. Stop. Run.”
I can run again. The Liquid Fire surges through me. I feel light.
“We will not be able to force you to operate at that limit past a certain point. If we try, your mind will shut down, and you will go mentally blank. There is only one hope for you, and that is your own willingness to drive yourself. I will tell you what to do, and you will do it, until you feel you can’t. But you can. You can always do more. You just won’t want to. You’ll not want to so much you’d rather ignore me and lay down to die. It is up to you when that moment happens. Yes?”
“Yes!” I pant.
“Stop. On the ground. Crunches. One. What will your body do?”
“Lose muscle.”
“Two. And?”
“Lose fat.”
“Three. And?”
“Grow cord catalysts.”
“Four. How many cords catalysts do you want?”
“As many as I can.”
“Five. Why?”
“Fine control.”
“Six. What happens if you give up?”
“Skeleton.”
“Seven. That’s right, if you don’t grow enough cords, you’ll be an atrophied skeleton. Eight. We’ll have to re-modify your body back into normal conditions and then therapy you back to normality before kicking you out. Nine. You’ll forever be weak and feeble. Ten. You don’t want that. Get up.”
I never did sit-ups either. I didn’t exercise in general, beyond my physically exhausting everyday work.
“Right. You have pretty bad petrification. Stretches, then! Touch your toes. No, not your knees. No, not your shins. Toes. Here, let me help.”
“ARGHHH!”
We stretch for two hours. I’m given a light snack of some wildly high-energy-density kind, and then immediately forced to run again.
I curse our world, which has 36 hours in one day. I curse my body, which only requires 10 hours of sleep a day. I curse myself, for choosing to do this to myself.
Until midnight, I run, stretch, climb, lift, squat, and suffer. There are occasional breaks for small snacks, and for nothing else.
My mind blanks.
I am shocked out of my stupor when my instructor runs me into the showers, and orders me to wash myself off. I do this with great pain, then dress into a new uniform.
Without further ceremony, I am shown to the dorm. It’s a room of single beds. The other four Recruits are already here, sleeping.
My instructor points me to a bed. I lay on the sheets, close my eyes, and instantly pass out.
I am awakened in 10 hours by the same armored giant that put me to bed.
“UP! UP AND ABOUT! MORNING RUN!” he roars as I and the other Recruits roll out of bed.
I run, climb, lift, squat, crawl. I suffer, eat, and then, again, I sleep.
I wake up. I run, climb, lift, squat, crawl, vomit. I suffer, eat, then sleep.
I wake up. I suffer, eat, suffer, eat, suffer, eat, suffer, sleep.
I wake up. I suffer, then sleep.
I wake up, suffer, then sleep.
I suffer.
I suffer.

Panoply: You guys alive?
Lanceford: Fundamental training.
Panoply: No shit :V Axeford?
Lanceford: Does he know how to use chat? He’s from a village on the outskirts, probably never had a Card or phone before…
Axeford: Not an imbecile yet. Getting there tough.
Lance: Oh good - How’re you holding up?
Axe: This is the first coherent thought I’ve had in days. You guys are pulling me out of a stupor here.
Lance: Ohhh, exhaustion trance.
Pan: Axe, you need to do an inventory check. Talk to your instructor. Ask about your progress. If you’re under-performing, you need to panic and lock in.
Axe: Ok.
Axe: Are you two ok?
Lance: Fine, but we knew what we were getting into.
Pan: Same here. Axe, please make sure you’re on track.
Axe: Will do. Thanks.
Pan: Axe, did you ask?
Pan: Axe, if you read this, set an alarm to wake up early so you have time to answer us before your instructor gets to you.
Axe: Sorry. Keep meaning to reply but keep passing out when I get to bed before I think to pull out my Card. And slept through the alarm the first time I set it.
Lance: These timezone differences turn this into a letter correspondence, so don’t leave us hanging. What did your instructor say?
Pan: I’m past the minimum threshold for catalysts, going into the upper 50 percentile with my buildup. Glad you guys aren’t here to see me, I lost all my curves and charm.
Lance: I’m also in the upper 50 now. I lost my dick.
Pan: Axe, you may thank me my great wisdom and libido when we meet again. Without me, you would’ve gone into this without a final pleasant memory.
Lance: Oh did you two bang? Who initiated that?
Pan: Axe was very forward, I was impressed.
Axe: I miss my dick too. The instructor was really surprised I talked to him, he says I was blanked out for week now. He says I’m doing really well, upper 30 percentile on cord catalysts. All my normal muscles are all ripped up by overstretching. They’re making me do weird exercises so the under-developed groups can get more cords.
Pan: Axe in the upper 30 percentile? You sure you don’t mean in the upper 70?
Lance: That’s very impressive.
Axe: Upper 27th.
Pan: Screw you, locking in.
Lance: Outdone by a lumberjack. Don’t at me, I’ll be climbing a mountain till I catch up.

I smile at the screen, and pass out.
I wake up, I suffer. I sleep.
I wake up. I suffer. I sleep.
I wake up.
Up.
Up.
“Recruit Ironwood.”
“Here,” I whisper.
“RECRUIT IRONWOOD!”
“Here,” I whisper again.
“Look at me. LOOK AT ME.”
There is a spread of fishline-thin strings that engages to permit my head to lift. There is no muscle left in my back or neck. There is no muscle anywhere in me. I am bone, guts, skin, and a tangle of thin fishlines running under my skins.
I am a horror. There are no mirrors in the Recruit Center, and now I know why.
I look up at the instructor with eyes that are too decomposed to see.
“Recruit Ironwood, do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your favorite food?”
I consider, forcing my brain to move. “Sausages with spaghetti and cheese.”
“Good. Recruit Ironwood, you have no muscle or fat left. Your bones are almost entirely replaced. Your old skin is all gone, and new skin is growing in nicely. There’s nothing left for your body to digest or eject, and this morning’s blood sample shows the hormonal release that indicates post-Foundational modding. Your body can start cord buildup.”
I try to frown, but my face muscles and eyebrows are gone. I have no hair left at all, anywhere.
“What?” I whisper. Talking is hard. Vocal cords are also muscles. Or, they were, before.
“You’ve done it, Recruit Ironwood. You’ve made it through the first half of Foundational training. From here on, it’s all uphill.”
“I did it?”
“You did it.” The Instructor looks like he wants to put his hands on my shoulders, but he knows I’ll crumble under the touch.
“I can join Legions?”
“Once you rebuild? Yes!”
“I miss my dick,” I whisper.
“Worry not, for it will return to you! So let’s get started on that, and on getting your cords worked in. Your future is bright!”
“It is?”
“More than you can imagine, recruit. We’re all wildly impressed. By the final count and diagnosis, you are in the upper 4 percentile by cord catalyst count. You’ve really done well. Congratulations. You have been given a chance to set your limits, and you have managed to raise those limits well in the sky. Now, let’s get you worked up towards filling all that potential!”
“How?”
“Run!”

[Trigger]

13: Rock Bottom
The change in my day’s schedule and routine is violent and sudden. Five weeks of repetition have put me onto a mental railway. The change is derailing and disorienting, to a point of making me want to vomit.
I’ve done a lot of vomiting over the last five weeks. Not food. Never food. Whatever they feed me refuses to come back up. But I’m certain that throughout the weeks I’ve vomited out my intestines, lungs, and maybe my spine.
I’m run into the medical center, where I am subjected to intensive diagnosis. A doctor feels through my skeletal husk of a body. I’m told to breath from a mask and count to ten. When I wake up, I am covered in small scars.
The doctor explains that they had to untangle some of the cord catalysts, lest the cord muscles grow in all wrong.
I’m ordered into a steaming bathtub. Sinking into the water, I realize that water it is not – it bubbles and hisses as fall into it. I feel nothing, but the transparent liquid turns gray and brown as something dark seeps out of my body.
I soak for an hour. It’s the most motionless I’ve been in weeks, outside of sleep. I have so little mass that the heat from the water almost instantly digs into the very core of my reformed bones.
The flesh revels in the first moment of comfort it has had in much too long.
When later I’m told to extract myself from the bathtub, I find myself barely able to move. I’ve no muscle, and the cord catalysts provide too little strength to do anything well. I crawl my way out and up, then struggle to shower off and dress.
There’s another medical check, and then…
“Go home.”
“What?” I’m shaken to the core.
“You’ve got a cabin, right?” the instructor asks.
I do? Yes, I do. The cabin my blood parents killed to earn. The cabin I slept in once, a lifetime ago… Or maybe more than once – I probably slept there after I was born.
“Right. Yes.”
“Go. Sleep, eat, relax for a day. Day after tomorrow, be here at 09,00. Dismissed.”
He watches me as I jerk into motion, and shamble away.
My uniform has been upgraded with a warm overcoat. My body has very little thermal regulation right now, and the cold burns to my very core.
I make my way out of the recruitment center. I don’t remember where the tram station was – I have to find it by signs. From there, I have to check my Card to remember what my home address is.
The incline up the narrow cliffside road leading to my cabin is one of the most difficult hikes I’ve ever done in my life. I have to stop and rest every few steps.
“Hey kid!” comes a female voice from behind me. “Holding up?”
“Fine,” I heave.
“Did they just let you out of fundamental decomp?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice! Whose kid are you? I know you look all different now, but I don’t remember anyone down this road having a kid entering the Legion.”
Whose kid am I? How to answer that? And how to answer with as little breathing as possible, lest I collapse. Using my brain is still hard.
“Orphan.”
“Huh? Wait, are you Vector?”
“At birth. Axeford now.”
“Oh wow! Last I saw you, you were a little baby with big round eyes.”
I begin to shuffle again.
“I saw supply stopping by and warming up Arma and Lance’s place, I was wondering about that. What’s your cord score?”
“4th.”
“Percentile? Upper?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, you best eat well kid, then you’ll grow big and strong like auntie Dance.”
I stop and turn.
I try look up. It’s hard – I don’t have enough strength to leverage my heavy head.
“Holy shit,” I state.
Auntie Dance is roughly 2.5 meters tall. At first I think her uniform is unnaturally loose, but then she moves, and I realize that she fills out the oversized clothes.
Atop the titanic stature of muscle it’s a proportionally upsized head. The face is the only part of her that’s recognizably human – she’s young and beautiful to the eye, with fantastically large eyes. The aesthetic is limited to the face only – past the ears and jaw, her skin turns pitch black, merging color with her hair.
Aside from the face, she has no feminine features or proportions of any kind. Her shoulders and hips at just a bit too far apart, seemingly to accommodate the overturned diameter of her hands and legs.
At first I think she’s wearing leather gloves, or some kind of black undersuit. Then I realize that her exposed hands are pitch black, just like the neck.
She looks like she deadlifts horses for fun.
The Legions do not mess with human height, or so I was told. Why make people taller, when small size is more advantageous in a vast majority of cases? A small person can fit better into tanks, and presents a smaller target. Strength is something engineered with the mods we get, so why make people larger?
Clearly that logic does not apply to Auntie Dance.
“…What do I need to eat?”
She breaks out into a laugh. I realize that her beauty and her voice are engineered. She’s meant to look beautiful above the neck, despite the armor hardpoints implanted into her skull.
A gigantic hand lightly brushes my shoulder, careful not to topple me as a stiff breeze might. The woman walks past and up the hill, off on her way.
“Good luck, kid! I’ll come by to make sure you ate later today, ok?”
“Sure,” I whisper, watching her go.
My mind reels at what I see. Her height cannot be natural. So what is she?
I begin to shake from the cold, and force myself back into motion.
Finally, am before my cabin.
The path to the door is cleared of snow. The shutters are open. The windows are dark. A light trickles of smoke flows out of the chimney.
I stumble inside, close the door behind myself, and breathe in the warm air.
“Thank you, Plan.”
The fireplace is full of gray coals. The chimney is shuttered by a metal slide just beneath the celling, keeping the hot air and warmth in, and the cold outdoor air out. The thick stones of the fireplace are hot, full of energy after accumulating days of burning.
I look up at the two cylinders atop the shelf above.
“Hello.”
The cylinders sit silent.
Auntie Drance’s words come to mind. The woman will show up in my nightmares, I can tell that already. When a monster like that orders you to eat, you’ll eat.
The fridge is fool of packets – the same stuff they fed me at the recruitment center. My body can’t digest anything else right now, and these soft bricks are all I can manage to process without vomiting it back out.
I eat, shower, fill the fireplace with wood, open up the chimney shutter to let smoke out, and then collapse on the double-sized bed.
Outside the window, the winds rage against the cliffside.
The blankets are thick and warm.
I instantly pass out.
A knock on the door wakes me up. I shuffle to the front door, and open it to the cold.
Auntie Dance smoothly squeezes right on past me, without ever once touching me. She folds down to get through the door, then closes it behind herself.
“Did ya eat?”
“Yeah,” I yawn.
“Sleep?”
“Yep.”
“Eat more.” She sets down a stack of packets onto the table. They’re not a kind I’ve ever seen, nor anything I have in the fridge.
“Safe?”
“Your stomach should handle these just fine.”
As I sit at the table, the woman looks around. Her eyes lock on the cylinders on the fireplace shelf – they’re at her eye level.
“Ah, there you two are. Assholes.” She turns to me and points at the urns. “Your parents were assholes, did you know that?”
I watch her as I chew.
“It’s true. They only got along because they were both assholes of a similar degree. I once saw them go from screaming their lungs out at each other, to kissing, without a break in between. Never said a kind word to anyone in their lives. Absolute, genuine assholes.”
I glance up at the urns.
“Arma used to drive a tank. She’d use the big speakers to shout at Lance across the battlefield. I once saw Lance drop a full-on live skunk into that tank. Alright kid, I see you’re eating, so I’ll leave you alone. You have the day off tomorrow?”
I nod, chewing.
“Try not to get out or move too much, your body needs the rest right now.” She heads for the door.
“What do you do?” I ask?
“Charger,” she says. “You’ll see later. Sleep well!”
The door creaks shut behind her.
I look at that door for a long while. Then, I pull out my Card.

Pan: Upper 20!
Lance: 25.
Pan: Is Axe dead or is he just slow?
Lance: Remember how he’s built? It’ll probably take him an extra week to fully decomp.

I check the date, and realize that I’m a week overdue to graduate fundamental decomposition. Since taking that pill, a full six weeks had passed, not five. My friends are a week into recomposition, while I just finished shitting out my bones.

Axe: 4.
Lance: He lives! And he’s cracked???
Pan: You’re full of shit Axe.
Axe: 4.
Pan: This is unfair, you had an extra week to build up it sounds like.
Axe: Benefits of previous occupation. Built like a horse, mom said.
Lance: You’ll be a menace.
Axe: Guys, who or what is a Charger? I just met one, she’s a neighbor.
Pan: Neighbor?? Axe, did you inherit a house??
Axe: Cabin, double sized bed, nice fireplace.
Lance: There is no justice in this world.
Pan: I’m transferring to Blood legion. These perks are crazy. I want a cabin too.
Pan: We get to sleep in barracks, like peasants, while the lumberjack has a house to himself.
Axe: Hold on, Legion patriarch is coming up the road, be back soon.

I spot Blood through the large front windows of the cabin. I set my unfinished meal down, and shuffle at the door.
There’s a strange absence of shame for how I look right now. I am a ghoul, a starved monster to the eye, but everyone here has seen this before. They don’t care.
So, I open the door, and let the patriarch in.
“I won’t stay long,” the old man says as he steps inside. “I heard you’ve done really well for yourself. Well done, well done.”
“Thank you.”
“A bit of something for you, to start filling you up again.” He hands me a packet, then glances at the uneaten food on the table in the main room. “Who brought that?”
“Dancer.”
“Ah, the tall lass. Good, good.”
“Is she naturally that tall?” I ask.
“Ah, no. She’s a Charger. They have different rules. Don’t worry about that. Eat, sleep, relax tomorrow. Okay?”
I nod. “Will do.”
“Good lad.”
The patriarch leaves.
I sit back down before my Card and meal.

Pan: Chargers are absolutely insane, do not engage them.
Lance: What? Why?
Pan: They’re contagious. They make you want to be like them, which is suicidal.
Lance: I guess. But they’re easily the most interesting specialty in the Legions. They’re modeled to be psychological weapons just as much as direct combatants. If Axe met a lady, I bet he thinks she has the prettiest face he has ever seen.
Pan: True and unfair.
Axe: So what exactly do they do?
Pan: What did your patriarch say?
Axe: To eat and sleep.
Pan: Do that.
Lance: In modern ground warfare, peer armor makes you really survivable. Killing one soldier requires the focused concentration of a squad. It makes things very difficult. So, we have melee specialists. Chargers. They use that same survivability to close range, and to kill quickly with specialized melee weapons. Because of the nature of the job, they need crazy physical stature, and very unique training and capabilities. It’s also really hard not to make a legend out of people who run across a battlefield to vanquish a few squads single-handedly.
Axe: Knights?
Pan: Basically, if knights came with Remass rocket boosters and Direct Feed lances for weapons.
Lance: Eat whatever the Charger and your Patriarch gave you, first.
Axe: Why? More drugs?
Lance: Designer nutrition. It’ll give you a nice head start on recomposition.

I wake up. I realize I fell asleep at the table, before an empty packet of food.
Sitting up seems to crack every bone and joint in my body.

Axe: Sorry, passing out. Need to sleep.
Pan: Nighty night!
Lance: Don’t freeze.

I add more fuel into the fireplace, and collapse back into bed.

[Trigger]

14: Recomposition
I find myself deeply amused. Several people warned me to stay in today, to not move around a lot. Why? No force nor god in the world, short of orders, would get me out of the house today.
I eat, sleep, shit, eat, and sleep again. When I tire of sleeping, I force myself to move around the house a bit to warm up the body, then go right back to bed.
The urge to get out and explore is non-existent. This is the first day off I’ve had in six weeks, and my body needs it more than my mind needs to explore.
My Card provides plenty of brain food. Panoply and Lanceford are in the middle of their day, undergoing recomposition, so they provide no comedy. Instead I read the material available to me – history, manuals, basic doctrine.
I have to remember how to read. My brain is atrophied from weeks without use. This is the first time since I started decomposition that I have something to do other than physical exertion.
Dance visits twice.
“Are you on vacation?”
“Naw,” she says, “I just live nearby, and my dojo is just across the chasm. I make the hike to and from there every morning and evening.”
Across the chasm? I stand and walk over to the window. The chasm just outside my cabin? The sheer half-kilometer slope down, and another half-kilometer slope up to the opposing mountain ridge? That chasm?
“See that building? That’s where I spend most days. Come by when you’re up to it, I run Red Quals for all kinds of melee.”
Red Qualification, one of those things I had been warned to do, if I can manage it. Green Quals include, for example, the use of the rifle. Yellow Quals might cover electronic warfare module operation. You’re not allowed to fail Green Quals, and you are not supposed to fail Yellows. Red Quals are something that you both can, and will, fail, simply because it takes too much time, effort, and grit to pass.
“I will. What weapons do you use?” I’ve yet to see Dance in armor or with weapons of any kind. Every time she wears nothing but her uniform. She doesn’t even carry a rifle.
And yet as I watch her, I realize that she’s emitting a fine shell of steam as the air around her boils. And I realize that she probably doesn’t need a weapon to do what she does.
“Depends on what we’re fighting this week. If it’s a sub-peer opponent, we use planars. Against peer targets, Direct Feed lances. Either way, a lot of the time it comes down to breaking arms and necks, so it comes down to these bad boys.” She extends and flexes a hand. The limb audibly cracks. The loose uniform is suddenly tight around unimaginable muscles. Even through the concealing black tone of her hand, I see cords deform the skin’s texture.
“Planars? Why not use those against peer enemies?”
“Planars don’t work against our armor, or against armor hardened against them. We use Ironwood to stop planars, others have come up with other means. So if the opposition is well-enough equipped…”
“Ironwood doesn’t stop planars,” I note. “It’s the only way to cut an Ironwood tree – with a planar axe.”
“You’re talking about raw Ironwood. But Ironwood is magical in large part because of how well it absorbs micro-liquids. We petrify Ironwood with metals and ceramics and fibers, soak and harden it to make it into our armor.”
I frown, and nod in thought. Of course. This is how I used to get rid of Ironwood stumps – let the stump soak in a bunch of specialized explosive compound, then light it a day later and watch the entire root system turn to shards.
“Come to the dojo,” she repeats. “I’ll show you everything.”
She leaves, and I go back to sleep.
The next day I get up before sunrise, eat, close up the cabin, and head out. I can still barely move, so I give myself several hours of leeway to get to where I need to go.
My only side-stop is the dispatch center.
“Mailing,” please.
The clerk looks at me over the counter.
“First time sending from here?”
“Yeah.”
She smiles, and reaches for a box under the counter. I’m impressed – if faced with the horror that I am now, I would not be able to smile. But she doesn’t seem disturbed by my current state of degradation.
“Give me your Card. Give it every time you send mail. We’ll keep track of which telegram cards you select, so you don’t send repeat images.” She pulls out a card, and gives it to me.
I flip the card and look at the picture on the other side. It’s a genuinely well chosen shot of the mountains from one of the peaks, during sunrise. The ring shines from over the skies, reflecting morning sunlight.
“Thanks.”
“Yep! You can sit there to write.”
I sit with relief. My skeletal legs are shaking from the exertion.

To Ironwood Estate, Ironwood Terr., Northern Reach, Valley.
Mother, Father, brothers and sisters, friend,
I’m between what I can only call ‘medical conversions’. This is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to pick up a pen. I’m in the mountains, at the Legion Home. It’s beautiful here. Everyone’s very kind and welcoming. I think I’ll make it here.
All is well.
Axeford Ironwood

If they ask the Guards back home, they’ll assume I’m just out of Refactoring, about to start Decomposition.
I wonder if I can fool everyone back home forever. I’ll try.
“Thank you,” I tell the clerk. She reads over my telegram, and nods, throwing it into the outbound bin.
“Headed for Recomposition?”
“Yeah.”
“Good luck!”
I smile with closed lips, and nod. I don’t want to show her my toothless gums.
Time to move, again.
I shamble out to the tram station.
It’s 08,50 when I get into the recruitment center. It’s scary how close I came to being late. My body feels like it’s giving out after the mild amount of walking I’ve had to do so far. Somehow, I’m ravenously hungry despite having eaten 2 days ago.
I pull out the last of the packets that Dance brought me, and chew it down in the 10 minutes I have.
The Instructor catches me as I stuff the last of the bar into my mouth.
“Hungry?”
I nod.
“Did you eat well yesterday?”
I nod again, still chewing.
“Really? Well done. Most people can’t eat without orders after decomposition. Come on, let’s get started.”
“What’s your name?” I ask, standing.
“What?”
“I don’t remember your name, instructor. Sorry. I don’t remember much from the last few weeks.”
“I never told you my name. I’m glad you have your wits back, though, at least enough to ask questions. I’m Trench.”
“Why are you working recruitment, instructor?”
“You mean why am I your personal babysitter? I’m on medical and punishment duty.”
“Why medical?”
“I got shot by a tank,” he explains. “Dead center mass hit on my chest plate. Full body concussion. Got put on extended medical leave so I can recover.”
“Why punishment?”
“I got shot by a tank,” he repeats. “Not the brightest decision of my life.”
“Intentionally?”
“No, but I did try to do something stupid.” He sighs. “I saw a Charger do their thing, and sort of went crazy thinking I could do that too.”
“I met a Charger. She leaves nearby. Brought me food.”
“Which one?”
“Dance.”
He turns to me. “Listen, Recruit. Do not try to imitate Chargers. Don’t try to do what they do. They’re absurd. Be yourself, do what you’re trained to do, and when you start feeling a tide of motivation and inspiration at the sight of one of those maniacs charging across the battlefield, you stuff that feeling back down and don’t do stupid shit. Okay?”
“Yes, Instructor. How do you get a full body concussion?”
“Our armor is magical. It takes any high-velocity hit and distributes it across every hardpoint and surface area it can. Getting shot doesn’t even hurt – unless the slug is big enough. You ever seen a tank fire?”
“No.”
“It’s a multi-ton behemoth, and every shot rocks it back. Imagine how much energy it takes to shove around that much mass. And that’s how much energy you get hit by. Yeah, the armor will take the hit, but you get thrown back, and your whole body gets to deal with a shock that would turn lesser humans into liquid. Take a long time to recover from that.”
The instructor picks up a familiar box.
“Uniform off. Medical monitors today, and for the rest of Recomposition, so we can monitor your body grown in.”
I begin to strip as the instructor slaps familiar round disks onto my skin, around all major joins and cord gatherings.
“Here’s the plan for the forceable future,” Trench explains. “Your week will be 3 days, instead of 6, starting today. 2 days of muscle buildup and conditioning. 1 day off.”
I could cry. A day off out of every 3 days? Rest? The concept is almost foreign to me.
“We’ll start with stretches. You must never become as horribly inflexible as you were when you got here. Uniform on, I’ll be at the square.”
My mind tries to blank out as I start to go through stretches, just as it blanked out for the last 6 weeks. But I fail to check out – the activities I’m being run through are too varied, and too different from what I’m used to.
Now that all my old fat and muscle is gone, the Instructor is finally interested in giving me a chance to build up muscle. I am forced to use every cord catalyst just enough to start the burn. By the end of the day, my whole body burns.
I eat like a starved man, and sleep like a corpse despite the fever and the snoring of the other recruits.
The next day, the process repeats. I jog, climb, lift weights, stretch, and am even forced to swim in a long indoor swimming pool. My body is surprisingly dense, and I am far too weak to keep myself afloat, so the swimming exercises come down to simply moving through the resistance of the water.
At the end of day 2, I’m told to go home to my cabin. To sleep in my own bed, not in the barracks.
I’m shocked.
“When should I come back?”
“09,00, day after tomorrow.”
“I get to sleep in my cabin… 2 out of every 3 nights?”
Trench smiles. “You, yes. The other recruits will enjoy the absence of your snoring here.”
“I snore?”
“Like a tractor. Don’t worry, that’ll go away as your mods and cords grow in. Now, go, get out.”
My whole body burning from the inside out, I make my way home. I shower in my own bathroom, eat behind my own table, and sleep in an oversized bed.
It’s heaven.
I start my day off with stretches and breakfast. The burn is still there, but it’s a good kind of pain that I realize I’ll be becoming very familiar with.
With food in my stomach, I put on my insulated coat, and make my way out for a walk.
It’s not snowing today, and the skies are clear. The sun heats me well as I make my way up the road – away from the tram station, and deeper into the cliffside neighborhood.
I take the time to look over the cabins. They’re all different, and seemingly handcrafted rather than pre-assembled or templated. Many are quiet. Some echo with the sounds of life.
The row of houses ends, and the road narrows into a one-person trail. I heave and sway my way up the steep trail, reluctant to turn around before I see its end.
There is no end. The trail reaches the mountain ridge, and then slopes down onto the other side. There are large structures on this side of the ridge, functional buildings that do don’t mind being on the dark side of the mountain.
On the ridge, on a small carved-out balcony, there’s a wooden bench. I sit, alone. At the top of the world, I look down onto the endless mountains in every direction. Buildings and antenna speckle the landscape, connected by bridges and tram paths and trails.
I sit, soaking in the sun’s warmth, and think. It’s something I haven’t had much time or energy for lately.
I must excel. If there is a door in the Legions, it must be open to me. I’ve managed this in decomposition, somehow managing to push myself into the top 4 percent by cord count. Now I need to repeat the success.
Anything they teach me, I must understand and make my own. Anything they try to give me, I must take.
This is why I’m here. This is why I’m willingly suffering. Because I wanted to be something more than a lumberjack in a village, something more than yet another husband and parent, filling a long and boring lifespan with menial issues like neighborhood squabbles and cattle disputes.
To come here, only to half-ass my time here, would be the peak of idiocy.
I must over-perform myself. Instructor Trench said the mind is always weaker than the body. We’ll see about that.
With this line of thinking echoing in my mind, I finish the day. Eating, reading, and sleeping fills the time until 09,00 the following day.
Once more, I fill my body with pain and heat as the Instructor systematically forces every cord in me into physical saturation. The night in the barracks doesn’t bother me – if others snore, I’m too deep into sleep to be bothered by it. The following day is more of the same, though the variety of exercises seems to grow.
I manage more than I could last week. I can stay above the water without standing on the pool floor for a bit, and I can even manage to pull my way up a rock-climbing wall. The stretches come easier.
I feel better. Despite the exhaustion and the pain, I return to my cabin feeling better than I remember ever feeling. I’m outwardly unchanged from the ghoul I was a week ago, but I feel as if I can walk straighter and easier.
Another day off. More reading, eating, and hiking.
I fill my mind with the material available on the Card. I’m refused the mental-accelerating drugs I was previously given, so I’m left to memorize and comprehend the material on my own.
A day of training. Another day of training. A day of rest.
Another week, another two days of training and a day of rest.
Again. And again. And again. And again.
Weeks pass.
Bone disappears beneath muscle. Can swim, and I can climb, and for the first time in weeks I can do something that resembles running more than shambling.
On one of my days off, something strange happens. I find myself reading about the compositions and tactics used by the various nations of Forma. The document is well written, and engaging – there’s none of the rigid structuring and seriousness I’ve come to expect from biomedical documents. The authors sound genuinely interested in the subject they write about, and I am equally interested in learning.
The room around me turns sharp. The information my eyes gather is sharp and orderly. My brain surges backwards, regurgitating and re-organizing everything I’ve read so far.
I sit at the table in my cabin, staring out the window but seeing nothing, as my brain goes into overload.
I’m high. I know this feeling – the effects are similar to the Crystal pill Violence fed me on the train all those weeks ago. I can comprehend, process, and memorize information as if I’m at my mental peak. Without new information or a task, the brain begins to churn through previous information, reprocessing it all.
Even this realization is clinical to an unnatural degree. It takes a second to understand exactly what’s happening to me.
My body just synthesized Crystal on its own.
I force myself to meditate. Slowly, the hormono-adrenal compound drains from my body, until I feel I can stand without shaking. I dress, and head out for a walk, trying to burn the rest of it off.
As I step out of the cabin, I spot a figure sprinting up the road at a dead run. It’s Instructor Trench. His body trails steam. He charges up the hill at an incredible speed, especially given the slope.
When he spots me, he slows to stop beside me.
“Recruit Ironwood, what’s your status?”
“I’m heading out for a walk. I just had a Crystal high, so I want to burn it off.”
“Did you eat pills?”
“No, Instructor. I was reading, and suddenly got the high.”
“Touch your nose.”
I slowly reach for my face with a shaking finger, and tap my nose.
“Other hand.”
I repeat.
“Stay inside, or you’ll slip and die on the cliffs. Come on.”
“How did you know?” I ask as I turn back to my door.
“There’s a medical monitor on your back you didn’t take off. It alerted me when Crystal hit your blood stream.”
“Is it dangerous?” I step inside, and hold the door open for him. Trench follows me in.
“It depends. It’s really early for you to be getting a high. You don’t have he muscle mass to process it well. Nice place.”
“Thanks.”
He spots the cylinders on the fireplace, and gives them a short bow.
“Recruit, you swear to me you haven’t taken drugs or pills to get that high?”
“None, Instructor.”
“Then that’s another spot on the edge of the statistical distribution that you can be proud of. Your lymph nodes and glands really shouldn’t be grown in yet, but here we are. I need you to try and trigger the effect again.”
I look at him, remembering the feeling of concentration, focus, and interest that I was feeling when the high it.
The room sharpens.
Trench’s Card begins to beep. He pulls it out and frowns at it, then stares at me in genuine shock.
I close my eye, shaking all over once more. Without information to process, the high is mentally painful – memories of all kinds seem to re-appear, suddenly with new meaning and significance.
“Eat this.”
I swallow the pill without looking at it. Then I sit, and let the high settle.
“We’ll work on it. Need to find your other triggers too. If you can manage the other three core modes as well as you can grasp Crystal, you’ll be golden… Man, I need to see if this is normal. I don’t think it is.”
“Bioengineer,” I say, still waiting for the shakes to calm down.
“What?”
“I am a biomechanist. I understand how adrenalin and hormonal responses work and trigger, on a fundamental level. When I had the first high, I ran back what triggered it and memorized the feeling.”
“Sit quietly and relax, before your heart bursts. I’ll step out to take a call.”
He leaves.
I sit beside the table, eyes closed, trying to calm my body.
Left to myself, I smile at the empty room.
In fact, I grin.
Yes. Like that. That’s how I’ll live my life. This is where I want to be – ahead of where I should be, better than I should be, to everyone’s awe and surprise.
The other three ‘modes’? Let’s figure that out.

[Trigger]

15: Abomination
I wake to the scream of my Card. It’s a shrill, annoying siren that jerks me out of deep sleep. I reach over to the bedside table and snatch the damned thing up.
The Card senses my touch.
“ATTACK. ATTACK. ATTACK. ARM YOURSELF. STAY INDOORS. AVOID WINDOWS. ATTACK. ATTACK. ATTACK.”
I silence the voice and look out the window.
It’s pitch dark. This street has no lights. Further down the cliff, behind a turn, is a tram station, but I can’t see it from here. All I see is a cliff, a chunk of the street, and some of the neighbor’s houses.
I roll out of bed, and begin to rummage through the cabinet. My dead blood has left me a lot of souvenirs. I cannot find the use for most, but some I recognize.
The grip of the planar knife settles into my hand. I slowly unsheathe it in the dark, then lock it back into place.
Now armed, I try to calm down.
I’m still in the early stages of Recomposition. I’m still physically weaker than most adults. Certainly, I’ve gotten no combat training of any kind.
So what should I do? Go out and to a neighbor’s house? Not with what that alert said.
I realize that the pitch-black room around me is drifting into clarity. Into color. The window is black. The door to the living room glows. The corner of the furnace that protrudes into the bedroom is bright.
The colors shift again. There’s only black and white now, but I see the room clearly.
Another shift, and I’m back to being mostly blind in this pitch darkness.
This cycle continues. Over and over I cycle through seeing heat, seeing clearly, and seeing nothing at all.
Now, of all times, my eyes have broken in. If I had light, and a mirror, I’d be able to see my irises cycling through the colors of the rainbow.
I revel in this new ability. Then, slowly, I raise my head above the bed to look out the window.
Normal color vision is blind to the darkness. But slowly, it gives way to thermal vision, and I begin to see heat.
There’s something on the street. Long, angled lines of heat shift as it moves, then slows to a stop.
My eyes continue to cycle, into extreme low-light.
The thermal blur is gone. The outline of long limbs remains.
Three eyes flash, reflecting distant light as they rotate to look at me through the glass.
The three vision modes merge into one as my heart begins to hammer. In just one second, I am able to see in all three modes. It gives me a perfect, dizzying view of the nightmare as it charges off the road and at my cabin.
I dive for the door. The window explodes at the charging mass crashes through the triple-layered glass, followed by its countless limbs.
The door smashes open under my push as I back into the dark living room. The thing in my house doesn’t bother to rotate itself upright – it just scrambles after me.
I unsheathe the planar knife, step sideways from the doorway, and slash blindly as the multi-meter-long limbs spear through the doorway.
The planar edge gives no resistance. I can’t feel if I’ve missed entirely, or if I’ve cut a limb – except my vision has blurred into one mix of vision, in which I can see heat, clear outlines, and barely visible colors, all at once.
My frantic slashes sever a limb. The thing is unphased as it spears its feet into the floor, ceiling and walls, and pulls itself through the doorway.
I run into the tangle of limbs, aiming for the small mass where the legs all merge.
Something hits me in the shoulder. In the corner of my vision, I see the spear-like tip of the thing’s limb protruding from the left side of my chest.
I am become blender, destroyer of horrors. My right arm swings without order or patten, severing limbs. Just like the nightmare, I’m halfway through the door, physically obstructing my opponent. The spear-like limb-tips strike the wall, but my position prevents the thing from using its obvious hunting method – closing range and skewering towards itself with its own limbs. Almost all of its limbs are in the living room, and I am hallway back into the bedroom, and reducing its appendages by one every half second.
I can’t stab. Not with the planar. Every planar crystal has one or two edges, but never a sharp point.
And so I cut, until the floor is covered in fluid, and the thing is unmoving.
I stand in the doorway, heaving, dizzy with an adrenal overload, staring down at the horror at my feet. In the darkness, I sheathe the blade, not caring for the fluids it carries into the scabbard. Then, I grab one of the limbs still attached to the dead central mass, and drag.
I drag the corpse out through the front door, onto the short little pathway to the road. I drop the body on the road, and look around.
There are distant gunshots, but nothing else out of the ordinary.
I go back inside. There’s a can of lighter fluid in the corner of the room, well away from the fireplace. I grab it, and then light a thin piece of wood in the coals in the firewood, and shamble back out. I don’t know how I’m able to use my left hand, but I can, and I use it to dowse the corpse in lighter fluid, then throw the smoking stick at it.
The corpse flashes into flames. I finally get a good look at the thing.
It’s a black beast, most akin to an oversize spider of a kind that doesn’t come with a large central body. It has maybe 12 limbs, and no features that resemble eyes or a mouth. I know I saw 3 eyes before, but where they are now, I have no idea.
I go back inside, and drag out the limbs I’ve actually managed to sever. There are only 4 – most of my cuts were not deep enough to remove a limb, only to render it mostly separated.
With the 4 limbs and a chair dragging behind me, I go back out for a third time. The limbs go into the fire. My ass goes onto the chair. The lighter fluid slashes onto the pyre to keep the flames going.
I sit beside the light, on the cliffside street beside my cabin, and stare at the fire as my vision’s cycling slows down.
Yellow flames, white snow, and black corpse shifts into the heat of fire, shifts into the sharp outlines of the terrain all around, and back into the yellow-white-back of color.
Minutes pass, and my heartbeat slows along with my vision cycles. I stare at the corpse, without a thought in my head. Except that I am certain that if I am to fight again tonight, it won’t be in the confines of my home. It’ll be here, near the pyre.
I will not let whatever this is defile my home. I’ll kill and burn them here.
Something flashes to my right. I look down the mountain slope, into the darkness, and see something new.
Specks of light flicker across the chasm. They ripple down the opposing slope, then rush up the slope I’m on. After a few moments, I lose track of the lights as the cliff beneath obscures them
I sit, awaiting the next fight.
With a sudden, deafening thunderclap, a massive cluster of fire shoots up past the road beside me. Instead of following its natural trajectory up, the fire flashes and thunders, and suddenly lunges onto the road. Another flash and thunderclap are followed by a drift of snow that rushes over me and the corpse of my guest.
I sit, and wait.
Out of the artificial snowstorm emerges a giant. Fire dances on its legs and arms, and on the sword sitting on its shoulder.
The sword’s flames flash, and go out. The flames on its limbs dim.
The giant steps forward. Its footfalls are silent. Its armor makes no noise as the plates shift over each other. The eyeless helmet shifts left and right, scanning.
“Dance?” I ask.
“Hey, kid,” the giant says, stepping into the light of the pyre. “Are you alright?”
“Sort of. Blood loss, I think,” I explain.
“Did that thing break in?”
“Into my bedroom.”
“So why’re you out here?”
“I don’t want the next of them to mess up my home even more.”
She snorts. “Can you move?”
I stand.
“Go inside. Did it break the window?”
“Bedroom window.”
“I’ll shutter it, then join you inside.”
I shuffle inside, dragging my chair with me. I feel a bit stupid – what was I doing outside, really? I have no idea.
Staring into the fireplace, I wait until I hear the shutters crash shut in the other room, cutting off the howl of the cold wind. Dance comes in and closes the front door after herself.
“How can you see?” she asks.
“My eyes broke in.”
“Really? When?”
“About ten seconds before that thing broke in.”
“Wow. Listen, I’ll turn on the lights, okay?”
“Okay.”
The room’s gray lines are replaced by color and light.
The door to the bedroom is hanging on one hinge. There are scratches carved into the wall around the doorway. I missed a limb – it’s still there, beside the wall, cleanly severed at the base. The table has been toppled over, likely by the thing’s over-reaching limbs.
Snow floats in the mix of black and red blood on the floor.
I break out into a laugh.
“What?”
“I get it now!” I laugh, and point at the puddle of blood on the floor. “Look!”
“It’s blood, yeah?”
“More red than black! I bled more than it! I out-bled it! Haha! I understand now!”
Dance takes off her helmet. Her eyes are a blur of every color of rainbow.
She smiles at me, and it’s the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. In her armor and undersuit, her hair and face are the only parts of her that I can see. Without the obvious visibility of the muscular frame beneath that armor, her beauty seems unconditional. I realize that this is what her beauty was designed for – to be a combination of a stunning face and an elegant, powerful armor. Without that armor, she is like without skin – incomplete in her looks.
She nods to me, eyes closed. “Yes, Blood Legionnaire. You really do understand.”
My laughter fades into pained whimpering as the Necro and Crystal drain from me.
No, not just that. It’s not just the anti-pain and mental-clarity drugs that are draining from me. There’s something else, something new that I’ve felt before only once, in the gray building in Central.
Liquid Fire leaves me, taking with it the focused wrath that drove me to burn my enemy and to sit over its burning corpse.
I shake on the chair before the fireplace as Dance speaks, unheard. She digs into my shoulder, filling it with something, then wrapping it with several meters of bandages.
A new figure is suddenly in the room. Compared to the Charger, he is small and stout.
Instructor Trench takes off his helmet, and squats before me.
“Recruit, are you still with me?”
“Yes.”
Dance claps me on the good shoulder, unbelievably soft given her side and armored hands. “I’m heading out. Hang in there, Axeford.”
“Thank you, Dance,” I stammer.
“Oh it’s a pleasure. See you later!”
I turn to Trench.
“Instructor, can I have a better weapon?”
“What’d you use?” he asks, shifting from kneeling to sitting on the floor. His armored motions are just as silent and elegant as Dance’s – just more compact in size.
I pull the knife out from my belt, and hand it to him with a shaking hand.
He frowns, taking it.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Left behind by parents.”
“Right, right. Funny. This was standard issue in the South Republic 15 years ago. It was the weapon of our enemy.” He unsheathes it, and black blood spills out onto the floor.
He stands. “Let me wash this out before the blood hardens.”
I continue to stare into the fire within the fireplace. Dance took the last of the abomination’s limbs with her, but the blood on the floor remains. I’ll have to clean this out later.
Trench returns, and hands me back the knife.
“Still here?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Great.” He looks into my eyes, one after another. “You really went all in for that fight, huh?”
“Did I forget a medical monitor again?”
“On your back, yeah. Look, usually all support personnel sleep in well secured spaces, and all Legionnaires sleep wherever because we can out-fight these things. But you’re a special case – a Legionnaire without the full capabilities, yet living on the surface. Recruits usually live in the secured barracks, or with families that are full Legionnaires. You being left to live alone was a mistake.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You don’t.”
I wave around the room with my good hand. “I like it here.”
“Yeah. But it means that when your medical monitor reported your blood going crazy, I had to take a bet and call the Charger you talked about before, because I was too far way to make it in time.”
“She didn’t make it in time either.”
“I know. She had a whole swarm of them to work through.”
“What was that thing, exactly?”
Trench sighs. “You know the world hates the Valley, right? Well, a while ago, people that really, really hate us declared the Valley as using biological weapons.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you and me. Artificial life meant for warfare. And having declared that, they claimed it right that they retaliate in kind.”
“So they made things like that?”
“Abominations. It was stupid because they’re basically animals. The Valley’s borders repelled them hard enough that they rebound and cleared out a no-man’s-land around the Valley – territory swarming with Abominations, where other nations once were. But the things still cross over into the Valley sometimes. That’s why there are so many Guards deep inside the Valley. Abominations have instincts that get them to migrate deep past the border defenses before hunting.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“You’ve been taught about them. But you never grasped them like you do now. You wanted to see the world. This is it, Axeford.”
“Right. Right.” I nod, and close my eyes.
“Your first heard has been skewered. You’re going into shutdown. Rest, we’ll wake you when we fix you up.”
My first heart? Skewered?
I pass out.

[Trigger]

16: Recruits
The next morning I am in line with the other 4 recruits of my Foundation range, waiting for our instructors. The hole in my heart has been closed, and the heart has been restarted into function. Bone has been fused back together. The cords I’ve been growing needed barely any repair at all.
Less than half a day ago I was skewered through my primary cardiovascular pump, and now I’m in line, waiting to hear how I’ll be sweating my ass off today.
Five instructors, including Trench, walk out onto the training square. Four stand back as Trench squares up in front of us.
“Good morning Recruits.”
“Good morning Instructor!”
“We’ll be changing pace today. As you all know, there was an Abomination attack yesterday. No one but Recruit Ironwood knows what that means. Recruit Ironwood was alone in his parent’s cabin when one of the attackers broke in and tried to kill him. He used a trophy planar knife to defend himself, then dragged the beast’s body outside and burned it on the street. It would be considered littering, but it was very cool, so I’ll let it pass. Ironwood, what did you ask me when I arrived on the scene?”
I rack my brain. I think… “I asked for a better weapon, Instructor.”
“You wish has been granted! As of right now, Recruits, you will all begin to familiarize yourself with the first of the Legion’s weapons.”
There’s a flash of motion. Without an in-between, the Instructor goes from holding nothing, to holding an exposed planar knife.
The knife’s blade is long and wide, a bit like a machete, but without any of the curves. The blade immediately catches fire. I note the curved handguard protecting the armored gauntlet holding the weapon from the flames enveloping the blade.
“Only one of you has experience with planar crystals, and none of you have experience with activated planars. Therefore I will demonstrate to you what you will be dealing with.”
One of the instructors walks past us, handing out rebar. It’s a stick of steel, simple as.
“Rebar out in front of you.”
We do as we’re told.
“Do. Not. Move.”
Instructor Trench stands at one end of the line. He holds the knife out in front of him like a torch, and simply walks forward.
He does not swing or move the blade. He just walks, knife first, through out line of extended steel sticks.
The knife passes through the rebar. Half of the rebar falls to the floor, the other remains in the Recruit’s hand.
When my turn comes, I brace to resist some sort of force. But there is no force – the stick I’m holding gets lighter by half, without any other pressure or push.
Planar edges don’t do that. They need momentum, and good alignment. No planar can do this – severing steel like it’s not there.
Trench reaches the end of the short row, and sheathes his knife.
“If you drop your knife onto yourself, it will not know that you were even in its way. It will not slow or catch on you as it severs your fingers, or your limbs, or your guts, or your skull. You are the person most likely to die to your knife. Be incomprehensibly careful. That said, collect your planars from your instructors.”
I walk up to Trench, and he hands me the knife he had just performed the demonstration with. It’s sheathed, and seemingly inactive.
“Until you get your palm identification implants, you won’t be able to active the weapon. Without activation, it’s just a regular planar,” he explains. “I know you just murdered a bastard with a planar, but nonetheless, please, be careful.”
“Yes, instructor.”
“PLANAR SAFETY ONE-OH-ONE!” Trench roars, and everyone turns to him. “FIRST! You will not align the edge of your planar with your own body. There are many ways to die, let your way not be a split in two by your own blade. SECOND! You will not unsheathe your weapon except in self-defense, and for training, until I say otherwise. THIRD! You will ONLY unsheathe your planar if there is not another unarmored person anywhere within throwing distance of you. Alright?”
“Yes, Instructor.”
“Throughout your future runs, you will have things thrown at you. You have one job – draw your knife, and interpose the edge in the way of the projectile. The two halves may strike you, but I do not care, as long as the thing passes through your knife. You will proceed to slowly, carefully, sheathe your knife, and continue with your hike. Understood?”
“Yes, instructor.
“Secure your scabbards onto your belt.” He waits. “Good. Now. Hiking, route 1, full speed, GO!”
I break into a run. All 5 of us know this route well. We jog out of the Recruitment Center, and down the mountainside. There’s a narrow, incredibly mean trail that zig-zags around the mountain, down one side of the ridge, and into the chasms below. It’s not a road – it’s a navigable path across rocks and roots and dirt that isn’t an outright cliff.
Last half-week, my best time around designated Route 1 was just over an hour. I am the lowest among the recruits – both because of my late arrival into the Legion, and because of my extended Decomposition.
Today, I am focused. More importantly I am capable of filling myself with Liquid Fire.
I do this slowly, and carefully. I find the moment of fight or flight, the same reflex that seems so broken in me. I find the fight, and I slowly turn it up.
My breath eases. My body lightens. My jaw clenches in directionless anger.
I sprint, leap, scramble, and climb without a moment of fear. After the first time I almost slip and fall off the cliff, I add some Crystal to my blood, and the world slows. With sharp precision, I scale the cliff, and continue my run. Each footfall is efficient and aimed. Each breath is perfectly timed for endurance.
I close on the back of another Recruit. My surprise is buried by the artificial anger.
“MOVE!” I roar.
The Recruit lurches aside. I do not permit the escape. I plant two hands on the woman’s back, and shove. “MOVE!”
“OH SHIT!”
She is much more physically developed than I am. She actually looks like a human. I am still a skeleton with skin, despite the beginnings of cords. If my strength is barely human average, then she is already approaching the levels of an upper-tier athlete.
However, she has yet to find a way to trigger her adrenal glands. And so she runs on nothing but strength and discipline, while I am driven by artificial wrath.
I shout at her back ever time she slows. I shove and kick and poke at her back when she ignores my shouts.
Together, we close on the third-to-last recruit.
This time, our voices are one.
“MOVE!” we roar.
Like clockwork, the third moves aside form us. He is out of breath and mental energy. I permit no passing – I ram my shoulder into the guy’s back, and keep roaring at him until he breaks into a sprint ahead of us.
For half an hour, the three of us run, screaming insults at each other was we circle around the ridge and climb back up to the Recruitment Center.
The other two recruits are already there, finished with their runs. They’re doing pullups. Our three instructors await us. The other two are nowhere to be seen.
“Three best times,” one of the instructors calls out. “You get a 5-minute break for your efforts.”
“Everyone but Ironwood,” Trench corrects. “Ironwood, pullups. Keep your blood running whatever you’re running.”
I run up to the bar, leap to grab it, and begin pullups.
The two missing instructors show up, and take over their designated Recruits. Trench orders me off the bar, and into squats.
By the end of the day, I am no longer able to offset myself with Liquid Fire or Crystal. I am barely mobile, and full of horrific muscle pain. The hot bath of whatever fluid they have me soaking in keeps me ambulatory, but the exhaustion just escapes deeper into me.
This is how I drag myself into the barracks and towards my bed.
I am not permitted peace. Somehow, the other 4 recruits find energy to pester me.
“Axeford.”
“What?” I mumble into my pillow.
“What happened with that Abomination thing?”
I take my face out of my pillow. “I woke up to the alert. Panicked so hard my eyes started cycling vision. It was pitch dark, but I could see, so I glanced out the window. The thing was on the street – it saw me, and broke in through the window. There’s a bunch of old trophies around my house, one of them was a planar knife. I overdosed on everything my body could produce, including Liquid Fire, for the first time. Cut it up, dragged it out, set it on fire, then passed out because apparently I got stabbed through the heart.”
They mutter among themselves. I almost fall asleep.
“What’d it look like?”
“A dozen 3-meter-long spider legs with no body. 3 eyes, somewhere on there. Very sharp legs. I hope supply cleans my place up, it really messed the walls and floor up.”
I pass out.

Axe: So I had a fun night.
Axe: Any of you ever hear of Abominations?
Axe: One of them broke into my cabin. I got stabbed in the heart, then killed it with a knife. Now the Instructors are giving us planar knife training.
Axe: Please, ladies, form an orderly line.
Lance: Take me first, I am more handsome.
Pan: This is utterly unfair, why do you get the cool on-site incursions? We just have snow.
Lance: Where did you even get a planar knife in the first place?
Pan: Do your parents not keep planar knives in every cupboard and drawer?
Lance: Oh, right. Man that must’ve been a souvenir knife he used. Do you know what model it was?
Axe: Instructor said it was a South Republic model from 15 years ago.
Pan: That is a piece of shit.
Lance: Be glad it didn’t break. The Republic never managed to make consistent or reliable planar crystal production before it collapsed. You were using the equivalent of a muzzle-loaded blunderbuss made out of impure metal.
Pan: Did you get to keep a part of the thing?
Axe: Not sure. I’ll be going home today to see what state my place is in. But I did burn most of it.
Pan: Why??
Axe: I ramped myself into a rage with Liquid Fire during the fight, and somehow it made sense to drag the corpse outside and burn it.
Lance: I’m sorry, that’s not Liquid Fire, you’re just unhinged.
Pan: Axe, when are you visiting?
Axe: Lance is first in line.
Lance: The spot is up for auction.
Axe: Why?
Lance: Believe it or not, I started dating someone.
Pan: DURING FOUNDATIONAL TRAINING?
Axe: She must really like you for your personality, because if you’re like me, you should look like a ghoul right now.
Lance: She’s very weird.
Axe: You’re weird. Where did you find the strength??
Lance: Drug glands, remember?
Pan: That’s horrible. It must sound like a xylophone when you bang.
Axe: Holy shit Pan.

[Trigger]

17: Flex
Three weeks later, we reach the end of our hike routes in a group – I am at the back, beating on anyone who slows down enough for me to punch. I drive myself, and when I catch up to my fellow recruits, I drive them too. I have to start and end several fights, in the process angering and hurting the opponents enough to trigger their first-time Liquid Fire and Necro responses.
Once all 5 of us can use Liquid Fire, things speed up. I no longer have to push everyone ahead of myself. Instead I play the looming threat at the back, the menace that prevents the others from trying to slow down.
We always end the exercises in order of recruitment seniority. First is Dust, who is in the process of becoming a man – as opposed to the woman he was before joining the Legions. He’s from the Wheel family, a rare trading group in a nation that barely uses money. He has taken a fairly heavy helping of aesthetic mods – his face sharpens into a classical sort of handsomeness, mixed in with odd, sharp ears. His personality opens up as his body develops out of decomposition – he smiles more than any of the rest of us.
Second and third are the Baker sisters, Smoke and Ash. Ash was one of the two recruits I initially had to kick up the hill after my bad night with the Abomination. She’s younger than Smoke by several years, and a bit mentally weak compared to her sister. The sisters are both in the process of transformation. According to them, they were both somewhat overweight before joining the Legions, and deeply unhappy with their own looks. In compensation they went with some of the more extreme physical modifications the Legions permit. As they grow out of their ghoul-like state of decomposition, and as their hair begins to grow back, their heads suffer an odd sort of migratory event. The process is visually disgusting, but the results are just flat out odd – the two sisters each acquire a pair of large, triangular cat ears to go along with their transformed faces.
The second to last in our group is Loom, from the Textile family. He’s not used to physical labor, deeply introverted, and driven entirely by the same fear as me – the fear of his life disappearing behind his bland, featureless family profession. As a former factory and production line engineer, he has a skillset that reminds me of Rampart Hydro - he views everything as a mechanical problem. He, like me, elected to have almost nothing changed about his face.
And then there’s me.
My jaw has widened. My new set of teeth is growing in, and the perfectly aligned things are somehow a bit too serrated and orderly to be comfortable to the eye. My nose is straighter and less hunched. The bones around my eyes morph, changing my pug-like eyes into squinting ports. When my hair starts growing again, the hair line is much lower than before. At the same time, my fatal hair is nowhere to be seen.
There are more practical changes, too, of course. My hands and feet turn pitch black. What the concealing black hides is obvious from the rest of my body - cords weave themselves under my skin, shifting like snakes under a thin blanket with my every move.
My fingers drift apart from each other, making space for muscle and, later, armor. Similarly, my hips and shoulders widen, the skeleton adjusting my frame to better accommodate armor.
I am not just a weave of cords. I am absurdly flexible, as ensured by Instructor Trench. Despite my new musculature, I can easily put my legs behind my head, or fall into a super-split, or kick the back of my head with my own heel. My shoulders and wrists and hips bend in way that terrify me.
Our training shifts. Conditioning, I realize, is the name of the game.
We carry our planar knives for a week before we get to use them. The instructors let us forget and relax, before assaulting us with a trickle of snowballs that we struggle to split with the large knives.
The task is simple. During our hikes, we must spot the instructors, draw our weapon, and interpose it against the snowball before it hits us.
This is almost impossible to do, normally. The instructors do not mess around – those snowballs are perfectly aimed, and unnaturally fast.
The trick proves difficult, yet simple. To react fast enough, I must be high on Crystal – mentally alert, and with a sense of time dilation. This, of course, requires a constant upkeep of Crystal in the system, throughout the multi-hour hikes the Instructors force us through.
I take to the challenge with vigor. In two weeks, I manage to complete a full Route 5 hike in record time, without ever once failing to intercept an instructor’s attack.
At the end of that run awaits the Recruit Center, and Trench. I am first here, and alone since the hikes the recruits were ordered onto were all different routes.
“Recruit Ironwood.”
“Instructor?”
I don’t see him move. I don’t even see a tell that would tell me he’s about to move. The armored man goes from walking at me, to landing his attack, with no in-between frames.
His armored boot crashes into the front of my knee.
I scream. My leg is bent the wrong way. The pain is horrific, right up until Necro floods my system.
Instructor Trench is in my face.
“FLEX!”
“WHAT?” I scream.
“FLEX YOUR LEG! EVERY MUSCLE! FLEX IT NOW!”
I close my eyes, and clench my whole body in a full-body muscle flex.
My left whips pack with a fleshy crack. Something pops in my kneed at it settles back in place.
“HOLY FUCK!” I scream at my leg, horrified.
I try to get up, and the next attack nails me in the left shoulder, instantly dislocating it.
“FLEX!” the instructor screams.
CRACK.
I feel like I’m about to overdose on the Liquid Fire. I force it down as I struggle up.
“Punch me.”
“…What?” I ask.
The punch connects with my other shoulder. I stay upright, and clench my torso and arm, forcing the shoulder back in place.
“PUNCH ME!”
I swing at Trench. No one ever taught me to punch, and it’s the worst punch I’ve ever thrown, or ever will throw.
My fist is met with the instructor’s armored gauntlet. His fist rams through mine. I feel every bone in my left hand disconnect from its neighbors.
This one’s hard to put back in place. It takes me several tries to get my muscles to move enough to put the bones all back together.
In genuine fear, I turn to the instructor, and receive another kick to the other knee. As I fall, he grabs me by the arm, breaks my hand, and dislocates my elbow. He then stomps down on my other arm, dislocating that elbow as well.
I scream as I flex. I scream as my body makes popping and cracking noises that nobody should ever make.
“Medical,” Trench orders. “Go.”
I shamble off. All my work, muscle and flexibility are reduced to what I was between De- and Re-composition – a shambling, hunched ghoul.
Medical is ready for me. I am given my 1,000th x-ray, and suffer my 100th micro-surgery as the doctor adjusts my insides based on the damage I took.
I no longer fear being cut open. I’ve lost the fear of having fingers and instruments shoved under my skin about 90 surgeries ago. For me, Medical is a moment of peaceful rest. The attached blood filter helps my body drain the adrenal overload, and I promptly pass out on the surgery table.
When I wake up, I am on my barracks cot, surrounded by muttering and swearing from the other recruits.
“Ha,” I say. “Good.”
“What’s good?” Dust asks.
“You got some of that too.”
Loom sits up in his bed beside me. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” I stare at the ceiling, unwilling to move. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” one of the sisters agrees.
The arguing dies down into silence.
I wonder about that. They were pretty chatty, right up until I woke up.
“You guys aren’t pissed at me, right?”
“For what?” one of the sisters asks. I can’t tell which. “For kicking our asses?”
“That.”
“We’ll even the score.”
“Good,” I say. “Good.”
Instructor Trench walks in.
“Lazing about?” he asks.
I almost swear at him.
The Instructor raises up a device. It’s a black rectangle with a handle.
“What temperature is this?” he asks me.
I frown. My vision is cycling even now, a mechanism as consistent as my heartbeat since it activated. A third of the time, my vision is largely infrared – I can see a relative gradient between hot and cold.
I am hot. The other recruits are hot. The floor is cold. The handle of my knife is cold unless I hold it for a while. The instructor’s armor is exactly as cold as the room’s ambient temperature, with his head glowing atop.
But exactly what temperature the things I’m seeing are is a mystery to me. I can tell relative temperatures, but not absolutes.
I stare at the square, and compare it to the instructor’s head. They’re roughly the same.
“37 degrees,” I guess.
“Huh?” He looks at the square. “Where’s you pull that out of?”
“It’s the same as your face,” I explain.
“Okay. First of all, my face and the thermal element are made of different materials. Different emissivity and reflectivity. Second, my normal body temperature is not 37 degrees Celsius.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s not, and neither is yours. Do you remember that persistent fever you had during decomposition? That never went away. You, and me, and all of you,” he waves at the other Recruits, “have a core temperature of approximately 45 degrees.”
I no longer have to wear the warm jacket when I go outside, I remember. I no longer fear the cold of the mountains. It’s comfortable enough, at least until I get back to my warm cabin.
“I follow,” I say.
Trench changes something on the handle, and the square cools. “What temperature?”
“20?”
“Wrong.” He moves to Dust’s bunk. “You?”
This goes on for an hour. We lay, trying to get a feel for the absolute temperature of the little heating element in Trench’s hand. It’s an intuitive thing, but that intuition needs to be developed to work.
Between thermal guesses, we are lectured on biofeedback training. This ends with Trench handing us each a small rectangle with a clip.
“You’ll all be wearing bio monitors constantly,” Trench says. “The boxes are trainers. They’ll issue orders. You are to accurately and quickly react to those orders. Mr. I Have My Own House will get to take it with him for the weekends, and the rest of you will carry them around on your belts.”
“Temperature,” my box says in a robotic voice.
I stare at it. The box is suddenly warm in my hands, and glows in my vision.
“60 degrees,” I guess.
“15 low,” the box says. “Answer: 75.”
I stare at it, but there is only silence.
“Instructor, is it durable?” I ask.
He stares at me, then snorts.
“Extremely.”
“Good, good,” I say, clenching my fist around the box.
Trench addresses the room. “Eat, sleep.”
This is an order I’ve heard around a hundred times now. It’s how Trench ends the day. We are to eat, clean ourselves, stretch, and sleep.
As one, the Recruits roll out of our beds. We lay there, on the floor, trying to get up.
“Stretches first,” I decide.
“Agreed,” Loom agrees.
We do our best to stretch without getting, then slowly leverage ourselves onto our feet. My knees don’t just hurt – they’re stunlocked by sharp pain that fades only with motion.
It’s painful. It’s scary. But it’s also far from the damage I should’ve suffered after getting every major joint dislocated.
“A thought occurs,” I say, as we warm up our shoulders.
“What’s that?” Ash asks.
“I bet the armor doesn’t prevent joint dislocations.”
“Oh, you think we’ve been re-designed to take joint breaks in stride instead of relying on armor to prevent them?”
“Think about it,” I explain. “If a tank runs into us, is it better to be leveraged by the shoulder it clips, or to just have the shoulder dislocate without taking the torso along? If the armor resisted these kinds of breaks, it’ll make each of our limbs a giant mechanical lever against our bodies.”
Loom’s brain is ahead of me. “I bet it resists tearing, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’ll prevent the arm from getting torn off, but not prevent a shoulder dislocation. Damage minimization.”
“You’re a genius, Loom,” I state. “I’ve seen Trench put on armor. When he attaches the arm and torso armor, they link by these strands. Probably filament to prevent tearing.”
“Probably. Food?”
“Food,” I agree. “Everyone mobile?”
“And hungry,” Smoke says.
“Let’s go.”

[Trigger]

18: Conditioning
The little rectangle is the beginning of my plague. When I go home, it sits on my kitchen table, occasionally surprising me with its voice.
‘Temperature’ means I need to state the box’s temperature, as per my vision and intuition. ‘Dodge’ requires me to drop to the floor, and the score it gives me based on the speed at which I react. ‘BPM, 80” means I need to raise my heartbeat – this is scored on speed on accuracy.
‘Blood, 1-0-0’ means I need to put Crystal into my blood, and this one causes me a lot of trouble. The numbers represent Crystal, Liquid Fire, and Necro. The unit of 1 is fairly relative – it is the quantity of Crystal I need to get into the first stage of its effects. The real number is different per-person and measured in nanograms per liter, but what matters is the effect. The challenge is accurately and quickly telling my body to generate that particular hormono-adrenal compound. Up until now I relied on external triggers – fear, pain, stress. Now I must command my body with nothing but willpower, and be judged by the medical monitor on my back.
Aside from accurately making the three key compounds, I am also conditioned to quickly clear my blood. This proves challenging beyond belief. It’s not enough to let my body slowly digest the drugs – I must find the neurological trigger that forces the process to happen faster.
This is what I suffer on my free time, these sudden orders I must respond to as quickly and accurately as possible.
The rest of the time, we are conditioned more personally. The reflexive cutting of snowballs continues, but it is augmented by other reflexive tasks. Simple things, like dodging bullets.
The first time Trench pulls a pistol on me, I do not flinch. In the mountains, in the middle of my hike down route 7, he appears as he did before to throw snowballs at me. The reflex is there to intercept the projectile with the knife, just as I’ve been doing for weeks now. So I draw, and I interpose, like an idiot.
The small kinetic round nails me in the chest. I recognize the feeling – this is the same gun I was shot with during my recruitment interview.
I sheathe my knife and continue running the trail, prying the bullet out of my skin I do. There’s a bit of blood, but the bullet didn’t get under the skin.
Without prior comment or instruction from trench about this new kind of training, I am left to think for myself. What to do there? To dodge and take cover, of course.
Within the next 3 minute of a run, another instructor appears. She draws her weapon as I reflexively reach for my knife. This time I fall flat and skid along the snow, into the cover of a boulder.
There’s a ping as the rock deflects a bullet.
I peek out from behind the rock, and see the instructor holstering her firearm. I get up, and continue the run.
That evening, the recruits get together to discuss the new conditioning. We realize that there are two ways to pass the gun test – to get into cover, or to dodge the shot.
Dodging, it turns out, is fairly simple. The Instructors consistently fire the moment they have the gun aligned on us. Simply dodging in place just before the gun fires is enough to cause a miss.
Enlightened, we go into our second week of bullet-dodging conditioning.
We are soon made to fight. Grappling, unarmed and unarmored, against each other, is crushingly exhausting. It's a full body exercise that leaves me panting and fighting against adrenal overload. Technique is slow to follow – grappling is much more a challenge of strength and size than of skill.
Eventually we have some primitive moves drilled into us – arm and knee breaks, armbars, throws. It’s the kind of skill that is deeply reliant on practice, and so practice we do.
Weeks roll by, and the day comes when we are called in for capital surgery.
Unlike most operations, I am knocked out for this one.
When I wake up, I am a cyborg.
“Don’t move,” Trench says as he lays me out on my barracks bed.
I am the last of the recruits to have the surgery, and the others are already here – covered up to the neck, and sweating in pain.
“What’s the new, Instructor?”
“The news is that you look majorly fucked up,” Trench states. “Sleep, you’ll get checked up on every hour. Call if something feels wrong.”
I lay there, absorbed in sensations. All around my body, even on my scalp and forehead, are spots of heated pain. I know what they are, but the concept still scares me.
A big chunk of the pain comes from my fingers and palms. That pain is sharp, and overwhelms all other sensations. I focus on that, slowly moving my fingers around to release the pain, until I pass out.
Throughout the whole day, I am repeatedly inspected by the doctor and nurses. They check me over, occasionally giving me shots and feeding me. I am barely able to stay awake – the pain is instantly crushingly exhausting.
The day passes, and so does the night.
By morning, the pain is gone. I wake up with a breath of relief.
“Holy shit.”
“Good morning,” the 4 Recruits chorus.
“I lived,” I croak, sitting up. Everyone’s already sitting up, eating breakfast from trays.
I stare at them, really seeing them for the first time since surgery. My mind fills with horror as I realize I look just like them.
Neither the men nor the women wear any clothes. There’s nothing really left to distinguish men from women among us, at least above the waist – we are all similarly shaped obelisks of dark muscle. Even below the belt, the distinction is lost without closer inspection – since early recomposition, my genitals receded into my body. I know for a fact that the most critical element can emerge on call, but I have yet to manage a hard-on through my constant, unending state of physical exhausting.
The surgery has only added to the barely human aesthetic we’ve all quired. Across our chests, backs, shoulders, arms, fingers and heads are spots of veiny, spreading red. It’s a crimson red, like some kind of horribly poisonous fungus growing under our skin.
The spots of red crawl converge around connectors. They are solid, mechanical, cylindrical locks that go into our muscles. I don’t actually feel whatever artificial material the connectors are made of – the red growth holding the ports seems to be a buffer between flesh and alloy.
Everyone has these connectors in roughly the same places. On the arms, torso and head, they are large and robust. On the fingers, the connectors are small and simple.
I look at my own hands. There are ports on the backs of each finger segment. Something is also under the skin of my fingertips and palms.
On a whim, I reach over. The pain slows me down, but I reach the knife under my pillow. Extracting the weapon, I look around to make sure the Instructors are not around, and against orders, unsheathe my knife.
The half-meter planar crystal erupts with fire. The weapon warms in my hands, humming.
I finally have the hands that Legion weapons answer to.
I quickly sheathe my weapon, hide it back under pillow, and reach for the food waiting for me on the bedside table.
After eating and a few more hours of medical examinations, we are allowed to stand. Our instructors await us at the training square.
“Ironwood,” Trench calls.
“Instructor.”
“Unauthorized drawing of your weapon.” He unwraps a whip. “Use of Necro is forbidden. Shirt off.”
It’s my first time receiving a flogging. His aim is impeccable – not once does he strike my new implants.
When it’s over, Instructor Trench lectures.
“If I issued you a firearm, then unholstering it would’ve instantly left it in an armed and loaded state, ready to fire. Without the experience to control the weapon, you are too much of a hazard to the other recruits to be openly armed around them. Idiot. Route 10 hike, go.”
I break into a sprint, escaping the training square as I fill myself with Necro and a small helping of Liquid Fire and Crystal.
Route 10 is scary. There are some mean cliffs in these mountains, sections where I have to hang at a more-than-sheer cliff as I climb up. I can fall and survive, but the injuries I’d suffer would be significant – there are no safety lines, just the unconquered and untouched wilderness all around.
I climb slowly and carefully, valuing my life.
When I return, I get to fight – not recruits, but the instructors, one after another. Unarmored, they repeat what Trench did one a few weeks ago. I am left with every joint dislocated and re-located, and subsequently sore.
The next day, things go back to normal, and I consider myself let off easy.
Conditioning continues. Trench issues us new medical monitors that cap the connectors. These also link into the conditioning boxes, and new tasks appear. Now I’m forced to control functions that I didn’t know I had – like electrical potential generation. My cords can create electrical charge, and this is apparently a function critical enough to require fine control. I am quickly forced to generate electricity for prolonged stretches of time, including when I sleep. In parallel, I am frequently asked to control the ports. They have one key mechanical function tied into the muscles around them – they can be cycled into locking or unlocking at will, supposedly towards the final goal of holding secure the armor I am to wear. Once the armor is on, the only way to release it is by willing the ports to release. This is critical, because if I fail to master this, then simple armor removal might turn into a horrible capital surgery involving a lot of cutting.
I begin to eat more than ever before. This in turn causes a spike in cord growth. The connectors in my muscles and skull settle in, with the red crawl around them fading and merging into the muscle.
Trench explains that the red crawl was an organ cloned from me, and grown around the connectors to ease installation. Genetically indistinguishable from me, the crawl was able to merge into my muscles and nerves, permitting the connectors to be installed without a long integration process.
There’s a large, overly complex connector on my back. It has more functions than other connectors, and the red crawl there is still present, spreading up and down my spine.
Through the exhaustion that occupies me, I begin to feel a sense of stress. Of discomfort. Of disgust. The weeks change me, and I no longer know how I look. I refuse to look at myself in the mirror, only catching glimpses of my head when I perform morning and evening hygiene. Glimpses of the connectors in my forehead. Of a foreign face. Of serrated teeth and rainbow eyes and unfamiliar lines.
The other Recruits don’t look too bad. Smoke and Ash have those absurd cat ears and overly attractive faces that distract from the connectors. Dust’s hairline frames his connectors well enough to make them fit. Loom just looks like loom, skill implants or not.
They look fine. I fear I do not. But I refuse to look closer, because the idea of seeing myself fills me with overwhelming dread.
The weeks pass.