The fourth day of incarceration commences not with the mercy of a slow dawn, but with the jarring, rhythmic impact of wood against straw. Under the merciless heat of a rising sun, the air in the pentagonal fort grows thick and stagnant, smelling of baked dust and stale sweat.
Officer Aguilar sits high atop his massive warhorse, a beast of iron-grey muscle that snorts plumes of hot breath into the morning stillness. Aguilar's presence is as suffocating as the scorched steel of his breastplate. He stares down at the hundred captives, his eyes two chips of cold flint.
"Ye wretched shards of glass! Drive the point home or find it nestled in your own gullets!" he bellows. His voice vibrates with a terrifying vitality, echoing off the high stone ramparts.
The Earthling teens, a ragged line of exhaustion, stumble forward. Among them, Minh grips his spear with hands that no longer feel like his own. His palms are a mess of raw, weeping blisters and jagged splinters from the rough-hewn shaft. Beside him, Joon-soo's face is a mask of grey fatigue, his hair matted to his forehead with a paste of grime and perspiration.
"I literally can't feel my fingers!" Joon-soo mutters, his voice a dry rasp. He thrusts his spear half-heartedly at the fraying straw dummy. "This guy is actually obsessed. It's a scarecrow, dude. It's not hitting back."
Aguilar's horse trots closer, the heavy hooves churning the dry earth into a fine, choking powder that coats the teenagers' damp skin. The Officer leans over his saddle, his shadow swallowing Joon-soo whole.
"Dost thou whisper of 'scarecrows,' whelp? In the heat of the vanguard, the straw shall wear the skin of thy betters, and thy lethargy shall be the herald of thy demise!" Aguilar sneers, his lip curling in disgust. "Thrust! Again! Or by the King's blood, I shall see thee lashed to the post!"
The process is a soul-crushing loop of mechanical agony: charge, thrust, retract, reset.
Minh lunges forward. The impact of the wooden tip hitting the packed straw vibrates up his arms, sending a jolt of white-hot pain through his screaming shoulder muscles. He staggers, his knees buckling for a split second before he catches himself.
Minh pants, looking up at the towering officer with a squint of pure resentment. "Just give me a second to, you know, not die of a heatstroke. We've been doing this for like four hours."
Aguilar's face reddens, his neck veins bulging against his gorget. He wheels his horse around in a tight, aggressive circle, forcing the line of teens to scramble back.
"Death is a kindness thou hast yet to earn!" Aguilar roars, his voice cutting through the air like a lash. "Thinkest thou that war waits for the cooling of thy brow? Speed! Aggression! If thou canst not pierce the heart of a puppet, thou art naught but carrion-in-waiting!"
Minh wipes a trail of salty sweat from his eyes with his forearm, leaving a smear of dirt across his brow. He looks down the line at the other captives; their eyes are glazed, their movements wooden and hollow.
"The main character energy on this guy is exhausting.." Minh whispers harshly to Joon-soo as they retract their spears in unison.
"Total villain arc," Joon-soo agrees, his jaw tight. He forces another thrust into the dummy, the wood groaning under the strain. "But if he calls us 'whelps' one more time, I'm gonna lose it."
Aguilar ignores their hushed defiance, pacing the line with the restless energy of a predator. He demands more speed, more violence, his lungs seemingly immune to the dust and heat. Around them, the fort remains a silent stone witness to their slow breaking, the only sound the rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of wood on straw and the relentless, noble fury of their captor.
The afternoon sun hangs like a molten coin in the sky, Refusing to set even as a deceptive, gentle breeze begins to ghost across the desolate training grounds. It carries the faint, mocking scent of distant pines, a reminder of a world beyond these stone walls, but the air remains choked with the fine, powdery dust kicked up by a hundred pairs of shuffling feet.
Officer Aguilar sits motionless in his saddle, his silhouette sharp against the blinding horizon. With a flick of his gloved hand, he signals the end of the thrusting drills. "Cease thy pathetic flailing! Lay down the poles of thy shame and gather round, ye spineless maggots!"
The Earthling teens collapse inward, forming a loose semi-circle around the warhorse. Aguilar begins a lecture on the craft of the spear, his movements practiced and haughty. He draws a short, curved blade from his belt and begins to shave a length of raw timber, the curls of wood falling like flakes of dead skin into the dirt. He explains the balance of the tip and the necessity of a straight grain, his voice dripping with condescension as he reveals various spear variations used by the Palantine military.
Then, he lets out a low, sneering laugh that sounds like grinding stones. "Marvel at the mercy of the Crown, ye whelps! The Professional Central Army wields pikes of solid, forged iron—heavy enough to crush thy brittle ribs by their weight alone. Such instruments are for men of steel, not for soft, doughy things birthed of Earth's rot." He tosses a wooden shaft to the ground with a thud. "Ye shall make do with timber, for thy weakling arms would snap like dry twigs beneath the majesty of true Palantine metal."
Minh looks at the "weapons" they've been given. Many of the shafts are visibly diseased, riddled with the tiny, dark pinholes of termite infestations. In some places, the wood is so hollowed out that it feels light as a husk.
This is a joke, Minh thinks, his eyes fixed on a termite crawling out of a crack in his spear. He's literally giving us termite-eaten sticks and calling it training. We aren't soldiers; we're just props in some sick power trip.
Nearby, a small Indian boy with trembling hands stares at the wooden shaft in his lap. He leans toward a girl beside him, his voice a terrified, frantic whisper. "A full-metal spear? That's literally impossible. Even on Earth, a solid iron pole would weigh like eighty pounds. Nobody could fight with that on foot. He's just lying to flex on us."
The warhorse's ears twitch. Aguilar's head snaps toward the sound, his senses preternaturally tuned to the frequency of dissent. He spurs the beast forward, the powerful chest of the animal shoving teens aside like bowling pins. He reaches down, his gauntleted hand snapping out like a viper to seize the boy by his collar. He hoists the youth halfway off the ground, the horse dancing restlessly beneath them.
"Dost thou dare weigh the logic of the King's armory with thy fluttering tongue, thou thrice-damned insolent cur?" Aguilar's face is a mask of terrifying, composed fury, his breath hot against the boy's pale face. "Thou art a cancer upon the PCA. I shall excise thee before thy rot spreads to the rest of these shivering swine!"
"Wait, no! I was just—" the boy squeaks, his feet kicking uselessly in the air.
"Silence! Thou art fired from the service of the sword! Thou art no longer fit to be a Conscript-Carcass. Nay, thou shalt serve the deep. Guards! Escort this filth to the Deep-Drudge pits. Let the lightless earth swallow his whispers, and may the suffocating dark be his only company until his lungs turn to soot!"
The guards drag the screaming boy away, his heels digging furrows in the dry earth. A heavy, sickening silence falls over the group. Joon-soo watches the boy vanish through the iron-studded gate, his knuckles white as he grips his own wooden spear.
Deep-Drudge. A slave-miner, Joon-soo monologues internally, his jaw clenched so hard it aches. He just sent a kid to die in a hole because he knows basic physics. Don't look up. Don't make eye contact. Just stay invisible.
Aguilar's gaze rakes over the survivors, looking for the next crack in their resolve. He halts his horse in front of a tall, lanky boy who is desperately trying to smooth out the tip of his hand-carved spear with a piece of flint. Aguilar dismounts, his armored boots hitting the ground with a heavy, final clack. He snatches the boy's spear and holds it up against a standard-issue pike.
The boy's spear is shorter by the mere width of a finger.
"Behold this monument to sloth!" Aguilar bellows, holding the spear aloft. "A finger's breadth! In the shield wall, a finger's breadth is the window through which death enters! Thou art a clumsy, ham-fisted oaf, and thy incompetence is a treasonous stain upon my field!"
"It's... it's just a sliver of wood, man..." the tall boy stammers, his eyes wide with shock. "I can just... I can fix it? It's not that deep."
Aguilar's hand flies out, backhanding the boy with the heavy leather of his glove. The boy hits the dirt, clutching his bleeding lip.
"It is as deep as the grave thou hast dug for thyself!" Aguilar spits, towering over him. "I grant thee an 'honorable' reassignment, thou worthless stick-breaker. Thou art hereby named a Timber-Hewer. Go! Feast upon the sap of the forest until thy back breaks beneath the weight of the oaks. At least the trees shall not care for thy lack of measure!"
"God, not the woods..." a girl behind Minh grunts, her voice thick with dread.
"Timber-Hewer," another boy mutters, a low, guttural sound of despair. "It's just a fancy word for cutting wood until you drop dead."
The sun begins to dip, casting long, distorted shadows across the fort, but there is no reprieve. The spear-throwing begins. The repetitive, hollow thud-crack of termite-weakened wood hitting targets serves as the only soundtrack to their degradation. Under Aguilar's watchful, hateful eye, the Earthling teens continue to throw, poke, and carve, their spirits eroding alongside the brittle wood in their hands. Each snap of a breaking shaft sounds like a bone, a sharp reminder that in the eyes of Officer Aguilar, they are all expendable
By the time the sun dips below the horizon, the Earthling teens are little more than walking corpses, their spirits ground down by the sheer weight of Aguilar's expectations and the constant threat of reassignment.
Day 5 arrives with a cacophony that sets teeth on edge. The heavy, iron-bound lids of supply crates are flung back, revealing rows of primitive matchlock rifles that smell of stagnant oil and cold soot. Officer Aguilar stands amidst the metallic clatter, his shadow stretching long and jagged across the uneven dirt of the training yard.
Minh and Joon-soo move like ghosts. Their eyes are bloodshot, staring into the middle distance as their hands reach for the heavy wooden stocks. They are on complete autopilot, their minds retreating to a numb, silent corner to survive the sensory assault.
Aguilar's voice cuts through the morning fog like a serrated blade. "Ye literacy-bloated peacocks! Ye claim the power to read the stars, yet thy minds are as porous as sieve-cloth! Behold the twelve sacred motions of the matchlock. Prime the pan! Open the charge! Cast the ball! Tamp! Adjust the match!"
He moves through the twelve steps with a terrifying, rhythmic speed, his armored fingers clicking against the mechanisms. Around Minh, the other captives scramble to keep up, their fingers fumbling with the smoldering slow-matches.
"Is he for real?" a girl named Chloe whispers, her hands shaking as she tries to pour the coarse black powder. "Twelve steps? I can't even remember my Netflix password half the time. This thing is going to blow up in my face."
"Just pour and pray..." a boy next to her grunts, his face twisted in a grimace of concentration. "If I have to break one more rock because I forgot to 'tamp the wad,' I'm actually going to scream."
Aguilar's horse snorts, sensing its master's rising fury. The Officer stalks the line, his cape billowing. "Again! Thy movements are sluggish, like flies in winter honey! Why dost thou falter? Is the memory of an Earthling so fragile that twelve simple strokes of genius elude thee?"
He stops abruptly, his eyes burning with a zealot's fire. "Five centuries ago, thy kin turned their faces from the Light and knelt before the Demon Lord! Ye brought ruin to the world, and now the glorious Mikhland Federation—here in the sacred soil of Palantine Heilop—hath summoned thee to bleed! Ye are but living coins, minted to pay an ancestral debt of blood and shadow!"
A boy near the front, his glasses sliding down a sweat-slicked nose, drops his ramrod. It clangs against the stone. "That literally makes zero sense!" he shouts, his voice cracking with indignant fear. "We aren't those people! My ancestors were like... accountants in New Jersey. We aren't related to some 'Demon Lord' from five hundred years ago. You've got the wrong guys!"
The air in the courtyard freezes. Aguilar's face turns a shade of bruised purple. He lunges forward, his heavy boot catching the boy in the stomach and sending him spiraling into the dust. He looms over the gasping teen, the brass pommel of his sword glinting.
"Blasphemy! Thy blood carries the same rot, the same rebellion!" Aguilar roars, his voice vibrating in the chests of every teen present. "Dost thou think the passage of years washes the stain from the soul? All Earthlings are of one vine—a vine of thorns and sin! Whether thou hailest from 'New Jersey' or the pits of the Abyss, thou art bound by the same tether of guilt!"
He kicks the fallen boy's matchlock aside. "Guards! Take this heretic to the rock-piles! Let him learn the weight of his 'unrelated' sins through the shattering of granite!"
Minh and Joon-soo don't even blink as the boy is dragged away. They simply lift their heavy rifles, their movements mechanical and hollow. Open the pan. Pour the powder. Close the pan. The rhythmic clack-slide-thud of the rifles becomes the heartbeat of their misery. The sun climbs higher, baking the scent of sulfur into their skin, as the nineteenth, twentieth, and hundredth repetition begins. There is no logic here, only the weight of the iron and the endless, screaming demand for a penance they do not understand.
The sun of Day 6 rises like a bruised eye over the pentagonal fort, casting long, distorted shadows that stretch across the packed earth of the training yard. The air is thick with the acrid, lingering stench of burnt black powder and the metallic tang of blood. Today, the stakes shift from simple drills to a complex, violent dance: the transition.
"Fire the volley! Drop the iron! Seize the ash!" Officer Aguilar's voice booms, his noble cadence cutting through the morning mist like a heavy broadsword.
The Earthling teens stand in ragged lines, their matchlock rifles heavy in their trembling hands. At the command, they squeeze the triggers. A chaotic, thunderous CRACK ripples down the line, followed by a cloud of choking white smoke. Before the echoes can even die, they are expected to slung the muskets and snatch up their spears, planting the butts into the dirt to form a defensive hedge against a hypothetical cavalry charge.
In the center of the chaos, Minh and Joon-soo move with a terrifying, rhythmic precision. Their faces are blank, their eyes hollow, but their bodies have integrated the torture. Bang. Drop. Grab. Plant. They are a fraction of a second ahead of everyone else, their movements fluid and silent.
Aguilar's horse trots over, its heavy hooves narrowly missing Minh's foot. The Officer leans down, his eyes narrowing as he watches them reset for the tenth time without a single fumble. He reaches out, grabbing Minh by the shoulder of his sweat-stained shirt and hauling him toward the corner of the ramparts.
"Halt, ye two! Thy hands have found the cadence of the carnage while thy peers still stumble like newborn calves," Aguilar barks. He signals to a younger, stern-faced officer standing nearby. "Officer Shaw! Watch these two. They have outpaced the maggots. Drive them into the advanced forms. I shall deal with the remaining rot."
Minh wipes a smudge of soot from his cheek, glancing at Joon-soo. "Great..." he mutters under his breath, his voice a flat, exhausted monotone. "We're so good at being slaves we got promoted to 'Extra Hard Mode.' Awesome."
Joon-soo just nods, his jaw set. "Just keep moving, Minh. Don't think about the sleep. If we stop, we're done."
As the two are led away to a separate, even more grueling corner of the yard, Aguilar returns to the main group, where the atmosphere is rapidly deteriorating. The transition is too fast, the weapons too heavy, and the fatigue is a physical weight.
"I can't... I literally can't lift this again..." a girl near the back grunts, her spear tip dragging in the dirt.
"Did he seriously say no sleep tonight?" a boy whispers to his neighbor, his eyes darting toward Aguilar's back. "That's a human rights violation. Like, actual torture. My dad is a lawyer, he'd have this guy in a suit so fast—"
Aguilar spins his horse with a violent jerk of the reins. His hearing is preternatural, catching the smallest murmur over the clatter of wood.
"WHO DARES WHISPER OF 'RIGHTS' IN THE SHADOW OF THE KING'S WALL?" Aguilar roars, his face a mask of noble fury. He charges into the ranks, the horse's chest shoving several teens to the ground. He halts in front of a tall German boy who is standing with his arms crossed, his face a mixture of defiance and sheer, intellectual outrage.
"I am speaking!" the German boy says, his voice shaking but clear. "I deserve agency! I am a student, a child! International law dictates protection from exploitation, not this... this medieval insanity! My nation invested in my talent, my education—"
Aguilar's laughter is a cold, jagged sound. He dismounts, his armor clanking with a heavy, final sound. He walks right into the boy's personal space, his shadow swallowing the teen.
"Talent? Thou speakest of 'talent' as if it were a shield," Aguilar sneers, his breath smelling of bitter ale and iron. "If thy nation trained thee, then thy hands should be accustomed to the labor of the forge. If thou hast such 'agency,' then let us put it to a use that serves the Crown."
He turns to a pair of freeman soldiers standing by the gates. "Drag this 'talented' ox to the PCA Smithy! He shall be an Iron-bender—a Slave-smith in your filthy tougue. Let him see how his 'rights' hold up against the heat of the furnace and the weight of the sledgehammer. He shall bend iron until his spirit is as brittle as the slag he treads upon!"
The boy's face goes deathly pale as the soldiers seize his arms. "Wait! No! I meant I have potential! I can help with strategy—"
"To the pits with him!" Aguilar screams, a curse in the old tongue following the boy as he is dragged away.
The remaining teens go deathly silent. They return to the drill, their movements frantic and desperate. Fire. Drop. Grab. Plant. But the failures continue. A girl is too slow by two seconds; Aguilar declares her a "Field-Thrall" and has her hauled away to be sold to a local Baron for harvesting.
As the sun sets and the torches are lit, the heat doesn't fade—it just becomes a wet, suffocating blanket. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hours of the night pass in a blur of flickering orange light and the relentless thud of spears. Every time a head nods in sleep, a lash of Aguilar's voice—or his whip—brings them back to the nightmare.