Zero-eight-hundred hit like a sledgehammer.
Caleb sat in the back row of Briefing Room Seven with eleven other new recruits and the kind of headache that came from four hours of sleep, industrial lights, and a thing under his ribs that considered breakfast a legal right.
The underground chamber smelled of burnt coffee and gun oil. It had no windows, no banners, and no motivational slogans about honor, unity, or sacrifice.
The Seventh Division left the slaughterhouse undecorated.
A dented steel podium stood at the front beside a cracked digital board.
Vice Captain Iris Calder walked in carrying a chipped ceramic mug of black coffee.
Her uniform sleeves were rolled high. Scar tissue crawled up both forearms like old burns pulled tight under skin. Dark circles bruised the space beneath her eyes. She had the face of a frontline worker who had survived long enough to become someone else's bad news.
She set the mug on the podium.
"Welcome to the meat grinder," Iris said. "You signed the death forms last night. Now you learn what you actually agreed to."
She tapped the digital board, and a sterile chart illuminated the room.
STREAM ECONOMICS
Base Salary: 50,000 credits per month.
Viewership Bonus: public engagement points and direct viewer gifts convert to credits.
Guild Tax: 22 percent deduction applied to viewership bonuses and gifts.
Highlight Clips: sold to corporate sponsors for a bonus multiplier based on Danger Class.
Executive Private Feeds: public chat disabled. Secondary sponsor bidding disabled. One viewer owns the stream.
Caleb kept his eyes on the numbers until they stopped being numbers and became a noose with interest rates.
The base pay kept collection agencies away from his family. Barely.
It covered the interest and bought time, but it would not clear the principal, repair his mother's old apartment, or keep him fed if the thing in his chest kept burning through calories like a furnace.
To actually climb out, he needed bonuses.
To get bonuses, people had to watch.
His feed belonged to one anonymous ghost.
Iris tapped the board again. The economic chart vanished, replaced by a jagged pyramid.
"First and Third Divisions use sanitized corporate ladders," Iris said. "We use Schlacht ranking. Slaughterhouse rules. Old-world name, modern exploitation."
She slapped the bottom tier.
"Rank F. Draugr. Walking dead. That is every one of you. Zero public presence, base pay, and whatever scraps the Guild allows."
Her finger moved to a blue tier.
"Rank C. Jaeger. Hunters. Ten confirmed Danger Class harvests and one hundred thousand viewer engagement points. Hit both thresholds and you get double base pay, public ad revenue, premium surplus, and rations that do not taste like punished sand."
A recruit near the front muttered, "One hundred thousand?"
Iris smiled without warmth.
"Correct. The pyramid is not designed for your comfort."
She tapped the side of the board and a second column appeared.
AVERAGE TIME TO PROMOTION
Rank F to C: 18 months.
Rank C to A: 31 months.
Rank A to S: no reliable data.
Rank F casualty washout before promotion: 62 percent.
Nobody muttered this time. The numbers did what Iris had not bothered doing with her voice. They made the room smaller.
"If those averages depress you," Iris said, "good. Optimism won't stop teeth. Despair won't either. Learn the math, then work inside it."
Her finger moved to a red section near the top.
"Rank A. Shinigami. Assault squad. Survive a year as Jaeger, pull a million viewers, and make enough kills for Command to pretend your trauma is marketable. You get custom armor, corporate sponsors, billboard time, and better odds of dying in slow motion for a premium clip."
Her eyes lifted to the gold tier.
"Rank S. Aesir. Captain Kade and me. We take thirty percent of division gross and choose which fires the rookies run into."
Above the gold block, a final tier hovered separate from the rest.
Dark red. Pulsing.
"Rank SSS," Iris said.
Every chair in the room seemed to remember it was bolted to the floor.
"Questions about them get people noticed. Ambition toward them gets people dead. They operate above the military grid and answer only to Guild executives. If an SSS operator appears in your field zone, you run the opposite direction and hope your stream catches somebody else dying first."
Caleb did the math because panic without math was just noise.
Ten confirmed harvests might be possible; one hundred thousand engagement points was a wall.
Public engagement could not flow through a locked feed. No public chat. No sponsor bids. No clip market unless his private whale allowed it.
To reach Jaeger and secure real money, the ghost behind his ear would have to pour engagement into his account for reasons that had nothing to do with generosity.
His stomach cramped.
He gripped the edge of the rusted desk.
He thought of his mother's rent account, the interest notices folded in his duffel, and the debt collector who smiled like a dentist whenever Caleb missed a payment window.
The Defense Force had taken poverty, dressed it in a uniform, and priced death high enough to make survival look like an investment.
That was the part the younger recruits missed. They watched the board and saw ranks. Caleb watched it and saw meat weights, bonus triggers, and all the places a man could be charged for bleeding incorrectly.
"Class dismissed," Iris said. "Grab datapads. Confirm barracks assignments. Practical drills in the staging yard at thirteen hundred."
Chairs scraped against concrete.
The other recruits moved quickly, eager to escape the Vice Captain's attention.
Caleb picked up his duffel.
"Mercer." Iris's voice cut through the room. "Stay."
He lowered the bag.
The last recruit slipped out. The heavy steel door shut with a latch click that sounded too final.
Iris walked down the center aisle.
Up close, the scars on her arms read as history: bad decisions, survived by refusing to die.
"You hold the only Executive Private lock in this cycle," she said. "Your entire feed is blacked out. No public gifts. No sponsor bids. One anonymous whale owns every second of your life on camera."
She stopped beside his desk.
"I read your file. Five years in disposal yards. No sponsor bloodline. No pedigree. Care to explain how a casualty with one percent sync pulled exclusive million-credit patronage?"
Caleb kept his posture loose. For him, loose meant ready to move without warning anyone.
"I was bleeding out in a disposal zone," he said. "A capsule dropped. I accepted help."
Iris searched his face.
What she found there was calculation, debt, and the flat patience of someone used to bills. Caleb had seen entitled men in the yards; they complained like the world had made a bookkeeping error.
He carried himself like someone who knew the bill always arrived.
"Convenient guardian angel," Iris murmured.
She held out one scarred hand.
"And the encrypted comms chip buried under your hairline?"
Caleb paused.
Getting washed out on day one would send him right back to collectors with a fresh failure stamped on his name.
He reached behind his ear, peeled the chip free, and dropped it into her palm.
Iris held it between thumb and forefinger instead of pocketing it. She brought the tiny microphone close to her mouth, eyes still on Caleb.
"Listen carefully, whale," she said. "The Seventh is a war zone. He is my soldier now. You lock his feed, you cut his resources. You cut his resources, he dies. If you want a private show, pay for him properly and stay out of the way."
The fluorescent hum filled the room. Then the cracked digital board glitched. The ranking pyramid dissolved under purple static. Text crawled across the glass.
[???] He belongs to me.
Iris took a slow sip of coffee.
[???] I own exclusive rights to his suffering. You only borrow him as bait.
"I use him to kill Danger Class threats," Iris said into the chip. "That is the job. Keep your wallet open if you want him alive long enough to entertain you. Dead weight gets buried. Civilian orders get ignored."
The purple text pulsed once, pressing behind Caleb's eyes.
Iris tossed the chip onto his desk. "Put it away."
It clattered across the rusted metal.
Caleb picked it up and pushed it into his pocket instead of behind his ear.
Iris slapped the side of the digital board. The military grid fought back, purged the purple text, and restored the blank Defense Force seal.
She watched him shoulder his duffel.
"Get calories, Mercer," she said, and the command landed softer than the rest. "You're gray around the mouth."
"I have been told worse."
"By people with better eyesight?"
"Usually by debt collectors."
For the first time, the corner of Iris's mouth moved like it wanted to be a smile and decided against the paperwork.
Caleb left before she found another reason to keep him.
-----
The hallway arrows led him toward the mess hall.
By the third turn, his boots dragged too heavy. The hunger under his ribs sharpened with every step, taking on shape: heat and teeth pressed against bone from the inside.
He caught himself against the cinderblock wall when a cramp folded through his stomach.
Paint grit scraped his palm. One breath. Another. Keep walking.
The Seventh Division mess hall was a cavern of dented steel tables and bolted chairs. It smelled of boiled lab-grown protein, industrial cleaner, and old fatigue.
Veterans sat scattered across the room in faded Rank F uniforms. They chewed with the mechanical efficiency of people who ate only because dying before shift change caused administrative trouble.
Caleb approached the serving line.
A bored attendant stood behind thick glass.
"Identification."
Caleb tapped his temporary access card against the scanner.
The screen flashed red.
"Rank F."
The attendant scooped a gray protein block onto a plastic tray, added a foil packet of nutrient paste, and slid it under the glass.
"Standard ration."
Caleb studied the tray.
A normal soldier would come up short before afternoon drills. What lived in Caleb's chest would burn through it before the next hour ended.
"I need a double portion."
"Double portions are Rank C and above."
"Medical clearance says recovering trauma."
"System says Rank F." The attendant crossed his arms. "You want more food, go kill something and rank up."
The answer was stupid enough to be policy.
Caleb's attention went past the glass to the trays stacked behind the attendant. Protein bricks. Paste packets. Salted electrolyte strips. Enough calories to stop his hands from shaking, maybe. Enough to keep the burning thing behind his sternum from making suggestions.
The attendant noticed where Caleb's attention had gone.
His hand moved closer to the alarm button beneath the counter.
So the Seventh knew hunger made people dangerous.
They just billed danger by rank.
Caleb's hand twitched on the counter.
For one tight breath, he saw the whole line: the glass, the trays behind it, the attendant's throat, the distance between wanting and taking.
Then he picked up his ration and walked away.
The far corner table was empty.
He sat, tore the foil packet open with his teeth, and squeezed paste into his mouth. It tasted like chalk and sulfur. The thing under his ribs consumed it before it became comfort.
He ate the protein block in slow bites because rushing made hunger look desperate.
Footsteps approached.
A woman with chopped dark hair dropped her tray onto the steel table opposite him. Her faded gray uniform carried two years of repairs. Her eyes held the blank, exhausted focus of someone who had stopped expecting the system to make sense.
"You're the new guy with the locked feed," she said.
"Caleb."
"Rina."
She chewed a piece of dried fruit and pointed her fork at his bruised arm.
"Two years in this division. Came in wanting to climb. Now I stay in the back of formation and collect base pay so I can eat. Military math is rigged."
"Noticed that."
"Good. Faster than most."
She glanced toward the public board mounted near the mess entrance.
"Quartermaster uploaded your regimen. You have to build raw physical mass just to force dead suit fibers to move. With one percent output, unpowered armor will crush your spine before a beast touches you."
"You tell all rookies that?"
"Only the ones with enough sense to listen."
"That a compliment?"
"No. A warning. Compliments get people confident, and confidence makes them stand in front."
Rina stabbed her fork into the last piece of ration fruit.
"The Seventh's problem is incentives," she said. "The ranking system rewards spectacle before competence. Kids chase clips. Veterans chase calories. Captains chase budgets. Somewhere in the middle, a beast notices nobody is watching its off-hand."
Caleb swallowed the last bite.
The hunger remained.
"I survived disposal yards," he said. "I know how to carry dead weight."
Rina studied him.
"Everyone says something like that on day one."
She picked up her tray.
"Drills start at thirteen hundred. Try not to die. It ruins morale."
She walked away.
Caleb sat alone with an empty tray.
Rank C required ten harvests and one hundred thousand engagement points.
He had a starving body, a dead-weight suit, and one viewer with a possessive streak sharp enough to cut wires from inside the walls.
He reached into his pocket. His thumb found the Seventh Division pin first, with the comms chip waiting beside it, and Caleb closed his fingers around both.
If the ghost wanted a bloodbath, he would have to make it useful.