Chapter 14
Zero eight hundred hit like a sledgehammer.
Caleb sat in the back row of Briefing Room 7. Eleven other new recruits occupied the rusted metal desks around him. The underground chamber smelled of burnt coffee and gun oil. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed overhead. The cold light exposed every scuff on the concrete floor. There were no windows. There were no corporate banners. A dented steel podium stood at the front of the room next to a cracked digital board.
Vice Captain Iris Calder walked into the room.
She carried a chipped ceramic mug of black coffee. Her dark gray Seventh Division uniform sleeves were rolled high. Thick raised scar tissue crawled up both of her forearms like frozen lightning. She took a slow sip, swallowed hard, and set the mug on the podium.
Dark circles bruised the skin under her eyes. She looked like a frontline worker who simply survived longer than anyone else.
"Welcome to the meat grinder," Iris said. Her voice carried a raspy edge. "You signed the death forms last night. Now you learn what you actually agreed to."
She tapped the digital board. 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 all viewership bonuses and gifts.
Highlight Clips Sold to corporate sponsors for a bonus multiplier based on Danger Class.
Executive Private Feeds Public chat disabled. No secondary sponsor bids. One viewer owns you.
Caleb stared at the numbers. The reality settled heavy in his gut. The fifty thousand base pay kept the collection agencies away from his family. It covered the interest. To actually survive and pay off the principal, he needed the viewership bonuses and the highlight multipliers.
He swallowed the nausea and forced his posture to stay rigid.
Iris tapped the digital board again. The economic chart vanished.
A jagged pyramid replaced it. The text appeared in a heavy font.
"First and Third Divisions use sanitized corporate ladders," Iris said. She rested her forearms against the metal podium. "We use Schlacht ranking. Slaughterhouse rules. Hybrid of the old world."
She slapped the bottom block of the digital pyramid. A gray bar highlighted on the cracked screen.
"Rank F. The Draugr. Walking dead. That's every one of you. You're ghosts. Zero public presence, base fifty grand, and whatever scraps the Guild leaves in the disposal bays."
Her finger moved up the pyramid to a glowing blue tier.
"You want out of the graveyard? Ten confirmed Danger Class harvests. A hundred thousand viewer engagement points. Hit those, you evolve into Rank C. The Jaeger. The hunters."
Iris tapped her chipped mug against the metal podium.
"Jaeger gets you double base pay. Public ad revenue pool. Premium surplus gear. You stop starving."
Her finger tapped the red section near the top.
"Survive a year as a Jaeger, pull a million viewers, you join my assault squad. Rank A. The Shinigami. Death gods. Corporate sponsorships, custom armor, your face on the neon billboards in the upper sectors."
Her eyes lifted to the tip of the pyramid. The block glowed gold.
"Top seats? Captain Kade and me." Her razor sharp grin returned. "Rank S. The Aesir. Gods of the meat grinder. We take thirty percent of the entire division gross. You want our seats, you kill us for them."
Above the gold block, a final tier hovered separate from the rest. It pulsed with a dark red light.
"Then there's Rank SSS," Iris murmured. The room went silent. "You don't ask about them. You don't aim for them. They operate above the military grid and answer only to the Guild executives. You see an SSS operator in the field, you run the other way."
Caleb evaluated the requirements. Ten confirmed harvests were manageable. A hundred thousand viewer engagement points were mathematically impossible with a locked feed. He had exactly one viewer. To reach Rank C and secure the untaxed bonus pay, his anonymous hacker had to dump hundreds of thousands of credits into his private stream purely for her own entertainment.
He was dependent on the ghost. He gripped the edge of the rusted desk. The aching void in his stomach twisted hard.
"Class dismissed," Iris announced. She picked up her coffee mug. "Grab your datapads. Get your barracks assignments squared away. Practical drills in the staging yard at thirteen hundred hours."
Chairs scraped against the concrete floor. The tension in the room broke. The other eleven recruits grabbed their gear and hurried toward the heavy steel doors to escape the Vice Captain.
Caleb grabbed his canvas duffel bag and pushed himself up from the desk.
"Mercer," Iris called out. Her gravelly voice cut through the shuffling boots. "Stay in your seat."
Caleb stopped. He lowered his bag to the concrete.
The last recruit hurried out into the corridor and pulled the heavy steel door shut behind him. The latch clicked into place. The room sealed.
Iris walked down the center aisle. Up close, her scars commanded attention. She stopped a few feet from his desk and studied his cheap canvas jacket and the heavy bruising up his neck.
"You hold the only Executive Private lock in this cycle," Iris said. Her tone dropped into a cold clip. "Your entire feed is blacked out. No public gifts. No sponsor bids. One anonymous whale owns every second of your life on camera."
She tilted her head. "I read your file. You scrubbed bone marrow for five years. Care to explain how a disposal yard casualty pulled an exclusive million credit patronage?"
Caleb kept his posture relaxed. His muscles coiled tight. He was a thirty year old man carrying secrets that could get him executed by a firing squad. He offered only the minimum truth required to survive the conversation.
"I was bleeding out in a disposal zone," Caleb said. "A capsule dropped. I accepted the help."
Iris studied him for two full seconds. She searched his face for a lie. She searched for the pampered entitlement of a corporate plant. What she found was the calculated restraint of a cornered survivor.
"A convenient guardian angel," Iris murmured. She held out her scarred hand. "And the encrypted comms chip currently buried under your hairline?"
Caleb paused. Getting washed out on day one was not an option. He reached up, peeled the adhesive off his skin, and dropped the tiny matte black device into her palm.
Iris did not put the chip in her pocket. She held it up between her scarred thumb and index finger and brought the tiny microphone directly to her mouth. Her stare went straight at Caleb. The words coming out next were meant for the ghost on the other end of the line.
"Listen close, whale," Iris murmured. "The Seventh's a warzone. He's my soldier now. You lock his feed, you cut his resources. You cut his resources, he dies. You want a private show, fine. Don't handicap my squad. Stay out of the way, or I'll drop him in a signal dead bunker and you'll never watch him bleed again."
The hum of the fluorescent lights filled the empty room.
The cracked digital board at the front glitched.
The sterile white pyramid dissolved. A wave of corrupted static washed over the glass. Pulsing purple code replaced the military data. The text crawled across the wide screen, dominating the dark briefing room.
[???] He belongs to me. I own exclusive rights to his suffering. You only get to use him as bait.
Iris did not flinch. She did not reach for a weapon. Another slow sip of her black coffee went down. Her eyes read the purple text lighting up the concrete walls.
"I use him to kill Danger Class threats," Iris answered. She spoke clearly into the earpiece. "That's the job. Keep your wallet open if you want him to survive long enough to entertain you. I don't carry dead weight. I don't take orders from civilians."
She tossed the comms chip back onto Caleb's rusted desk. It hit the metal with a sharp clatter.
"Put it away," Iris ordered. She turned her back on him and walked toward the podium. "At least you don't lie about your baggage."
She slapped the side of the digital board. The military grid fought the hack. The system purged the purple text and replaced it with the blank Defense Force seal.
Caleb picked up the matte black chip and shoved it deep into his canvas pocket. He stood up. His bruised right arm hung heavily by his side. The physical toll of his healing ribs made every movement drag.
Iris leaned against the podium. She watched him pack his bag. Her dark eyes tracked the slight exhausted hunch in his shoulders.
"Get some calories, Mercer," Iris said quietly. The cold edge left her voice. "You look terrible."
Caleb grabbed his duffel bag. The heavy canvas strap bit into his bruised shoulder. He walked up the center aisle toward the steel doors. The hum of the fluorescent bulbs followed him out into the concrete corridor.
He moved through the underground complex. The painted yellow arrows on the linoleum directed the recruits toward the mess hall.
His boots felt like lead. The adrenaline from the confrontation with Iris drained away. The thing coiled under his ribs intensified its demands. A severe cramp folded his stomach in half. He caught himself against the cinderblock wall with his left hand. The rough texture of the painted concrete scraped against his palm. He dragged thin streams of oxygen through his nose.
He forced himself to keep walking.
-----
The Seventh Division mess hall was a cavern of dented steel tables and bolted chairs. The smell of boiled lab-grown protein and industrial cleaner soaked the air. A dozen veterans sat scattered across the room. They wore the faded scuffed gray uniforms of Rank F. Nobody spoke. They chewed their food with the mechanical efficiency of people who ate only to survive another shift.
Caleb approached the serving line. A bored attendant in a white apron stood behind a thick glass partition.
"Identification," the attendant grunted.
Caleb pulled his temporary access card from his pocket and tapped it against the scanner.
The screen flashed red.
"Rank F," the attendant said. He scooped a gray dense block of protein onto a plastic tray, dropped a foil packet of dry nutrient paste next to it, and slid the tray under the glass partition. "Standard ration."
Caleb stared at the gray block. It contained barely enough calories to sustain a normal human through a training drill. It would not even begin to satisfy the monster knitting his bones together.
"I need a double portion," Caleb said.
The attendant crossed his arms. "Double portions are for Rank C and above. You want more food, go kill something and rank up. Move along."
Caleb gripped the edge of the metal counter. The hunger burned straight through the cold void in his stomach. He could reach across the glass and take the entire tray of protein blocks. The urge spiked hard in his brain. His right hand twitched.
Caleb locked his jaw, grabbed the plastic tray with his left hand, and walked away.
The far corner of the room had an empty table. The bolted steel chair groaned under his weight as he sat down. He tore the foil packet open with his teeth and squeezed the dry nutrient paste directly into his mouth. It tasted like chalk and sulfur. He swallowed it dry.
Heat flared in his chest.
The food hit his stomach and vanished. The thing inside him consumed it instantly. The burn sharpened. It settled deep in his marrow. It left him hollow again.
He picked up the gray protein block and forced himself to take slow methodical bites. The food provided zero relief. A deep itch crawled under his skin. The burning fatigue bleeding from his joints refused to evaporate.
Footsteps approached his table.
A woman with chopped dark hair and a faded gray uniform dropped her tray onto the steel surface opposite him. She sat down. She chewed on a piece of dried fruit. Her eyes held the blank exhausted stare of a two year veteran stuck at the bottom of the slaughterhouse hierarchy.
"You're the new guy with the locked feed," she said. Her voice was flat. "I'm Rina. Welcome to the graveyard."
Caleb leaned his elbows on the table. He kept his bruised right arm tucked close to his ribs. "Caleb."
"Two years I've been stuck in this division," Rina muttered. She swallowed the dried fruit. "Came in wanting to climb the tiers. Now I just stay in the back of the formation and collect the base pay so I can eat. The military math is rigged."
She pointed a plastic fork at his bruised arm.
"You don't have the sync rate to survive the front line," Rina said. "The quartermaster uploaded your training regimen to the public board. You have to build raw physical mass just to force the dead suit fibers to move. The unpowered armor will crush your spine before a beast even touches you."
Caleb finished the protein block. The hunger remained physical agony.
"I survived the disposal yards," Caleb said. He kept his voice flat. "I know how to carry dead weight."
Rina studied him. She picked up her tray. "Drills start at thirteen hundred. Try not to die. It ruins the morale."
She walked away.
Caleb sat alone in the mess hall. He stared at the empty plastic tray. The path to Rank C required a hundred thousand engagement points. He had zero public visibility. He had a starving body. He had an unpowered surplus suit.
His hand reached into his pocket. His calloused thumb brushed the sharp edges of the matte black Seventh Division pin. He felt the cold outline of the comms chip resting right beside it.
He had one viewer. He would have to give her a bloodbath.