And stand out I did.

A little under a month had passed since that first class with Culkmen. Fortunately, we still hadn't had any conversation about where I'd gotten my tricks. I settled into a nice groove of training, sparring, and putting my feet up with the people of Fletcher Hall. I'd inadvertently become part of a quintet of Eyes, Kylen, Weiland, Phoebe, and I. We were a fiercely loyal group, but we kept enough space between us to respect each other's secrets.

That was a good thing for me because I had accumulated a stack of them: my true age, my relationship with Delta, the authority attribute, and the abilities [Windslash] and [Inflame]. It was easy to forget that everything could be undone by the wrong person getting a glimpse of my [Status].

Those weeks were also spent learning what it meant to be fodder in Zeus’ Legion. As time passed, I couldn’t help but be unimpressed with what I saw. If it hadn't been for my own training routine, I would've felt wholly unprepared for combat against another large group. The Imperial Officers in charge of Fletcher Hall's training seemed fully willing to just feed my group of enlistees to the meat grinder when the time came.

If that attitude was the same everywhere, then that might begin to explain why the Legion's mortality rate was so high. Feeling like you're disposable isn't great for morale. Nor were many of the practical exercises they had us perform.

Some of them were a disaster.

One afternoon, a training group of enlisted gathered for instruction in one of the subterranean arenas of Lobsterhead. In that arena without a visible sky, I found myself becoming overwhelmed by the sensations of what was happening around me.

The sound of sand crunching beneath a heavy boot. The painful sting of sweat dripping into an eye. The taste of blood. The heavy breath of air from lungs screaming for a break in an exhausted body pushed to the brink. It was my body. Just as it was my ragged breath, my blood, and my sweat.

I was in a fight.

The training group was sparring in deliberately uneven matchups: three against one, four against one, six against one. There was only one group of six, an unusually large group, tasked with the single purpose of bringing down the one among them who was part giant. Me.

They’d given me a shield, a sword, and the opposite goal: I was supposed to take on six of my peers in combat. My opponents were supposed to fight fair. I, however, was allowed to use any means necessary to achieve my victory.

Well, I thought, that wasn’t technically true. No one had specifically forbidden me from fighting dirty. They’d just thrown me in and said, ‘Good luck!’

The goal of the exercise was to get used to facing insurmountable odds. It was supposed to shatter your pride like a stone thrown through a glass window. Instead, I took it as a challenge. The belief that someone thought me incapable made my blood boil. I'd recap the event later with Kylen, and see if he had a better explanation than convincing every person that they were beatable. He was better than I at rationalizing their behavior.

The word that Imperial Instructors threw around more than any other was survivability. All an individual’s survivability meant was their ability to get the hell off the battlefield when the real players showed up. When the monsters of men, those who were like Beluga, decided to appear and warp a landscape into a waste. My survivability was quite high, even more so when you counted what [Inflame] had done when I fought the Spineback. I thought the whole was nonsense.

Outside of wartimes, Legion policy in case of the appearance of a god could be surmised in one word: run. During wartime, I found the one-word rule held true, too. Only it was a different word. Run became die.

After the third lecturer told me that I had no chance against someone truly powerful, I’d about had enough. After the fourth, I nearly stormed out of the barracks’ classroom. I had to find a way to make Beluga pay, and it didn’t seem like the Legion would be much help with that.

Interrupting my thoughts, three wooden blades from three different sources slammed at once into the too-small tower shield the fort armorers had given me. The shield was heavily used, much like everything else assigned to our batch of trainees, and about half of my face went clear over the top of it. That didn’t matter much. None of the impacting blades made me move in the slightest, not even in a gentle rock backward.

My survivability had become something of a joke in Fletcher Hall. There weren’t any three individuals from my cohort that could beat me in a trial of blunt weapons. I could stand still and take a beating for an age, and no one else had the ability or the desire. If I looked in any of their directions with a club in hand, they’d collapse like a house of cards.

I took a step forward, pushing against the flats of the blades with the shield backed by the bulk of my weight. The three whose blades I battered away staggered backward as if they’d been hit. They regrouped a handful of paces away.

Six sets of eyes stared me down from across the sand.

I had to move. It was essential that I controlled the direction of the scrap. There were too many weapons poised against me for me to stay on the defensive. But, there were too many of them to engage all at once, so if I wanted a shot at victory I needed to change the circumstances. Six on one was a stretch for me. But, did I think I could make quick work of a group of three who were each a head below me?

Yes, and everyone knew that I could. That’s why they’d thrown six against me. How could I separate them? I needed to permanently divide their group with only the tools I had in hand. For a device meant to offer total-body protection, the tower shield did a good job of protecting everything except my skull. I didn’t think that was a flaw, however. The increased visibility would be useful in this fight.

I slowly advanced toward them. Honestly, I was hesitant to commit to anything too risky for fear of overextension being brutally punished by a hailstorm of blows. They stood still together as a group, making a nervous wall of bodies. They waited for me to strike. By doing so, they allowed me to determine the terms of engagement. I'd use that to my advantage. I was no mouse.

On the last possible step before I was in range for them to engage, I exploded into action. I used my size, just like Delta had taught me. More importantly, I used my strength. I charged into the center of where they stood. The group recoiled away from my movement. They broke ranks, and each took a few steps back. They were afraid to engage me. Good. And now they'd split themselves up.

With as much force as I could muster through [Empower], I jammed the shield into a crack in the stones of the floor beneath the sands of the arena. It wedged there with the harsh shriek of metal scraping against stone and stood upright in the middle of everyone. I am unsure if I was yet strong enough to crack stone, but I could take advantage of a weakness already present.

The shield formed a natural barrier, a wall for me to work around. It changed the game.

Two of them approached me from either side of the shield. A simple flank. My eyes darted back and forth between them, watching to see if the two who hadn’t yet approached would commit to a side. If I was right about what the pair was doing, they were waiting for me to choose for them. It was a simple strategy. Whichever side I engaged; they’d immediately reinforce. The fight on that side of the shield would go from two versus one to four versus one in the blink of an eye. Of course, that was assuming they were fast enough to be able to assist their comrades in time.

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Against me, few in Fletcher Hall were. Except maybe Eyes, whose preternatural grace made him hard to pin down. I had no idea how high his Dexterity must've been.

I made a feint towards the pair on the left, and then pivoted my heel and leaped to the right. They both flinched. With someone twice your size barreling towards you, who wouldn't?

Which gave me the opportunity to hit them both, which I did, and I hit them hard. They went down in a single strike each. Despite me only using a blunt weapon, I didn't think they'd get back up. They'd both just become more work for the Healers.

The Healers were a feature of Lobsterhead that I found invaluable, mostly because I kept sending fellow trainees to them. They were a subdivision of the Legion devoted to stitching people back together with the help of the System. I wasn't sure about the mechanics of how it worked, I just knew that the few times I had gone to them I'd left feeling a dozen times better. The Healers were a spooky group, though. They had a lot of pageantry associated with them, and when you coupled that with the fact they mostly wore flowing robes and swore to spend their lives in the service of Zeus, things got a little unnerving.

Though that wasn't something I'd ever tell them.

I met the two boys in the back halfway through their approach and sent a wooden hilt into the forehead of one, which I immediately paid for. His partner's training blade connected with my torso. It stung like you wouldn't believe, but bounced off my skin. Gritting my teeth, I turned to face the one that had struck me.

I frowned at him and lowered my blade slightly.

"What did that accomplish?"

He looked at me and stammered something unintelligible. I sent a fist into his gut, and he went down with a wheeze.

With that, the fight was officially mine. Two versus one. I liked those odds, as I'd dispatched four of my peers with hardly a bruise to show for it. Two more was nothing. I threw my sword aside and let it rest on the floor of the ring. Then, I crossed my arms and spoke to them, but not before letting out an audible yawn.

"Feel free to give up. The Healer's ward is going to be busy enough as it is."

Unexpectedly, one of them actually took me up on my offer. I'd meant it as a joke to piss them off, so I was pleasantly surprised when a boy whose name I couldn't remember tossed his blade onto the floor and began to climb out of the arena. I thought he might've been called Pierce. Or maybe it was Patricius? No, it was definitely Pierce.

He was a part of Fletcher Hall, but not one of the people I was chummy with.

"Thanks, big guy!" Pierce called back once he'd cleared the wall and rejoined the rest of the training group. The combat instructor glowered at him, but he seemed to pay them no mind.

That left only one.

The individual remaining against me turned a pale white and raised his blade. His wit didn't last long. He began to shake like he'd caught a chill. Then, a full-blown shiver began to rack his body and make his practice sword wave uneasily back and forth through the air. In truth, I was actually a little worried for his health.

"Are you okay? You aren't looking so great."

I took a step toward him. He collapsed onto the sand.

All in all, I felt like it had been a productive day for the growth of my ego. I outclassed them in every way, so much so that I hadn't even needed to lean on the assistance of the System. This fight was definitely going to go to my head.

* * *

The curriculum of a foot soldier was not individualized. I'd come across this problem very early in my time in the Legion. While I might've been leagues ahead of them in combat, which I felt was the soul of being an effective soldier, I suffered elsewhere. I couldn't read as quickly as many of them, and I often found myself fighting to stay awake through the lessons that weren't tactics or swordplay. I struggled with etiquette most of all. It was reminiscent of the animosity I'd had with Voltani's lessons, only much worse.

It was these difficulties that led to the ironic reality of me being lectured about manners by a bumpkin.

Kylen, my bunkmate and friend, was trying to get through to me that remembering the titles of various inherited positions and how to address them was important. I'd taken the safe route of addressing anyone who was even slightly well-dressed as 'sir' and hoping for the best.

"Ghul," he exclaimed. "if you encounter a high-ranked enough member of the Temple Authority, you have to address them as 'Your Eminence.'"

I groaned. "Why? What's the difference?"

Eyes, who was sitting nearby and listening to the conversation, laughed at my question. He didn't laugh by laughing, which would've made noise, instead he made a rapid motion of his shoulders up and down. If you didn't know that Eyes didn't speak, you'd probably be wondering about his health after seeing that display.

It'd taken Kylen and I the better part of a week to get used to his style of communicating without words, but, eventually it became like he was a part of our talks.

Kylen sighed. "If you don't, you'll end up spending a night in the stockade under charges of irreverence for Zeus."

That sounded like a trumped-up bunch of self-important nonsense. I shook my head in disapproval. He continued,

"After all, they are His voice. And His voice echoes through the sky and minds of New Rome, spreading truth."

The one thing I didn't enjoy about Kylen was that he was one of the faithful. Not that Eyes and I weren't. When evidence of the divine was available at any great conflict, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in New Rome who didn't believe in the might of Zeus. But acknowledging his supremacy wasn't the same as worshipping him, and Kylen lived and breathed Zeus' law.

He was a fanatic. Lovable, but still a fanatic.

"Kylen, I doubt Zeus cares about which honorific we use to address his priesthood. I think it's more about intending to respect him," I said. He shook his head at me.

"You cannot presume to know what Zeus wants, Ghul. It's only by following the rules of the Temple Authority that we can be absolutely sure."

Personally, I doubted that Zeus himself wrote those rules. The Temple Authority seemed like a bunch of old men in white cloaks with holier-than-thou attitudes. I thought their only redeeming quality was that they sometimes gave out food to the needy. I remained unconvinced of their necessity.

"Plus, it's the rules of the conduct with the Temple Authority that Dame Lucy is going to drill you on."

That was a good point. Dame Lucy loved her tests, and she was a stickler for details. I viewed myself as someone who focused more on the big picture, which wasn't great for a class obsessed with minutiae like which fork to use.

Dame Lucy was half instructor, half quartermaster, and wholly hated by the residents of Fletcher Hall. She was old as dirt, her hair gray and accompanied by an oversized pair of spectacles that sat crooked on her nose. She remained alert at all times, ready to pounce on the mistakes of an unsuspecting enlistee. I thought she took a sadistic delight in pointing out a person's flaws. Her voice was like the shrill screech of a bird. It made you cringe and cover your ears. I didn't like her. To be fair, she didn't like me either. She was fond of questioning me at random.

I had no idea what could make a person so unpleasant. I didn't care to find out.

I raised my hands in mock surrender.

"I yield the point, out of fear of Dame Lucy's wrath. Instructor Kylen," I gave him an exaggerated bow. "Please instruct me on how best to grovel." I couldn't resist making fun of how seriously he was taking this. There'd be no real consequences for any mistake I made in addressing someone, aside from whatever creative punishment Dame Lucy whipped up that day.

"Well.. in that case, here's your first lesson!" Kylen exclaimed and then threw what he had in his hands at me. It was a crumpled ball of parchment from when he'd been practicing his letters.

I was an easy target and made no move to dodge the incoming projectile. I just sat there, smirking like an idiot when it hit me in the face.

Eyes laughed some more to himself. We laughed with him.

* * *

Later in life, it was because of friends like them that I would become Ares. Because there were citizens of the Empire of New Rome that did nothing except selflessly care for others, and none among the divine cared for them in turn. I swore to myself that I would protect them. Eventually, it was that desire to protect that would lead to me becoming the god of war. The irony of the situation was not lost on me.

But for now, I was just focused on having passable manners. I didn't see the storm clouds rolling over the horizon. I didn't know that we were teetering on the edge of disaster. I had no idea that trouble was brewing elsewhere in the Empire, and that it threatened to spill over and consume the rest.

I didn't know a war was coming.