Thirty seconds to cross the field had been surprisingly achievable.

Looking back on it, he was surprised it had taken him as long as it had to make it across the first time. His fear had made him run foolishly.

Growing the muscle mass had been quick; the growth shots and their high-protein diets made them swell quickly.

His mom had always told him he'd been too skinny. Now he looked at himself in a mirror and his muscles were defined even when he did not flex.

But the Field Run hadn't been the worst of it, not by far.

There was the Gas Run, where you kept having to run to different stations to get a mask, which would only last for twenty seconds before intentionally opening. Double-dipping didn't help, every mask opened as when that timer hit, even on the racks. A few had made the mistake of trying and died gasping.

And far worse than the Gas Run had been the Holding Sit. When mortar shells had been shot at them constantly from above, and they had to hold positions in the open. All they could do was to huddle under their Guardian drones and hope their combat armor would protect them from the shrapnel.

Sitting in rings, being in the middle meant that there was less chance of ricocheting shrapnel hitting you in the ass. But it also meant you were at the center of the target; if the Guardian Drones missed one mortar it'd land in your lap.

A few panicked and tried to run out the first time; they were in the same area as the Field Run, and they were so close to the bunkers.

But those who tried, hadn't made it. The mortar fire picked up immediately.

Their first shelling, he'd felt the man next to him try to run. Crushed together so tightly, he could feel the muscles in his legs tensing, ready to carry him out once he thought he'd found the right timing.

"Don't!" he'd yelled to the man. He hooked his arm around the other man's, and his neighbor with his other, locking him in. "Hold!" he yelled.

"Hold!" another yelled, then another. Rapidly many.

Then it became a chant. "Hold! Hold! Hold!"

The man, who he only knew as 27, did not try to run, and they made it through.

Shock block washed away his fear and doubt.

It made one feel great after the training. They made it!

Yeah, it was deadly. But as long as you did what you were told, and you were good enough, you would probably make it. The odds were on your side.

Some still hadn't been able to take it, though. Maybe the shock blockers didn't work well for them, or maybe they were just cowards.

They were encouraged to jeer at the malingerers as 'COWARD' was branded onto their foreheads. Afterwards, still bleeding, they were dragged out by the security officers.

"They will work to repay their debt," the Sergeant had told them. "No one gets a free ride!"

They said it like that was some kind of justice. Lukis knew it was not, but he cheered with the others, even if half-heartedly.

Many, he saw, really meant it.

During their second shelling, one shell slipped through the Guardian drone barrage. No survivors in that group.

Before the shelling they were put into new groups, and Lukis noticed that the people who rated the poorest were all put together. Older men, with slower reflexes.

He didn't know if they hit the group intentionally to get rid of them. But he wondered. If anyone else did, they didn't say anything, and he felt alone. Hating himself for feeling glad it wasn't his group.

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The safest days were just weapons training, or the Injection Learning days.

The former were the best; even if you had to shoot a rifle all day until your ears rang and your body was sore from the recoil, it was a lot better than the alternative.

Injection Learning was supposedly to teach them tactics and formations and other information more efficiently. A small headset you put on connected to the device in your head. Images flashed in front of Lukis's eyes, words repeated, followed by questions. It was more than just flashing images, he knew, the Injection Learning was literally altering their brains through the device in their skull. Sometimes the flashes of information were not even things on the screen, but his brain was being prodded in a way that made it visualize the information.

By the end of the day, you knew everything they were showing you; you could answer questions without knowing how you knew the answer.

Always at the end of the Injection Learning was the propaganda. A steady hour of it that dragged on and on.

Gloria was the home of humanity, since Earth had been taken by the depraved Rejectionists - those who Rejected the Emperor and brought mindless chaos.

Gloria was the New Earth.

Gloria Aeternus

They only had Gloria because of the Emperor.

Emperor Netanoric de Villard the First and Only, High Dynast of the United Glorian Republic and the 501 stars of the Hyades.

Gloria Aeternus

He had saved humanity from falling completely into depravity.

The humanity of the Sapient Union was depraved, chaotic, and under the sway of the Alien. Humanity would never obtain their birthright and own the galaxy.

Gloria Aeternus

The Alien would weaken humanity and destroy it.

One day, the Emperor's Avenging Armies would sweep the cosmos clean of the Depraved, Rejectionist, and Alien, and then they would have paradise.

Whenever Lukis thought of any of it, the words Gloria Aeternus popped into his mind. He could tell the Glorian stories without ever knowing he'd heard them. He noticed that the way he thought about things was altered; he sometimes wondered what the Emperor would want him to do, what he could do to make Gloria stronger.

But something key was missing. That part was clear to him. The imprinting was missing a bedrock, he thought. He had not been raised hearing about the Emperor and the Glorian "truth".

It was sometimes just confusing. He was not Glorian, his homeworld of Eziter was from a small colony world that had been a part of the Ouo Ledory decades ago. The place had a population under a million, and even with it being taken in the war between Gloria and the Ledory, not much had changed.

Neither, though, had he been particularly religious. Sometimes the Propaganda spoke to him about Ouan religious ideals that he only knew passingly, disproving them, suggesting new meanings and interpretations and . . . he could only say it was logic in that it was intended as such. He'd never had a strong belief, so tweaking those beliefs didn't have much of an impact.

No matter how much they wanted to paint the Emperor as the Chosen of the Infinite, as the Ouo Ledory awaited, it did not mean much when he did not believe in the prophecy.

But it was still strange, going to bed having learned months worth of book-reading in a day. He woke up with words on his lips, dreamed of pure information and tactics of 3D shapes on theoretical terrains, and specific tactical situations - watch out for the drones, there were always drones, and the gas bombs that would turn the skies a cursed yellow or red, and if you took off your helmet at all you'd die from them and seal any holes in your damn suit!

Death just swirled together into a morass, and he awoke with cramps from thrashing so hard in his sleep, his head burning with fever.

The first time it happened, a Drone came to him. When it saw that he couldn't get back to sleep, it swooped in and offered him a sedative.

Drugged sleep was even worse, though. The same death states persisted, and he relived his own memories in even deeper dreams that felt real.

Lukis got his conscription notice from the network and the next day they came to collect. One Collection Officer in heavy armor and a dozen sleek and deadly drones.

The man waddled up awkwardly, one of his legs a cheap prosthetic. He'd just yelled for him to come out, that he had three minutes to appear.

His mother didn't want him to go, but when he thought about hiding like she said, he saw the Fail State, and they all died.

He told her they'd just talk to the Collection Officer, tell him that he couldn't go. They had to do that much.

As soon as they let the man in, it became clear that there was no talking his way out of it.

The man explained the privileges and duties of a conscript. Lukis remembered, exaggerated in the dream-state, how the place where the man's mechanical leg met his flesh had been inflamed, the skin peeling. Seeing him scratch at it disturbed him in a way he couldn't put into words.

Every step of that tense day, he had to say the right thing, the thing they wanted to hear, or he would hit a Fail State and die. His whole family would die.

He couldn't let that happen, it was easy to just be taken along, and so he agreed to everything they said and left with them to be a soldier for Gloria Aeternus.

"Bye mom," had been his last words to her, in the dream as it had been in real life.