28 - Soldiers
The screaming of a woman caught Mathias Navarro’s attention. He snapped around, his axe raised and ready to strike. A woman stared up at him, clutching a child. She was yelling something to him, but he didn’t understand her. She looked at him in horror, no she wasn’t looking at him. Navarro turned to see a creature out of a nightmare crest the remnants of a shattered wall.
Blood drenched the odd chitinous armor that covered its body, still fresh and dripping. The beast let out a hideous screech and the ground rumbled around him, the stampeding noise of the monster’s brethren come to back it up.
“Run!” Navarro shouted and stood his ground. The monster raised a heavily furred arm, seemingly an attachment from a completely different animal than what made up the rest of the creature. The woman clutched her child and staggered away, toward the fortified lines that the Cosmonaut held.
“Mat where the fuck are you?” a voice chattered in his helmet. Navarro grimaced as he slapped the side of his helmet. That damn bitch Maya had made it impossible for him toe remove the helmet and the volume from the radios was way too loud for him.
“Found a woman and kid,” Navarro said, backing away as the monsters all stared at him, the front half of their bodies leaning against the brick wall.
“You fucking her or what? Get your ass back here.” The voice belonged to Pedro Rojo, one of Samanco’s old friends. The name came from all the blood he had been covered with in the attacks upon the villages.
He was nearly as vile as Samanco, but smatter and crueler. Of all the people who should have died alongside Samanco, Navarro was sad to see that man still alive.
“You know the rules,” Navarro said. “Every person we save is an hour we get of ‘free time’.” Navarro looked up at the counter at the edge of his vision. It read 24. He had saved 24 people in the last few hours, helping those that had been trapped behind the lines or cut off get back to the defenses of the settlement that the Cosmonaut had created.
“I don’t give a shit what that whore is promising. Get your ass back here and lend a fucking hand,” Pedro snarled. “We’re getting our asses handed to us.”
Navarro sighed and glanced back at the monsters who were still watching him. Why hadn’t they attacked? He didn’t know and didn’t care. They were being overrun in every quadrant, the Penal Brigade was holding their own. It wasn’t hard to understand why, they all had high levels compared the to Russians. These Russians might have survived Moscow, but they had nothing on the power leveling and murder that had gone on under Samanco’s rule.
It was why they were here after all. Their hands had been soaked in blood and now this was their payment. Navarro was never a good Catholic, no matter what he mother had tried to instill in him. Yet there were moments in this fight, moments when the creatures were swarming and it was only him between them and the defenseless people. It was in those moments he began to realize what life could have been like if he hadn’t met Samanco.
Everyone had talked about power in the beginning. The power to do anything and everything they wanted. They were the top of the food chain now, they were given strength and power by the System and there was no one to stop them from taking it. That had been the lure of so many people. They wanted power and they wanted to be the ones on top.
That lure of power had intoxicated Navarro. He had been nothing before Integration. Just a poor man living in a poor village where his future was a straight line from poverty, to crime, to death.
Now he was Level 17 with [Axeman] having hit Level 20. He had saved 24 people from death. He had seen the horrors that were plaguing the world and he had seen the bravery of average men and women standing in the face of that.
He didn’t know that life could be like this. That he could make a difference.
Navarro stood his ground as the monsters decided they were done watching him. Seven of them threw themselves over the shattered wall and screamed as they rushed him.
His axe moved, his body flowing into forms and stances he never had to fully think of. It was as if his body knew what it was doing. He just had to will it to move and he danced his way through the creatures. Their heads were sliced off, their furry paws chopped, and their chitinous armored body ruptured from the forces of his punches. He was a Level 18 [Brawler] now and he could punch through steel plating.
The red of his armor was drenched in too human looking blood. The carcasses of the monsters flopped to the ground and Navarro breathed deeply. The filters of his helmet were amazing, he never had to face the stentch of the fires that were burning across the city of Moscow.
“I think you’re enjoying this too much,” a voice said.
Navarro turned to see a Russian soldier, a woman in normal camo, wearing the usual mix of military and civilian attire. She carried a strange rifle across her shoulder and had a cigarette dangling from the side of her lips. The days of dust, dirt, and blood were caked to her clothing and her face was redden by either sunburn or some kind of explosion.
“This is what we are here for,” Navarro said.
“Yeah, that’s what all of you say,” the woman said. She let out a piercing whistle and a dozen more soldiers joined her from their hidden positions. “Word is that you’re all prisoners or something. Did some bad boy stuff and now you’re paying the price for it by fighting to the death.”
“Something like that,” Navarro said.
“Murderers, thieves, sadists, and fuckups,” the woman said. “Penal battalions, we’ve been there and done that.” She laughed and spat into the dirt. “But you’re alright, as long as you’re killing the monsters. Plus that Sullivan person has decked you all out in some of the best armor and weapons I’ve seen. No one carries that much gear around. Wanna trade?”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Navarro said.
“Your loss,” the woman chuckled. “Low-grade trash weapons for that nice ass axe would have been a sweet deal.”
“No, I mean it. I can’t trade this even if I wanted to. It’s all gene locked to me and according to the rules, Sullivan will pay good money for it to be returned as salvage.”
“Huh,” the woman grunted. “Shit, she really wants every bit of you back.”
Navarro didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t fully understand who Maya Sullivan was, but everyone seemed to know her name. The Cosmonaut did and so had his lieutenants and other officers. They had looked at him and the others with disgust, but they had used them. That was what they were here for, to be sent into the worst places and fight and die.
He took another deep breath.
“As long as you fight the right things, you’re good in our book,” the woman said. She flicked her cigarette into the pooling blood of one of the monsters. It sizzled and a small wisp of smoke rose.
Navarro looked out into the desolated wasteland that remained of Moscow. He saw the rising smoke, the dust that marked the location of battles, and the distant explosions. He could hear the screams of the innocents as they died trapped and abandoned. He had heard those same screams back in Peru. He had elicited those screams himself.
Blood stained his armor, red like human blood. But this was a blood of a monster, one that he had killed to protect others from.
A strange feeling filled him.
Navarro stepped forward, the battle wasn’t done and there were more monsters to kill.
And people to save.
***
Emilia Morales was hurried forward, a man in a uniform, dark with purple piping was shouting. The tone was urgent and commanding, but the words were gibberish to her. She looked at the man, saw he was Asiatic and he glared at her.
“Move!” he shouted at her in accented English.
“Run!” another man screamed at her.
Emilia rushed forward, one of the nearly fifty men and women that had arrived to the Market in the middle of the night. She had been roused from her sleep by the appearance of a golden window, it announced she and any others that had signed up to the Infantry were to be at the Market in two hours. Pack nothing and be quick about it.
They were heading to the Cage. Emilia was both terrified and excited. The people were being clustered into a small area, two other soldiers in dark uniforms that looked like coveralls with purple piping were standing before them.
“Ladies sand Gentleman,” a woman said. “Today begins your first steps into protecting mankind from the mana mutations that are destroying our world. In a few minutes, the Threshold will appear. When it does, move fast and enter. Every minute we waste here is twelve minutes in the Cage. Maya Sullivan doesn’t want people who’ll waste their time.”
Silence greeted the woman’s announcement.
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“This is the last chance for you to refuse to join the Infantry.” A window appeared before Emilia and she saw that faraway look people at when they were looking at a window. She swiped her window away. She had made her decisions.
Leaving Chicago had always been in her plans. With her brother now presumed dead and her mother refusing to acknowledge the change in the world, Emilia had nothing left to hold her back. Even her best friends had died, along with millions of others.
No one moved or left. They all stared at the woman and she smiled grimly at them.
“You will be paid well, you will receive training and equipment, but you will also be used to fight. And you will fight. The world is pretty fucked up and you’re needed.”
There was a sudden thickening of the air and Emilia felt a strange sense of fear and the need to run. She flinched as a wall suddenly appeared before them. It was tall and the words Maya’s Emporium flashed upon it.
“MOVE!” the soldiers shouted and Emilia surged forward with the rest of the gathered men and women. A massive doorway yawned open before them, with only darkness beyond it. Emilia wanted to stop, wanted to turn back, but she was being pushed forward by the crowd.
Then she stepped into the Cage.
Nothing happened. She wasn’t ripped apart. She wasn’t cast into some dark hole of nothingness. She stepped from the battered concrete of the Market and onto smooth metal decking. The room before her was massive, like a gymnasium, metallic walls reflected lights that hung at least twenty feet above her.
There was a clicking sound and she looked behind her and gasped. The door she had entered was gone. Instead there was only a blank metal wall. A murmur of concern began among the gathered people, but the soldiers that had chased them into the Cage were calmly walking about.
“Welcome to the Cage,” a woman announced. Emilia looked toward the woman, she was fairly tall and was dark skinned. She wore the same uniform as the other soldiers, so someone in charge? “You are now in the Infantry. This is Training Room 1. For the next two days you will be within this room as we train you up to use weapons, armor, and gear you toward your Occupational Specialty.”
“What does that mean?” a woman asked. She was in her mid forties by the grey in her hair and the hunch in her shoulders.
“This is only called the Infantry, but we need SIL in every occupational slot, from medics, melee weapon users, mages, and system tech engineers.”
“Mages?” a man asked, excitement in his voice.
“Calm down there, tiger,” the woman said. “You’ll have to undergo tests to see what your Foundation looks like before we begin assigning you anything. Plus, there’s bootcamp.” The woman grinned at them.
“Bootcamp?” another asked.
“Totally. Y’all are gonna love this.”
Emilia got an odd feeling from that phrase. She looked at the person to her side, but she was focused on the woman. The wall behind the woman began to dissolve. It did not move or slide away, instead it looked as if it were decaying in real time. The wall just broke apart, vanishing into thin air as the woman walked forward.
In another room there were scores of more men and women milling around too. They looked up at the newcomers, their stances tense and confused by their arrival.
“Y’all are the first class to be brought in,” the woman said as they followed her. Emilia noted that her voice was clearly audible to everyone, as if she were talking and standing near every person. Emilia didn’t have to strain or listen intently to catch her words. “We have a shortage of time,” the woman continued, “Time is always something that’s in short supply. Therefore, after discussing it with some of the experts, mostly Asoltolia, there are some methods we can speed up your training.”
“Who is this woman?” a person whispered near Emilia.
“Dunno, but she looks like she’s in charge of this.”
“First of all I’d like to introduce you to your overall commander, Major Ramon Sanchez.” A man stood beside the woman. He had a hard face and the sleeves of his coveralls were rolled up, revealing burns along his arms. He peered among the gathered recruits and did not look pleased at all.
“As I wa saying, time’s the issue we’re having. There’s a lot going on these days and although we could be putting some effort into other projects, this one is one of those projects that we really need,” the woman waved her hand and the ceiling of the room opened up. A massive terrifying looking machine began to descend. It was all tubes, wires, blinking lights, and jagged edges.
Emilia, along with everyone else, backed away from the machine. A murmur of concern rising among them.
“This,” the woman said, “is a wide spectrum VR generator.”
More confused murmuring.
A door opened and more uniformed men and women appeared, carrying crates in their hands. The soldiers began passing out a palm sized disc to the nearest people, spreading across the room and finally handing them out to everyone.
“Corporal Chu?” Emilia asked, surprised to see the soldier in the Cage.
“Oh, hey, kiddo,” the soldier said, grinning at her. He carried a crate in his hands and stopped before her. “I forgot you were apart of this group. Guess I haven’t been keeping up on the news too much.”
“What are you doing here?” Emilia asked. “Did you join the Mobile Infantry too?”
“Oh, hell no. I’m here as a spy and to lend a hand.” Chu pulled out a palm sized disc from the crate and handed to her. “Slap that baby on your forehead and things’ll get interesting.”
“How?”
Chu only jerked his head into the woman’s direction. “She’ll explain it.”
“Who is she?” Emilia asked.
Chu chuckled. “That’s Maya Sullivan,” he said.
The people eavesdropping on their conversation all let out a low gasp. No one really knew what Maya Sullivan looked like, Emilia realized. She just knew the name, not the person. Even the purchasing of the System’s information didn’t show a image of her, just her publicly available information, like what businesses she owned and where it was based out of.
Emilia forgot about Chu and stared at the woman. She wasn’t like she was expecting, but then again Emilia didn’t really know what to expect. Someone who commanded such power and abilities, someone who had created the Sullivan Boxes, who had gathered up mankind to fight and defend the planet… Emilia expected more.
The woman wasn’t old, probably in her mid-twenties of older. The image in her mind had been of a woman in her later years, someone experienced and knowledgeable in organization and business. Someone who had managed to obtain skills and abilities that no one on Earth had gained, someone who was both charismatic and impressive in their stature.
Perhaps it was her own need to think of the Maya Sullivan as someone who would be a savior to mankind. It was disappointing to see she was just a young woman with tired eyes.
“As I said before, time is something we don’t have much left of. Time flows differently in the Cage, but that doesn’t mean we can waste it by taking our time. We need to use the time we have here as efficiently as possible. That’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to push forward in Virtual Reality training.”
A murmur ran through the recruits again.
“Like the Occulus stuff?” someone asked.
“Like it, but waaaay better. So good that you could mistake it for reality,” Maya said. “Knowledge is the foundation upon which skills and abilities are gained. You can level up all you want, but if you don’t try to understand what things are and how they work, you’ll never gain more than the basic abilities. Therefore to speed up your learning, y’all will be placed with a VR environment where time will flow about ten times faster than it does here. You’ll spend the equivalent of twenty standard days in bootcamp, then afterward you’ll be power leveled to gain abilities and skills.”
Some people were grinning from ear to earn. Emilia looked at the recruits and realized what Chu had said long ago about the people who would be joining this mercenary group would be scraped from the bottle of the barrel. She was only level 6, because she was terrified of the horrors that were everywhere. These people seemed to be in the same boat, they were either old, out of shape, or far too young.
“Let’s get this party started,” Maya said. She waved her hand again and there was a rumble. The deck began bulging upward. Emilia hastily stepped back, but bumped into another bulge rising from the floor. Within seconds a bed was formed before her. She blinked at it and saw machinery attached to it and a monitor. “These are some monitoring beds. The thing with VR is that it disconnects your brain from your body, or that’s what your mana channels think. This’ll cause a lot of discomfort, disorientation, and other problems. It’s not deadly, well not entirely, but we’ve fixed that…. Sort of.” Maya laughed. “Place the disc on your foreheads, lay down, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
There was a nervous rumble from the people. They looked at one another and then at the soldiers that were gathered. Were they going to be forced?
“No one’s forcing you,” Maya said. “If you don’t want to, just say the word and you’ll be released from service. You’ll be returned home whenever we reconnect to where you arrived from. This is all voluntary, so no pressure.”
She might have said no pressure, but Emilia felt the pressure. If she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t have anything to go back to in Chicago. Her mother needed money to live and there were always assholes like Angel from her old neighborhood who had a grudge against her. She looked down at the disc and slapped it onto her forehead. She felt a slight sting and the disc attached to her skin.
The bed was very comfortable, seemingly to conform to her body. She stared at the distant lights on the ceiling, breathing slowly and calmly. The noise of other people following her example filled the room, shuffling, murmuring, and low whispers filling the air as they settled down into their beds.
“The world needs people like you,” Maya’s voice spoke to them all, like she was whispering in their ears. “Learn as much as you can and train as much as you can. Humanity is depending on you.”
Emilia took another breath and then the world went dark. She began to panic as she felt as if she were swimming in an utter void. She tried to scream, but she had no voice. She struggled to move, but she had no body. She was a floating consciousness in a vast darkness.
Then the darkness disappeared.
***
Asoltolia set the cup of coffee aside, sighing.
“I think I will buy this product and try to resell it in the Union,” she said.
“Well, we’ve managed to pull in a cargo ship that was hauling a lot of coffee the other day,” Maya said, sipping from her own cup. They sat on a balcony overlooking the staging area. A large courtyard where soldiers were gathering. To be precise, Asoltolia’s Union Mercenaries.
One thousand and forty three men and woman, all apart of the Revvena House were gathering below them. The shouts, curses, and clattering of equipment filled the massive room as the mercenaries prepared for themselves to be deployed.
“I’m still worried about this mana stripper of yours,” Asoltolia said.
“From what I’m hearing, it takes less than a day to fully recover from it. It’s painful, but only slightly. It’s more akin to having your skin abraded and then salt tossed on it.”
“That doesn’t sound only slightly painful,” Asoltolia said.
“With the high ambient mana, they’ll be fine.”
“But higher levels will take longer?” Asoltolia asked.
“We haven’t tried any real high leveled SIL yet, but it might be far more painful for them to cross over.”
“But doable?” Asoltolia asked.
“You want to take a gander around our world?” Maya asked.
Asoltolia chuckled. “A Tier 2 world? Of course. Do you know how many Tier 2 worlds are accessible in my universe? None. They’re all mana hellholes that’ll swallow entire fleets of ships and anyone lower than Tier 3. This world is a gold mine, if you want resources and training.”
“Tell that to Earthers,” Maya said. “We’re barely surviving on that planet.”
Asoltolia nodded. “Forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make light of your people’s suffering.”
“No prob,” Maya said. “How long will it take for your troops to be ready to be deployed?”
“Their officers say it will be about a standard day.”
“China is getting hit badly,” Maya said. “The mana mutations are growing faster than they can be killed. I’ll be sending all of the mercs there along with everyone I can scrape together. Right now I have about six hundred volunteers that’ll be ready in a day and another six hundred in our Penal Brigade. Thankfully the situation in Russia has calmed down. They’re still plenty of critters scurrying about, but enough that Yuri can hold them back himself. We’ll be throwing everything into China to see if we can push the monsters back. If not, then it’ll be time to evacuate the entire area.”
“Such are the things that we must face in this Integrated multiverse,” Asoltolia said. “The System is not kind to anyone and it is up to our own will and abilities to survive it.”
Maya nodded. “Yeah, the System’s a dick.”