“You ran!” Drill Sergeant Bidlack turned onto the mass of trainees that had run into the hall. “Forty of you ran from one zombie?” He shook his head. “Turning you lot into killers might just be ice skating uphill.”
Instructor Nills wiped the finely made blade of his sword off on Sarine’s training uniform. “Nasty bit of work, that.” He sheathed the weapon and turned to walk out of the room.
“Instructor!” Izzy said, walking up to the human. “What happened here?”
He cocked his head, studying the sea elven woman. “One of your fellow trainees turned into an undead. I killed it.” He walked out of the chow hall into the hallway. Izzy looked at all of us helplessly. Jackson put down his chair and walked over to her, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“So she’s just gone?” Izzy snapped her fingers. “Just like that, and we’re supposed to just go on with our day?” She shook her head, clenching her jaw, and stalked out of the room.
I gave a hand to Elyse, helping her up. Her hood was furled in despair. She murmured thanks and walked out into the hall. Conan shrugged and put the table base down. He walked out of the room, whistling.
I could hear Izzy yelling from the hallway. “Drill Sergeant, what is this? What’s going on? You kidnap us, force us into training. Our friend dies. What are we doing here?”
“I can answer that better than he.” A voice comes from the door to the parade ground. The well-dressed gnome stood there with a notebook in one hand. “Come to the training room, all of you.”
Drill Sergeant and the instructors, still missing Stethyr, herded us all into the training room. There was a podium with stairs against the wall. I hadn’t noticed it before among the plethora of training aids leaned over there. The gnome climbed up the stairs to stand behind the podium. Dozens of castle guards wearing steel armor and carrying halberds surrounded us. A couple stood beside the gnome.
“I thank you all for coming and am truly grateful for your participation in The Great Work.” His voice was surprisingly deep for such a small creature. He had a monocle hanging from a chain on his shirt and wore a sharp goatee. “My name is Dr. Mingelt. You may ask about the doctoral certification, I assure you I earned it. I studied at Stanford’s Medical School and graduated third in my class.” He beamed at the group. “Unlike all of you, I was born here. The discovery of the portals between our world changed everything!” He raised his hands in the air like a preacher at an old time religion church.
Dr. Mingelt spoke with the tones of a practiced orator. His voice filled the training room. “The reason you were brought here,”
“Kidnapped!” yelled a human at the back of the crowd.
Mingelt raised a hand for silence and got it, “The reason you were recruited for The Great Work is how exceptionally malleable the body is during Zeroth Level character creation! You’re all changing every day. The only native residents of this world we’ve been able to find that are similarly malleable are the inhabitants of The Shattered Island.” He shuddered. “They proved resistant to our recruitment efforts.”
The gnome banged a hand on the podium. “By us being able to observe you and study you, we’ll be able to advance our understanding of magical anatomy by decades!”
“We want to go home, man.” The gruff voice of Bron, the bronze dwarf rang out. Falaise had healed him, but he had a terrible scar on his face. I guess the healing magic couldn’t grow back the missing flesh. “None of us volunteered for this, so just let us go.”
“Ah, I’m afraid that’s not possible.” He shook his head mournfully. An animal growl came from the trainees. The two guards standing beside the podium stepped in front of it. One of the ogres, Marko who was the one that had used the table base to hit Sarine, charged forward with a roar. He was tripped and had the halberd’s spearpoint at his throat before he took more than two steps. Mingelt shook his head again, looking for all the world like a teacher with an unruly class.
“So, and this is exciting, as you advance towards first level, your bodies and minds will go through a total reshaping. There’s nothing else like it in nature!” Mingelt clapped his hands in excitement.
“Why us?” Izzy asked. “Why not take volunteers?”
“Well, it had to be someone from your world.” The gnome shrugged. “Did you realize only you world walkers go through character creation? None of my instructors have the faintest idea what level they might be. They have to train to grow in power.” The doctor gripped the edges of the podium and leaned forward. “Not you. You only have to absorb the mana of dying creatures. Isn’t that marvelous?” He shook his head with a little smile, as if in wonder.
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“That didn’t answer the question. Why us?” Izzy yelled.
Mingelt put a hand up again to tone down the room. “Queen Isolde, long may she reign, has agreed to fund my work. You see, we’ve long studied gamers. None of you have the slightest qualm about killing non-player characters. So she’s directed us to create murder teams of players, because the entire world, to you, are all non-player characters.”
“Hell yeah, murder hobo for life, baby!” The ogre at the back of room pumped a fist. His tusked grin stood out over a group of frowns.
“You understand that isn’t real, right?” I said. “Those aren’t actually people. They were electronic blips.”
“See! That’s the logic we’re looking for!” Dr. Mingelt said with a grin. “Once you’re fully trained your targets aren’t actually people. Very good! Train hard and get those precious experience points!” The gnome turned and went down the stairs. Castle guards closed around him, keeping all the trainees away. They clomped out the doors to the parade ground. The boom of the closing door felt like someone closing our tomb.
All the trainees just stared at one another. We were to be part of a murder squad? Like a hit team? Drill Sergeant said, “Okay, ready yourself for your next block of instruction. It will be unarmed combat.”
“How do you expect us to just go back to training after hearing that?” Izzy asked. “You don’t know what it’s like to be taken from your birth world!”
“Yes.” Bidlack said succinctly. “I do.”
“Drill Sergeant, we didn’t get to finish chow. May we go back and finish eating?” I asked.
The Drill Sergeant looked at me for a long time, then he scanned over the faces of the trainees. He turned without saying a word and walked over to the double doors leading to the dining facility. He held one of them open. “Julian, the trainees didn’t get to finish eating before. Give them all another ration of beer.” He then stepped out of the way and held the door open.
We all filed through and got our flagon of beer. I noticed Julian didn’t write down any names on the clipboard this time. Third squad sat around our own table. With Niobe still missing, we only had to grab one chair from another table and made it work.
“Y’all, this sucks.” Jackson said, taking a small sip of his beer to try and make it last.
“Hold on brother, I think I just thought of a trick.” I chanted the words and a snowball appeared in my hands. I broke it in half and put half in Jackson’s beer and half in mine.
He looked at me with eyebrows gathered together in skepticism then took another sip. His eyes lit up, “It’s cold! Why didn’t you do that before?”
“I just thought of it!” I chanted again and broke the snowball. Half went in Izzy’s drink, that she pushed towards Jackson and half in the drink of Wendy, one of our fae elves.
She had a bleak despairing look on her face and perked up a bit at the first drink of cold beer. “Thanks Mike.” She raised to flagon to me in salute.
“Sorry everyone, that’s the only ones I had memorized.” I held up my hands in an I surrender gesture at the chorus of boos from the rest of the squad.
“I think I can help!” Elyse said, standing. “Ass you know I’m in training to be a water ssorcerer.” Hearing her reptilian hiss with that cheerful voice made me smile. “That means I can casst ssnowball ass well.” Everyone cheered as she chilled everyone’s drink.
Zeke, our only dark haired Fae Elf, shook his head, “What do we do? I mean, do we just keep rolling through training and become murderers?” He ran a hand through his hair.
Hera716, who was one of the few who hadn’t told the group her real name and still went by her guild tag, sighed. “I don’t want to be an assassin.”
“If they are just NPC’s does it matter?” asked Marko, the ogre who had gotten knocked down.
“I think they are actually people.” Izzy said, shaking her head. “We’re not in a game. We can’t rage quit this.” She gave a tired smile.
“The mad scientist in charge of us is a gnome.” Fistandatilus said, putting his head in his little hands. He was the only gnome in our squad. “So I can’t even be casually racist to talk trash about him.”
Izzy giggled at that. Jackson slapped the little guy on the back in appreciation of the joke. That got some smiles on faces.
“I’m not sure we have a lot of choice.” I told them. “Its like you said. We can’t exactly rage quit this.”
“Youse seem to be handling it pretty well.” Deniz’s Bronx accent sounded hilarious coming from a little halnaak. The bird-like lizardman should sound like anything else.
“It isn’t too different that when I was in the army.” I shrugged. “That was a long time ago, but I guess the reflexes are still there.”
“You were in the Army?” Jackson asked.
“Yeah, Vietnam.” I answered.
“Wow, you were old as hell.” The human said with a grin.
“Ha, yeah. I guess I was.” I punched him in the arm.
“You were in Vietnam?” Tomaz asked. He was a human that poke in the precise way that made me think English wasn’t his first language. He looked vaguely Mediterranean, but I didn’t want to ask.
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Don’t get me wrong, I was in supply. I wasn’t like a ranger running around with a necklace of ears. But I worked in Saigon in 70-71.”
“Wow, that’s when my dad was born.” Zeke said.
“Hey, I was old in the other world. We all get it.” I threw my hands up. “In this world, I’m sort of getting a new start. So are all of you.”
“Yeah, starting to be murderers.” Hera said glumly.
“What do we do about this, guys?” Izzy asked, putting her chin in her hands leaning on the table. “We all literally got drafted to be assassins.”
“I don’t see as we have a whole lot of a choice.” My broad shoulders shrugged. “I got drafted once before. So I think I’ll tell you what we’ll do.”
The whole table leaned in, eager to what I had to say. “We get trained. We grow as powerful as we can as fast as we can. We work harder than anyone has ever worked before.” I nodded.
The table looked confused, except Marko. He was totally on board with being a killer for hire. I looked each of my squad members in the eyes.
“Then when we get powerful, we’ve gained levels and gotten magic weapons, etc.” I emphasized every word. “We shove this castle so far up their asses it will qualify as a dwarven delving.”