Zyn's red eyes trained on Shen. "I believe we're about to witness our first smartass. Pray tell me, Recruit Shen, what don't you understand?" Despite his words, he didn't sound or look upset.
Shen had to take his helmet off to reply because it blocked sound from the inside. Zyn had heard him anyway, but he wasn't about to speak just so the First Lieutenant could hear.
"First Lieutenant," Shen replied as he put the helmet in his spatial ring, "I don't understand why we'll waste these two days. I doubt you need assistance to train anyone. Even if we end up as squad leaders due to our early arrival and learn how to work together a little better in these two days, it's not big enough of—"
"Stop," Zyn said, and Shen complied at once. The muscular goblin then looked at Luthdel. "Recruit Shen is stating the obvious to Recruit Luthdel Elafir's and some of the slow ones' benefit." Zyn looked back at Shen. "I appreciate the care for your fellow combatants, but I will not tolerate misinterpretation of my words. I asked if you understood what I said, not if you agreed with it, if it was logical to you, or if you had questions. Did you understand the meaning of the sentences I just spoke?"
"Yes, First Lieutenant!" Shen replied.
"The front lines aren't a place of politics, legal loopholes, and minced words like the civilian Alliance. We function as military for good reasons. You are not only four-limbed bipeds of similar sizes, but your minds also work similarly. We can all understand both the letter of the law and the spirit behind it in similar ways. Everything you do will be judged based on what the average soldier in your place is expected to have understood. You, Recruit Shen, tried to twist the rightful meaning of my words. I would've given you a warning if you did it by malice or for your advantage, but I'll let it go because you were trying to benefit another. This is my first and last act of leniency to you. Understood?"
"Yes, First Lieutenant!" Shen replied. "Thank you!"
Zyn was right, and he also didn't mention one thing: Shen was also testing the boundaries of the regulations and Zyn himself. He wanted to see if Zyn would notice what Shen was doing and if he would allow it.
Shen was greatly pleased by the answer he got. Although too much bureaucracy could bring issues, sticking to the chain of command and the spirit of rules was a good way of guaranteeing an organization like this could work. He didn't take Zyn's words at face value, of course; it was impossible to avoid politics whenever two people interacted. But decreasing the influence of politics was for everyone's benefit when it came literally to an existential war.
Zyn continued, "You'll work with beings with similar minds for most of your permanence in the front lines. Not everyone will be the same, but close enough. In the rare occasions when beings of outlandish minds interact, at least three distinct minds are always present, and a vote is cast. The vote isn't about the best for everyone but the best for the majority, according to their individual understanding. It's unfortunate but necessary for our military to work."
He waved his hand, and Shen felt the Laws before him twist. A silvery metal cube with golden edges was teleported there and kept afloat by a Law he didn't recognize. Every C-rank got a similar cube.
Unlike the info cubes he had seen on the drow homeworld, these were full of scratches and wear marks. His was missing a huge chunk in a corner. He was impressed that the enchantments even worked.
"These are info cubes modified to be used with either qi or mana," Zyn said. "They are old and have been used to exhaustion. They are only safe for one extra use. Only the seven of you will be trained with them. Although Recruit Shen had hidden intentions in his speech, he wasn't incorrect. I could prepare an entire world without your assistance. However, the help you'll give me when instructing the others will be training them in my place. You are to learn everything in your cubes as soon as I give you the command. Then, you'll have two days to talk among yourselves and ask me questions. Raise your hand and wait for me to call you to ask a question. The question cannot be anything among the lines of 'explain X' or 'what's the origin of rule Y.' They must be pointed questions about pointed subjects you have a difficult understanding. If you want to explain something so everyone can hear, just speak your mind to your fellow Recruits. Lastly, you cannot leave until the two-day timeline. Do you understand?"
"Yes, First Lieutenant!" everyone replied.
"You can start," Zyn said, and everyone touched their info cubes.
The drow info cube had felt like being punched in the brain with information. It had also slowly dumped data in his mind. Shen had been annoyed by it back then, but this time, he felt outraged to be given such a piece of shit.
Forget a punch; every second, it felt like a nuclear bomb was exploding in his mind. The data came much more slowly and was completely unorganized. First came a language he had never seen. It had memories of someone learning it from the ground up, grammar written in that language, and advanced classes. However, the information stream was so messy that he sometimes got advanced courses right after learning the sound of a letter.
Shen only found out after one Standard hour that it was named "Stangue," short for Standard Language. It was simple enough, but he got no convenient dictionary as the drow had given him.
At least the slowness with which the info cube pushed information into his mind—and it was ridiculously slow—made it easier for him to organize everything properly. He could also review everything multiple times, even as he got new data. Two Standard hours later, he felt like he had something akin to a high schooler's understanding of Stangue, and he could improve it by studying his memories for longer.
After the language, the cube sent the front-line regulations. There was a lot of jargon that he had to get through context. Shen also had to constantly go back and forth between the language memories to double-check something.
Another three hours later, the stream stopped.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Another big chunk of the info cube crumbled when Shen finished. All around him, all info cubes suffered a similar destiny. Some crumbled entirely, and one of them outright exploded, though it wasn't anything that even a D-rank would have trouble dealing with.
Shen didn't immediately start asking questions. Instead, he took his time to organize and review everything. He did it over and over again until he was sure he had understood almost everything, both the letter of the law and the spirit. Another hour later, he only had seventeen questions about very distinct things to ask Zyn.
He wasn't the only one who had elected to think more deeply about what they had learned. Perhaps it was also because they could only ask questions in Stangue. That's the language Zyn had been speaking and was used on the front lines. The Alliance couldn't count on the system's auto-translation functioning when fighting the Void. Everyone had to speak the same language.
Stangue was incredibly simple compared to Syron, the drow language. It wasn't only vocal but could also be spoken with fingers, toes, limbs, tentacles, non-sounding vibrations, and even by blinking—not to mention its written form. Every single race in the Alliance was capable of communicating with it.
Unlike Syron, however, each form of communication was used separately. They were just other ways of saying the same things. Stangue's main "dialect" was through sound. Any race that couldn't produce sound or hear was obligated to get enchanted items to deal with that.
Seeing as no one was asking questions or talking, Shen waited. He didn't want to interrupt their thinking, and his seventeen questions should be simple enough to answer. He would have enough time after everyone was up to par.
He attributed his faster learning to his learning ability upgrade, the Realization Impartation, and his prior experiences learning a new language, dealing with an info cube, and sorting through the information in the antidron. He found it strange that some people had supposedly come prepared to the military hoping to take shortcuts—which were legal and documented in the regulations but didn't apply during some events, like a Calamity—but hadn't taken the time to learn Stangue beforehand. There were no rules against it.
He guessed that would be his eighteenth question.
All in all, the Alliance's front lines worked exactly like one would expect from a massive military with people from different cultures. The rules were clear and self-explanatory, and each regulation was explained to exhaustion with many examples. The hierarchy was rigid and completely vertical, which was both good and bad. Just because Zyn was a First Lieutenant didn't mean he had the right to boss any Recruit around; he could only command the Recruits assigned to him. However, his Recruits had to obey any of his commands as long as it wasn't illegal.
It was the opposite take from the civilian Alliance rules. In the civilian Alliance, you were only obligated to obey someone of a higher rank or position if the law allowed them to give you that order. Here, if not forbidden by the regulations, Zyn could ask Shen to do just about anything.
Fortunately, there were plenty of very open-ended prohibitions in the rules. Torture, killing, maiming, verbal and physical humiliation, and so on were all forbidden. They were only allowed in very specific circumstances. The fact that the spirit of the law mattered made it even harder to claim something illegal was allowed. First Lieutenant Zyn couldn't even offend Shen's ancestry, for instance.
Unfortunately, Shen could think of millions of ways to inconvenience a subordinate without stepping on any toes. For instance, while physical humiliation was forbidden, First Lieutenant Zyn could ask Shen to do the same tedious task forever. Some tasks were less than enjoyable, too. However, while they might be considered humiliating, they were exempt from the prohibitions because they were explicitly mentioned and allowed in the regulations.
All in all, the military laws were more straightforward than the Alliance's civilian rules but weren't in place to coddle anyone.
The hours passed, and Shen frowned. He had answered two of his questions by himself, and some people were talking to each other, but no one had asked about anything yet. Was his understanding lacking? Did his info cube come with a problem, so it hadn't explained something everyone else understood?
Whatever the case, he wasn't about to continue ignorant. He raised his hand.
"Yes, Recruit Shen?" Zyn said at once. He had just stood there with his arms beside his body as if he didn't care about waiting or getting comfortable.
"First Lieutenant, if all three Commanding Officers, the seven appointed replacements, and all Sargeants die in a medium-small counter-raid, but people survive by luck in a subatomic folded space, and one of them suspect a Class 3 Void Infection on another, how should the matter be resolved?"
That was a very edge case, but Shen wanted the answer anyway. You never know what can happen during or after a fight against the Void Spawn. In fact, some regulations were even more nitpicky than his question.
To his surprise, Zyn replied at once. "Refer to Post-Combat 443,813, paragraph 772, item GF."
Shen did, searching his memories, but frowned and raised his hand again. Zyn let him talk, and Shen said, "First Lieutenant, my info cube might've been faulty. Item GF talks about— Oh. I see."
That specific item, when seen in a different light and connected to six other laws, gave Shen the answer. It was a complex mess that ended with the obvious solution: the matter wouldn't be resolved because the survivors would all be considered Void Spawn. There was no getting lucky in that situation. Whoever was dispatched was expected to win or die.
In theory, there was an infinitesimal chance that they might survive in a situation like the one Shen had hypothesized. In practice, the costs and risks of opening a subatomic folded space—which could only be done from the outside below A-rank—to see if it had survivors, then checking each for Class-3 Void Infections would be too absurdly high. There was less than a 0.0001% chance of finding a stranded Alliance fighter and over 80% of finding Void Spawn. It just wasn't worth it.
"What?" Luthdel asked using high-elven language. "What did you understand?" He had been silently sorting through his thoughts but had paid attention when Shen's name was mentioned.
"I'll explain later," Shen replied, then raised his hand again.
"Yes, Recruit Shen?" Zyn said.
Shen asked another question.
New questions popped up when he got some answers. He kept going. Ultimately, he asked over fifty questions before he was satisfied with everything. Finally, only one thing remained unanswered.
"First Lieutenant, why didn't the two Recruits with me that came prepared to take advantage of Administrative 915 didn't also take the time to learn Stangue?"
Administrative 915 was the rule that would let them skip a couple of days of time-consuming bureaucracy if these were regular times.
Zyn raised an eyebrow at that. He hadn't expected that question. "I suppose that is related to the regulations. The answer is simple: because, just like you, they didn't want to or saw no need to."
Shen frowned. The answer was simple enough and made sense, but he had hoped for more. That those people were willing to learn only the bare minimum to take a shortcut made him think less of them. It was one thing to come as prepared as possible, to become a kind of elite commando beforehand to soar through the ranks, but stopping at just good enough to avoid some annoyances and step ahead of their peers was the very definition of arrogance.
Well, they might just have been told a few things and not care too much about it, too, but when he looked at the exact two people who had answered the First Lieutenant first, he saw not fellow warriors against the Void but competitors—because that's how they saw him. They weren't even hiding that they were already targeting the others.
Shen took it personally. He hadn't come here to make enemies but wouldn't run from it either. This was a war of survival, yet those two had already started with petty schemes.
He would make sure to crush both—the female cultivator included.