Jomrin Min sighed as he stared at the cot next to him.

He was doing his mandatory two years required for Citizenship, and just prayed that he wouldn’t get sent to any active duty company. He hadn’t tested out with the reflexes needed for flying, artillery required better math skills, and the tank corps wanted guys with driving experience and was extremely competitive. He didn’t have the mechanical skills to be in repair and maintenance straight off, nor the accounting and computer skills to be in logistics.

He was a gravball player and athlete, one of the best in his schola, but what that translated to in the military was an infantry grunt.

Worse, there were rumors going around that the company he was assigned to was a penal company, and the officers running were only assigned there because there was nowhere else to send them that they couldn’t fuck up more. If it ever did become time to fight, the last thing he wanted was that kind of person in command...

“Company Tats! Move it out if you want your company tats today, or tomorrow when you’re fucking exhausted and just want to get your three hours of sleep! Move it, recruits!”

The woman’s force was sharp and piercing, almost driving him to his feet. He took a look out the doorway of his temporary quarters, saw two women walking down the hall, pounding on the walls with impressively strong blows, repeating the same words. They pointed behind them, at another soldier at the end. “Move, recruits!” the one in the lead snarled out, which somehow made her exotic cheekbones, the blue-black tats, and pointed ears all the more fetching. Her dark eyes met his, and he straightened despite himself as she jerked a finger over her shoulder. “Move it out! You’re in Company Waltz, get your Tat before I have to drag your ass in there tomorrow and listen to you scream then!”

Jomrin swallowed despite himself, wondering what he was in for, and headed for the end of the corridor, where a stony-faced soldier with ganger tats shoved him down a line after the first group.

------

Half the mess hall had been cleared, and numbers of young women were sitting at different tables, with simple kits open next to them, and glowing lights around their hands. Jomrin stared with all the other men and women at the golden claws covering their hands, looking like razor gauntlets tipped in dye that danced over the shoulders of the recruits sitting in the chairs next to them.

Nymphals? All of them? Mindblades? Mindclaws?, he corrected himself, dumbfounded. What were so many psions doing here? Didn’t they go to a special division or something?

He shuffled from foot to foot, both astounded by the sight of so many gorgeous women at work doing Tats, and overwhelmed by seeing so many psions together. No, they couldn’t be psions, or they’d be Mentats. They were just wearing uniforms like normal soldiers, nothing special about them.

And then one of the inkers lifted her arm, and her subject did the same. She bent and twisted it to the side, and the recruit yelped and did the exact same thing.

A blue-green claw snapped up around his arm. Jomrin felt his eyes almost pop out.

What the hell? Did she... make him a mindbl-claw?

“Dude,” he nudged the guy in front of him blankly, who was also gaping. The guy was shorter, with a round, honest face, currently with eyes wide.

“The fuck?” was the immensely informative reply, which Jomrin could only agree with.

There was a score of the women at work, taking about three minutes per recruit. The line flinched when the guys getting Tatted punched the claws on their right hand into the palms of their left hands, and all of them screamed in shock. Their hands quivering as their mindclaws faded away, and the Tats on their arm smoked and hissed for a moment, they staggered away, back to their cribs.

It was only six minutes before Jomrin found himself being hand-waved over, as a petite girl staggered away, trying not to cry as she did so, but also staring down at her hand in amazement.

“I am your Platoon Leader. Tomorrow you will find me and line up behind me,” the woman said, as the razored claws on her hands dipped into a different ink each, flowing up her claw in multi-colored threads. She had golden hair and hazel eyes, and the nymphal cheekbones, ears, and those blue-black Tats similar to what he’d seen on the other one. Her nametag said HARI. “Don’t move.”

“Can I-” She swatted his mouth, and he shut up as she began carving into his shoulder. He winced, started to move, and her hand clamped down on his shoulder so hard it took his everything not to scream at the power in her grip.

“You try to move and I’ll render you unconscious, then I’ll strip you and put your underwear on your head to indicate what a shithead you are.” Jomrin went white and tried very, very hard not to move.

There was something like an electric shock, and a surge that went right through his skull and made his head go blank. There was a bright shining door there.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

-Do this.- The command reverberated in his head, laced with iron and razors, and he couldn’t even think of refusing. His arm went up, came down as he found himself reaching down there, and with a head-splitting, nauseating wrench, he grabbed something there, and twisted and sent it out into his hand.

There was a hum as a green-white mindclaw snapped into place around his right hand, just above his fingers.

He gawked at it, even as a drop of blood came out of his nose. He’d naturally been tested for psi when he was young, but he’d tested blank, even though he had an uncle who was in the lower order Mentats.

-And this.- The command was so rote and overwhelming that he didn’t even think, and plunged the index finger of his new mindclaw right into the center of his other hand.

Something white-hot seemed to pop and come gushing out a hole in his hand, like the biggest blister ever getting forced through a tiny opening. He screamed like a little girl despite himself.

“You’re done.” Despite the fact she looked so slender and younger than he was, he was yanked up to his feet and sent stumbling away, his mindclaw dissipating as he lost concentration.

-You will report to me tomorrow.

-You will manifest your mindclaw a minimum of one hundred times before muster.

-If you want to be barely competent, you will do it two hundred times.

-If you want to be competent, you will do it five hundred times.

-If you want to be fucking awesome, you will do it one thousand times.-

The Tat on his shoulder was sizzling, the voice in his head was like steel and bells. The Door in his head shut up, but he could feel her, right on the other side of the that door, like a golden sword raised and ready to fight.

What... what have I gotten into?

He felt a sense of panic at the idea that he had no idea what was going on, this didn’t match up to any of the tales he had been told. He’d heard of the tats most of the recruits got, but never mandatory, and never... doing this...

Giving him a mindclaw!

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The bones on his right hand were aching from the power that had flowed through them, his left hand didn’t have a mark on it, but felt like there was a burning hole in it, and he had an incredible headache.

Jomrin made it back to his bunk, sat down against in relief, and felt his eyes turn up as everything seemed to throb.

Snap... snap... snapsnap... snap...

The sound caught his ear. He thought about it for a minute, and then realized that it was the sound... of people manifesting their mindclaws...

One hundred. Two hundred. Five hundred. Or... a thousand?

He licked his lips, tasted the salt of the blood from his nose, staring at his right hand.

He lifted his hand up. He brought it down, and twisted...

That jolt didn’t come all the way through, fading before it reached his hand.

Oh, oh, it wasn’t automatic. He had to do it right. Do it right every time!

He grit his teeth, his eyes a little bit wild.

He would be awesome. He would!

He focused his attention on that split in his head, realizing it was a hole, a gap to strength and power, and he had to lever it open if he wanted that power. Gritting his teeth, his raised his arm and brought it down, twisting his mind and hand...

Snap!

---

A normal recruit barracks would normally have nervous recruits lolling around, bored, playing games on devices, maybe reading a book or watching vids.

The recruit rooms for Company Waltz were silent, save for continuous snaps of mindclaws manifesting in all sorts of colors...

---------

“How’d you do?” I asked the girls, because I couldn’t Marktell with them.

“They are all done,” Ruby Rantha stepped forward and replied.

The eighty of them had each had to do fifty recruits for this class, so about two and a half hours to clear them all. Fifty recruits was well below their Marshal capability, so they’d be given a hundred soldiers each to start with, one company per, and the next class coming in would bring in more.

A certain Colonel Belisha Kyaragrov had been originally in charge of this class. She was also a member of the Broshkov mob and had quietly funneled ‘excess’ military inventory to them over the years, and moved certain members of the family into positions where they could exploit the hierarchy.

Those family members were now all dead, and any record of their military service had been purged with them. An extremely well-informed group of my girls with G&G supporters had swept through the Broshkov civilian holdings and wiped them clean, with a few Juris forensic teams padding through afterwards and finding an absolute bonanza of crooked dealings.

It was a hostile takeover, and after appropriate taxes were paid, not an issue with the Juris.

To keep the books straight, I and the girls able to enlist were simply inserted into the positions of the dead mobsters in the army, and then we were all transferred here.

Our Curses had latched onto the mobsters nicely, and they’d all get reborn as Ranthas. More to the point, we’d Bound and Sealed them before that happened, and they’d picked rebirth over being let go to the Warp, having no wish to walk out into the horrorscape beyond death. The price was the standard reincarnatory purge of memories, which were dumped into our personal akashas for review.

So, we all looked like young women, but we all had many years of service to the Janus Prime military to draw on... and who was going to argue with Four+’s with minimum Charismas of 22, ranging all the way to 30+? And then me...

As for the sudden appearance of a Colonel Sama Rantha out of nowhere, the fact I was relieving a redacted Colonel of command, and the news of the purge, meant nobody was going to create problems for me. They knew who was backing me without anything being said, and they couldn’t investigate my military background, other than a totally true yet completely fabricated list of qualifications.

Colonel Belisha was still sticking around, a mix of outraged at being killed for her crimes, intrigued at voyeuring with me, and terrified at both the idea of dying and exactly what I was and planned to do. She knew the system very well, and even in this limited time, watching me start to make it dance was delighting her. The irony that much of her family... was going to become my family... was not lost on her.

I was going to build a core following in the military forces here, and expand. I had both the Coronals and Umbrans silently behind me, and even the City Lord wasn’t going to be able to stop me. Of course, I also had to make sure my Karma-hungry girls got their fix, but that shouldn’t be too hard...