A long, resonant bell rings with a heavy, melancholic toll that shudders through the damp stone of the prison complex, its deep timbre suggesting the presence of a central authority akin to the Catholic Church of this world, though the deity it serves remains a mystery to the captives.
The sound acts as a mechanical trigger, signaling the end of one existence and the grim beginning of another as the atmosphere inside the holding area shifts from stagnant dread to frantic, organized movement.
The guards, clad in boiled leather and dull iron, begin busily opening the heavy iron bars with a rhythmic clanging that echoes like hammer strikes against an anvil, while three others stand in a defensive semi-circle with their polearms held at a ready slant, their eyes narrowed as if they fully expect the Earthlings to attempt a desperate, futile escape.
Each cell is meticulously placed together with a row of nine others, forming a batch of exactly one hundred souls, a clinical and efficient method of processing human livestock that leaves no room for individuality. Minh and Joon-soo find themselves swept into the same batch, their shoulders brushing against terrified strangers as the collective mass of prisoners is funneled toward the exit.
The heavy oak door at the end of the hall creaks open, and for a fleeting moment, the horror of the interior is replaced by the sudden, blinding brilliance of gentle spring sunlight that shines on their faces, bringing with it the scent of blooming jasmine and turned earth.
As their eyes adjust to the golden radiance, they see the line of Earthlings approaching a mage who sits with stoic posture at a simple wooden table, his robes embroidered with shimmering thread that seems to catch the light even in the shadows. The mage raises his hand with a fluid, practiced grace, and a soft, pulse-like light emanates from his palm, mirrored instantly by a twin glow that shines from above the Earthling's head like a fleeting halo.
Without looking up, the mage records the magical signature into a thick, leather-bound notebook with a quill that moves with scratching, predatory speed. That Earthling is processed, filed, and forgotten in a matter of seconds.
Joon-soo immediately thinks, This is the selection step ! and a cold knot of realization tightens in his gut, a sentiment mirrored perfectly by the grim set of Minh's jaw. Both of them think so, and judging by the shivering silence of the others in line, the rest of the Earthlings think so too, recognizing the weigh-in of their own souls.
When it finally becomes Minh and Joon-soo's turn to stand before the magical ledger, an officer standing nearby—distinguished by a crimson cloak and a face like scarred granite—steps forward and curtly tells the mage to write them down as Conscript-Carcass. The mage pauses, his quill hovering over the parchment as he and the officer whisper to each other in low, conspiratorial tones that are swallowed by the wind, but despite whatever brief hesitation occurs, they still hold their positions at Conscript-Carcass, marking the two friends for the front lines of a meat grinder.
Minh and Joon-soo stand stunned to see that, the weight of the classification settling on them like a physical shroud, until a guard with a notched spear unceremoniously urges them to move aside with a blunt shove. Then, as if they are nothing more than inventory, Minh and Joon-soo are handed small, stiff cards with their "given names" inscribed in a sharp, unfamiliar script. Minh's card reads Aldo Patriot and Joon-soo's reads Bertrand Comtois, both marked with the chilling code V1, the derogatory word "Fresh," and a stark black line symbol that cuts across the paper like a terminal diagnosis.
Joon-soo complains under his breath, his voice cracking with a mixture of disbelief and simmering anger, "Ugh, I can't believe we're both being sent to the army."
The reality of their situation begins to bleed into their surroundings as they are marched toward the transport area, passing by stone walls that have stood for centuries. Joon-soo turns to Minh, his eyes searching the architecture for clues of the power structure that has claimed them, and asks, "How can these feudal lords have a regular army?"
Minh replies, his voice low and analytical despite the chaos, "Surely they must have centralized taxation and administration, like medieval China." He watches the guards' movements, noting the uniformity of their gear, which suggests a level of industrial output far beyond a simple decentralized barony.
Then they are taken away, led toward a line of waiting wagons that smell of old hay and horse sweat. As they walk, Joon-soo tries to gather intelligence, asking a guard in his newly acquired, magically-translated Heilop tongue if there are any nobles or serfs in this land.
The guard comes to a halt, his leather armor creaking as he turns to give Joon-soo a puzzled, almost pitying look. He stares as if Joon-soo had just asked whether the sun intended to rise tomorrow.
"Nobles to lead and serfs to bleed," the guard grunts, wiping a smudge of grime from his cheek. "The High Lords hold the crests, and the rest of us hold the plow. How else would the world stay upright? You must have fallen quite hard on your head to ask after the soil you're standing on, thrall."
He gestures toward the wagons with a rough jerk of his chin. "Now move. The wagons won't wait for your wits to return."
Joon-soo turns to Minh, his brow furrowing as he translates the guard's confirmation, and asks, "What does that mean?"
Minh sighs, a long, weary sound that seems to carry the weight of his entire previous life, then sighs again as he stares at the heavy fortifications of the city. Joon-soo repeats the question, looking increasingly worried that Minh has seen a ghost in the gears of the local economy.
Minh leans in close, his voice barely a breath against the rattling of the wagon wheels.
"Think about it, Joon-soo..." Minh whispers, his eyes darting toward the nearest guard. "To keep a standing force like this, the ruler of the Palantine Heilop would either have to cover every single copper of the expenses themselves—and live in a cardboard shack to afford it—or the PCA is footing the bill."
He pauses, his jaw tightening as he surveys the disciplined ranks of the Professional Central Arm.
"If the PCA is bypassing the local lords and building a centralized military machine on their own dime, it means one thing," Minh concludes with grim certainty. "There is a profound, structural conflict brewing between them and the traditional nobility. You don't build an army like this unless you're planning to make the old guard obsolete."
Joon-soo gapes, pressing a palm to his forehead as he tries to process the geopolitical implications of a world he didn't even know existed an hour ago. The sheer weight of the transition—from a simple feudal structure to a brewing military coup—makes his head throb. He turns back to the guard, desperate to verify the theory, and begins parroting Minh's academic analysis word-for-word, though his tongue trips over the alien phonetics of the abstract terms.
"So... the ruler... must cover one hundred percent of expenses and live in cardboard," Joon-soo stammers, his voice high and frantic. "Or the PCA is... is somehow bearing the costs itself? Does the Professional Central Arm have a... a profound, structural conflict with the traditional nobility? Are they bypassing the local lords to build a centralized military machine?"
The guard comes to a dead stop. He doesn't understand a single syllable of the boy's rambling; the concepts of centralized versus decentralized fiscal policy are far too abstract for a man who lives by the rhythm of the spear and the ration. His face is a mask of dull, heavy confusion, his thick eyebrows knitting together in a V of irritation.
"Cardboard? Fiscal bypass?" the guard growls, looking at Joon-soo as if he's speaking the language of a fever dream. "What in the Hells is a 'military machine'? A wagon with teeth?"
He leans in close, his breath smelling of sour ale and onions, his voice dropping to a gruff, warning rumble.
"Keep your tongue behind your teeth, thrall," the guard snaps. "You bark these strange, nonsensical things like a dog with the foaming sickness. The PCA gives us bread and steel; the lords stay in their manors. That is the world. If you keep spewing this gibberish, the Captain will decide your head is too heavy for your shoulders. Be quiet and move!"
Joon-soo simply points a trembling finger at Minh, shifting the entire burden of intellectual heresy onto his friend. "He's the one! He's the one saying the weird stuff, not me!"
The guard turns his heavy, suspicious gaze to Minh, who meets the man's eyes with a calculated stillness.
"Will I be punished if I speak my mind?" Minh asks, his voice calm and leveled.
The guard snorts, resting a hand on the pommel of his sword. "The tongue is free until it turns to treason, thrall. Speak if you must, though I doubt your words have any weight."
Receiving no immediate threat, Minh begins to dissect the world around them as if he were standing in a lecture hall. "It's a matter of structural inevitability..." Minh explains, his tone dry and academic. "The nobility's power is rooted in the periphery—they manage local affairs and collect local rents. But your Professional Central Army is a centralized, alien institution. It doesn't belong to the land; it belongs to the throne."
The guard's brow furrows deeper. "The Army belongs to the Realm. What are you prattling about, thrall?"
"I'm saying the PCA has to centralize everything to survive," Minh continues, ignoring the guard's irritation. "You will have to exert immense pressure to centralize taxation, administration, and the courts. The central government must seize the local affairs that the lords currently control. These two systems cannot occupy the same space. They contradict each other. This will inevitably destabilize Heilop, leading to a long-term systemic division—or, more likely, a very bloody civil war."
The guard listens, his confusion only deepening. The words remain abstract and distant from his reality of mud, duty, and the next meal. "Tax-ation? Sys-temic?" the guard mutters, shaking his head. "You speak as if words are spells that can move mountains. A lord is a lord, and a soldier is a soldier. There is no 'war' between the hand and the head. Now shut your mouth before I shut it for you."
However, a war mage following behind the group, draped in robes the color of a winter sky, suddenly slows his pace. He finds the conversation more than just "interesting."
"A 'centralized budgetary bypass' causing 'systemic destabilization'..." the mage murmurs, his voice like cracking ice. He pulls a small, leather-bound pocketbook from his sleeve and begins to take meticulous notes, his charcoal pencil scratching furiously against the parchment.
He looks up, his eyes flashing with a predatory intellectual curiosity as he stares at the back of Minh's head. "Please, continue..." the mage says softly, a thin, sharp smile pulling at his lips. "I find your 'heresies' remarkably... quantified."
The guard eventually nods just to end the conversation and barks a command; then Minh, Joon-soo, and several other teen Earthlings are dragged into a heavy horse-drawn carriage. The vehicle groans under their weight as it begins to move along the bumpy, uneven dirt road, the wheels jarring against every stone. The other captives in the carriage are all the same, trembling with a rhythmic, contagious fear, weeping or loudly denying that they have been summoned and enslaved, their voices a discordant choir of grief.
Joon-soo sighs, watching a boy in a torn rag suit rock back and forth in the corner of the wagon. "Does everyone have to react with such predictable, messy desperation?" he wonders aloud. "It's like a script for a bad disaster movie."
Minh observes the boy with a detached, clinical pity. "It's a standard psychological collapse, Joon-soo," he says, his voice flat. "This is effectively a high-stakes kidnapping. An experience like this strips away the veneer of civilization in seconds. He isn't being dramatic; he's just broken."
Joon-soo retorts, his chest puffing out slightly as he grips the iron bars of the window. "Well, I'm not acting like that. I'm keeping it together."
Minh looks at him, a flicker of amusement crossing his face. "You? You're just a different kind of broken. You're crazy to react with such bravado in the face of a god-like magical kidnapping. Normal people scream."
Joon-soo doesn't miss a beat, snapping back, "But... They don't try to audit the local government...but you did...then...There are two crazy people here, Minh."
Minh doesn't care to argue; he turns away and looks out through the windows, which are designed to be opened and closed for ventilation but are reinforced with thick iron bars to prevent any hope of escape.
"These locals are way too meticulous about preventing slave escapes..." Joon-soo grumbles, poking at the heavy door. "Look at these double-locking mechanisms on the carriage. It's overkill. They're obsessed with the logistics of keeping us in here."
But Minh is no longer listening; he is focused on the landscape rolling past, mesmerized by the thick, lush green wheat fields that look almost velvety under the spring sun. He notices the strange, rhythmic patterns of land use. Some areas are completely uncultivated, overgrown with tall, swaying weeds, while in other fields, farmers have sown oats in neat, traditional rows.
Is this a war-torn region? Minh wonders, his eyes scanning for smoke or ruins. But there's no fire, no scorched earth. Maybe this is just how a medieval farm looks in a world where magic exists?
Joon-soo competes with Minh for the view, shoving his face against the iron bars. "Look at that mess," Joon-soo mutters, gesturing to a patch of weeds neighboring a pristine crop. "Why would they plant like that? It's totally haphazard. It's like they just gave up halfway through."
This place has definitely been through a war, Joon-soo thinks to himself, convinced that only a battlefield could leave such scars on the earth, even if the vast, peaceful fields show no other signs of conflict.
Minh shakes his head, frustrated. He watches the sequence: a field of wheat, then a field of oats, then a field left completely to the wild. He knows it's a system—a rotation—but the specific name of the practice escapes him.
"It's not haphazard, it's intentional," Minh says, though his brow furrows. "Wheat, then oats, then... nothing. I can't remember what the term for this three-part cycle is."
Joon-soo pouts, crossing his arms and huffing as if he expected Minh to have an answer for every mystery of this alien world. "Wait, you actually don't know? I thought you were the human encyclopedia. What's the point of the 'Professional Central Student' if you can't even explain dirt?"
Minh grumbles, his eyes still fixed on the horizon as a patch of fallow land sweeps by. "I'm not Google, Joon-soo. Give it a rest."
As the carriage rattles past a group of peasants working the soil, the laborers begin reciting a very medieval, archaic version of Empirelect. It is a version so thick with local dialect and ancient syntax that Minh and Joon-soo—and indeed any other Earthling, even with their magical enchantments—find it nearly impossible to comprehend. The words sound like grinding stones and rustling leaves, a language of the earth that ignores the refined grammar of the mages.
The peasants lean on their hoes, their faces caked in the very dust they till. A barrel-chested man with skin like cured leather spits into the dirt as the PCA wagons roll by.
"Aye, look'ee there," the man growls, his voice a low rasp. "More mouths for the High Lord's grain, and more steel to guard 'em. I wagered a silver clip that the tax-grubber comes knockin' 'fore the moon waxes full. That thievin' rat-faced maggot, Callow, 'll be lookin' for a fifth share of the oat-yield, mark me."
"A fifth?" a younger woman scoffs, wiping sweat from her brow with a mud-streaked forearm. "The tax-farmer'd pluck the feathers off a livin' hen if he thought there was a copper hid under the down. He took three of my best layers last frost just 'cause the tithe-book had a smudge on it. Cursed be his name and his kin."
"Least ye have hens left, Marga," a lanky youth pipes up, leaning against a fence post. "Did ye hear o' young Tom? Tried to lift a piglet from the reeve's pen. Got caught by the ear and spent two nights in the stocks. His father's fumin', says the boy's got more wood in his head than a forest."
A sturdier man, leading a thick-legged beast by a hempen rope, chuckles as he joins the huddle. The animal grunts, its ears twitching at the sound of the passing carriage.
"Forget the boy and his pig," the man says, patting the animal's flank with pride. "Look'ee at this beauty. Bought 'im off a trader from the lowlands. This mule's got shoulders like a mountain. I'll be haulin' twice the wheat to the market-square come Sabbath. No more breakin' my own back with the sacks. He's a sturdy soul, this one. Stronger than the Lord's own promises."
"Aye, he's a fine beast, Elric," Marga says, her eyes narrowing as she glances toward a cottage down the road. "Shame he can't carry the shame out o' Miller's Lane. Did ye see Gerta creepin' out o' the blacksmith's shed at matins? And her man away at the quarry! A scandal that'll rot the harvest, I tell ye. Adultery under the sun's own eye—the village elders 'll have a word about that, or I'm a trout."
The laborers erupt into a chorus of grunts and murmurs, their dialect swirling into a thick fog of "ye's," "thou's," and "hath's" that leave Joon-soo and Minh blinking in confusion.
"I think... I think they're talking about a pig?" Joon-soo whispers, straining to catch a familiar root word amidst the linguistic sludge.
Minh shakes his head, frustrated. "It's too dense. The syntax is looping back on itself. It's like trying to read a blueprint written in poetry by someone who hates the alphabet."
Outside, the peasants' laughter dies down as the lead guard barks a command. They turn back to the soil, their voices sinking into a rhythmic, grumbling chant about the weight of the plow and the greed of the crown, a conversation as old and immutable as the dirt beneath their fingernails.
Joon-soo grips the iron bars, his face twisted in concentration as he tries to parse the peasants' thick, guttural chatter. "I thought this magic translation was supposed to be a 'total immersion' package," he hisses, gesturing toward the field. "I'm hearing sounds, but it's like my brain is trying to download a file with zero signal."
Minh rubs his temples, looking genuinely annoyed. "The enchantment is tuned to the High Tongue—the standardized dialect of the mages and the PCA. It's useless for this archaic, regional sludge. To the spell, these serfs aren't speaking 'language'; they're speaking 'geography.' It's the ultimate linguistic scam."
The carriage continues to move them deeper into the heart of the Palantine, the rhythmic clopping of the horses' hooves marking the seconds of their vanishing freedom as the sprawling wheat fields give way to the dark, beckoning eaves of a distant forest. The dust from the road rises in choking clouds, coating their "Fresh" cards in a layer of fine, grey grit.