The next day, as the sun beats down on the stubborn soil, a War Mage approaches the line of weary workers. He wears an elegant, full-length blue robe featuring intricate silver embroidery along its high collar, wide cuffs, and hem. The robe is accented by a broad, V-shaped yoke across the chest displaying detailed circular patterns, and a tan messenger-style satchel featuring a dark starburst emblem drapes over his shoulder.
He stops before the first group, gesturing with a hand that looks more accustomed to turning parchment than handling laborers.
"Cease your clumsy excavations, you primitive bipedal entities! Halt! If you move while the ethereal ink is bonding, the sigil will fracture, and I am certainly not wasting a second application on your sub-optimal epidermal layers. Stand perfectly still so I can complete this administrative nightmare and return to a room that doesn't smell of unwashed desperation and manual labor."
The mage begins to carve a Sigil into the flesh of each Earthling—a magical brand of ownership. However, as he draws near Joon-soo's turn, the glowing magical ink in his kit flickers and runs dry. The mage's face turns a shade of purple that rivals his robes.
"By the seven gates of the celestial void, are you kidding me? Empty? Again?! This is statistically impossible given the requisition forms I filed! It's those degenerate, intellectually stunted officers—veritable thieves in polished armor! They're bleeding the treasury dry, skimming the powdered dragon-scale and aether-salts to sell to black market alchemists just to fund their wine cellars and gambling debts."
"I am a scholar of the high arts, a master of resonance and runic structure, yet here I am, stranded in a literal dust bowl because the logistics department is a nest of corrupt, low-born brigands! I should have stayed at the Academy; I should have never accepted this wretched commission!"
In a fit of pique, he slams his satchel shut and storms off the field entirely, muttering about "budgetary treason." He doesn't come back, leaving Joon-soo, Minh, and several others unbranded.
Nearby, the officer in charge of their detail—not the fiery Aguilar, but a man who looks as though he hasn't slept since the last century—sits on a crate. His chin is tucked into his chest, his eyes half-lidded and glazed with a profound, soul-crushing boredom. He watches the mage leave, blinks slowly like a drugged lizard, and then simply stares at a cloud, completely failing to notice that half the row remains unmarked.
Joon-soo nudges Minh with his elbow, leaning in close while pretending to inspect his unblemished arm.
"Hey, Minh, check out the 'Unity' of the Professional Central Army of Heilop. It's truly a well-oiled machine, isn't it? You've got the officer over there entering a literal coma from boredom, and the resident Gandalf is having a mental breakdown because the bosses are hockin' his magic ink for beer money. It's inspiring, really."
"We're being held captive by a bunch of guys who can't even agree on who's stealing more from the supply closet. If this is the 'High Command' Aguilar was bragging about, we're not just slaves—we're the only ones here actually doing our jobs. Professionalism is dead, even in another dimension."
Joon-soo turns to Minh during a brief respite, his hands raw and blistered from the plow. He wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead, his eyes darting toward the weapon racks where the guards have stacked the heavy, wooden-stocked muskets intended for the Earthlings' training on Day 3.
"Minh, look at those things..." Joon-soo whispers, nodding toward the racks. "They look like museum pieces. Tell me the truth—how much damage are we talking? If we're supposed to defend a perimeter with those, do they at least pack a punch?"
Minh scoffs, leaning heavily on his plow as he wipes dirt from his glasses. A bitter, technical smirk plays on his lips.
"Oh, they're 'powerful' alright, Joon-soo. They possess three very specific, very lethal powers. First, they can technically hit a target... provided that target is standing perfectly still and is less than fifty meters away."
"Second, they are notoriously inaccurate; you could aim at a barn door and manage to hit the bird sitting three trees over."
"And third? Their greatest power is their pacifism—the moment it sprinkles or gets a bit humid, the powder turns to mush and the whole thing becomes a very expensive, very heavy club. It's a mechanical disaster masquerading as a firearm. We're essentially being handed loud, smoky pipes and told to play soldier."
Joon-soo stands shocked, his mouth slightly agape at the primitive nature of their expected weaponry. The reality of their situation—defending against unknown threats with technology that predates the lightbulb—sinks in like a lead weight.
Nearby, every Earthling teenager who had been eavesdropping begins to murmur, creating a frantic, low-pitched buzz of conversation that ripples through the rows of turned earth.
"Fifty meters? Are you kidding me?" one Korean girl, the only one in the row, from the back hisses, her voice cracking with suppressed panic. "My high school archery club had better range than that! We're going to be standing there like sitting ducks while whatever is out there just walks right up to us."
"It's not just the range," a tall Canadian boy adds, his voice a frantic whisper. "If it rains, we're dead. Did you hear him? He said they're useless in the rain! We're in a world with 'War Mages' who can summon lightning, and our big defense is a pipe that doesn't work in a drizzle? This isn't a war, it's a choreographed execution."
Joon-soo looks back at the sleepy officer, who is currently nodding off against a fence post, and then back to the rusted plows.
"Great. So the plan is: we work ourselves to death in a dry field, and if we survive that, we get to go into battle with a gun that's basically a coin-flip on whether it explodes in our faces or just does nothing at all. I was hoping for at least a little bit of 'magic tech' to even the odds, but NO !!"
" We've got the Aguilar guy's ego, the Mage's missing ink, and now the world's worst hardware store leftovers. If I didn't know any better, I'd say these guys are trying to get us killed just so they don't have to keep track of the paperwork."
By Day 3, the training shifts to the Battle-Cant and the Lash, a grueling exercise in the "Universal Commands" that will govern their lives—and likely their deaths—in the field. Because the Classifier had grouped the Earthlings by general language blocks, the Officers use a simplified, guttural version of the local tongue, a series of monosyllabic barks designed to be understood even through the haze of exhaustion.
Aguilar stands atop a raised wooden dais, his polished breastplate reflecting the scorching sun like a hateful mirror. He paces with his hands clasped behind his back, his presence a suffocating weight over the pentagonal fort. Below him, hundreds of teenagers stand in ragged lines, clutching the heavy, rusted muskets and splintered spears.
"Behold the symphony of the righteous!" Aguilar bellows, his voice carrying that nauseating blend of noble piety and practiced cruelty. "You are the instruments, and I am the maestro. Your individual wills are but discord; only in the Cant shall you find the harmony of purpose. To hesitate is to sin against the Aguilar name and the Creator himself!"
He snaps his fingers, and a dozen sub-officers move into the ranks, their leather whips coiling in the dust like vipers.
"LEVEL!" Aguilar screams.
The Earthlings scramble to bring the heavy muskets to their shoulders. The wood is hot, the metal reeks of old grease, and the weight makes their trembling arms scream. Joon-soo manages to lock his stock against his collarbone, but a younger boy three places down fumbles, the barrel dipping toward the dirt.
Crack.
The whip finds the boy's calf, and he let out a strangled yelp, his body jerking upright.
"Again!" Aguilar roars, ignoring the blood staining the boy's tattered jeans. "SET!"
The front rank drops to one knee, bracing long spears against the sun-baked earth. The transition is messy—a cacophony of clattering wood and panicked breathing.
"Look at this !" Joon-soo mutters through gritted teeth, his eyes fixed on the back of the head in front of him. "He's not teaching us tactics, Minh. He's Pavlov-ing us. Level, Set, Reap—it's like he's trying to program a hard drive made of meat. If I hear 'Level' one more time, I think my brain is actually going to leak out of my ears just to escape the sound of his voice."
Minh, his face a mask of calculated neutrality, shifts his weight to brace his spear.
"It's efficient, Joon-soo..." Minh whispers back, his breath coming in shallow bursts. "The Battle-Cant is a linguistic virus. By stripping the language down to three commands, they bypass the prefrontal cortex entirely. They don't want us to think 'danger' or 'retreat'; they want the sound of the word to trigger a muscle spasm before we even realize we're terrified. It's brilliant, in a purely psychopathic, medieval sort of way."
The shadow of the Mage-Walks stretches long across the dirt as the hours bleed into one another. The heat is a physical blow, and the dust kicked up by hundreds of boots turns their sweat into a gritty paste.
"REAP!"
The command is a thunderclap. The Earthlings surge forward in a desperate, stumbling charge, their voices forced into a collective, hollow roar that sounds nothing like bravery. They run into the mouth of the shimmering heat, their bodies turning into extensions of the wood and iron they hold.
Aguilar watches with a faint, disgusted smile, his gloved hand resting on the hilt of his rapier. "Faster, you slugs! You carry the debt of centuries! Do you think the Demon King's shadow will wait for you to find your footing? To Reap is to offer your very breath to the cause! If you fall, you fall as a tithe to the Aguilar glory!"
"I swear..." Joon-soo pants as they are ordered back to the starting line for the hundredth time, his vision blurring. "If I ever get my hands on that guy, I'm going to show him a 'Universal Command' involving his own teeth. How is he still talking? Does he have a magical lung capacity to go with that ego? I'm out here wondering if my heart is going to explode, and he's up there composing a poem about how much he hates our ancestors."
Minh doesn't answer immediately; he is staring at the sub-officers, watching the rhythmic flick of the whips. "Don't look at him, Joon-soo. Look at the whips. This isn't a drill anymore. It's a ritual. We aren't being trained to be soldiers—we're being forged into a single, mindless organism. And Deity help us when he finally decides what he wants that organism to kill."
The sun finally begins to dip, casting the fort in a bloody, orange hue, but the command rings out again, eternal and unforgiving:
"LEVEL!"
...
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