⛧
The clash of blades echoed across the courtyard, dull thuds and sharp grunts shattering the dawn stillness.
Ashen's breath steamed in the cold air, his arms heavy from drills that had blurred together for hours. His opponent stumbled back. It was a lanky recruit with sweat plastering his hair to his forehead.
Sabrina's voice cracked the silence like a whip.
"Again."
The two men collided once more, weapons echoing on impact.
Ashen's muscles screamed, but his grip didn't falter. He drove forward with his spear, forcing his partner to yield until the man fell flat on the stones.
A muttered curse followed, but Sabrina only barked, "Pathetic. If that had been a monster's claw, you'd be meat on the floor."
Ashen wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
'If this continues, we're probably going to drop dead before even seeing any monster claws...' The thought flickered bitterly.
By the fourth day, exhaustion was more a constant symptom than a temporary concern.
Some men dragged their feet to the morning drills, eyes hollow from sleep deprivation.
Sleeplessness became the norm as the two-week countdown continued, each strike of the alarm bell reminding them that deployment drew ever closer.
The meals grew sparse and cold. Gruel that tasted of nothing, stale bread that crumbled between their fingers. Men who'd once complained about the food now shoveled it down without tasting, desperate for any fuel to keep their bodies moving. Water became precious; even washing was rationed.
It wasn't poverty that drove this. The Citadel was simply conditioning them, easing their bodies and minds into the deprivation waiting beyond the walls.
Ashen kept silent. He listened, watched, and learned. He memorized the terrain codes Sabrina drilled into them until they danced unbidden behind his eyelids.
He traced the maps in the dirt long after the others collapsed into their bunks. And when the rest slept, he sometimes slipped away, practicing his spear thrusts in the empty field until his hands burned.
'If two weeks is all I have, then I'll wring every drop from it. Better to crawl forward broken than wait for death in bed,' was his constant thought throughout every minute of the day.
He felt that if he didn't keep repeating the phrase like a mantra, over and over again, he'd surely let himself collapse.
But the true anchor was the new trait, Steadfast. It gave him the persistence to keep going and to turn this hellish experience into something tolerable… and eventually routine.
The lectures on monster behavior became a catalog of nightmares.
Sabrina spoke of creatures that could smell fear from miles away, beasts that hunted by sound alone, plants that would dissolve flesh on contact.
She described the Shrieking Hounds that traveled in packs of thirty, their howls driving men mad before the teeth found them.
The Iron-Back Serpents that could punch through steel plate like parchment. The Void Stalkers that phased between shadows, striking when least expected.
Each description was accompanied by detailed survival tactics: how to move, where to strike, what signs to watch for. The information carved itself into their minds through repetition and terror.
The sixth night, hysteria cracked the discipline.
A boy barely past seventeen snapped during a lecture on monster behavior, his voice high and desperate.
"This is madness! Two weeks, and then what? We're just bodies to throw at the walls!"
Sabrina didn't flinch. She ordered him to spar her on the spot.
Five minutes later, he was face-down on the stones, gasping, his arm twisted at an angle it shouldn't bend. The rest of the recruits stared in silence, the lesson seared into their minds: Fear won't fly as an excuse.
Ashen stared too, but his thoughts weren't on pity.
'He just said what we're all thinking. The difference is, he thought saying it would change something. It obviously doesn't. You either shut up and endure, or you're crushed underfoot.'
⛧
By the ninth day, the grind carved deeper.
Fingers became bloodied from holding weapons constantly, their bodies reeked of sweat and iron as even a bath became a luxury, and their minds teetered between numbness and despair.
The dormitory had become a tomb of groans and restless sleep.
Men talked in their sleep, reliving the day's punishments or crying out against imaginary monsters.
Some woke screaming, then lay silent and ashamed in the darkness. Others simply stared at the ceiling, too exhausted to sleep but too wired to rest.
Ashen collapsed onto his bunk after another day of torture disguised as training, and his roommate, Paul, who was red-eyed from fatigue, murmured into the dark.
"Feels like every minute just drives home that I'm closer to dying out there. Every lesson, every map... all it does is hammer in how screwed we really are." He added with a sarcastic edge, "They won't even give us a single day to fool ourselves or escape reality."
Ashen didn't answer for a couple of beats. He simply stared at the ceiling, listening to the faint howls outside the walls, and tightened his fists beneath the blanket.
Eventually, he uttered, "Closer to dying, yes… But also closer to living. If death is the only certainty, then the only question is how far we walk before it catches us…"
Paul was quiet for a long moment. Then, barely a whisper: "You really believe that?"
"We have to," Ashen replied. "The alternative is giving up before we even try."
⛧
By the twelfth day, Sabrina's ruthlessness reached its peak.
She had them march in formation until their legs nearly buckled, then shoved them into mock skirmishes where every mistake earned a strike to the ribs or worse.
Some kept cursing her under their breath as a way to vent.
One recruit even spat openly, sneering, "Blue-lipped bitch."
He didn't last the hour. By the end of the drill, he lay half-conscious, dragged away by his comrades, too broken to rise. Sabrina hadn't raised her voice once. Not like she needed to.
The final evaluation came without warning. Sabrina divided them into squads and threw them into a simulated monster assault.
Wooden targets shaped like claws and fangs emerged from hidden slots in the walls. Men who'd trained for nearly two weeks found themselves stumbling, panicking, forgetting everything they'd learned.
But some moved with newfound precision.
They flowed between formations, covered each other's flanks, and struck with calculated efficiency.
Ashen found himself among them, his spear finding its marks while his mind tracked threats and opportunities with clarity.
When it ended, seventeen men remained standing. The rest lay groaning or unconscious on the stones.
And then the final days bled into each other, exhaustion dulling time into a haze.
The men who'd once stared at her thighs now stared only at the ground, their smirks long gone, replaced by grim silence and respect carved through suffering.
Ashen felt the same fatigue drag at him, but he kept trying to think of it differently.
'Pain means I'm still here. If I can keep moving, then I'm already winning against the grave…'
Sadly, no amount of motivational speech, even if it bordered on self-brainwashing, would negate the agony.
When the two weeks ended, a different kind of bell rang, and the gates opened with its sound.
Ashen stood with the others on the sides of the citadel streets, watching as the frontline regiment returned.
They trudged back into the citadel, armors dented, cloaks shredded, faces gray with exhaustion.
Some limped, some leaned on comrades, and a few were carried on stretchers, their blood dark against the dawn light.
Their eyes told the story… the thousand-yard stare of men who had lived too long on the edge of death.
The citadel watched in silence as the battered soldiers passed, the only sound the uneven clatter of boots on stone.
The reserves saw their own faces reflected in the broken regiment. And beneath the silence, one fact pounded in their skulls louder than any bell: This is the coming path. And I'm already walking it.
❖⛧❖