Chapter 7: First Blood

  The morning started with Staff Sergeant Chen screaming at us about our "pathetic fucking grip strength" while we stood in formation holding wooden spears that weighed maybe five pounds but felt like fifty after the first ten minutes.

  "Thrust, recover, thrust, recover!" Chen's voice carried across the training field, a cleared area just inside the palisade wall where the grass had been trampled into submission by weeks of soldiers learning to stab things. "Your enemy doesn't give a shit about your feelings! Your enemy doesn't care that your hands hurt! Thrust, recover!"

  I thrust. I recovered. My shoulders burned in a way that was completely novel, a sensation I'd read about but never actually experienced. Real muscle fatigue. Real exertion. The kind that came from using your body instead of just inhabiting it like a slowly failing vehicle.

  It was fucking glorious.

  "Smith, you're grinning like an idiot," Marcus muttered from my left. He was sweating, his face red with effort. "What's wrong with you?"

  "Just enjoying the moment," I said, thrusting the spear forward and pulling it back. The movement was becoming smoother, more natural. My body was learning.

  "You're insane." But he was grinning too, just a little.

  Rodriguez, on my right, was all business. His form was better than mine, better than most of the people here. Army Ranger training, probably. He made the thrust-and-recover look efficient, economical. "Focus up," he said quietly. "Chen's looking for someone to make an example of."

  He was right. Chen was prowling the line like a predator looking for weakness. She was maybe five-foot-four and built like she could bend steel with her bare hands. Her voice could probably strip paint.

  "You!" She stopped in front of a guy three people down from me. Air Force, based on the way he'd introduced himself yesterday. "What the fuck was that? Did you just try to stab the air or give it a gentle suggestion? Again!"

  The guy thrust his spear forward. It wobbled.

  "Pathetic! You think a goblin's going to die of disappointment like your father? Again!"

  We drilled for another hour. Thrust, recover, thrust, recover. My hands developed blisters that I could actually feel forming, the friction of wood against skin creating heat and pressure and eventually the sharp sting of broken skin. I'd never had blisters before. Never done anything physical enough to earn them.

  I loved them.

  When Chen finally called a break, half the group collapsed onto the ground. I stayed standing, rolling my shoulders, feeling the ache settle into my muscles. Real ache. Earned ache.

  "Water break, five minutes!" Chen barked. "Then we're moving to archery. Try not to shoot yourselves, it reflects poorly on me."

  The archery range was set up along the eastern wall, targets made of bundled straw at varying distances. Short bows first, Chen explained. Easier draw weight, better for learning form.

  I picked up one of the bows, felt the weight of it in my hands. Smooth wood, slightly warm from sitting in the sun. The string was taut, professional. I'd never held a bow before. Never had the hand strength or stability. Never had the chance to develop whatever neural pathways turned intention into accuracy.

  "Nock your arrow," Chen called out. "Draw, aim, loose. Don't overthink it. Your body knows what to do even if your brain doesn't."

  Except my body didn't know. Had never known.

  I nocked the arrow, feeling the fletching against my fingers. Drew the string back. My arms shook with the effort, muscles that were strong enough now but had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. The string touched my cheek, my nose, anchor points that meant nothing to a brain that had never learned to judge distance or trajectory.

  I loosed.

  The arrow sailed over the target, over the wall behind it, and disappeared into the distance.

  "Well," Marcus said, "at least you didn't hit anyone."

  His arrow thunked into the outer ring of the target. Not center mass, but solid. Rodriguez's hit even closer to the bullseye, his Ranger training evident in his intense focus.

  I tried again. This time the arrow hit the dirt three feet in front of the target, skidding to a pathetic stop.

  "Smith!" Chen barked. "You aiming at the ground or the target?"

  "The target, Staff Sergeant."

  "Then maybe try looking at it instead of your feet."

  I was looking at it. That was the problem. Looking at it and having absolutely no idea how to translate that visual information into the right angle, the right draw, the right release. My brain had never learned. Had never had the chance to learn.

  We practiced. Drew and loosed, drew and loosed. Marcus's arrows started clustering together. Rodriguez was consistently hitting the inner rings. Mine went everywhere. Too high, too low, too far left. One hit the edge of the target and I felt a stupid surge of pride before the next one buried itself in the dirt again.

  "Jesus, Smith," someone muttered. "You ever done anything athletic?"

  "Not really," I said, which was possibly the understatement of the century.

  "Moves like Bambi on ice," another soldier said, loud enough for everyone to hear. A few people laughed.

  I felt my jaw tighten. Of course. The nickname was inevitable. I'd been waiting for something like this since I arrived.

  "At least Bambi could run," Rodriguez said, but his tone was light, deflecting. "Smith's just got no muscle memory. Give him time."

  "Yeah," Marcus added. "Bambi grew up, didn't he? Became the Great Prince of the Forest or some shit."

  "Focus up," Chen snapped, cutting through the chatter. She stopped behind me, watching. I could feel her judgment, her assessment. "You're gripping too tight. Relax your bow hand."

  I tried. The next arrow went wide right.

  "And you're not following through. Your release is all wrong."

  I tried again. Wide left.

  "Fuck," I said.

  "Yeah," Chen said, but her voice wasn't unkind. "Keep practicing. You've got the strength now, at least. The rest is just repetition."

  The long bows were worse. Heavier draw weight, more power, more ways to fuck it up. Some of the soldiers couldn't pull them back at all, which made me feel slightly better. Marcus managed it, his arrows still finding the target more often than not. Rodriguez was solid, consistent.

  I drew the long bow back, feeling the resistance, the way my muscles engaged. The string touched my anchor points. I loosed.

  The arrow sailed over the target entirely, disappearing into the grass beyond.

  "Well," Marcus said, "at least you got good distance."

  "Thanks," I said. "Really helpful."

  My next shot hit the ground three feet in front of the target. The one after that went wide left. I had no consistency, no muscle memory, no neural pathways that knew what the hell they were doing. Every shot was a fresh dose of embarrassment.

  "You're overthinking it," Rodriguez offered.

  "I'm really not," I said. "I'm just bad at it."

  Chen was about to call another round when the horn sounded.

  It wasn't like the movies. No dramatic brass fanfare, no stirring call to battle. Just a flat, harsh blast that cut through the morning air and made everyone freeze.

  "Shit," Rodriguez said. "That's the alarm."

  Chen was already moving. "Drop the bows! Everyone to the wall, now! Move, move, move!"

  We ran. My legs pumped, my lungs burned, my heart hammered in my chest. Real running. Real response to danger. The wall loomed ahead, the wooden stairs leading up to the fighting platform.

  I took the stairs two at a time, my hands gripping the rough wood of the railing. Reached the top and looked out over the cleared land beyond the palisade.

  "Oh, fuck," someone said.

  The goblins came first, but they weren't charging. They were being pushed. Maybe thirty of them, hunched and quick, their mottled gray-green skin catching the morning light. They moved in fits and starts, advancing a few steps, then hesitating, looking back over their shoulders.

  Behind them, the hobgoblins. A dozen of them, six feet tall and broad across the shoulders. They carried crude weapons, clubs and axes and blades hammered from scrap metal. And they were driving the goblins forward like cattle, shouting in a language that was all harsh consonants and threat.

  "Jesus Christ," Marcus breathed beside me. "Those are real."

  "Very observant," I said, but my voice came out tight. My hands gripped the wall.

  Below us, soldiers were forming up. Maybe forty or fifty of them, moving with the kind of organized chaos that suggested they'd done this before but not enough to make it smooth. An officer I didn't recognize was shouting orders, getting them into formation.

  "Shield wall!" the officer called. "Archers, second rank! Spears, third rank! Move!"

  The gates opened. The unit marched out onto the cleared ground, shields locked together, a moving wall of wood and metal. The archers took position behind them, arrows nocked. The spearmen brought up the rear.

  "How long have they been here?" I asked. "The veterans?"

  "About three weeks," Rodriguez said. He was watching the formation with a critical eye. "First wave. They're the only ones who know what the fuck they're doing."

  "...and this is what knowing what the fuck they're doing looks like?"

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  "Apparently."

  The goblins hit the shield wall first, but only because the hobgoblins forced them to. I could see the smaller creatures hesitating, trying to pull back, but the hobgoblins were right behind them, shoving them forward with the flats of their weapons. The goblins had no choice. They crashed into the shields with their crude blades raised, all teeth and desperate violence.

  The wall held, mostly. Shields bashed forward, spears thrust out from the gaps. A goblin went down, a spear through its chest. Then another, its skull caved in by a shield rim.

  The archers loosed. Most of the arrows missed. A few hit goblins, punching through their thin bodies. One arrow went wide and caught a soldier in the shoulder, punched through the gap between his armor plates and buried itself deep. He screamed, stumbled back, but the line held.

  "Friendly fire," Marcus said. "Fucking hell."

  The hobgoblins came in behind the goblins, more organized, more dangerous. One of them swung a massive club into the shield wall and the impact was visible even from where we stood. The soldier behind the shield went down, his arm bent backward at the elbow, bone jutting through the skin. White and red and wrong.

  Another soldier stepped into the gap. The wall reformed.

  A goblin got through, slipped past a shield when a soldier overextended. It drove its blade into the man's thigh and the blood came fast, arterial spray that painted the ground. The soldier went down screaming, clutching at the wound. A runner darted forward, grabbed him by his harness, started dragging him back toward the gates.

  The goblin that had stabbed him took a spear through the throat. It made a wet, gurgling sound and collapsed, blood pooling beneath it.

  More goblins were trying to retreat now, backing away from the shield wall. But the hobgoblins weren't having it. One of them grabbed a fleeing goblin by the scruff of its neck and threw it back into the fight. Another hobgoblin swung its club at a retreating goblin, the threat clear. Move forward or die here.

  The goblins moved forward.

  A soldier tripped. Just caught his foot on uneven ground and went down, his shield falling away from the wall. The goblins saw it instantly. Three of them swarmed him, their hesitation gone, replaced by something vicious and gleeful. They stabbed and slashed, their blades opening his armor at the joints. One blade caught him across the face, splitting his cheek open from ear to mouth. I could see his teeth through the torn flesh, see his tongue working as he tried to give voice to the pain and terror.

  Two soldiers broke formation to help him. The wall buckled.

  A hobgoblin charged into the gap, its axe swinging in a wide arc. It caught a soldier in the side of the head. The helmet crumpled. The soldier dropped like a puppet with cut strings, and when he hit the ground I could see the dent in his skull, could see the dark matter leaking out.

  "Thrust, recover," I muttered. "Thrust, recover."

  The combat was chaos. A soldier took a goblin blade across the forearm and the cut went deep, through muscle to bone. I could see the white of his radius before the blood covered it. He kept fighting, switching his spear to his off hand.

  Another soldier took a club to the knee. The joint bent sideways with a crack I could hear from the wall. He went down and a goblin was on him instantly, stabbing down with its blade. Once, twice, three times. The soldier stopped moving.

  A runner grabbed him anyway, started dragging him back. Protocol, I guessed. Even the dead got retrieved.

  The archers loosed again. More friendly fire. An arrow caught a soldier in the back of the neck, just above his armor. He reached back, confused, then collapsed forward into the shield wall.

  "Jesus," Marcus said. "Jesus Christ."

  A hobgoblin's axe opened a soldier's belly. Just split the armor and the flesh beneath like they were nothing. The soldier looked down at his own intestines spilling out, gray-pink coils hitting the dirt, and his face went blank with shock. He tried to hold them in with his hands, tried to push them back inside, but they kept coming.

  A runner got to him. Started dragging him back even though there was no way he was surviving that.

  The goblins were breaking now. Really breaking. Too many of them were dead, too many of their companions lying in the dirt. They started to flee, scattering back toward the tree line. The hobgoblins roared at them, tried to drive them forward again, but the goblins were done. They ran.

  One hobgoblin grabbed a fleeing goblin and snapped its neck, threw the body at the others as a warning. It didn't matter. The goblins kept running.

  The hobgoblins looked at each other. Looked at the shield wall, which was reforming now, closing the gaps. Looked at their fleeing cannon fodder. Then they retreated too, backing away with their weapons raised, daring anyone to follow.

  No one did.

  The officer called the formation back. The soldiers retreated through the gates in good order, shields still locked, dragging their wounded and dead with them.

  The gates closed behind them.

  The soldiers who came through were blood-soaked and shaking. Some were limping, others were being carried. The smell hit me even from the wall, copper and viscera and something else, something primal and wrong.

  "Good fight," one of the veterans near me said. He was leaning against the wall, watching with the casual interest of someone observing a sporting event. "Clean. Could've been worse."

  "Could've been worse," I muttered, barely audible. My voice sounded distant.

  "Yeah. Last week we lost eight. This time, looks like maybe three dead, dozen wounded. That's a win."

  A win. Three dead. Dozen wounded. A win.

  "Smith!" Chen's voice cut through my thoughts. "Get your ass down here! Training group, you're on runner support! Move!"

  We moved. Down the stairs, across the compound, following Chen toward a building that I'd thought was a barn or maybe a workshop. The doors were open, and the screaming was coming from inside.

  The field hospital was exactly as crude as it sounded. Wooden tables, some just planks laid across sawhorses. Wounded soldiers lying on them, on the floor, anywhere there was space. Blood everywhere. The smell was worse than outside, concentrated, mixed with sweat and fear.

  Staff in makeshift medical gear, some with actual medic training and some who just looked like they'd been volun-told, moved between the wounded. Bandaging, applying pressure, trying to stabilize.

  "Focus on bandages. There are no medications," one of them said as we entered. A woman, maybe forty, with blood up to her elbows. "ARIA didn't include them. No painkillers, no antibiotics, nothing. They'll heal in twelve hours, but until then, they have to endure it."

  "Twelve hours?" Marcus said.

  "Full healing cycle. Twelve hours from injury, their bodies will have had time to reset. Completely. Wounds will be closed, bones mended, everything back to baseline." She was wrapping a bandage around a soldier's arm, where a goblin blade had laid it open to the bone. The soldier was biting down on a leather strap, tears streaming down his face. "The hard part is getting through the twelve hours."

  A scream from the corner. A soldier with a gut wound, his hands pressed against his abdomen, blood and intestines seeping between his fingers. "Kill me," he was saying. "Please, just fucking kill me. I can't, I can't do this."

  "You can," the woman said, but her voice was tired. "Twelve hours. You can make it twelve hours."

  "I can't!" His voice broke. "Please!"

  Another soldier, his leg mangled below the knee, was making the same request. "End it. Just end it. I'll respawn, right? Twelve hours, I'll be back. Just make it stop."

  The woman, who I was starting to think was the closest thing to a doctor they had here, looked at him. Looked at his leg. "If we kill you, you respawn in twelve hours. But you'll have death sickness. You'll be sore, exhausted, barely functional for days. The memories of dying will be muted, ARIA does that much, but it still affects you. Psychologically. Physically."

  "I don't care," the soldier said. "Please."

  She looked around. Saw us standing there, the training group, frozen and useless. "You. All of you. Start helping move the wounded. Get them water if they can drink. Talk to them. Distract them. Do something useful or get out."

  We scattered. I moved toward a soldier who was lying on the floor, his shoulder bandaged but blood still seeping through. He was young, maybe my age, his face pale with shock.

  "Hey," I said, kneeling beside him. "You're going to be okay. Twelve hours, right?"

  He looked at me. His eyes were unfocused. "Hurts."

  "I know." And I did know. Not this specific pain, but pain. The constant companion, the thing that colored every moment. "But you can get through it. You've made it this far."

  "Hurts so much."

  I stayed with him. Talked to him about nothing, about everything. Told him about the archery practice, about Chen's creative profanity, about anything that might distract him from the pain.

  Across the room, the soldier with the gut wound was still begging. The doctor was standing over him now, her face drawn. She looked exhausted. Haunted.

  "Are you sure?" she asked him.

  "Please," he said. "Please."

  She looked at another staff member. "Get me a blade. Clean."

  They brought her what looked like a medical knife, thin and sharp. She knelt beside the soldier.

  "Close your eyes," she said.

  He closed his remaining good eye. The other was swollen shut from a facial wound.

  She positioned the knife. "I'm sorry," she said.

  Then she drove it through his eye socket, angled slightly up, into his brain.

  The soldier's body went rigid. Then limp.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the body began to shimmer, like heat distortion on a summer road. It faded, dissolved into particles of light that dispersed into the air.

  Respawn mechanic. He'd be back in twelve hours, somewhere in the compound, alive and whole but carrying the weight of death.

  I stared at the empty space where he'd been. My hands were shaking.

  The doctor stood up, wiping the blade on her already blood-soaked apron. She looked at it for a moment, then set it aside. Her hands were shaking too.

  "Next," she said, her voice flat.

  This was war. Real war. Not the sanitized version from movies or games or news reports that reduced human suffering to statistics. This was blood and screaming and the choice between enduring agony or dying to escape it.

  This was what I'd signed up for. What Michaela had snuck me into. What I'd been so fucking grateful for because it gave me a body that worked.

  A body that could be torn apart by goblin blades. A body that could feel pain, real pain, the kind that made strong soldiers beg for death.

  I'd spent twenty-two years in a body that hurt, that failed, that trapped me. I knew pain. I knew limitation. I knew what it was like to be helpless while your own flesh betrayed you.

  These soldiers didn't. They'd had working bodies their whole lives, taken them for granted, never had to think about the gap between intention and action.

  Now they were learning.

  And I was learning something else. That having a body that worked meant having a body that could be broken. That the joy of movement came with the risk of violence. That being alive, really alive, meant being vulnerable.

  The soldier I'd been talking to had passed out, shock or exhaustion or just his brain's mercy. I stood up, my knees stiff, and looked around the field hospital.

  Marcus was helping hold down a soldier while they bandaged his leg. His face was pale but determined.

  Rodriguez was talking to a wounded woman, his voice low and steady, keeping her focused on something other than the pain.

  Chen appeared in the doorway. "Training group! Back to the field! Now!"

  We filed out, silent. The moans of pain followed us.

  The training field felt different now. The spears we'd been drilling with weren't practice weapons anymore. They were tools for creating the wounds we'd just seen. For causing the anguish we'd just witnessed.

  Chen stood in front of us, her arms crossed. She didn't acknowledge what we'd seen. Didn't offer comfort or context or anything that might make it easier.

  "Pick up your spears," she said.

  We picked them up. The wood felt heavier now. Or maybe I was just more aware of the weight.

  "Thrust, recover, thrust, recover!"

  I thrust. The spear went forward, came back. My shoulders burned. My hands ached where the blisters had formed.

  "Again!"

  Thrust, recover. Thrust, recover.

  My mind was still in the field hospital. Still seeing the doctor drive the knife through the soldier's eye. Still hearing the screaming. Still smelling the blood.

  But my body kept moving. Thrust, recover. Thrust, recover.

  Because that's what you did. You kept moving. You kept training. You kept going forward because there was no going back.

  I'd wanted this. Wanted a body that worked, wanted to be part of something, wanted to matter.

  This was the cost. This was what mattering looked like in The Forge.

  Blood and pain and the choice between enduring or dying.

  I thrust the spear forward, pulled it back. The movement was smoother now, more practiced. My body was learning how to kill.

  "Again!" Chen barked.

  "Look at Bambi," Rodriguez said from somewhere to my left. His voice carried a note of something I couldn't quite identify. "Not flinching at all."

  "Everyone else is pulling back now," Marcus added quietly. "Half-committing. But he's still going full extension."

  Thrust, recover.

  The spear felt different in my hands now. Heavier. More real.

  I glanced sideways. Marcus was right. The soldier next to me was thrusting, but his shoulders were tense, his movements abbreviated. Like his body was trying to protect him from something his mind had just learned to fear.

  I didn't have that. No muscle memory telling me to hold back. No instinctive self-preservation developed through years of sports and physical activity. My brain had never learned the neural pathways that made you flinch away from commitment.

  I kept drilling. Kept moving. Kept training.

  Because I couldn't go back to the hospital room, to the failing body, to the life of watching from the sidelines while everyone else lived.

  I could only go forward.

  Even if forward meant learning how to survive in a world where mercy looked like a knife through the eye and a good day meant only three dead.

  Thrust, recover.

  Thrust, recover.

  The weight of the spear settled into my hands, and I kept moving.