Chapter 2: Legion Training

At breakfast, the food they fed us was copious but bland.  I had trouble eating as my new reality sunk in.  I listened intently to others speaking and heard familiarity in their speech but could not place it.  Some words almost made sense, but the heavy accent and rapid speech made it difficult. 

We had no guards when I walked around the buildings.  That surprised me, but I remained close to my assigned building and watched the experienced classes training.  They worked on conditioning, fighting with various weapons, coordinated marches, and small formations of sixteen to twenty men.  My stomach roiled as the muscular and fit men performed athletic stunts well beyond anything I was ever capable of.  I had lost weight since arriving, but my gut was still evident, and I was worried about what I had gotten myself into.  Even more so when a man had his arm broken from a club.  I turned away, almost losing my breakfast from seeing the bone sticking out.

We waited two more days before all bunks were filled.  I was given a translation amulet charged at breakfast by one of the magicians who healed injuries, along with five others who apparently did not speak the native tongue.  The mage was named Damian, and after he gave me the amulet, he showed me how to wear it.  

“You need to keep the cord tight so the amulet remains around the throat.  This way, it is unlikely to get damaged.  They are expensive, and if you were in the regular army, you would not even get one,” Damian explained patiently.

I was relieved to finally have the ability to talk to others.  I held it in my hand, and it looked like a closed pocket watch. “How does it work?”

Damian answered, “Runic discs stacked in oriented sequence and are powered by aether.”  I nodded as if any of that made sense to me.

Since I knew Damian was one of the healers from watching the others train, I thought it might be a good idea to befriend him.  “If you have time, I would appreciate some language lessons without the amulet.”

Damian looked me over. “Your body and mind are about to go through a daily gauntlet.  But if you have the energy, find me after dinner.” He left me to my own devices.

With the amulet, it was great to finally talk to others freely.  Most of the men in our 100-person barracks were here because they, like me, had opted to be soldiers rather than laborers to pay off their crimes.  Most of the crimes were not as petty as mine, though, with lots of murderers and violent assault cases.  I also found one benefit of the amulet: it always translated my speech at the same volume, so I could whisper a word and listen to the translation aloud.  This annoyed the others in the barracks, so I usually did practiced outside.

I spent most of my free time connecting the words and developing a vocabulary.  I think the language was related to English, so I rapidly added words to my mental dictionary.  I was unsure if it was because I was a foreigner, my demeanor, or that I just did not speak the language without the amulet, but I had difficulty making friends.  After two days of relative freedom our training began.

We had seven trainers who also served as wardens.  One of our group tried to escape the second night, and he was promptly put on trial and executed.  The follow-up speech by Silas, the Legion commander in charge, was not pleasant: “You leave the compound without permission of an instructor, and you will be executed.  Know that you cannot run.  Our mages—” he indicated seven men in a row “—will track you in minutes.  You chose to be here to atone for your crimes and serve the Empire.”  He made a hand motion, and one of the trainers grimly slid a long, pointed dagger under the chin and up into the brain of the violator.  The defiant look on his face turned to horror as he died.  I promptly vomited and was not the only one.

The scene made me have second thoughts about my choice to join and erased all thoughts of escape.  Two years of hard labor was probably a better alternative.  The dead man’s bed was promptly filled with another recruit.  There were seven barracks, each with a hundred bunks.  When a barracks was full, the 7-month training began, usually on the first of the month.  Each barracks had seven trainers, and a large estate building housed all the command staff. 

I wasn’t sure how many command staff there were, but Damian, who lived in the estate, said it was over one hundred, not including attendants.  There were also more than the seven mages who had been on display at the execution, but Damian said their number fluctuated between ten and fifteen.

On the first morning, we ran with a weighted pack before breakfast.  Then, we ate a large meal as our bodies protested the abuse but yearned for sustenance to heal it.  Next we had a lecture about the Empire and Legion that sounded mostly like propaganda to me.  Our seven instructors schooled us in hand-to-hand combat after the lecture, but the lesson was more about the instructors showing us how superior they were to us.  A number of my fellows got broken noses, dislocated shoulders, or torn ligaments that required healing.  The grim lessons caused several painful screams.  On one of my turns, I got an elbow to the face and spit out my two broken front teeth.

My instructor yelled at me, “Get your teeth, trainee.  A magician can heal it back in place, but they would not waste aether in regrowing them.”  I spit blood as I dropped to my knees and found them in the dirt.  Damian washed and carefully lined them up before healing them.  He patted me on the back, and I returned to the training.  Or, for a better description, the beating. 

After hand-to-hand combat, we had another meal.  I listened to the others complain as they ate, bonding over their hatred of the instructors but still not accepting me.  I was on the outside looking in, not being able to break into any conversations.  We were brought to a courtyard with a huge barrel of worn, dull swords.  We were each given one of the blades, and the instructor spoke, “All combat can be broken down into different movements woven together.  The speed and power at which you execute these movements make you a competent swordsman.”  

Then, we were schooled in sword forms.  We had to learn seven sword forms, each with seven segments.  We practiced with weighted swords, striving for perfect movements.  If we were good, they would give us a heavier sword.  My shoulders and arms were soon aching and struggling to hold the blade.

After a few hours with the sword, we spent time with the instructors.  Each one taught another weapon: dagger, axe, crossbow, short sword, two-handed sword, spear, and polearm.  They told us our goal was not to master another weapon, but to learn enough to fight effectively against someone with these weapons.  So we rotated every day between instructors in groups of 15.  After the cross-weapon training, we did more fitness training until sunset.  Then we had a shower fed by an aqueduct, received healing if needed, and more food.  The bland food suddenly tasted like ambrosia.  We had two hours to ourselves before the sun set and darkness filled the barracks. 

The first few days, I had trouble moving.  My body just stopped responding to the intense fatigue.  The instructors did not scream and yell at me like in the movies.  Instead, they offered calmly worded threats that I would be sent to the regular army if I could not keep going.  That seemed to motivate the other men, so I also forced myself to continue.  Convicted men in the army were usually sent to the front lines and used as fodder.  At least, that was what the instructors told us.  I pushed to keep myself from that fate. 

Most of us slept for our free two hours.  I, however, was outside and worked on mastery of the language.  I noticed one of the only two women in our barracks, practicing with a staff.  Her name was Helena.  After a few days, we started talking briefly while she spun her staff. The other woman in our group usually moved from bed to bed at night, whoring herself out for favors in combat classes. 

Helena trusted me and after a few days, she tossed me a staff. “You can talk and help practice.”  I caught the staff and painfully stood.

“How can you still move Helena?  And why practice more?”  I approached her.

“You just need to tell your mind that your body doesn’t hurt.  The more practice I get, the better my chance of making it.” She went into a series of attacks.  She slowed, seeing how terrible I was at defending.

After some exchanges, I found she was a good teacher.  A teacher who didn’t like to talk, just demonstrated.  Close to sunset, I asked her, “Why are you even here? You seem like a warrior.”

Helena huffed. “Criminal debt.”  She didn’t elaborate.  And I could tell she wasn’t going to talk further on it.  But from then on, I spent my evenings gaining proficiency with the staff.  Getting my abused body to do the extra training was not easy, but I was finding mental resilience to the pain, like Helena said. 

At night, before falling asleep, I always tried my damnedest to charge the medallion myself.  If there was magic in this world and I had a wisp of it, then I could make it work for me eventually. After two weeks of this, I thought I might be starting to feel the aether, but I was unsure.

My body was broken repeatedly during training—literally.  We had good healers to repair our injuries.  Torn ligaments, broken bones, concussions, cuts, internal bleeding—all of it was repairable with magic if they got to you in time.  I got healing just about every day and found myself starting to become numb to the pain—which one of the instructors told me was the point.  It was a hallmark of a legionnaire, fighting when his body was broken.  At least now I was able to function relatively normally with one broken arm.

After completing three weeks of hell, we were tested on the tablet.  Fourteen of our hundred washed out after the test and were sent to the regular army training camp.  Some of us were surprised, but after I talked with Damian, I found out the amount of resources needed to train the Legion of Lion was ten times that of the regular army.  This meant Commander Silas liked to cull the groups early, which allowed our instructors to focus on the more promising men.

Damian, who was one of the dozen magicians administering the test, let me peruse my results on the paper after they were copied.  Most of the other soldiers just had their results copied and sent away.  Making friends with the man had been a boon for me.

My physical stats had made good progress.  I was more curious to see my magic skills, which had barely moved. But still, they had moved!  So the hour I had spent every night trying to charge my amulet had done something.  It gave me the motivation to continue the effort.

After the tablet reading, we had a large round of combat competitions over three days to rank the remaining 86 members of the squad.  I placed 48^th in hand combat, 37^th in sword combat, 77^th with daggers, and 29^th with sword and shield.  It had been the first time we had been given a shield, so I thought I did well.  I was surprised I had done so well, but then again, most of the men in the barracks had not been warriors before coming here.

Then, in a sort of awards ceremony, the top three placers in each combat got a minor essence of strength or power for a reward.  The small marble-sized balls were dark purple or orange, which the winners eagerly consumed.  What is an essence?  From Damian, I found out there were two effects of essences.  One, they could raise your potential in stat, and the other was they could raise your attribute without having to bust your ass in training.  After just three weeks of training, the bottom three performers were sent to the army camp, reducing our barracks number to 83.

Talking to Damian, I found that each minor essence cost between one and twenty gold coins depending on which stat.  Physical stats were the cheapest, while magical stats were the costliest, and mental ones fell in between. Generally, it took 30 minor essences to forcefully raise a stat up one point without any training.  Unfortunately, minor essences usually had little effect once a stat reached half of a person’s potential, unless the individual also trained it. 

There were also major essences that were about an inch in diameter.  These could help raise stats to about 80% of your potential without having to train.  They were also ten times as effective at raising stats over minor essences, meaning you only needed to use 3 for an increase.  According to Damian, major essences cost between 50 to 500 gold. 

Finally, there were apex essences.  They were the size of a golf ball but were very difficult to harvest, cost hundreds of gold, and could raise someone past 80% of their potential without training.  More importantly, though, apex essences were the only thing that could raise your potential: your stat’s limit ceiling.  These essences were rare, expensive, and reserved for nobility.  Using them on yourself was a crime unless you had permission from a noble called a First Citizen.

I spent the next three weeks of training extremely focused on improving my combat skills.  The instructors noticed and gave me more attention in practice sessions.  I didn’t want to fall below the imaginary line that would have me sent to the regular army; if I was going to survive in this world, I also needed this training.  I found my body acclimating to its new reality, and most of my body fat was gone after just six weeks.

The next tablet test, three weeks later, yielded good results for me.

The tester only recorded my physical and mental stats, ignoring the magic column again.  I had substantial gains in my physical stats, and was benefiting from all the weapon practices.  My mental fortitude potential had increased from 87 to 88.  I asked the tablet testing mage about it.  It wasn’t Damian this time, but my goodwill among the mages seemed to have spread. 

He checked the records. “A single point in potential increase is not unheard of.  The tablet’s calibration could be off, or you could have just been on the cusp between values.  You shouldn’t worry about it.  Don’t be surprised if it is back to 87 on your next reading.”  I had waited to be last in line so I could review my scores, and the three mages administering the test packed up the three tablets they were using carefully and left.

Six people were expelled from our barracks after the tablet testing, bringing our number to 77.  I didn’t even bother to figure out who they were.  Rumor spread among us that the goal was to finish with 30 Legionnaires.  The top six in our class would be sent to the capital to join the Royal Legion, and the remaining 24 would form a platoon under the command of a mage and be sent on missions across the Telhian Empire.

Combat testing was fairly intense this round as everyone realized they might not make it and have to go to the regular army, which was considered fodder to hold the borders.  Life expectancy was not very high.  I finished 19^th in sword ranking, 24^th in sword and shield, 29^th in dagger, and 9^th in hand-to-hand.  We were also tested on our marksmanship with the crossbow, and I finished 18^th.  Once again, prize essences were handed out to the top three for each event, and three more soldiers were cut—74 of us remained.

We, shockingly, were given a day off.  It was our first free day in six weeks of intensive training finished.  I noticed another man shedding tears of joy when it was announced.