After that, commands were barked, and the small group of soldiers that had accompanied the mage since the start went outside with a simple order: protect the tent and its occupants, and kill everything that wasn’t human. After that, the tent wasn’t much quieter than it had been before, though. It wasn’t even particularly tense, which made the whole thing feel anti-climactic somehow. 

Benjamin’s friends and the other strangers that were forced to stand there in whatever they’d been sleeping in continued to struggle against the orders of the cute kitsune girl as she lectured them on how glorious it was to kill a wolven, a dryad, or any of the other spirits that made up the shock troops of the natural world. Those sounds of struggle got weaker with every passing minute, though.

Benjamin had opted to stop fighting when he’d gotten his resolve down to the halfway mark. This wasn’t because he was done fighting, though. It was because he was saving it for the right moment. He was sure there would be some key moment that he could break away and escape, but so far, one hadn’t materialized.

Instead, he just stood there, occasionally glancing at Ethan to his right or Matt to his left, and he tried not to let his favorite waifu distract him too much from trying to figure out what it was the mage and his apprentice were up to as they wandered from person to person. This was hard since Benjamin and his friends were in the front row closest to the bloodthirsty fox girl, and the mage had started with the back row somewhere behind him. 

From the sound of the man’s footsteps, Benjamin could tell they only lingered in front of each person for perhaps half a minute before they moved on to the next person. Sometimes it would be much shorter than that when the mage declared the person to be “unfit for combat” or “completely disposable.” 

When the dispassionate man called one of those out, he uttered a few words that were completely incomprehensible to Benjamin, and he could see a brief flare of green magic light to the walls of the tent before the pair continued on. He had no idea what that meant, but he continued to watch and try to assemble clues while he did his best to ignore the way that Kitsune Miku-chan jiggled in her armor. 

After the first dozen humans had been ‘processed,’ or ‘initialized,’ as they referred to it, the younger man started to make more and more comments that helped Benjamin to understand what it was they were doing. “You know - this one isn’t a complete waste,” the younger man said after they lingered for almost two minutes in front of someone unseen before they moved on. That was followed by him insulting the next couple of guys in line. 

He just laughed at the first one, but at the second one, he said, “You know, judging from the state of these doughy men, this might be the most out-of-shape world we’ve ever seen. Maybe we should conquer it instead of just borrowing their citizens.”

“If magic worked there, I’d consider it,” the mage said coolly, “but sadly, the reason why they are so fruitful is because the rules of their universe don’t allow the sort of monsters that we must contend with here on Aavernia.”

Benjamin was hoping to hear more about that, but that’s when the sound of battle grew disconcertingly close to their tent. The mage and his apprentice stopped what they were doing for a moment but then continued on as if nothing was happening. The noises were enough to make Benjamin shake in his sneakers, but he could do nothing but listen to the carnage as he tried to parse the different sounds to try to understand what was happening outside.

Though the clash of swords and the roar of battle cries, even with the foreign tongue he was still getting used to, were largely understandable, that was less true about other sounds. There were keening screams that sounded positively inhuman in the way they grated on Benjamin’s ears like glass. There were other, deeper sounds that were more animalistic too. Roars, grunts, and growls all sounded terrifyingly close, but even though it sounded like the few soldiers out there were facing an army and the smell of slaughter grew thick in the copper-tinged air, the red fabric of the pavilion never wavered. 

So, minutes later, despite the raging battle outside, the mages finally made it to the first row of people in the tent, where he and his friends had been hiding from whatever terrible deprivations the mages had been inflicting on everyone else. It was a terrible moment, and as the pair worked their way down the front of the line, Benjamin could barely hear the sound of the cheering fox girl over the sound of his pounding heart. 

Any second they were going to reach Emma and do god knows what with her. After that would come Matt and then Benjamin himself. It was a terrifying thought, but not quite as brutal as the idea that by the time they worked their way to Ethan and Raja just past him, he probably would no longer even care what they did to his friends. 

He couldn’t decide if he wanted whatever was out there to rip him to pieces or not as they got closer and closer. It would probably have been kinder than what these men were going to do with him. That was true until they reached Emma, at least. Once they got to her, the younger man said, “You know, making a woman with a body like this a soldier would be a real waste Master. Perhaps you could let me—”

Benjamin had mostly made peace with the fact that he was never going to get Emma, even before her sudden engagement to Matt. He’d put that shit behind him, but the idea that some smarmy little fuck was going to get his claws into her with his mind control magic was beyond sick, and he surged against his invisible bonds as he drained most of his resolution in a last-ditch effort to break that asshole’s neck. 

His efforts were only successful enough that Kitsune Miku-chan fixed him briefly with a dazzling smile and said, “Please calm down before you hurt yourself. I know this part is unpleasant, but you’ll be able to join the fight soon enough, I promise, okay?”

Whether Benjamin wanted to or not, he felt himself calming down immediately. The mages never even noticed his rage, though. Even as he found himself drifting back to a blissfully neutral state, they continued their conversation about Emma without even noticing him. 

“We have no need of more pleasure slaves, Kathalles, and if we did, they would be for the prince or his court, not for a lowly apprentice like you. She’s much too willful to make a good transplant for a noblewoman too.” the older man chided, “No, letting you optimize this one would be too much of a temptation I’m afraid, but since you’ve been observing so patiently, I will let you try your hand at the last few, so observe me on this one closely while I turn her into a [blade dancer].”

“Ah, I see,” Kathalles said, failing to hide his disappointment as he watched his master work. “Yes - I can see exactly why you lined up those stats like that. Very clever, sir.”

As they spoke, they finally stepped in front of Matt, and a cold chill went down Benjamin’s spine as he realized that he was next, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was a terrifying feeling, but even that didn’t have as much impact as it should. Just like his rage over the way the apprentice had referred to Emma, it was muted by a soft veil of words that everything was going to be fine as his resolve ticked down a few more points. 

“As you know, the most important thing when it comes to reformatting a character’s system is to work with the grain and do as little damage as possible,” the older mage said, raising a small rod and pointing it at Matt suddenly bringing his character sheet into existence so that everyone, even Benjamin could see it. “Now tell me what the first thing that needs to go is.”

“Academic knowledge, just like so many of these others. His medicine is awful high if he isn’t going to be a healer… oh, I know - his love status effect. He’s definitely not going to need that anymore,” the apprentice said with a smug expression on his face. 

“While that status effect is indeed something we can reclaim a few points by removing, it’s something we will have to evaluate after all the other changes, because it is most likely to be destabilizing for the subject,” the mage said with a shrug. “There is however one trait on this man’s character sheet that would render him completely unusable if it wasn’t removed first.”

“How useless!” the apprentice said with a laugh. “Why would anyone choose that trait!”

“Well if you or I were to select it, it would contribute seven build points. That's practically a level and a half that a focused healer or craftsmen could use to increase their abilities,” the older mage waxed absentmindedly. “There are similar traits you could adopt as a mage. Synergistic disadvantages to enable you to outcompete a less devoted competitor at court should you desire, nephew, but in this case, we will have to remove it.”

“A core trait though - that’s as tied into his soul as his love for the girl you just optimized,” the apprentice said, “won’t this damage his soul quite a bit, Lord Jarris?”

“It will,” the older mage agreed. “For lesser issues I would leave in this place, but in this case, since it must be removed, I’m inclined to replace it with an opposing disadvantage. You would think that adding in something like [ill-tempered] or [belligerent] would exacerbate the problem, but research I’ve seen indicates that an opposing trait can mitigate the soul damage by up to a third.”

“So, all we need to do is remove the problem,” the mage said as [Pacifist] disappeared from his friend’s character sheet, “add a solution…” As he spoke, [Berserk] appeared in that place as he continued to speak, “and once we verify that the stability levels are still high enough we can make the other changes we need, and now we have a specialized class that will do even better than the average soldier.”

As Benjamin watched, Matt’s character sheet morphed until it was unrecognizable. The class of Healer (apprentice) vanished, along with a number of other skills, and they were almost instantly replaced by Berserker and a number of skills that seemed antithetical to everything that his friend stood for. leadership became lore (military) and lore (creature), athletics (soccer) became melee combat, and meditation became rage. 

At the same time, as all this was happening, Benjamin watched his friend’s appearance start to shift visibly as they adjusted his stats, and his body literally changed to conform with the magic. They dropped his Matt’s intelligence and appearance down quite a bit and dumped all those points into strength and agility. That was a terrible fate, even theoretically, but to watch it play out in real time was abominable. 

Benjamin could only watch from the edge of his field of vision as Matt’s formerly good looks faded into something misshapen and angry, and his kind, inquisitive eyes lost their luster. In less than a minute his friend - a man that he’d known since high school - went from a familiar face to someone that Benjamin would have trouble picking out of a line up. 

When it was all over, Matt got a status debuff that said Bound to Serve, but the character sheet winked out of existence before Benjamin could see what it did. That it was going to do nothing positive was obvious enough, but when the sclera and the iris of Matt’s eyes disappeared and his eye’s turned jet black, it became doubly obvious that whatever they’d done to him was even more inhuman than all the other indignities he’d suffered already tonight as he became just like all those other soldiers.   

It was terrifying, but not as terrifying as when the mage handed the metal rod to his apprentice and said, “alright, let’s see what you can do with the next one.”

“Really?” the younger man asked. “I didn’t think you’d let me try this for months yet.”

“Why not?” Lord Jarris said with a shrug. “This… Benjamin Newsome… was likely just going to be another sacrifice for the blood mages. Let’s see if you can turn him into something worth keeping around a while longer, Kathalles, and if you botch it, well - nothing of value was lost.”

Even though Benjamin had a handful of resistance left, he couldn’t even bring himself to struggle because he was too overwhelmed by fear. He’d just seen what they’d done to his friend - to a man that he secretly considered to be better than him in almost every way, and now they were about to violate his soul, but it was going to be the apprentice wielding the scalpel instead of the master?

Benjamin still heard the sounds of battle outside, but now he wished more than anything that one of the monsters would just come in and kill them all where they stood.