The two men just blinked at me. Then one of them—the older one—burst out laughing. His slightly over-sized belly rocked wildly as peals of laughter rang through the early morning air and probably woke half the neighborhood. It woke the third man in the tent, at least, who turned onto his side groggily and rubbed his eyes. He groaned.

  “Is it breakfast time yet?” He asked with a slurred tone, like he was drunk. Only I could tell he wasn’t tipsy—just tired.

  “Mornin Tom,” the still chuckling man said, “Rise and shine!”

  Tom spat a mild swear at the man, something about a chicken and the start of a new day being when the sun had gotten back from the grocery store, but he sat up anyway. There were dark circles under his eyes and what looked like the remains of a jagged cut across his forehead. It was red and raw, but a healer had taken at least a passing glance at it, so it wouldn’t get infected.

  His chocolate hair was mussed and shorter in some places than others, and one of his ears was missing a chunk from it. The ring finger on his left hand was also missing. Other than that, he was a healthy young man with sun-tanned skin and a well-muscled body. He was good looking, too, despite his disfigurement.

  Tom’s eyes flicked over to me, looking me up and down. They lingered on the scars marring my chest and my missing arm. “Who’s the new kid?” He asked, to nobody in particular.

  “That’s what we’d all like to know.” The third man spoke up for the first time. He was skinny as a twig with lean muscles and a face sharp enough to slice clean through lead.

  “Patience, Walter,” the older man—I still did not know his name yet, as nobody had said it aloud—said. He patted Walter on the shoulder and looked over at me. “So, what’s your story, kid?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “First of all, my name is Felix. And you are Tom, Walter, and…”

  “Elbon.” He supplied.

  “Elbon, “ I copied, “Haven’t heard that name before. Anyways, where exactly am I? I assume I was dropped off here by either the camp’s medical staff or Vicious and his friend, but I don’t know where ‘here’ is.”

  Elbon looked at me with what I could almost construe as pity in his eyes. “You’re in what we call the Barrier division. It’s the one place you do not want to be in this army. See, the Barrier division is made of the unwanted, shunned, disliked, and/or generally useless members of the Intrepid Explorers, and while that in and of itself is not such a big deal, the real reason you don’t want to be here is because of what they do with us.”

  “We’re the expendables,” Tom said, rubbing at his missing finger, “We’re given little to no pay, and no extra gear that we didn’t bring with us or buy for ourselves. And to top it all off, they put us on the very front lines of the battle as basically just meat shields to soak up the charge. Nobody survives long in this line of work.”

  “The only benefits to this position are the looting rights.” Elbon said. “They have to make it look like it isn’t slavery somehow, so they give those of us that survive first chance at the loot from all battles that we win.” He put scare-quotes around the word ‘win’.

  Walter mumbled sarcastically, “Yeah, and we all love what happens after that.”

  “Oh, it’s not all that bad. At least we come away with something.” Tom turned to me, “The higher ups take a seventy-five percent tax off of everything we bring from the bodies on the field. We don’t know how they know what we take, but their calculations are accurate. I’ve tested it personally. And they force us to spend the rest on basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Barely any of the plunder makes it into our pockets at the end of the day. It’s daylight robbery—slavery with extra steps.”

  I sighed. I had been expecting something like this, though not to this extreme of a degree. It was like this in the outside world sometimes too, depending on the commanding officer and the people in the Council of War at the time. This had also been a common practice back some thousand or so years ago when the nations had broken into all out war. We had brought back a system similar to that of the Islamic Janissaries, slaves of the sultan, but with even less benefits and more induced trauma.

  After that war, slavery had been officially abolished, for perhaps the third time in history. But that didn’t stop anyone, at least, not in practice. Debt slavery was still in effect, as were prison work camps, but those weren’t much of a concern compared to the forced prostitution and round-out indentures. Credit cards—which had miraculously managed to stick around for at least a hundred years before people realized how stupid the idea of credit score was—had basically enslaved the populace with compounding debt as well, as had the housing market and the idea that you had to have debt in order to function well in society.

  This was all before the system had arrived, which had made things exponentially worse.

  When the system came to earth, it immediately became apparent that whoever was the strongest would be the one in charge. It was a twisted version of survival of the fittest, or whatever that naturalistic philosophy was that had been posited by a senile “scientist”. Dane, or something like that. I hadn’t bothered to remember his name, unlike like that Newton fellow, whose laws of motion and universal gravitation had held the world up for over half a millennium before the system had come and broken them.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  And again, it wasn’t like it had done too much damage, just changing a little about how different kinds of light worked and how physics functioned at the upper and lower extremes of existence. Most of the Laws still functioned to some degree or other, even Kepler’s and Einstein’s—whose law of general relativity worked in conjunction with Newton on a great many things—were mostly intact to this day.

  It’s just that “gamifying” everything, as people in history had called it, tended to warp the laws of reality a little bit.

  It also brought out the worst in people. Dictators rose in power as the rights of challenge and ritual combat began again and people could challenge for thrones without being afraid of a bullet drilling through their skull. This was before the dungeons had been discovered, so the only way to level was to kill animals or other people. Bloodbaths and massacres were commonplace back in those days.

  Then the dungeons were discovered and people were no longer required to sacrifice their neighbors in exchange for power. The animals were all but extinct, and the world was on the brink of collapse. But it survived. Barely.

  But with the lessening of human sacrifice came the growing of slavery once again. It ran rampant through the streets, and while it had decreased over the centuries, it hadn’t gone away entirely. That was impossible, as personal power still reigned over all and the strongest’s word was law. An absurd extreme, perhaps, but true in the face of reality as the system caused it.

  This was what had happened in the Intrepid Explorers’ guild, though to a lesser degree than during the Unmaking. We were Janissaries, conscripts, volones. Those whose lives made no difference, meant nothing to anyone but as armor for their own. We were just the pincushions for arrow and spear alike. No wonder my floor quest just told me to survive.

  Tom, noticing my disturbed silence, commented, “You got here at the best time you could, though. Yesterday was our big fight of the week. Today is an off—”

  A bell started clamoring in the center of the camp. It was deep and ominous, tolling some distant memory of ancient, ponderous beasts trembling the ground with languoring steps. Smaller bells quavered alongside the great echo, prompting haste.

  Walter began hyperventilating. His chest rose and fell in witless, haggard gasps of sheer panic. “No! No, no, no, no! This can’t be happening! Why now? Why today? We weren’t supposed to do this today. Not again.”

  Elbon stood slowly. “Well boy, looks like you’re getting an on-the-job introduction to what we do round here. Get your armor on and let’s head out.”

  Well that sucked. Not only did I not have any armor, but I only had the equivalent of eight silver to my name so I wouldn’t be getting some any time soon. Dalia had provided a pair of silver coins and a half dozen bronze ones, and the rest had come from the random monsters I had come across. The treant had already been looted by the time I got to it, and I hadn’t even seen the corpse of the An Dreores since I ripped its spine from its body by means of the cranium.

  In other words, I was still broke despite having more access to money than ever.

  The sword in my inventory, which I figured would be getting a good amount of use in the coming hours, was by far the most valuable item I had. Not only was it incredibly well forged, but it was also enchanted. Even though its material was only steel—though the dungeon must have sneakily reinforced it somehow to make it stronger like it had my now broken shield—that sharpness enchantment alone brought its price up to at least forty silver.

  A good set of armor that would protect me better than my natural defense at this point, would cost me at least double what I had on me. And since I wasn’t going to sell my sword, I would have to suffer without. So all I did was stand up, put on a new—well, not new, but slightly less beat up—pair of pants that covered what they needed to, and lean against one of the tent posts to watch the others dress in their gear.

  Hatchet-faced Walter wore a boiled leather chestpiece, along with a pair of black-metal vambraces that had an ominous red glow to them. He carried a wicked pair of knives in his belt as well as a scimitar that had faint traces of dried blood on it. Shame on him for not taking care of his weapon.

  Elbon was dressed more like a traditional knight from ancient medieval England. He wore chain-mail with some plate and mostly leather except for a traditional helmet with a triangular visor. That was made of solid steel and it gave off a soft white glow unlike Walter’s vambraces. He also carried a standard issue cruciform longsword with an ever so slightly pointed pommel.

  And Tom? Well, he was the most peculiar of the lot. He wore no headgear of any kind, nor did he wear anything below the ribcage. All he had on was a pair of fingerless leather gloves and a breastplate that blinked and appeared on his body directly from his storage. It was made of scales the color of rust and blood, with spikes off its left shoulder and ridges down the back designed to make sword ricochets unpredictable when striking. Tom also carried a two-handed, single-edged longsword bordered with the same material as his breastplate and bearing similar spikes jutting from near where the crosspiece would have been had the sword had one. Nothing else.

  Elbon held the tent flap open for us and we all filed out and started making our way towards wherever the place was that we were to convene for battle. I didn’t know how serious of a battle this would be, but I was willing to bet on what had caused it.

  Walking across the camp, I finally got a good look at things around me. It was just after dawn, and the world was waking up from its slumber. Craftsmen were preparing their tools to begin the day’s work. Woodworkers were sharpening their awls, chisels, and planes. Blacksmiths were heating their forges and dawning their aprons. Leather-workers were dividing their workable scraps and new pieces to be sewn into armor and sword grips.

  The world was abuzz with the motion of a thousand voices and the clamor of ten thousand men gathering themselves to greet the sun.

  Fully armored soldiers jogged past, heading in the same direction we were, but they seemed to be following orders of some kind rather than just organizing for war. One of them carried a missive with a wax seal on it. The paper crumpled slightly in his grasp.

  Underfoot was nothing but packed dirt from worn paths made by feet treading months—and perhaps years—before we did. Above was the empty sky filled with wheeling vultures and crows for the slaughter. It was going to be a glorious day filled with joy and good hard work and…

  Oh, right. War.