Chapter 2: Paragons to Come
"Follow me, I'll take you to our cadet center." Can said. "Don't I need to register first, or pick up my uniforms and identification?" Lucius replied. Can laughed. "I forgot, you're from the Imperial Academy. We don't have much in the way of formality here. I hope that doesn't make you uncomfortable." Lucius shook his head. "I think I could get used to it."
Can led them to a small, long building on the edge of campus. It was a wooden longhouse of sorts, the wood old bordering on rot. It's maroon coat of paint had long since faded and chipped into an off-color blood red, giving it a disturbing and menacing appearance. Can reached for her pocket, presumably to draw out a key, but Lucius coughed and nodded towards the door.
The entire key mechanism had just been pulled out of the door, and there was a large circular hole where it used to lay. "Oh, stuff like that happens sometimes. Anyway let's go inside." She pushed open the door with a heave impressive for her small size, and to Lucius' great surprise, the room was full of people.
The building was dimly lit, and resembled an unholy marriage between classroom and clubhouse. There were desks of various sizes scattered about the room, most covered in burnt out candles and scattered papers. There were racks all over filled with pikes, rifles, shields, and other military equipment foreign to Lucius. All the way in the back there were two longer, dining room sized tables, each missing at least a few chairs apiece.
There were at least a dozen people inside, and they all seemed to be staring daggers at the stranger intruding on their fraternal cavern. Lucius didn't come all this way to stare silently. "Hey everyone, I'm Lucius, and I'm a new cadet from the Imperial Academy." There was a moment of awkward silence, followed by an eruption of greetings and cheers.
Lucius was overwhelmed and kind of stood in place with what he hoped was a convincing smile. "Alright you goons." A tall man hopped off the table and strode towards him. "You're clearly overwhelming the poor guy. As your leader, I get to greet the new guy first." He thrust out his hand to Lucius, his wild green eyes buzzing with amusement. "Name's Vincent, and you and I are going to be good friends."
Such displays of outright friendliness and emotion were foreign to Lucius; it was not the way people behaved in the Capital. But Lucius liked it, so he did his best to reciprocate. He took Vincent's hand and shook hard. "Pleasure to meet you, and I hope so." "While we've got you here, let me introduce you to some of the rabble you'll be spending your time with."
He gestured towards a stocky, wide framed man about Lucius's height. "This is Albert, our god of wine and good times." Albert laughed and stroked his beard. "Your words buddy, not mine. Nice to meet you Lucius." "Anyway now that we're past that big lush, we can move onto..." Vincent's words were interrupted by a loud bang at the door.
"Cadets, we need a strike team to reinforce the northwest quadrant ASAP, two quads of you, right now." Vincent practically growled at him. "You can't call on cadets for unscheduled wall service. It's in our waivers and its dangerous." The man burst into the room, tall and dour, with a full head of graying blond hair. "Vincent you will address me Section Leader, and I know its not your job, but we're having a hell of a time out there."
"Look, no one's asking you to go stop the main advance, but we need at least a few of you to garrison part of the academy's walls. Most of you are scattered all over Ridgeland right now and you're all I've got out here." Vincent sighed. "To defend my home, fine." "I'll take the new guy, and everyone he's met so far, so Albert and Cantia. Peter, Helena, Cory; Portia will lead you guys up on the wall. We all clear?"
After receiving his expected chorus of agreement, everyone jumped from their tables and desks and started grabbing things off the wall. "No time for our regular gear, just take what we have." Vincent turned to Lucius. "What kind of load out do you southern boys use?" Lucius was already swinging his bag from his back. The large duffel was half filled with his military equipment.
He pulled out a snub nosed revolving rifle, and a long square shield with a circular indent in the top. He fixed a long bayonet to the end of the rifle, and began jamming reload disks into his tunic. "Rifle and shield, for the projectile slinging behemoths on the plains." Vincent sighed. "Our Abandoned are a little more.... feral. That's OK, we probably won't see too much action, and a gun's a gun."
Albert reached on the wall and pulled off a leather breast plate and tossed it to him. "Here, we need armor up here because we're usually up close and personal with the things. It's a little big but it should fit." Lucius struggled with the foreign buckles, and Vincent ran behind him and fastened the clasps around his shoulders and back. "There, ready to go soldiering. Sorry to put you out on your first day."
Lucius shrugged. "It's nice to have some excitement, though I'd prefer some sleep." Can had grown quiet, her bubbly demeanor suddenly suppressed and replaced with a terrifying and calculating gravity. Albert strode to the group. He carried a wide, massive blunderbuss shotgun with four barrels and four triggers. The weapon was ancient looking but sufficiently terrifying.
Vincent had a regular shotgun, equally ancient, and a long spear slung onto his back. Cantia dual wielded revolver pistols, and had a collection of randomly selected knives jammed into a belt around her tunic. Vincent laughed. "We look cool as hell. Well, Wilson said to go die, so let's go die." Section Leader Wilson scoffed at the remark. "Don't be so dramatic Vince. Anyway I'll lead you all to the wall, let's go."
Can turned to Lucius. "Oh, as you probably noticed, we all suppress intent, even in here. If you want to exert some now, go ahead, but otherwise wait until we see enemies, if we see enemies." Lucius nodded gratefully. Every part of the Empire had explicit and implicit rules for projecting mental energy, and it was often confusing and awkward to ask out loud.
They broke into a light jog towards the wall, and reached it in a few short minutes. Lucius was a bit short on breath; he had been in great shape when he left Salvation, but three weeks on trains had not been great for his stamina. The unexpected weight of his thick leather armor didn't help either. The walls were old, but incredibly thick, and as tall as twice a man's height.
Walls like this were uncommon in the Southwest of the Empire, where Abandoned monsters were usually slow, tall beasts that could easily step over most walls. As scary as they were, they took weeks to form and were generally far too slow to endanger any major city or village. They mounted a series of stairs to the top of the wall, a cacophony of boot thuds against sturdy and unyielding timber.
They got into positions, spread out about fifteen meters apart to man as much as the wall as possible. To their right and left, squads of Imperial soldiers and cadets took up their own positions. All in all, about forty or fifty people occupied the walls near the academy and training grounds. They stood in terse silence, too far away to really speak to each other and too anxious to do so even if they could.
He heard a fierce shout from a regular soldier a few hundred feet down the wall. "Hostile. Abandoned, mobile, wolf-like." Lucius felt some of the man and the creatures killing intent spill into his body, and his veins grew cold as the flash hit him. What he saw approaching the wall disturbed him even more; a large dog-like creature with far too many legs and a sunken, deformed skull.
It half limped half scrambled from the forest to the wall. The forest was very close to the wall, about a hundred meters by Lucius' estimation, and it never even got close. Shots rang out from those wielding rifles, and the monster stumbled as a few bullets found their mark. It took a surprising amount of hits to fell the beast, but it eventually stumbled and fell to its side.
Not willing to take chances, more shots fired out at the downed creature, hitting its now immobile body. This went on for about a minute, until the officer in charge of those men admonished them for wasting munitions on a dead beast. This set Lucius on edge, as he wasn't used to weird, Abandoned animals. Most of the monsters he had grown up with were slow, featureless, and vaguely humanoid.
They were dangerous, of course, but they lacked the unforgiving and feral vibe of the now dead thing that lay in front of them. The night was far from over though, as Lucius felt an energy bound from the dark depths of the forest. Even from this far away, he could feel it strongly. It was feral, chaotic, enraged, and heading straight for them.
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