The lingering echoes of death rattles still vibrated against the gray stone of the dormitory as the heavy iron gate slammed shut behind us.
Dawn was filtering through the thin cellar grates, but it brought no warmth.
Instead, the harsh morning light laid bare the wretched state of the survivors.
Most of the recruits looked sick to their stomachs—it was written plain on their pale faces, hollowed by exhaustion and washed in tears.
Some stared down at their trembling hands, consumed by instant guilt, while others sat prostrated, utterly traumatized by the horrors they had just committed to purchase their right to breathe.
It was at that exact moment I realized a glaring truth: contrary to what one might expect from a criminal syndicate the size of Eresboros, not all the recruits present were hardened alleyway thugs or natural-born killers.
No.
Among us were people who were terrifyingly normal.
Men and women who had simply strayed from the straight and narrow, driven by hunger or looking to make a quick buck.
Others had only hoped to find protection here—a precarious shelter in a ruthless world where the weak were inevitably slaughtered.
So, being thrown into a closed arena and forced to slit a roommate’s throat in cold blood had certainly been no easy feat for them.
The price of their new life was a piece of their humanity.
We all descended toward the depths of the castle, plunging deeper into the bowels of the earth.
Valentin Ash Crawford led the pack with insulting nonchalance, pacing through the dark corridors like a scout leader guiding young recruits on a casual stroll.
From the curl of his lips and the easy swing of his arms, it was obvious this whole display amused him to no end, and he didn’t even bother to hide it.
After a long, silent trek through an underground network so vast it rivaled the size of a small city, we finally emerged into a sprawling circular chamber.
At its center stood a massive mirror framed in blackened silver.
Crawford pivoted on his heels, sweeping his hand in a grand gesture to signal we had reached our destination.
Suddenly, the glass surface lit up with a blue, almost liquid glow that began to ripple.
“Alright, my dear children, step through one by one,” Crawford announced in a sugary voice.
“Your future awaits on the other side.”
The crowd began to move forward in a slow crawl, swallowing their fears as they entered the dimensional portal in cathedral-like silence.
Beside me, Lucas was struggling terribly just to walk.
His strength was abandoning him as the night’s adrenaline wore off.
He leaned heavily on my shoulder, gritting his teeth to stay upright and stifle his groans.
I helped him navigate the final few yards, determined to cross the mirror at his side.
But when my turn came, just as I was about to step into the blue light, a white-leather-gloved hand slammed firmly against my chest.
Crawford held me back with a sharp jerk.
“No…
not you,” he whispered, his monocle glinting under the magical radiance.
“You wait here.”
My blood ran cold.
I opened my mouth to protest, but Lucas’s eyes caught mine for a fraction of a second before he was sucked through the mirror.
Panic washed across his features—then he vanished.
Why was he keeping me back?
What was about to happen?
After the last recruit crossed the threshold, the room plummeted back into a suffocating gloom.
I was left as the last one, alone before Crawford, who stared at me intensely with that unyielding, maniacal smile carved into his thin lips.
The chamber door swung open to admit Melo.
Callis’s secretary walked right past me without granting me a single glance, her pointed Spriggan ears barely visible beneath her neat hair.
She stepped into the mirror, which immediately went dark after her passage, returning to a plain, lifeless sheet of shadowed glass.
Crawford gave me an imperious nod, ordering me to follow, and we exited the room.
Falling into step behind the man in the red suit, I carefully observed our surroundings.
This section of the basement bore no resemblance to the filthy dungeons where we had been penned like cattle.
It was a hive.
Reinforced steel doors lined the halls, and dozens of people in uniforms or work attire bustled to and fro, hauling crates, scrolls, or weapons.
Who could have guessed an underground sector would be this active, concealing an entire administrative army beneath the stone?
Crawford veered sharply to the left.
Before us stood a colossal black door, massive, forged from an unknown metal and engraved with strange geometric patterns that made my head spin.
With a simple wave of the secretary’s hand, the internal mechanisms clicked, and the heavy double doors began to swing open.
“Get in,” he commanded.
Despite the alarm bells blaring in my survival instincts and the doubts clouding my mind, I knew I had no choice.
Disobeying here was a death sentence.
I stepped across the threshold.
The moment my feet touched the floor of the massive, empty room, the heavy doors slammed shut with a noise like thunder.
Almost instantly, a bank of optical lenses fixed to the ceiling flickered to life, projecting red lights of unbearable intensity.
Crawford, remaining near the entrance, calmly reached into his vest pocket, drew a small silver vial, pulled out a pill, and swallowed it whole.
At first, I didn’t understand what he was doing.
But the glare of the spotlights grew overwhelming, almost searing.
The longer I stood exposed to the scarlet radiation, the more I felt a bizarre, creeping pain beneath my skin, like thousands of white-hot needles digging in. This story is hosted at g.com.
Crawford just stood there with his arms crossed, watching me without a word.
Unable to endure the oppressive silence, I decided to break the ice, my voice tight from the first pangs of agony:
“Where are we?
Why was I the only one kept back?
What are these red lights?
What’s going on…
why are you just standing there looking at me?”
My questions echoed off the bare walls, but Crawford remained completely mute, content to savor the show.
After a few minutes, the mild pain amplified exponentially.
They were no longer needles, but invisible whip-cracks and stings from venomous insects tearing through my nervous system.
Time seemed to stretch.
My body grew terrifyingly heavy; my lungs refused to inflate properly, as though the air had turned too dense to breathe.
I felt like I was suffocating.
My knees buckled, and the sheer suffering began to blur my analytical mind.
I couldn’t comprehend what was happening to me.
After what felt like an hour of nameless agony, my screams of pain finally shattered the silence of the hall.
Madness threatened to drag me under.
That was when Crawford made a move.
He calmly removed his blood-red suit jacket, unclipped his monocle, tucked it safely away, and finally spoke in a professorial tone.
“Well, my dear child.
I know it hurts, but this is merely the bare beginning.
You asked me questions, didn’t you?
Let us talk about these red lights.”
He gestured upward.
“They are photon padlocks.
Beams of light artificially crafted from raw Fantasia, then amplified by geometric reinforcement stones.
Originally, this system was used by the Royal Guard to simulate immense neural pain, breaking high-security prisoners to make them docile.
However, our organization modified the process slightly.”
He took a step toward me, his polished shoes clicking on the floor.
“Of course, the simulated pain remains, but thanks to our scholars’ research, these rays also drastically weaken your metabolism.
They drain your reserves of physical and magical energy, rendering your body infinitely more sensitive to the slightest external shock.
Isn’t it marvelous?
The more time passes, the more unbearable the pain becomes.
Your muscles gorge on acid, you can no longer move, and you are condemned to endure.”
So that was it.
My logic and pragmatic mind pieced the puzzle together despite the hell I was enduring.
I understood why the pain intensified as my strength ebbed away.
It was a perfect trap.
But one question remained: why me?
Crawford must have read the question in my eyes, for his smile widened.
“You wonder why you are here while the others were sent off?
The answer is childishly simple.
After the first two selections, standard recruit training begins to shape candidates into official apprentices.
The problem, my dear Drey, is that during last night’s massacre, you openly took a side to protect your dying friend.
You acted as his shield.
And as you know, in Eresboros, there is absolutely no room for weak links or sentimentality.”
He leaned in closer.
“So, we devised a fitting punishment.
We decided that instead of following the standard curriculum with the rabble, your training will be twice as intense…
twice as destructive.”
He stopped a single yard away.
His murderous aura flared out all at once, heavy and suffocating.
“But rest assured.
If you manage to walk out alive, you will become one of our finest weapons.
And as a substantial bonus, you will be trained directly by me…
The Pruner himself.
Now then, my dear child…
My “Black Fire”—that cold, pragmatic thirst for vengeance that had burned within my guts ever since my parents’ death—ignited anew.
Crawford undoubtedly expected to see hatred or rebellion in my eyes, but I refused to give him that satisfaction.
I didn’t want to kill him; he was merely a cog in Eresboros, and I needed the power he promised to reach the scarred man.
I planted my feet into the floor, gathering what little energy I had left, and locked my gaze straight onto his, accepting the challenge with geometric coldness.
Crawford lunged.
Before I could even attempt to dodge, his fist plunged violently into my stomach.
The blow hit with such force I felt as though my organs had been impaled straight through.
I collapsed to the ground, my mind drowning in a sea of red agony.
Meanwhile, thousands of leagues away from that torture chamber, space itself tore open.
On the other side of the magical mirror, the recruits materialized abruptly on a massive, rocky island, battered by harsh winds and completely exposed to the vast ocean.
The air here was suffocatingly rich, thick with salt and iodine.
Every recruit stood petrified, awestruck by the wildness of the landscape and the instantaneous transition from the dungeons of Malbour to this lost piece of rock in the middle of nowhere.
Lucas, fighting not to pass out, cast panicked glances around.
Sea salt was already soaking into his tattered shirt, brutally burning the charred flesh on his back, but his one and only concern was my absence.
Where did Drey go?
Why did Crawford hold him back?
Just as he began constructing the worst-case scenarios, Melo stepped in front of the group, cutting off any attempt at conversation.
Her rigid silhouette stood out starkly against the ocean horizon.
“Very well.
Every single one of you must be wondering where you are, but that is of strictly no importance to tools of your caliber,” the Spriggan began in an icy tone.
“All you need to know is that out of the initial three hundred recruits, one hundred and fifty died after the first two selections.
Normally, last night’s purge should have eliminated exactly one hundred and twenty-four people.
It seems the night was significantly more eventful than planned.”
The recruits exchanged glances, a murmur of anxiety running through the ranks.
They understood the count was off—that some had cheated or survived by some miracle.
Narissa Varain, the young Neid with dark hair and blue-scaled skin, stepped forward.
Despite the extreme exhaustion clouding her features, her eyes burned with a fierce light.
“And now…
what happens to us?” she demanded of the commander.
“Are we supposed to slaughter more people like last night, or are you finally going to give us real missions?”
Melo remained stoic against the Neid’s insolence.
She adjusted her gloves before answering in a voice devoid of the slightest hint of compassion.
“You are Narissa Varain…
former leader of a highwayman gang that had the audacity to try robbing our supply convoys on the outskirts of Calderon.
Unfortunately for you and your associates, you failed miserably.
Your friends were all executed, but one of our Sirs deemed that your agility and lack of scruples could make you a useful asset.”
The crowd went dead silent.
Lucas held his breath, stunned to learn there were people insane or desperate enough to attempt robbing a shadowy syndicate as vast as Eresboros.
Melo resumed her speech, sweeping her lifeless gaze across the crowd.
“To answer your question, Narissa: you are here to be forged.
We cannot allow apprentices to fulfill contracts in our name without possessing a minimum threshold of power.
Therefore, for the next eight months, I will personally oversee your training.”
She paused, letting the weight of her words sink in.
“I do not guarantee your survival.
This island is crawling with monsters and severe weather hazards, and the exercises I will subject you to are brutally extreme.
Statistically, it is almost impossible to escape without permanent scars.
But if you succeed…
only then may you claim full membership in Eresboros.”
Lucas let his hand slide down to his ribs, right where his secret Pentacle—the word Daken—was carved directly into the bone.
Under the dull ache and despair, the mark pulsed weakly beneath his skin, instilling just enough mystical energy to numb the burning on his back.
His eyes hardened.
If Drey wasn’t here, it was because he was paying the price for saving him at the port and in the dormitory.
Poor Lucas blamed himself bitterly, certain his friend had once again drawn the syndicate’s wrath due to his own weakness.
He took a deep breath of the salty air, squaring his wounded shoulders.
If he wanted to survive these eight months of hell and find Drey again, he would have to become strong.
Extremely strong.
The training of Eresboros had just begun.