In my first dozen steps through the gate, I saw one of the recruits get his head blown off by gunfire. I dove to the ground as more projectiles whizzed through the air over me. Dozens of others followed suit, and soon I was surrounded by a mass of people screaming and crawling for cover.
To my left, a woman rolled on the ground, clutching at what was left of her arm. She struggled to her feet as I moved closer to help, only for a hole to appear where her heart should have been and she collapsed to the ground again. I saw others crawling toward the end and ignoring the blood and death happening all around them.
Dazed, I followed after them, sometimes crawling over the bodies of the fallen just to traverse a few more feet. What had been hard-packed dirt had turned to thick mud from the blood coating the ground. I kept my eyes closed and kept crawling until the ground fell out from under me and I tumbled into a deep trench.
My body hit the ground hard. Someone else fell in after me and I felt my ribs creaked as the full weight of their body crashed into me. Shoving them off, I wiped the blood from my eyes and looked around for the path forward.
“This way!” Someone shouted, waving their arms in the air, “It goes straight through!”
Lacking any other good options, I struggled to my feet and helped the recruit that had fallen on top of me up to follow. We were a dozen feet away when he started down the path and I heard an ominous mechanical click.
He must have stepped on a landmine. I’d heard about them back home on Braroclyn, but never seen one in action. The man disappeared in a flash of light and sound. The concussion from the explosion threw me off my feet and back onto the muddy ground.
My ears rang, drowning out the sounds of the men and women fighting for their lives around me. My head felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton, and everything sounded muffled like I’d stuck my head underwater. I grabbed the hand of the recruit I’d helped up before, but when they didn’t try to get up I looked down and saw a piece of metal sticking from their skull. The sounds of battle came back into sharp focus.
I didn’t know what else to do, I just ran.
Sprinting as fast as possible, I relied on my instincts to overcome the seemingly never-ending lethal obstacles. In the moment, everything seemed so sharp. Almost like what I was going through was more real than my life had been before. Trying to remember it now, everything is foggy. I climbed walls covered in barbed wire, even going so far as to clamber over the bodies of others who had gotten stuck in the tangles of razor-sharp metal. A man went down screaming in front of me and I used his back like a springboard to jump over the next trench.
Everything was chaos, just flashes of light and garbled sounds. The cacophony of voices blurred together to become a featureless hum, background noise to the sound of my heart beating in my ears. As I saw the other recruits lying on the ground, fallen to the Proving Grounds, all I could think was better them than me.
I could see the end. A line of blue circles in the ground. There were recruits already standing in most of them, facing the Proving Grounds and heaving for air. There was only one circle left, and I was going to get it.
Someone came up from behind me. I could hear them approach, and watched as they began to creep up beside me. They were faster than me, and no matter how hard I ran I couldn’t outpace them. As they pulled ahead, I kicked my leg into the inside of their ankle.
My boots hit the knob of bone and I felt something crack in the other man's leg. He tumbled to the ground, rolling just short of the line of circles and howling in pain. Hopping over his fallen form, I entered the circle and stood at attention. The circle lit up as I entered it, and the sounds of battle stopped so suddenly it was as if the world ended.
The sergeant approached us and graced us with a slow, sardonic clap, “Congratulations recruits. You have succeeded in passing the Proving Grounds. You’re officially at the top of the garbage pile.”
The man in featureless armor paced between us and the Proving Grounds, eyeing those who were still struggling through the obstacles. When he turned back to us his voice struck deep into my soul.
“The fifty of you will spend the next six months being molded into the elite troops of The All Father. You will suffer, you will beg for mercy, and you will be broken.”
The sergeants pulled out a sidearm and looked down at the man whose ankle I’d broken. Without hesitation, he shot the man in the head, killing him instantly. As if responding to a signal, the guns lined up along the Proving Grounds opened fire, targeting those who had fallen short and executing them without mercy.
I felt my breath leave me as I saw the dead man on the ground. If I hadn’t broken his ankle, it would be me lying there. A shiver of cold realization ran up my spine as the full weight of my decision to come here settled onto my shoulders like a burial shroud.
Over the sound of gunfire, the sergeant shouted, “For the Spear!”
A chorus of answering recruits rose around me, my voice weak as I looked at the dead man on the ground.
“For the Father!”
Our voices rose again, stronger and more confident.
“For the Universe!”
As I looked at the man on the ground, all I could see was Presh.
Well damn