A dull beeping woke Kronos from his slumber. He blearily looked around to find the source of the noise before he realized that it was coming from his HUD. He checked the time and cursed. It was 0430 Imperial Standard Time and he had fallen asleep around midnight. He spent much of his time last night familiarizing himself with all the questions he had accumulated the previous day. Each topic had sent him down a rabbit hole of information. It had been a beneficial use of his time. He felt like his brain had switched into a different mode of operating. He poured through thousand of technical diagrams, geographical data, historical documents, scientific journals, and more. What was even more remarkable was that as Kronos lay there thinking about it, he felt he could recall every item with perfect clarity.

He frowned as he sat up in his bed. The changes to his mind were unnatural but not unexpected. He had already been told that he had been enhanced. He just didn’t know to what degree. He slid off his bed and stared at it longingly. The bed itself was a wonder of modern technology. It had conformed to every part of his body to the point where he felt like he was floating on nothing. He had left only his biosuit on over night and his body had been the perfect temperature.

With a thought, he pulled up the diagnostics of his sleep and discovered that it was probably the most restful sleep he had ever had. He had even had his intralink interface with the bed and repeat Basic words and phrases throughout the night. He wasn’t sure if it would work, but he felt like he had a greater familiarity with the language. The strategy had been suggested in one of the many scientific journals he had studied the night before.

As he slipped on his CUU and his boots, he glanced at the orders he had received while he was sleeping.

[Trainee Kronos,

Report to Training Bay 8032 at 0500. Uniform of the day is the CUU. No weapons or armor required.]

There was no sender marked, but he knew the order was as inflexible as a command from the gods. He had not been ordered to grab food and he hadn’t been ordered to take his time. His ass needed to be on the training ground in thirty minutes. When he pulled the location up on his HUD he cursed again. He was on the fiftieth floor and the training grounds were thirty floors beneath him. The lifts were always packed with people and it would take forever to travel that distance.

He quickly went through his morning hygiene routine which included shaving. It was a first for him, but apparently while he was going through training, he needed to have a fresh shave every morning. As he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn’t help but notice how young he looked. He was almost thirty standard imperial years of age and yet without a beard he looked in his early twenties.

Once he was done, he strapped on his PCD and sprinted from the room. He took the hallways at a light jog and other members of the IID moved out of his way. He figured they had all been late for a time hack before and knew the signs. Kronos was thankful that no one intentionally got in his way or delayed his progress.

He got to the nearest lift with twelve minutes to spare. He knew that he would just barely make the ordered time. He tapped his foot against the metal floor as the lift silently descended into the bowels of the complex. The other occupants gave him dirty looks at the irritating, repetitive sound, but he was too focused to care. While he waited, he couldn’t help but wonder what the training would be like.

Are they going to teach me how to shoot a rifle? Pilot a mech? Infilitrate a colony?

All of the above would be useful things for him to learn. He was looking forward to the training in a way. On one hand, it would keep his family safe and in relative comfort, and on the other hand, the Empire was training him to be their worst enemy—they just didn’t know it yet.

When the doors to the lift opened, he rushed in front of the other people and jogged down the corridor. A couple lefts and a right turn and he would be at the training bay. If he remembered correctly, and he was sure that he did, it would be the same room that Chief Impez and he had been observing the day before. With all of the things Kronos had learned in the interim, it felt like a lifetime ago.

The double doors the the bay opened as he approached and he was greeted by a formation of trainees facing away from him. There was a single opening at the end of the formation that hadn’t been filled yet. A quick look told him that when he got into position, there would be an even hundred. Since one hundred and one would be a strange number and an even stranger formation, Kronos took it as a sign that he was one of the last to arrive.

That isn’t good. Kronos felt a spike of dread in his gut. The chief said I needed to be the best.

He pushed down the sense of dread as he fell into the formation and copied the stance of the other trainees. Their feet were spread shoulder width apart and they had their hands clasped behind their back. When he mimicked their appearance, no one turned to acknowledge him, and nothing indicated that anything was out of the usual. He sighed in relief and checked his HUD.

[04:59]

I made it, he thought, relieved.

As the clock turned to five. A shape appeared in front of the formation. The person didn’t walk up and a lift didn’t rise of from the floor. No, the air seemed to fold and then a man was in it’s place. It wasn’t localized teleportation. Kronos had read theories on that the night before.

It has to be active camouflage.

The empire had technology that could make some of its units completely undetectable to the unenhanced eyes.

Hell, they even have some tech that makes them invisible to sensors and electronic surveillance, he considered.

The man interrupted his train of thought.

“Welcome trainees. This is your first day of training. You have been selected to join the Imperial Intelligence Agency. I’m sure you all understand the high honor that has been afforded to you.” The man looked up and down the formation as if he was daring one of the trainees to say anything contrary. Seeing nothing, he continued.

“I am Master Trainer Diamenes and I will be ultimately responsible for your development.” He let a natural pause enter his speech to give time for the assembled trainees to absorb the information.

“I will be assisted by a team of Trainers who sole job is to make you the most effective fighting force in the empire next to the Pale Guards themselves. While the Pale Guard sits on Terra and protects the Emperor, you will be the tip of the spear of the Empire at large.”

A smirk stole across the man’s face. “Well, that’s assuming you survive your training.”

Kronos noticed more than one trainee stiffen at the implied threat. In his own case, he had no option but to survive. More than that, he had no option but to excel. He couldn’t afford to worry about failure or death. That was another day’s problem and he needed to focus on the here and the now.

“To that end, today will likely be the single worst day of your lives up to now.” Diamenes grinned. “Boys and girls, today is tolerance day! It’s where we find the absolute limits of your mind and your body and we push you past them. By the end of today you will be broken in body, mind, and in spirit.”

He paused to take another look at the formation.

“If you make it past today, then you will be ready to be refined into the tool the Empire needs. Each phase of today’s training will be a representation of the on-the-job experience you can expect for the rest of your time here. Although, it will last only ten hours in real time, your training will take place in virtual reality where the time dilation will make it feel like you’ve been in there for ten months.”

As he spoke, ten more individuals entered the room from behind the formation and spread out across the room. Where they settled, Kronos watched as another hundred hatches opened in the floor and strange looking chairs rose from the deck. There was something faintly intimidating about them. They looked like medical devices and in the context of their surrounding, they had an ominous feel. There were ten per trainer and it was pretty easy to tell that the trainers had set up various stations for the trainees.

“Virtual reality, as realistic as it can be, is no substitute for actual training. This is the only day that such methods will be utilized. Your body will feel like you experienced the things within and your mind will feel like it learned the topics presented. However, this is just the foundation for your learning. What you discover today will be reinforced during the rest of your time here.”

Master Trainer Diamenes looked down to press a button on his PCD. Once done, he addressed the formation again. At the same time, Kronos saw a new alert on his HUD. He didn’t open it, wanting to remain completely focused on the Master Trainer.

“You’ve just received your orders. Open them and report to your first station,”he ordered.

Kronos HUD lit up with his destination and he jogged toward the next station. Nine others in the group were heading in the same direction. As he studied them, he realized that Zhang was also in the group. They made eye contact and smiled, but didn’t say anything. They both realized that this wasn’t the time or the place.

When they arrived their trainer was already shouting at them. She was pointing to various chairs and assigning a trainee to each one. When they were all settled, she started walking them through the initiation process. Kronos was careful to follow the trainer’s instructions perfectly. He didn’t want to make a mistake that would leave his brain a melted mess. He only had a cursory knowledge of virtual reality that he had picked up while researching how his HUD worked. He didn’t have any confidence he wouldn’t mess this up and he couldn’t afford any mistakes.

When he was plugged into it’s interface properly a message scrolled onto his HUD.

[Integration successful. Training Protocol initiated.]

After that, his vision black out and he found himself alone on a beach with the ocean lapping at his feet. Looking around, there was a jungle with tropical trees behind him, but there was no civilization to speak of. He marveled at the smell of the ocean and the chirping of tropical birds flying overhead. There was nothing that would distinguish virtual reality from the real thing. It made Kronos wonder if there were people in the Empire who preferred a world like this to their own. A pang of homesickness went through his heart but he clamped down on the feeling. He didn’t the distraction. Soon after he materialized, the rest of his cadre arrived along with their trainer.

She didn’t bother making any introductions.

“Begin!” She shouted.

Kronos was going to ask what he was beginning but his HUD helpfully informed him. What followed was an agonizing month of exercises in the water. He was required to swim in full kit in the ocean. He had to dive and grab heavy weights that were at least twenty meters under the water. As time went on the distances they had to swim increased, the amount of time they had to hold their breaths were lengthened, and the distance between the weights on the bottom of the ocean and the surface were extended.

In between the periods of sustained exercise, they learned how to fish, how to identify various flora and fauna. They learned how to treat water-related injuries such as hypothermia, barotrauma, decompression sickness, nitrogen narcosis, and of course, drowning. During the month of simulated training, Kronos couldn’t tell how many times he had almost drowned or watched others drown.

Before the simulation was over, one of the trainees had actually died from drowning before one of the other trainees could save them. When that happened, the trainer hadn’t even looked concerned. She merely informed the rest of the cadre that if they died during the training, they died in real life. When that happened, every other member redoubled their efforts.

Despite the difficulty of the scenario, Kronos actually found himself thriving over time. By the end of the first couple weeks, he could hold his breath longer than anyone else, he grew less tired of the unending exertion, and the rest of the cadre started to look to him for guidance when it came to identifying plants and animals that were safe to consume. It made sense because Kronos had single handedly saved every member of the cadre from drowning at least once. Meanwhile, no one had needed to save him from a single thing. As time went on, he became something of a lucky charm to the rest of the team.

When the simulation ended and he found himself back in the real world, he felt tired beyond measure, but that was just the beginning. His cadre had gotten their orders and they moved on to the next station. When Kronos looked around between stations, he noticed that his team was one of the larger ones. Some of the cadres had lost half of their members. It was a startlingly realization.

They really don’t care if we live or die during this, he realized.

Each station was just as difficult as the last. After the water training, they moved on to movements. It was an innocuous name for a truly hellish amount of running, hiking, and sneaking. They lost another member of the team to heat shock but the rest of them bulked up substantially. All of their training was taking place on a simulated high gravity world. Just like before, Kronos quickly excelled among his peers. He became faster, stronger, and more skilled during the movement phase of training. By the end he was carrying more wait than any other trainee and lugging it further and faster than his peers.

It was a trait that Zhang capitalized on many times. When the trainer wasn’t directly observing them, he would load Kronos’ pack with extra gear so that he could take it easy. Kronos didn’t mind. His whole life he had been the one to shoulder the extra burden on every raid. He would do whatever it took if it meant that another member of his crew could make it out alive. His training cadre quickly became his crew.

When they were done with movements, they moved onto their strength and conditioning phase. The simulation was a little less strenuous, at least for Kronos. While they improved their bodies, they were taught about nutrition, cybernetic and genetic enhancements, and other ways to maintain the superhuman body that they were developing. For Kronos, this was the most boring part of the training. His already ridiculous strength, increased to an absurd degree. He found that he could squat around seven hundred kilos, bench press three hundred and sixty kilos, and dead lift over four hundred kilos. Even the trainer seemed impressed. She told him that most people needed powered armor to reach those heights. Zhang was less impressed. He just said that if Kronos got any larger, he wouldn’t be able to wipe his own ass and that he damned sure wasn’t going to do it.

After strength and conditioning they worked on their agility. They had to run through obstacle courses in various extreme environments. Some were on high grav worlds where the exercise was punishing. Some were in urban environments, so they had to climb up skyscrapers or perform similar extreme feats. They lost a third member of the cadre as he fell to his death during one of the exercises. The trainer dryly informed the cohort that the man’s heart had stopped before he hit the bottom. It was in this part of the training that Kronos lost much of the mass that he had acquired during their strength and conditioning. He still retained his power, but it seemed as if his body were adapting to his need for speed. He assumed it was part of the enhancements the Empire had given him because he had never changed so radically over such a short period of time on Hod.

Agility work, completed they went through weapons familiarity. This phase was also a pleasant one for Kronos. He learned how to operate, disassemble, and repair most of the weaponry in the Empire. This included things like explosives and starship weaponry. They learned how to build improvised explosive devices and how to deploy them. They also got an impressive amount of information on the weapons that other factions within the Empire, including a psionic weapon that literally melted brains. Unfortunately, they lost another person when an IED they were rigging exploded in their face. It wasn’t the fire or the explosion that killed her, it was her heart stopping. It was at that point Kronos realized the true danger of virtual reality. It wasn’t that the simulation itself was deadly. It was that the scenarios were so realistic, that your brain couldn’t tell the difference and it stopped the heart when it thought it had died.

With their instruction with weapons familiarity over with, they hit the midpoint of the training. They were informed by the Master Trainer that they had been split into two groups. The first groups initial scenarios were overall physical evaluations while the second’s were more technical. Now they switched.

Kronos didn’t think technical was the right term for the next round of training. They underwent extreme environment survival training, they learned how to organize an assault In various locations and from various mediums, they organized fortifications and the defense of everything from an outpost to a starship, they learned how to use their omni-tools to hack into enemy technology, how to build and operate communications systems, and more. Finally, they learned everything there was to know about covert operations. They learned how to insert stealthily, how to assassinate figures, how to create and groom intelligence sources, and how to interrogate enemy combatants.

When they left the final scenario, only Zhang and himself had survived the round of training. When he looked for the rest of the trainees, he saw that some groups had been entirely wiped out while others only had one or two survivors. By the end of the day, only ten of the trainees had survived. It was a staggering death toll. Kronos frankly couldn’t imagine how the intelligence department kept their numbers up. If this many trainees died, he wondered how many were lost in the field.

When Kronos tried to think about all the different scenarios, he found that his memories were foggy and distorted. They took on a dream-like quality that made them hard to recall. He figured that he could vaguely identify weapons or recall concepts that he learned, but he was sure that it would take time to actually know how to disassemble a rifle or troubleshoot a communications system. One thing he was proud of was that he had proved the Master Trainer wrong. His mind felt ravaged, and he wasn’t sure what the state of his soul was, but his body felt excellent. He had never felt so powerful. He could feel the changes in his body but knew that he needed time to really digest what had been wrought on his form.

When the last ten trainees fell into formation, the ten head trainers left the room. It had been a long day for them, but it was nothing compared to what the trainees had been through. The Master Trainer looked at the ten faces that still survived and he gave the first genuine smile that Kronos had witnessed.

“Congratulations, you made it,” he enthused. “This class is the largest one I’ve had to date. Usually we get half of this number for follow-on training. After that—“ he made an ambiguous gesture behind him. “You should realize that you’re the best in the galaxy and truly worthy of the Empire’s resources. I look forward to training you all.”

He slowly met the gaze of each surviving person.

“Dismissed,” he shouted.

No one needed to be told twice. The trainees wearily made their way from the training bay. Kronos mind felt so drained that he didn’t even stay back to exchange words with Zhang. He just wanted to get to his bed, collapse into, and sleep for the next century or two.