Nadia hefted the rocket-barbell—the fifth rep in her last set of 315 for five—from her chest, smiling as her arms locked out. Five months ago, she had struggled with just the bar and a 25 on either side, but with a heavy regiment of training and steroids, this was nothing.
After her surgery, Nadia went to floor 83 and booked her stay in a hotel with a gym. With the influx of marks that only came from murdered spouses and suddenly liquid college funds, She had acquired her own weight in pills and liquid enhancements, along with a virtual reality headset and body-rig for weapons training.
For five, almost six, months, Nadia would wake at 3, drink a chocolate MooMass shake and eat a six egg insta-omelet smeared with peanut butter and catch up on news. To maintain a semblance of ladylike grace, she’d hiss at the chemical concoction before eating it. How else was she supposed to stomach it? After a breakfast that stopped disappointing after two weeks, Nadia worked her upper body against a rocket barbell with thrust that ranged from just a tad to this might melt the bar if you turn it up more, by Fried, how are you doing this?
Afterwards, Nadia drank a glass of cold black RepJuice, banishing her exhaustion like a frigid wind. Ready to go again, she would strap into her VR body-rig and run through military provided exercises for three hours. Nadia had always let Tobias—Fried bless him—tend to the guns of the family while she tended to the house, plants, and illegal opium. Now, Nadia could strip a rifle, clean it, reassemble it, and give her husband a lesson in marksmanship all the while. She hoped he was watching and that he was proud of…whatever she was now.
Nadia would make an early lunch—which was just breakfast 2.0—pound some RepJuice, and move to her cardio workout to run for two hours. She’d have a protein shake ready to go—if you guessed RepJuice, go claim your prize!—and she’d pound it down before more VR training, focused on CQC. This was followed by more RepJuice and chased with a lower body workout and dinner.
Dinner was always sacred, an 89-mark steak ordered from the kitchen and large enough to cover her face if she was so inclined. She wasn’t inclined to do so at all, that it was likely the only genuine item on the menu not changing her mind. She paired it with a red from a brand which advertised itself as genuine, but Nadia was sure some cheaper knockoff the cooks had been slipping her. As much as she wanted to down the entire bottle every night, she didn’t; there was still training to be done if she wanted to kill Markus.
Dinner was chased with an hour of cardio and more weapons and reflex training, usually a game where Nadia would have to listen for a cue—say, a branch snapping—and shoot the source of the noise before her avatar died. She didn’t die much anymore, even as the task had devolved into things like listening for a fly before it pumped her full of disease. Whatever time was left before bed was spent in prayer, making sure that she was on the path the Ironclad had set for her.
Sleep was a different beast. One would assume all the work she’d done each day would would leave her tired and rigid as a strung bow. One would be wrong. She was tired, and the lack of interactions left her prone to snap, but she did not sleep. The chemical tsunami inside her churned through the night, and she would spend hours looking at the ceiling as her tendons and organoids put her back together to a symphony of hisses and clicks. After a week, she had added 15 milliliters of Hyphelone—a sleep aid—to her needle regiment, but the song of her body continued in hushed whispers, as if it was taking notes for when she cycled off Hyphelone.
The family would not recognize me at all, Nadia thought as she looked at her not-roided-out appearance in one of the gym’s many mirrors. Her deep black hair was, as usual, a mental punch to the face, and only recently had Nadia stopped flinching when she saw it. It was a good reminder of her mission, if nothing else. “I will grow out my old hair when Markus is dead,” she said, only slightly surer of herself than the last time she had said it.
If her hair was a haunting ghost, her body was a shrieking phantom. Her once dainty arms had ballooned into muscular appendages, permanently loaded with cannon balls, while her legs were glassy obelisks that ended her dress at mid-thigh rather than at the knee like before. Her shoulders and traps had grown into pauldrons and a gorget, capable of stopping a knife if anybody was so stupid as to attack her. Nadia expected such a thing wasn’t likely, as even the hotel staff looked at her like she might devour them for the protein in their bones.
It wasn’t just that she was a little thicker and more vascular. Her limbs, back, and chest, all bore additional lumps and curved where the lab-grown micro-guts had been sewn. They bound directly to the muscles, feeding off the flesh in addition to the chemicals Nadia pumped into herself. Her training kept them disciplined and her meals kept them quiet, like smothering an overgrown, mumbling sibling until they returned to snoring. They weren’t entirely silent as they slept either, their unintelligible muttering scraping the back of her mind like dull nails. They felt like cockroaches under her skin—looked damn close—and should she ever stop exercising or feeding herself sludge, they would look to the rest of her for their meals.
But today was the final day at the hotel, and after Nadia had completed her first workout, she grabbed her few belongings and left the remaining RepJuice in the wind as she left. Thank fucking Fried. With her small backpack over her shoulder, Nadia hailed a shuttle to the floor’s zip station which would take her to Berlin Overcity, then Friedstadt where the krieger trials were held.
The zip tubes would cram a massive ship through a tunnel only an atom wide before bending space between the two points at many thousands of times the speed of light. Vaugely, Nadia knew energy-laden crystals would be liquified in the engine, and she knew—again, vaguely—that the empires of the world all shared most of their telemetry data to ensure that collisions were minimal. That made sense enough—just lines, after all—and she didn’t linger in the myriad of ways that crystal liquefaction or injecting could go wrong, or the various quantum misentanglements that could occur, instead focusing on more positive thoughts. In a few hours, she’d be an initiate, one step closer to the men who had taken her world from her.
Sleep took Nadia quickly, for once, and the she-beast was jostled gently awake by a reasonably fearful attendant. “Thank you,” Nadia said with a smile, collecting her backpack and leaving the freighter for one of the station’s many terminal hubs.
A window spanned the wall and Nadia moved to it, having never been in an overcity before and having never been granted the opportunity by her lord to see the full glory of an undercity. If Kraklaw was a stack of pancake cities, Berlin was the entire diner, the undercity sprawling below her like a desolate field of iron stalagmites. The sheer scale, both in metal and manpower, made Nadia's head ache. Our lord is one with a trillion hands, Nadia remembered. Quadrillion, more like it, or whatever is after that. Natalia would know.
Nadia tore herself from such ruminations and found a holo-board listing arrivals and departures. To Friedstadt in three hours, plenty of time to eat and pray, Nadia reasoned before scouring the airport for a suitable eatery to retrieve dinner from.
After half a lap around her terminal, Nadia’s stomach rumbled and her eyes scanned frantically for the nearest bathroom. That her steroids and organoids hadn’t agitated her stomach during the zip-travel should have been an indicator, but she had let darkness fool her. There was a trashcan nearby, but Nadia wouldn’t dare to touch it. She already looked like of a ghoul, and vomiting into a trashcan would be most unladylike. Swallowing down hot bile, Nadia jogged to the nearest bathroom. Fuck fuck fuck, she thought, each word pounding in her skull.
She flicked her foot out to open a stall door, the vomit nearly burning a hole through her throat as she lurched forward. Her lips slipped against each other as she pawed blindly for the lock behind her, the first scattered bits of sludge plopping into the water before heavier helpings followed. She felt lighter with each, a gentle ditziness passing over her like morning fog as she stood and flushed. With a little luck, it would be the only time she vomited.
Once Nadia had cleaned her mouth with her water bottle, she perused the zip port for food once again, pickier now. After a few laps and seeing the same bookstores, gift shops, and lingerie boutiques—for some Fried-forsake reason—Nadia settled on a food court eatery that looked decently close to mostly genuine food, as depressing of a rank as that was. Opting for a large salad from what appeared to be the cleanest option, she sat down and ate. A sea of muted sludges flooded her mind, replacing any semblance of fake animals.
The pieces of the salad were all there, all the right colors, just a little duller and the texture was there, just a little less firm. She didn’t want to to touch it, lest it chip like paint at the first prod of her fork and crumple like sand at the second. Still, her passengers demanded sustenance. Ever the Ironclad’s soldier, Nadia managed to stomach the bland chemicals masquerading as food and hoped her gut could do the same.
With her meal done, Nadia found the port’s nearest church with the help of another holo-board, nearly a kilometer away. No wonder the food is terrible. It is godless, Nadia thought before she began her trek. The church was built off the station itself like a finger off a hand, featuring a scaled down version of the archway of saints. When she entered, Nadia didn’t feel the need to scurry past the statue of Elizabeth Skarberk or Atena Lenlease—Markus’ and Vogel’s saints—but she also didn’t linger too long in case they decided to finish the job their children had started. Swiftness was a virtue as well.
Nadia found an empty pew and recanted a list of prayers, starting first with the Vater von Allem, followed by the usual requests of strength and guidance from the Ironclad. Sometimes one of the small statues of Fried would speak to her in between prayers, but not today.
Nadia rose to leave, before hesitating. I should pray the saint’s prayer, at the very least, Nadia reasoned. Nadia hadn’t said this prayer since Markus had taken her family, but now on the eve of trials, it felt…right? Necessary? Bare minimum? One of the three. She returned to the pew and held her hands high above her head.”
“Oh Lord Fried, whose will is iron
We come before you, ever
your servants,
To seek your strength and your will
We thank you for your twelve saints, who embody and bestow the most holy of virtues
Grant us the creativity of Flame,
To shape the world around us with skill and beauty, and so that the world may know your glory
Grant us Ishii’s strength of Body,
To care for the temple you have given us, and so that we may be ever your servants
Grant us Skarbek’s Discernment,
To see your will in all things, and so that we may not know folly
Grant us the Force of the silver saint,
To stand against those against you, and so that we may expand your kingdom
Grant us the clarity of Deimos,
To see through confusion and illusion, and so that we may know your will
Grant us the Iron Saint’s Justice,
To seek your truth in all things, and so that we may know no lies
Grant us the precise eyes of Napol,
To guide our hands with your own, and so that your kingdom may know perfection
Grant us the swiftness of Mercurus,
To see that your will is done, and so that we may not know idleness
Grant us the observance of the Talos,
To see where the iron is strong and where there is rust, and so that we may witness your glory
Grant us the patience of Odysseus,
To nurture your glory, and so that our foes may always know defeat.
Grant us the control of the Golden Saint,
To harness the blessings you have given us, and so that our will may be yours
Grant us piety of Richtofen,
To honor you in all that we do, and so that we may never be separated from you
Dein Wille ist unser, es wird geschehen.”
Nadia hesitated over the third and eleventh verses, but ultimately said them. I will need all of the blessings in the days to come. She lingered a minute longer to say a longer prayer at the statute of Deimos, not only since he ran the trials from his floor of Friedstadt, but because his virtue—clarity and strength of mind—would be paramount.
“Lord Deimos, Saint of the Mind and wisest of our lord’s saints, bless his servant with clarity and protection, so that she may better serve our lord before, during, and after the trials. Grant her what insight you deem pertinent so that she may better rise to challenges you have set before her. Dein Wille ist unser, es wird geschehen,” Nadia finished before leaving the church and making way for her terminal, content to get one last nap before the trials began.
Unlike the typical spherical structures of Berlin Station and Kraklaw Overcity, Friedtstadt featured multiple super-floors arranged like a spinning top, a disc for each saint. The city's lowermost cone housed a thruster engine that dwarfed entire spires in Kraklaw, suspending it over an ocean like a toothpick in a shot glass of irradiated water.
The zip deposited Nadia in the 127th floor of the fifth super-floor, a fair ways away from the 150th floor where the trials were historically held. The entire floor would be terraformed by Fried’s many hands to accommodate whatever wargame the Volkswaffen wanted to simulate that week. While the 150th was not unique in this role, it was one of the larger war floors the empire had.
Nadia traveled by tram from 127 to 150, cars filled to the brim with mutants like her. She wasn’t the largest by any means—plenty of Bennets walking around, garbed in cloaks bearing company logos—but she was by no means the frailest. Several withering sticks of people bundled themselves in robes embroidered with large, triple eagles on their back, hands raised in muttering supplication. Their prayers were all far too loud and enunciated, as if they could pray away their frailty. Do they not understand that our lord requires sacrifice, and that ascension demands transformation? Nadia thought, rolling her eyes at the pathetic displays. Still, I suppose Fried has let some of them ascend. Who am I to judge? I could be looking at the next Maria Friedlicht.
Maria Friedlicht had been a blind woman from the Warsaw region who had been blessed with foresight by Fried and later rose to the position of 257th commander of the Schattenklingen order some 23000 years ago. When the Reichstag had supposed themselves equal to the Volkswaffen—a heresy according to the good book—Maria had apprehended them with five saints—other times three, other times all twelve,—at her back. With a heresy crushed, Maria went on to lead Atlas in a series of campaigns to the east before disappearing in a brilliant flash of golden light.
If she existed at all. What lovely bullshit, Nadia thought, having weighed all of the stories several times over and emerged a skeptic. Friedlicht? That is not even subtle.
Nadia arrived on the floor in a flood of initiates, many shuddering from the sudden drop in temperature. Through the glassy tunnels that funneled the hopefuls to Ascension Stadium, Nadia saw snowy peaks until she could see no more. So phase one will be in the tundra, then, Nadia reasoned, hoping the thicker skin Manfred had given her was up to the challenge.
The trials were televised every six years—at least the first three phases—and Nadia had seen six trials in her life. Phase zero—the first phase—always took place in Ascension Stadium where hopefuls were put through challenges with weapons, to see if they could do the bare minimum.
Next, phase one—called the great divider—lasted months and put the remaining initiates through some sort of objective in the simulated floor. Past phase one, aspirants would become krieger rookies, Knappen, and be bestowed with the steam powered augments the krieger were known for, followed by a few challenges in phase two. Phase three—separated the remaining knights into groups of around 3,000, rotating through six-month tours with each of the orders. In phase four, the remaining knappen would be thinned to the nearest multiple of 1,000 and the orders would bet and bargain with each other to fill out their allotment of battalions.
Several kiosks stood at the perimeter of Ascension Stadium to register the initiates. There must be more than a million people here. Can the Ironclad not send more of his hands here to aid them? Nadia dismissed the idea, knowing if it was her lord’s will, there would be more attendants. News and food trucks lingered further into the plaza, pestering the initiates and charging an augmented arm and leg for food.
At the center of the plaza was a bonfire, with flames climbing nearly two stories as initiates threw their bags into it. “The Ironclad demands a tribute of his faithful. Sacrifice the possessions of this world before continuing into the next,” a voice said from the speakers mounted to poles at set distances around the plaza.
Nadia strode close to the fire and pulled the picture frame out of her bag. Watch over me, my love, Nadia thought as she placed a kiss on the photo letting it drift on the wind into the fire. She took off her iron necklace and bracelet, heavy as anchor chains in her hand. She kissed them both before tossing them high, iron gleaming in the ascent as if smiling at her. “Dein Wille ist unser, es wird geschehen,” Nadia muttered before she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Nadia pivoted, ready to sock whoever had touched her, only to see it was Gershwin. “I should have known I’d startle you,” he said, smiling as if he’d just completed a sermon, which he probably had. “I never forget a face. I suppose even with my eyes, Fried has blessed me such.”
Nadia straightened herself. “Are you here for the trials?” she asked. “What am I saying, of course you are. Any favorites that you are watching in particular?”
“Well, I’d hope that I can bless myself”—Gershwin pulled back his sleeves revealing arms of black steel—“but Die Mystischen Orden is rather silent on this particular issue,” Gershwin said before leaning into Nadia, “I think it’s not too much of a breach of my duties.”
Nadia ran a finger over her lips. “I will keep your secret. An accomplice in silence and deed, as you put it?”
Gershwin smiled. “Indeed. Speaking of”—he let the words hang in the air—“is that why you are here? Why you have augmented yourself so?”
I could lie, but he already knows, Nadia reasoned. “Yes. I plan on doing what I confessed I wanted. Fried’s will remains iron, martensite even, and five months has not tempered it any. Dein Wille ist unser, es wird geschehen.”
“The Ironclad is a lord of a trillion hands. If he commands one to harm another, who am I to question it?” Gershwin said. Which hand was which, Nadia didn’t know, and she figured that was the point, “I for one want to join the Fourth Order. They see the most action, but I fear not enough of them hear the word of our lord. I suppose that Seventh through Tenth would not be so bad either.” Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth were the artillery, fast-actions, border patrol, and siege specialists respectively, often called the frontline four. “Yourself?”
Anything that gets me closer to Markus or Vogel, Nadia had told herself through her grueling training. “I suppose Third Order. I always thought their armor looked the nicest,” Nadia lied. The black armor was sleek, yes, but that was hardly her motive and Gershwin knew it. “Or perhaps Eleventh,” Nadia continued. “The designs are nice, but there is such a thing as too much gold and too much vibrancy, no?” No amount of gold is enough to capture our lord’s glory.
Gershwin played along, smiling. “The Krahenvater have nice designs do they not? They’re dark, though not as dark as Third, but the etchings are simply immaculate, if you can stand the feathers.”
Nadia scoffed. “If you can stand the feathers and whatever sorceries they get up to. All of their books have chains, and I would not be surprised for a second if that is not the only thing they use those chains for.”
Gershwin laughed. “I suppose you have a point. No matter, so long as you don’t join Fifth. I don’t think either of us would take well to torture.”
Nadia clutched at nonexistent pearls. “Fifth? By Fried, they look like someone made an armor to look a human with the skin torn off while they still lived.”
Gershwin grimaced. “And then they made their face into the tortured expression, truly horrifying. It makes one wonder what our lord might be afraid of to employ such visages.”
“I suspect we shall know soon enough. Shall we?” Nadia asked before turning to the registration kiosks, Gershwin tagging along behind her.