You take a blow to the jaw and collapse to the mud, the heavy gravity of the Holy World weighing down on you like the sins of your family line.

You've only been here for a few moon cycles and you're still not used to it. Living outside of a vaccsuit, walking on the ground, the weight of it all. Breathing dirty, wet air.

One of the other trainees stands over you with a wooden staff, one end of it wrapped in a ragged piece of filthy red cloth, pressed into your heaving sternum.

"Do you yield?"

This had been the first time.

Here, at Camp Mikael, was the first time he breathed air that hadn't been recycled and filtered ad infinitum. It had no taste, but it did have many smells. The crisp scent of petrichor after rain. Thick, rich, earthy dust. It was strange, but beautiful. How much his people had lost in their exile to Kpyo - he had not even known, before setting foot on Bynzanthine.

But... Even if the air had no taste, he could taste something more familiar now. The acrid metallic tang of blood. Elias' jaw burned with aching intensity. Apollyon felt it, but did not care, it was not his jaw. He was not Elias any longer.

Elias would have gotten up. He would have stood defiantly against this other trainee. He would have brawled, all brute strength and passion. Elias would have been broken. Apollyon knew better. If his body was broken, he could not serve in the ANGELOS, and his family would stay on Kpyo. Besides - his foe had bested him. If this were a real skirmish, he would already be dead. There was no honor in thrashing like a petulant child against what was already decided.

Apollyon looked up to his foe. With his eyes. His real eyes, shielded by neither visor nor helm, blue as the snow of Kpyo... What a marvelous blessing that was. Did they understand that heavenly gift? Could they? "I yield," Apollyon said "Though you nearly broke my jaw, you have not broken my spirit. The next time we fight I will send you to the ground, brother."

As allowed Apollyon stood again. He took a moment to brush off some of the dirt on his back - but could not manage to clean it all off. There would be punishment for that later. An ANGELOS' uniform was always spotless.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 00:27, Thu 14 Feb 2013.

A tall dark-skinned man watches you rise with cold eyes, his face is a patchwork of scars and burns. He is, they whisper, one of the few ARKANGELOS, survivors of the program who go on to teach the next generations.

They are uniformly cold, hard men, but their righteousness is without question. God would not have allowed it otherwise.

The other student grunts and as you being to limp away towards the edge of the ring, you are seized by two large guardsmen and dragged towards the holding cages.

"Conscripts are to remain silent unless spoken to by a guard or instructor. You have not yet earned the right to speak freely."

Two days pass in the cage, 34 hours...

There are others in the nearby cages with you, but no one talks. Those who talk in the cage do not eat until sun-up.

When you are released, you found out during daily announcements that the conscript you sparred with is dead. His throat was crushed during a training exercise and his body will be burned to return to the Lord for judgment.

The next four star cycles was a long march across muddy shores and warm perpetually rainy mountains and jungle to the next training ground. Over half a dozen boys fell behind and were left in the jungle to die. It was said that some of the lost ones still lived out in the polar jungles of Bynzanthine and turned to demons to survive. Some believe that these demon-boys would come to drag off any conscript who stayed out after dark.

You learned quickly to communicate in subvocal whispers and improvised sign language so you wouldn't be caught by the guards or instructors and after a while like that you could carry on a conversation with a fellow conscript without ever getting caught.

It's been another few moon-cycles and you feel stronger already, the air is doing you could and the heavier gravity is forcing your muscles to grow thicker and tougher.

Your next camp is in the highlands, above the jungle line where for the first time you see snow. It is only present one pole at a time, you've heard and only in a small geographical area, but one you DO know: It's cold and uncomfortable and they are making you fight, eat and sleep in it.

Apollyon hated the cage... But he had earned it, it was his, and he would make that punishment his own. It had been worth it. That was the last time Apollyon heard his own voice. Even when he began to forget its own sounds, when things grew dark as the void, he remembered his own words:

You have not broken my spirit. It carried him through the cage.

Hearing of his opponent's death was shocking. The instructors told it to him, proudly, as if to prove to Apollyon how serious this was. How rough and ready they were - how little that young man had been worth.

Dead. He is dead, but I am alive? Does that mean that I, in truth, won? Apollyon was not sure, he could not decide - though he thought on it often. He put one boot infront of the other, blinding his mind to the exhaustion in his muscles. With time, he'd taught himself to ignore all but the most terrible discomfort. That was all it was, really.

There was a difference, he knew now, between pain and discomfort. It was a dichotomy few civilians would ever understand.

The hike through the jungles to the mountains was difficult. The trees grew thick, as if huddled together for protection. Always there were shadows. Demons, once conscripts, threatened to crawl from every pool of darkness. Apollyon's training rifle stayed at the ready - always. Some of the other trainees tucked the weapon's pistol-style trigger into their LBE's to make their burdens lighter. Apollyon did not.

The snow was strange. It was different than what he had come to know as snow - white, puffy, and pure. The "snow" of Kpyo was a bluish powder. A poison, cold as the blackness of space. This was cold too.

All the trainees were taught how to shelter themselves in the snow. They dug deep trenches, roofed them with pine branches, and covered those needles with more snow. It was frigid, still, but Apollyon did not freeze to death.

One night, as they changed guard in their patrol base, Apollyon left the line briefly to urinate. Before he'd had a chance to begin he saw them. Footprints, in the snow. Human feet. Unshoed, toes free of any boot. The trainee looked back to his nearest comrade. Strov, by his nametag. He had come too - as trainees were required to always travel in pairs.

Apollyon gestured with his left hand, right still wrapped around his rifle's handgrip. His pallid pointer and middle finger pointed earthward made the motion of a man's walking gait. Then he pointed to the tracks and brought his left hand back to his rifle's forward rest - slowly, footsteps quiet as a doe fawn's hooves, he began to walk backwards to the camp.

His rifle remained ready, barrel sweeping across the frigid white landscape. His weapon held real rounds. All the trainees' weapons did. Sim-rounds were expensive. ANGELOS recruits were cheap. Besides, he had been told, that for men to come to know a weapon for what it was... It must always be a weapon. Not a toy, not a pop-gun.

Some of the boys shared stories about what they had heard about the other armies, the mighty TEMPLARS where it was said they trained on every world in the Unified Brotherhood of Planets, lived in a palace, wore armor blessed by the patriarch and that the Lord's angels themselves watched over them and gave them divine strength. The endless LEGIONs which had their own training facility that spanned a whole city, they slept in bunks inside and ate hot chow and had concubines brought to them weekly. Or even the HORSEMEN who rode in the most advanced war machines in the galaxy and crushed the unrepentant to death with their wrath, it was said that they had been given something to eat which the Saints had blessed and it turned them into giants who could kill any man with their bare hands and who felt no pain.

The ANGELOS on the other hand, started with thousands of conscripts per batch and hundreds would die before the end. Once, a class of ANGELOS had risen up against their instructors and the previous class had been called in to put them down. They did, every last one of them shot, beheaded and buried in mass graves to be worm food, not to burn up into the sky to Heaven.

A flash of light and another, accompanied by the muffled cracks of rifle fire filtering through the dark mist that would rise up and cover the ground at night.