MTL - I Like This Dream!-v2 Chapter 106
What Richard II imagined, what deal he made with the Holy See, and how the Holy See reacted internally, people in Bungalow don't know. Earl Anna received the king's secret letter. She glanced at it roughly, and thought it was all useless polite words, so she threw it aside after reading it.
The hottest topic at the moment is the selection of the border army.
The nobles and other troops from the private army ran away one after another, and the deserters went to the conscription office to register. Anyway, the noble boss didn't know their names, who they looked like. As for the squad leader who can distinguish everyone, he probably came with them. Unlike those who only care about food and clothing, the little leaders with a bit of a brain smelled something different in this unique conscription.
If an army is really carefully selected and cultivated as in the announcement, the cost of individual soldiers will be staggering, and such expensive soldiers will never be used as cannon fodder. What confidence does Earl Anna have to ensure that the death rate of this expensive army will not be as high as before? Just by so-called training? The summer beast tide is only a few months away, what kind of training can make such a huge difference? Or will she have a team of secret supernatural beings to do it for her?
No matter what it is, it will be beneficial and harmless to those who join this nascent system—unless Count Anna wants to use the devil's secret technique. It's okay to take the risk, there's never a shortage of gamblers on this line of defense filled with offspring of criminals, all of whom are likely to die before next year.
Aiden, a former mercenary, is one of the speculators, but the ambitious gambler finds embarrassingly that even if he has the heart to gamble his life, the qualification to be on the gambling table is not easy to get.
The age required for conscription is from gender differentiation to less than 30 years old. Veterans who are healthy or have skills can be extended to 35 years old after passing the review. The entry threshold has eliminated many chances and compensation for casualties old guys. The primary candidates can get a small wooden sign with strange characters engraved on it, and those who have already attended the class say that it is a new number. The next hurdle is the physical examination. The border residents, who are so tough that their arms are broken and feel that they can still fight, go to the examination with confidence, but they are brushed down by half.
A large tent was set up beside Ashwood Town, and the interior of the tent was divided into many small compartments by cloth curtains. This arrangement reminded Aiden of the White House. He walked along the aisle to the empty seat, and found a holy man in white sitting on the other side across a table and barbed wire, with a small statue of a **** on the table.
Aiden immediately dismissed the irreverent thought. Although he is an old fritter, as a person from the Northland, he is also a devout believer. People who don't know whether they will die on the next job, it's better to be more devout to the object of their prayers.
"No. 257, please don't hide the truth from God, please don't attack the doctor and me, otherwise you will be disqualified." The local man sitting next to the holy man said familiarly.
Aiden glanced at the thin but articulate child, and then remembered that besides conscription, he also recruited "nurses" and "doctor's assistants". At this time, he found that the man in white was not a holy man. The white veil covering his face did not cover from the top of his head to his neck, but instead covered his mouth and nose horizontally and was tied behind his ears. This is the "doctor"? It smells like an omega too.
"May I ask if a certain part of your body usually hurts?" The nurse took a pen and began to record.
"Won't."
"Do you often get dizzy or have cramps?"
"No."
"Do you have any bumps or rashes on your body?"
"No."
"Please look up, what direction is the second arrow pointing in the third row from the left?"
Aiden looked up and saw several wooden signs bound to the top of the tent, each with arrows of different sizes. He pointed in one direction, the doctor nodded, the nurse asked another, and Aiden pointed. After doing this three times, the nurse continued to ask, "Have you ever been to the White House?"
This question made Aiden embarrassed, and he almost suspected that his thoughts just now had been seen. He looked at the statue, and obediently replied: "Yes."
"May I ask if you urinate frequently and in pain?"
Aiden glanced at the omega in white uncomfortably, and shook his head.
"Does your **** have a weird discharge? Is it itchy with blisters or sores? Are your **** swollen?"
"What?" Aiden's eyes widened.
The nurse repeated without changing her face: "I mean your chicken..."
"Okay, I get it!" Aiden quickly stopped, feeling as if a needle was being pricked under his buttocks. The soldiers naturally said all kinds of nasty things in private, but this was in front of an omega, in front of a **** statue! Even if it wasn't a holy person, apart from prostitutes, which normal omega wouldn't hide their faces for it...
Aiden subconsciously turned his head to look at the omega called the doctor. The doctor looked at him expressionlessly without even moving his eyebrows.
"To check if you are sick, if you don't want to answer, you can just take off your pants." The nurse crackled, apparently having said it many times, "Please don't be shy, your **** is in front of the doctor and on the eaves Ice is no different. Please note that if you refuse to cooperate or attack the doctor and me, you will be disqualified."
The doctor looked at him with the eyes of dead pork.
Aiden looked a little embarrassed, being at the mercy of an undifferentiated child and an omega made him feel an unprecedented embarrassment. Could it be that it's not allowed to attack the doctor? He thought about it, but what if someone really played tricks regardless of the consequences? Can this little layer of barbed wire stop the fighter's fist? Like a barbarian...
Then he heard screams like slaughtering pigs from the next door.
A tall bald head passed through the curtain next door and fell into this compartment convulsively. He kept his fist outstretched when he fell. Through the raised curtain, Aiden saw the electric sparks on the barbed wire, and the unscathed doctors and nurses on the other side of the barbed wire.
The former mercenary swallowed.
"No." He replied sensibly, "my lower body is fine."
"Are you sure?" the nurse asked persistently, "Can you swear to God?"
"I swear!" Aiden said, exasperated.
Putting aside the troubles of swearing the health of his **** and **** before God (and omega), Aiden passed the medical examination smoothly and got a new number plate. In this way, even if you have obtained the qualifications for enlistment, if you do not meet the standards in the subsequent training, you will not be able to enter the border army at the end.
Aiden walked into the new barracks that had been rested. His old-fashioned eyes swept over the paramilitary people who lived in the same dormitory with him, and he lined up for them in his mind. There are two people who can beat him, one is a muscular bald barbarian, and the other is a veteran who is close to the upper limit of conscription age. Aiden groaned in his heart, and he thought, if nothing unexpected happened, after the assessment, the team leader on their side should appear among these two people.
But even with the greatest imagination of the content of the assessment and training, Aiden still couldn't guess what they would face.
The imaginary physical fitness test did not come, and the superiors did not let them catch up and fight. The quasi-soldiers were first pulled into the classroom to learn numbers, divided into left and right hands (the hand that was tied with a badge when enlisting in the army was the left hand), and recited the rules to be followed, so the first five days passed.
There has always been only one rule of the frontier army: listen to the boss; plus a well-known unspoken rule: don’t mess with people you can’t afford—so to some extent, thanks to the toughness, unity and protection of the people here, the frontier army has no problems. Change jobs into robbers in minutes. And Earl Anna actually has as many as eleven rules here, what are they called the three major disciplines and eight points of attention. Their instructor said that there are more specific rules, and they will talk about them after they can read.
The so-called training for these five days has left most people confused, wondering what the use of this frivolous thing is. "I'm here to fight, not to be played like a monkey!" the grumpy man said angrily. The instructor glanced at him and wrote down his number.
Each brand has 50 initial points every month, rewards will be added, penalties will be deducted, and if the number is negative, get out. In addition to being used as a voucher to stay, the points can also be used for other things, such as adding food.
During the first five days of enlistment, food is the most noteworthy part. There are actually three meals a day, and the food is quite sufficient. Aiden especially likes a kind of soup as a staple food: some kind of khaki-yellow plant tuber that he has never seen before is cut into pieces and boiled together with the meat of an unknown animal, exuding a hot aroma. A large bowl of soup can fill an adult, and the whole person is warmed up. Each person has a quota of one bowl, and that bowl is enough for an adult to eat. If you add more, you have to use points or money in exchange, and the money used is not much.
It is not the season for the fruits to ripen in Wenjialuo, and Aiden thinks that these foods must have been bought by Earl Anna at his own expense and the caravan outside. He rubbed his bulging belly and thanked God in his heart for feeding their lord to do such good deeds.
The quasi-soldiers, including Aiden, would soon learn that Count Anna was never taken for granted.
From the sixth day onwards, everyone was called out by the assembly horn at daybreak, and a group of people got up and dressed in a mess, and it took an hour for all the members to gather. The army lined up according to the number plate, checked, points were deducted for disheveled clothes, points for standing in the wrong position, points for stepping on the wrong left and right feet under the slogan, and points for being late for gathering beyond the specified time. Latecomers run laps around the square as long as they are late, and they are not allowed to have breakfast until they finish running.
Throughout the morning, apart from running circles, people in a square formed a team. The commands "look forward", "look left", "look right" and "align" were repeated countless times. Points will be deducted, just continue. In other words, as long as there is one person who does not match the password, everyone will not want to disband.
None of the quasi-border troops had lunch.
When you start to issue the command to look left and right, a large group of people will be confused. Among those who are in the right direction, there are also some people who just aim at the right head so that they can get it right. After lunch time, most people can already distinguish left and right, and the stubborn ones who are slow learners turn in the wrong direction after listening to the password, and face a large group of colleagues who are looking at them murderously.
The human body is inertial.
The frontier residents who used to be able to survive eating one meal a day now want to eat three times a day under the sinister sugar-coated shells of the lord. It's easy to go from frugal to extravagant, but difficult to go from extravagant to frugal, not to mention that some people took the instructor's food directly to the playground! They took out a red soup. Beets, potatoes and carrots were boiled together, meat cubes and cream were added together, and a little spice was sprinkled at the end. The thick soup was bright and sweet, and the taste could waft for three miles. You can imagine its delicious and sweet taste when you smell it.
In addition to the soup, there are round breads, as white as the cheeks of a young omega, sunken when pinched, and as soft as cheeks. The hateful instructors tore off a piece of white bread and dipped it into the soup, and the white cotton wool was immediately saturated with bright red colors. They picked up the bowl, only to hear a gurgling sound, it was not the instructor who was drinking the soup, but the throats of all the soldiers who were standing immobile, swallowing the saliva that was about to flow out.
"Turn to the right!" said the instructor.
The soldiers turned in a hurry, and those who turned in the wrong direction were bathed in gazes that could swallow them alive before they stood still.
The five-day regular feeding not only gave them a biological clock to be hungry regularly, but also raised some malnourished bodies, so that no one fainted from hunger. The team on the square was disbanded after the first time in the evening when everyone lined up correctly. The people who kept doing mistakes that day looked around without tears. smile. You must know that people who move against the trend will always impress people.
Fifty points are directly deducted for fighting, but "helping classmates make up lessons" is encouraged.
Under the temptation of mutual help and food from their colleagues, the quasi-border soldiers quickly distinguished the left and right. Then came the counting, and the math teacher also comforted them with their progress. Standing in a military posture, starting to walk, running in a row, and so on, those who can stay have almost formed a conditioned reflex to immediately execute certain orders. This messy motley army became a neat and good-looking army in a few months, but, Aiden couldn't help thinking, what's the use of it?
Most people don't think about it, training wears them out and makes them sleep on their backs every night. Although it is a simple instruction, the endless running, lining up, squatting to stand up, lying down and crawling, etc. are really exhausting, and the part that needs to be recited consumes mental energy. They have to learn numbers, learn the most commonly used characters, recite the rules and disciplines of the army, memorize and swear not to violate the laws under Count Anna's rule, and they are too busy.
On occasional holidays, they are too lazy to go to the white house to have fun as usual. This is not just because soldiers need to register when they go to the white house. The training is so hard that many people would rather be in love with their own beds when they have time. Those with families hurried home, since they were not allowed to go home to visit their relatives on weekdays. It is also difficult for energetic bachelors not to be attracted by the market. Every time they can leave the barracks, the Bungalow defense line they see is different from the last time. The change is the same as in the past few years.
The caravan is here, and it is more prosperous than in the past year. In the past, the border people hated the businessmen for stealing, raping, cheating and wanton deception. The businessmen were afraid of the border people in Wenjialuo who would do anything at every turn. Only those who could afford to hire a group of supernatural beings dared to come. Now these merchants don't know what kind of guarantee they have, and merchants, big and small, have stepped forward one by one, and they have shown that they want to take root here.
"What are you doing in this back country?" Aiden asked one of the merchants.
"Not poor, not poor!" The businessman laughed and said, "The place Earl Anna is looking for will definitely flow with milk and honey from now on."
Aren't you afraid of losing money and people? Aiden wanted to ask. Then he saw that the patrol team named Chengguan took away the troublemaker, that dog-like guy wearing an armband, who was a hunter not long ago.
The young and middle-aged who joined the army were under the control of military law, and the other scattered people were either incorporated by Earl Anna or inspired by the Holy One, and those who wanted to play the law of the jungle were invited by the patrol team to teach them how to behave. Aiden found out that the supernatural beings who surrendered to Earl Anna and passed the assessment of "Ideological Morality and Self-cultivation of Law Enforcement Officers" were not incorporated into the army, but were put into the "picket team". The picket team usually patrols the market, and if the urban management encounters an opponent who cannot be defeated, they will blow their whistle, and the picket team will go out to deal with all kinds of dissatisfaction.
No stealing, no robbery, no molesting omega... There are a lot of regulations in the market, but the chaotic border that Aiden thought would be deserted by this has become more prosperous.
Many troupes came and performed twelve-hour rotations every day in the newly built theater. The theater was regarded as a public facility, and it was subsidized by Earl Anna. The ticket price was very low, and the quasi-border soldiers and their immediate family members could enjoy a 50% discount—equivalent to buying an egg. Few people could resist the temptation to take advantage, and dragged their families to the theater one after another. There are all kinds of juggling here, and what is more famous is theatrical performances.
The protagonist of the story is not the princess knight in the past, but an ordinary soldier. People on the stage performed the story of ordinary soldiers overcoming obstacles and defending their hometown and family, which made people excited. Even Aiden, who thought he had been numb for a long time, couldn't help standing up and applauding at the end of the performance.
wrong! What did I do today! Aiden, who returned to the team contentedly after the holiday, suddenly remembered that I was worried that the training would be useless! Didn't I plan to have an audience with my superiors? Why forgot!
Fortunately, the masters of the territory and the army have not forgotten.
About a month before the beast horde, some excellent paramilitary soldiers were assembled to start special training on other things. Some frail people (there are many betas and omega, but the fighters have no idea about it) showed a cylinder made of steel, and began to explain its principle and how to use it. Aiden was also in this ranks. He half-understood, learned for a while, and memorized the precautions and things that needed to be done.
In short, put black powder, smash it, aim, ignite, cover your ears, and the cylinder will shoot out iron balls? Like a catapult, right?
They practiced many times, but never really fired once. Nearly half a month later, all the remaining border troops were assembled, and Earl Anna appeared in front of everyone rarely.
"Let's make a long story short." Earl Anna said, "This is a cannon, and you will use it when the beast swarm comes. Because it is a consumable, it will not be used much after the experiment is safe, but we must let everyone feel it, so as not to use it. You should be afraid first. Cover your ears, don’t be afraid.”
How can you be afraid? Aiden couldn't help feeling a little disapproving. Not to mention the "artillery team" who already knew what was going to happen, even veterans who had never been exposed to artillery did not think that anything would scare them.
The fuze was lit.
In the next second, many people who were full of heroes and did not cover their ears fell to the ground. The small cylinder erupted with a loud noise like an avalanche, and black smoke spread from the opening. No one could see clearly what trajectory the iron ball was shot from. They only saw that the purple nanmu that was the target was blown to pieces from the middle.
After the toothache sound, the hard purple nanmu, which was helpless even if cut by a knife, fell down.
Aiden's hands and feet were cold, but his heart was burning. Can win! The thought jumped out so fast, we can win, we can survive!
For the first time in so many years, this native Bengalo is sure that he can survive this beast tide.