Orr did not receive Faan’s reply until the next day. In response to all the righteous messages he had sent above, his dear brother replied with only a picture and a voice message.
Orr opened the picture and discovered, unbelievably, that it was a selfie of Faan.
—“Sigh, André made me straighten my hair. Do you think straight hair doesn’t look as nice?”
Orr: …
He furiously closed the enlarged selfie of long, straight golden hair and cursed viciously in his heart: Shameless!
At the same time—
“Second column, fourth row! Step out!”
The instructor standing above them roared. Orr froze, looked up, and saw the instructor glaring at him with tiger-like eyes.
“You! What are you standing there for?” The instructor in a black military uniform pointed directly at him. “Get up here!”
“…Yes, sir!”
A vein pulsed on Orr’s forehead. Gritting his teeth, he snapped to attention and saluted, then pivoted left and jogged out of formation to the front of the group.
His movements were crisp and decisive, and his salute was perfectly standard. The instructor’s expression eased slightly, but he still lifted a foot and kicked Orr hard in the calf, making him “stand properly at attention” in front of the entire company.
Every year before freshmen officially began at Hain, they underwent two months of military training covering every conceivable area. It was an extraordinarily harsh closed training period, intended both to make the Empire’s future soldiers understand exactly what the path they had chosen required of them and to assess each person’s physical condition and individual strengths comprehensively. Once training ended, the records would be used to assign them to different classes, and anyone with outstanding talent in a particular field might even be given mandatory electives.
“I didn’t confiscate your personal terminals…”
Hands behind his back, the instructor jumped down from the platform and slowly paced among the rows of freshmen standing at rigid attention with chests raised and backs straight. He raised his voice. “But don’t even think you can play with them while you’re standing formation! Don’t even dream about it!”
Personal terminals had excellent privacy protection. Because they were linked to brainwaves, they could sometimes be activated without touching the screen or speaking aloud. Films, books, and private messages could all be projected in front of the user for viewing, and the projected content was blocked from everyone else.
That was exactly why Orr had opened Faan’s message automatically when he received it.
“Don’t treat me like I’m blind! Look at your faces! Look at your eyes!” the instructor shouted contemptuously. “What the hell do you think you can hide?”
As he spoke, he walked behind one freshman, paused, turned sideways, and drove the sole of his military boot into the student’s back.
Caught completely off guard, the student pitched forward and fell flat on his face. The ground beneath them was mechanically compacted gravel—hard, heat-absorbing, and painfully sharp.
Falling face-first produced a dull bang. The freshman’s upper lip split instantly against the ground, and blood began pouring down.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Many Alphas who came here had powerful family backgrounds. It was not that they could not endure hardship, but the sudden kick genuinely hurt. The student almost immediately pushed himself up and turned around to roar back.
“What am I doing?”
The instructor sneered. “I’m fucking dealing with you! I just said no fucking little tricks! What were you doing?!”
He really had been browsing the web on his terminal. Faced with that roar, he immediately went speechless and merely covered his bleeding mouth without answering.
“You dead? Squatting there waiting to lay an egg? Stand up!” the instructor barked. “That little bit of blood won’t kill you! Put your hand down!”
The freshman Alpha stared at the instructor for two seconds, lowered his hand, wiped his blood-covered palm carelessly on his trousers, and stood straight.
Only then did the instructor snort and continue pacing through the formation.
With those two examples before them, the atmosphere across the entire group instantly grew tense. Anyone whose terminal was still active hurried to shut it down, and every freshman the instructor passed stood ramrod straight.
After making a circuit below, the instructor returned to the raised platform and looked down at them from above.
Orr stood beside him. The brim of his military cap covered half his forehead, leaving only a pair of thick, dark brows visible. The instructor glanced sideways at him twice, looking him up and down as though trying to find some flaw, but in the end said nothing.
The sun climbed higher and higher. Time passed with excruciating slowness, like a long strand of silk brushing against the fragile nerves inside their heads.
The freshmen had been divided into several companies, each assigned one instructor. These instructors had only recently returned from the battlefield and treated training the students as a form of rotational leave. Even so, the intensity was far beyond what the current freshmen could endure with ease.
At five in the morning, they had been dragged out of bed. After jogging for a full hour, they were given half an hour to wash and eat breakfast, followed by half an hour of rest. They assembled here precisely at seven. It was now eleven in the morning, and they had stood at attention without moving for four full hours.
An Alpha’s innate physical condition made the task possible. The morning was primarily meant to test their willpower and endurance.
During that time, the instructor caught several more students secretly using their terminals. A row of Alphas now stood on the raised platform, staring awkwardly at the people below.
The training ground had deliberately been designed as a semi-enclosed ring, which made ventilation and heat dissipation poor but retained warmth extremely well.
Orr’s back was completely soaked with sweat. Beads the size of peas ran from his covered forehead and soaked the band of his cap pressing against his skin. Below, some students’ fingers had begun trembling despite their efforts to control them. The fierce sun overhead baked the training ground like a steamer. A little after eleven-thirty, the instructor finally gave the order.
“Temporarily dismissed! Go eat!”
“Reassemble here at one-thirty!”
The eyes of the Alphas below lit up instantly. They shouted “Yes, sir!” in unison and scattered in every direction.
Orr was just about to move when he saw the instructor’s gaze sweep across the line of people standing with him. “You lot. Another hour.”
Nearly everyone made some sound, showing their dissatisfaction through their expressions or eyes. Orr pressed his lips together and said nothing, straightening his back again.
Everyone else left. During that extra hour, the few Alphas remaining were restless and miserable, but with the instructor glaring from the side, none dared try anything.
When the hour finally ended, the instructor gave a nod. The Alphas immediately felt as though they had been liberated. Several staggered toward the exit on weak limbs. One even reached out to pull Orr along, only to be kicked away by the instructor.
“You.” The instructor stared into Orr’s eyes. “Another half hour. Can you do it?”
“What?!” the several Alphas who had not yet left shouted together.
Orr’s Adam’s apple moved. His mouth was so dry he did not even have saliva to swallow. But he still met the instructor’s gaze directly, back straight, and gave a textbook military salute.
“Yes, sir!”
The instructor nodded in satisfaction. The others looked at Orr with deep sympathy but, under the instructor’s pressure, did not dare say more and left reluctantly.
The enormous training ground was left with only the two of them. The instructor stood beside Orr, while Orr stared straight ahead at a white cloud in the blue sky.
It was only training, but he had still violated military discipline. No matter how long he was made to stand, he deserved it.
…Still, when he remembered that the message he had risked punishment to look at was a selfie from Faan that did not even show his face, Orr almost wanted to spit blood. He ground his teeth almost imperceptibly, and even the way he stared at that soft white cloud turned ferocious.
That damned Omega! No discipline! No awareness whatsoever!
The aura around him became so savage that the instructor beside him glanced over in bafflement.
“All right.”
The instant the half hour ended, the instructor spoke. “Time’s up.”
The tension drained from Orr’s body at once. With the sudden relaxation, his calf went weak and he stumbled involuntarily. The instructor caught his arm and steadied him.
“You brat.” Once training ended, the instructor dropped his terrifying expression and looked like an ordinary, rugged-faced Alpha. “I can tell you’ve got real drive. So why did you open your terminal back there?”
The instructor smiled. “Message from your girlfriend?”
Orr stood upright and curled his lip without responding to that subject—he would never find an Omega like that!—and merely promised,
“It won’t happen again.”
“Good.”
The instructor patted his shoulder, reminded him to assemble at one-thirty, and finally released him to eat.
Hain’s cafeteria food was very good. Alphas all ate enormous amounts, so the portions were large. The different serving windows were arranged by category, and students could carry trays around and choose whatever they liked.
Orr arrived an hour and a half later than everyone else. He had assumed the cafeteria would be almost empty by then, but the moment he entered and looked up, he found that most of the place was still full.
He paused and turned to head upstairs. Someone from his company spotted him with sharp eyes and waved wildly to call him over.
Orr thought for a moment, then got food from one of the first-floor windows and walked over.
Once he sat down, he unsurprisingly saw that every tray belonging to the Alphas at the table was already completely empty, even the soup bowls drained dry. Yet their backsides seemed glued to their seats, and they remained immovable in front of their empty plates.
“Seriously.” Orr drained an entire bowl of soup in one go and started shoveling rice into his mouth. “You’re all gathered here for some reason other than waiting for me, right?”
“Hey, you can’t say that.” The one who had waved at him spoke. This Alpha was called Leo and was also Orr’s roommate. “I saw the people who were punished with you come back half an hour ago. Why are you only here now?”
“Extra training.”
Orr gave the brief reply. Watching Leo act concerned about him while his eyes kept drifting in one direction, Orr rapped his knuckles against the table.
“…Have you developed a lazy eye?”
“What?!”
Leo shouted. Someone else from their company could not stand it anymore, shoved Leo aside with one hand, and threw an arm around Orr’s shoulders.
“Come on! Quit pretending with him!” The Alpha gestured in the direction Leo had been looking. “Look over there! Ah, ah! Two whole tables of Omegas!”
He waggled his brows suggestively at Orr. “Well? Don’t you feel like you’ve suddenly got strength again just knowing that?”
The two tables of Omegas were surrounded so completely by Alphas eating nearby that they could not actually be seen. Omegas did not have to undergo military training. They began their formal classes directly and only had basic physical training each day. This was their ordinary lunch break after morning classes.
The wolf howls outside the neighboring dormitory had erupted several times the previous day, clearly too much noise to have been caused by a single Omega. That morning, word had spread that the Omega dormitory building, empty for two years, had finally filled almost two entire floors. If all the Omegas in the school were put together, they could just barely make up one class.
Orr felt deeply gratified. He genuinely felt that the body exhausted by his anger at Faan had regained some strength. While eating, he used his terminal to take a photograph in that direction. Not so much as a strand of Omega hair was actually visible, but he still added the picture to a private favorites folder.
Alongside all the premium hot-blooded novels he had reread countless times.
