Gide, for his part, kept a close eye on her during combat practice.
“Any way you look at it, that weapon and style just don’t fit you,” he said. “You should switch to something else.”
“Can we even do that?”
“A few of the others keep spares. I’ll borrow some for you to try.”
Rita tested every weapon he managed to round up until, at long last, the magic gun caught her grip. Armed with nothing more than the barest grasp of marksmanship, she stepped into the training chamber and felled her very first demonic beast.
The sheer exhilaration of that victory remained burned into her memory. Right afterward, she went to Pascal and asked to change her weapon. He gave her a faintly curious look, as if regarding some curious anomaly, but handed over a firearm nonetheless. From that night on, the nocturnal indoctrination shifted, flooding her sleeping mind with the principles of marksmanship instead.
Once she held a gun, the girl who had ranked as the class's sorriest failure rose swiftly toward the top. Gide flourished as well; shifting his blade into his left hand yielded results far beyond anything he had managed before.
Two years slipped by. Then one day, Pascal delivered an announcement.
“The hour has come for your graduation trial.”
He marched the young trainees out to a desolate ruin, a sunken basin ringed by sheer stone cliffs.
“In the center grows a patch of blue mushrooms,” he told them. “Bring one back. The first five across the threshold shall graduate.”
Only long afterward did Rita learn that the ruins lay beyond the Final Defense Line, in territory where no ordinary human could draw breath. The air hung thick with corrupted mana, virulent enough to rot unprotected lungs. Only those bound by an Oath and conditioned to channel Od had any hope of enduring it.
The other children knew precisely how to keep the poison at bay; the technique had been hammered into their heads during their slumber. Rita alone was left defenseless. For reasons unknown, the lesson had never been planted in her mind.
The instant she crossed into the ruins, the corruption tore into her. Convulsing, she collapsed in a shadowed hollow, driven purely by the instinct to hide before any wandering beasts caught her scent.
It was Gide who tracked her down. When she forced her head up through the haze of agony, she found him kneeling in front of her, his expression drawn tight with dread.
“Rita, pool your Od into your palms,” he urged. “Press them over your nose and mouth. Yes, just like that… hold it steady. Once your body adapts, you can lower them.”
With his guidance, she managed to weather the ambient blight. Still breathless, she managed to croak out a question.
“Only five get to pass… Aren’t I making you fall behind?”
“So what if you are? Failing this test won’t kill me.”
While their classmates had sprinted ahead toward the prize, Rita and Gide arrived late at the central clearing. Waiting there in the shadows was the predatory pack that had butchered every other trainee—the beasts tasked with guarding the blue mushrooms.
A savage struggle ensued. Soaked in blood and pushed to the brink of collapse, the two barely managed to break free and retreat, each clutching a single mushroom.
When they dragged themselves out of the ruins, Pascal stood waiting. He showed not the slightest surprise at Gide’s survival. Nor did the total absence of the other trainees draw so much as a blink.
Yet when his gaze drifted toward Rita, something flickered across his face—a brief, genuine astonishment. After a heavy pause, his voice broke the quiet.
“Both of you have graduated.”
Dispatching them straight to the Final Defense Line, he left them with a final commandment to carve into their souls:
“Never fear your end. For in your death lies the seed of hope.”
“Hold these words close. One day, they shall be your salvation.”
She was twelve.
Having survived their grueling upbringing, Rita and Gide were posted as fresh recruits along the front. For the first time, their world extended beyond Pascal and their fellow pupils, throwing them headlong into a squad of hardened strangers.
“They're sticking Pascal’s little whelps in our unit?”
“Aren’t those freaks basically monsters wearing human hide?”
Suspicion and frost hung over every introduction. Yet having each other made the hostility bearable. Every evening after mess, right before lights out, Rita and Gide would sit side by side and whisper late into the night.
“They're on guard around us, but they aren't wicked people,” Rita observed. “Talk to them a little, and you'll see. They don’t truly hate us; they just don’t have the faintest idea what to make of the two of us.”
Bit by bit, Rita bridged the gap with the soldiers. Seasoned adults though they were, they gradually ceased viewing her as one of Pascal’s twisted experiments and began treating her like a normal child. Gide, meanwhile, wasted no time winning over the squad leader.
“Pascal never pried or sat in judgment of our choices,” Gide noted. “This squad leader is a very different beast.”
Quick to read a room, Gide handled every shifting mood with ease. He took on menial errands, stayed two steps ahead of every order, and proved his worth with a blade. Before long, the squad leader regarded him as indispensable—even if the officer himself was greedy to a fault and painfully out of his depth.
When Rita and Gide earned official citations from command for their battlefield exploits, the leader immediately lobbied for more of Pascal’s disciples. Soon enough, two fresh faces were assigned to the unit.
One was a frontline brawler. The other belonged to a branch Rita and Gide had never encountered before: a rear-line Pascal. She was a bespectacled girl with cropped hair, a technician-mage named Ollie Pascal.
“Are you seriously trusting your life to this piece of scrap? Give it here.”
Ollie took Rita’s magic gun, stripped it down, tuned the mechanism, and completely rebuilt its internals. Through that shared craft, the two bonded quickly. Ollie was the one who revealed that Pascal didn’t churn out only foot soldiers; his facilities molded mages, medics, and logistical specialists just as ruthlessly.
The other recruit was Max, a boy two years their senior who possessed frighteningly sharp reflexes. Rita and Gide warmed to him in no time. From Max, they discovered the sheer number of training compounds Pascal operated—and learned that the total massacre of their own cohort had been anything but ordinary.
“Not a single soul died in my class,” Max told them. “We all graduated together. That’s how it normally works. Surviving alone out of your whole batch… that must have been absolute hell.”
Max became an easy, loyal companion. But their commander’s greed only deepened. Hungry for glory and promotion, he drove the squad into reckless, high-risk sorties.
And that reckless ambition brought them straight into the path of an unrecorded Named beast.
She was fourteen.
Rita came face-to-face with a Mimic. Every soldier who marched into that engagement was butchered that day, including Max Pascal. It was the most horrific bloodbath she had ever witnessed. Rita alone crawled back from the carnage.
When Ollie, waiting back at the camp, and Gide, newly returned from a separate deployment, laid eyes on her, they were paralyzed with horror.
Having watched her comrade torn apart before her eyes only to escape by the thinnest thread, Rita clung to sanity by a fingernail. That she had walked back under her own power was nothing short of miraculous.
Worse still, she had triggered the backlash of her Oath. She had laid eyes on the Mimic and failed to put it down, which meant the geas judged her in breach of its inviolable decree: slay every demonic beast that crosses your sight. In return, her own Od turned violently upon her.
Her energy turned rogue, battering her body from the inside out. Until the penalty ran its course, she could not draw upon so much as a spark of power. Fever and violent tremors racked her through the days and nights. Much of that time vanished into a blur, leaving only the memory of Ollie and Gide taking turns sitting beside her bed.
Eventually her flesh mended and the spiritual retribution passed, but the mental scars remained raw. She spent her days staring blankly out from the infirmary cot, hollowed out. The squad leader stopped by once, peered down at her as if appraising a piece of shattered equipment, and walked away without a word.
Not long after that brief visit, Ollie came bursting into the quarters one evening, white as a sheet.
“Gide attacked the captain! He’s completely lost it—you have to come!”
Rita stared, stunned. Gide, who had always been so endlessly careful and calculated his every move? Why would he ever do something so reckless?
Ollie hesitated, her voice trembling to a whisper.
“I think… it’s because of you. That bastard was talking about having you discarded…”
Rita bolted toward the command tent, only to freeze dead at the threshold.
The commander was driving an iron awl straight into Gide’s right eye. Blood poured down the boy’s cheek as he clutched his ruined face, sobbing in agony. The man was already raising the spike again, aiming directly for the left.
She had to stop him. She had to keep Gide alive. No other thought existed.
Rita drew her gun. For the first time, she pulled the trigger on a human being. She had never aimed to kill—only to make him stop.
“Monsters! The Pascal brats are butchering us!”
With his dying gasp, the commander shrieked into the night and slammed his hand onto an emergency detonator. The outpost rocked on its foundations.
Footsteps thundered as squad members rushed the command post. Their loyalty had always belonged to the captain, not Pascal’s orphans. Unprincipled as the commander was, he had treated his men like fellow human beings, even if he treated the children like disposable tools. The moment their eyes took in the bloody scene, comrades who had once smiled and shared bread with Rita and Gide raised their weapons.
Rifles roared. Explosives tore through the dark, turning the encampment into an inferno. Bleeding and battered, Rita and Gide scrambled through the flames, desperate for an escape route. Out of the smoke, Ollie came running.
“Don't leave me behind!”
And so the three of them vanished together into the night.
In the days that followed, Ollie dressed their torn flesh, watching over them through feverish fits and trembling exhaustion. Rita never pressed Gide on why he had crossed the commander, and Gide never asked Rita why she had fired that shot.
There was no need for words. They already understood. Each had thrown their life away to protect the other.
Cut off from command and branded deserters, the three wandered the desolate expanse beyond the Final Defense Line, scavenging for scraps of food and medicine. They pulled stragglers from danger only to have their supplies stolen in the dead of night. They clashed with scavengers, forced to kill whenever survival gave them no choice.
Until the day they crossed paths with an outfit that called itself Fair.
“You kids know how to handle yourselves. You’re Pascal stock, aren’t you? If you’re without a home, sign on with us. Don’t fret, we’ve already got plenty of your kind in our ranks.”
“Put down your commander and ran, did you? Must’ve been a total bastard. Doesn’t matter to us. We couldn't care less about your history—only whether you can fight.”
She was fifteen when she first learned of the autonomous squads: irregular outfits answering to the Final Defense Line, yet living and bleeding strictly as mercenaries.