Reborn as a Fantasy General (Army-Building Isekai)

Chapter 1

"We must love one another or die"

-W.H Auden

"All wars are unnecessary. Human unity has only ever been accomplished through peace."

Marcus listened, trying his best not to grind his teeth into a fine paste.

"My opponent today is under the impression that all of us in this room who hold this belief do so due to naivety. But if love of my fellow human being makes me naïve, then I'm guilty as charged. May the brave warriors who venerate humanity's barbaric past like Mr Graham here string me up before you."

A series of chuckles came from the student body. Marcus was about ready to split his pen in half. He'd promised himself he'd take notes – that he'd focus on fact-based debate.

"Don't let yourself get baited!" Maria had told him when he groggily rose from bed at 2am this morning to look over his speech for the seventeenth time. "If Steven starts off with ad-hominem attacks, don't rise to it. You hear me? You can be such a bloody hothead and that's not the look you want."

Now here he sat in the lecture hall, his hands practically shaking with rage, which of course the student photographers at the debate event would take a snapshot of and label as fear in tomorrow's campus paper.

Above the door to the lecture theatre hung an 'Exit' sign in blazing neon letters that proved to be distractingly tantalizing. And below this sign, hanging limply from the door, was plastered the name of the event he'd, in his infinite wisdom, decided it would be a good idea to speak at:

'The Morality of Warfare'

Recent tensions in the contested nation-state of Kosava had prompted heated discussion on the subject on campus, and the Head of the Centre for Military History had called on him to make a case that their faculty was still a legitimate one. Marcus had risen to the challenge like a rooster with the rising sun, and only afterwards had he realized exactly who is opponent would be.

"Of course, I don't mean to assert that my opponent today is nothing but a mouthpiece of ideologically-charged talking points. I think his track record speaks for itself."

Steven Barenz. Chairman of the Unification Office – as dystopian as that title sounded. He was a self-proclaimed crusader for justice, who had taken it upon himself to see that Marcus's faculty – indeed his entire subject itself – was deemed too dangerous to be taught to the bright young minds of this generation.

The Unification Office...Marcus was someone who strongly believed in the separation of church and state, but he generally turned a blind eye to new faiths popping up on Campus. After all, people were free to follow whatever moral code made sense to them. This one though - the church of Unification...they seemed to breed evangelical robots more than they molded people.

Unity was what they wanted, even if it meant erasing the past. And men like Marcus - military historians - were on the wrong side of the new history they were writing.

"Yes," Steven was saying, hands flying around like a preacher. "Marcus Graham has been a spokesperson for a department in this college that is quickly becoming a thing of the Dark Ages. Like the wars he so desperately clings to - hugging the image of its old, gung-ho heroes to his breast like a glorified John Wayne production - he is a relic. A fossil. But he cannot be fully blamed for his ignorance. Our nation, after all, was built on the very same ignorance he demonstrates today."

Don't get baited, don't get baited....don't let yourself lose control, Marcus. He had known Barenz to be an opponent who could whip up a crowd with controversial statements. He was a showman. And, Marcus hated to admit, he was good at it.