Space crusaders

Chapter 2: Here we go!

Stan Levinsky was one of many newly recruited battle brothers. From what Stan had learned, the inhabitants of Earth were rather large and strong on the scale of their space cousins.

Yes, not only the beautiful big-titty elves of the Fey Republic, but even those nasty pigheads and even the snake-like weirdos were actually the genetic cousins of the Earth-folk.

Stan also learned that all these cousins, from so-called Mankind's Domain (which in turn was a loose collection of all these men-like races that recognized their mutual kinship), decided to name the inhabitants of Earth the Warmen.

Stan and all the other recruits accompanying him thought it was an awesome name! And apparently, the Warmaster himself thought so too!

So the Warmaster issued a decree that, at least in all official contacts with other races, the inhabitants of Earth should refer to themselves as Warmen.

After the Warmaster's message, both Stan and all his flatmates, probably his entire workplace, and certainly all the people he knew, volunteered. The local recruiting station opened the very next day. All the folk who had the day off stood in line; in the afternoon, those who had finished their shift joined in, and so on. Stan didn't go to work at all; in his mind, there was no other option than to become a space crusader!

Everyone who showed up was accepted, and even to Stan, it became clear that at this rate, the Earth would quickly depopulate. Stan once heard somewhere that there are less than a million people on the planet, and that's apparently not much.

"Heh, maybe a million people isn't much, but for a million PVP tokens, you can equip half a guild!" Stan thought, referring to the game he played.

During recruitment, Stan realized that the spaceships being built now were bigger than the apartment complex that housed his flat.

"You can fit there what we call cities on Earth today," someone told him during the recruitment process.

All the applicants passed the initial recruitment stage, which didn't mean that they all had to become space crusaders. Most conscripts will probably still be workfolk, but instead of on Earth, they will live and work on huge spaceships.

And it wasn't just the workfolk who volunteered; Stan also met many young eggheads. Stan had never met one in real life before, but he knew that in his MMO, such guys usually played wizards and other controllers, were quite good as range dps, and were the best possible healers.

The most amazing thing was that there were even a few girls in the queue, and one was quite close to Stan himself! This meant that every now and then one of the boys would comment that another boy was a creep because he either looked at the girl strangely, or for too long, or stood too close to her, and so on. At some point, someone also started talking to the girl herself, and she was obviously not interested, which again caused a whole argument about being a creep for harassing a girl. Stan lost the plot of it long before the first fist collided with the first face. The Guard folk present nearby quickly pacified the situation. Stan ended up with a broken nose but gained additional points in the recruitment!

"One step closer to becoming a space crusader!"

Stan underwent a lot more examinations that day, including genetic probing, but in the end, he was one of the few guys taken by train to the spaceport.

Once there, Stan was separated from people from his hometown, and, together with a group of several dozen boys and two girls, he was subjected to another phase of tests. This phase involved a lot of injections and pill-swallowing, during which Stan passed out.