The ride to the Hazard Clearance facility felt less like a military transport and more like a final journey. Jack sat in the back of the rumbling, windowless truck, the air thick with the smell of sweat and silent dread. He wasn't surrounded by recruits. He was surrounded by cargo. The other members of the newly formed Unit 17 were a collection of pale, nervous faces, the bottom-ranked dregs of the orphanage's latest draft. Some had bandages still visible from the assessment raid, a grim reminder of their proven incompetence.
Jack studied his new squadmates with the detached interest of a rancher inspecting a new shipment of livestock. He wasn't meeting teammates. He was cataloging future tenant flow. There was a trembling boy with an F-rank "Glow" talent, his eyes wide with a desperate, pathetic hope. There was a bitter girl with [Minor Toughness] who muttered constantly about being "thrown away." And there were two others, a boy and a girl, who were already silent and hardened, their faces blank masks of resignation. They had already accepted their fate. They were the ones who would break first.
He leaned toward the boy with the Glow talent, projecting a mask of shared despair. "We just need to stick together," he whispered, his voice laced with practiced fear. "Maybe they'll give us something easy, like Slimes. We can handle that, right?" The boy nodded eagerly, clinging to the false hope like a drowning man to a splinter of wood. The lie cemented Jack's position. He wasn't a threat. He was just another victim, just one of them.
The truck shuttered to a halt, and the rear door opened with a groan of rusted metal. The facility was even worse than Jack had imagined. It was a grim, half-abandoned military base on the city's polluted outskirts. The barracks were rows of rusted bunks, the equipment in the training yard was broken, and the Bureau guards who patrolled the perimeter didn't even bother to hide their contempt. This wasn't a posting. It was a holding pen.
A grizzled, one-eyed proctor who introduced himself as Sergeant Vale herded them into a briefing room. "Welcome to Hazard Clearance," he growled, his voice like gravel. "Your lives as individuals are over. You are Unit 17. Your job is to be the city's garbage disposal. You will clean sewers, you will burn nests, and you will contain minor breaches. You are the first wave, the expendable line. Your job is to die thinning out the numbers so that more valuable assets don't have to. Understood?"
No one answered. The truth was too brutal. Sergeant Vale just sneered. "Your first assignment is tomorrow at 0500. A sewer infestation sweep in the southern industrial sector. Primary targets are Giant Rats and Corrosive Slimes. Dismissed."
Jack felt a strange sense of calm. The state's cruelty was a known variable. It could be predicted, and therefore, it could be exploited. He was relieved that Proctor Sarah was not here. Her absence was a reprieve, a window of opportunity to operate without her watchful, analytical gaze. But he knew her eyes would return.
The final insult came during equipment distribution. While proper guilds gave their members new, well-maintained gear, Unit 17 was led to a rusted shipping container. Inside was a pile of dented armor, chipped swords, and frayed leather jerkins. It was the garbage of other, better guilds. The bitter girl held up a shield with a crack running through it. "They expect us to fight with this?" she spat.
To the others, it was the ultimate sign of their worthlessness. A cruel joke.
To Jack, it was simply efficiency. Why waste good equipment on assets designed to be disposable? The government wasn't being cruel. It was being logical. And in doing so, it was unknowingly creating the perfect, desperate, and poorly-equipped tenants for his own private enterprise.
That night, in the quiet of the decaying barracks, Jack closed his eyes and slipped into the cool, clean interface of his dungeon. He had work to do. He saw the empty schematic, the dormant monster icons, and the population counter, still at zero. But as he focused, a new, orange alert pulsed at the edge of his vision, a predictive analysis from his talent.
[System Notice: Tenant Supply Surge Predicted. Unit 17 Deployment Imminent.]
The System itself was telling him what he already knew. The farm was about to experience exponential growth.
He lay awake in the darkness, the sounds of the other orphans' fearful whispers and quiet sobs filling the air. He ignored them. He was running a simulation in his mind, rehearsing the words he would use, the seeds of rumor he would plant after their first disastrous mission. He would tell them of a secret dungeon, a place with better loot, a place that was their only real chance. He was already planning the harvest.
Would he bleed them slowly, one or two at a time, to keep the unit operational for as long as possible? Or would he let the first official mission thin their numbers, then lure the traumatized, desperate survivors into his culvert for a final, bountiful slaughter? The question was not one of morality. It was a question of logistics.