Training And The Conditioning Implant

The words lower-class citizen and slave swirled around in my head until my confusion reached its breaking point. Panicking, I screamed for them to send me home and hurled insults at the aliens who had abducted me. Since I was shouting in Japanese, Sario apparently couldn’t understand a word.

Once I had exhausted myself from shouting and finally calmed down, I noticed that Sario was watching me as though he had seen this sort of thing countless times before.

“Can I really never go back?”

“No matter how much you cry and scream, you can’t go back, yesh. If you resist, they’ll kill you.”

At the mention of being killed, I swallowed nervously.

“Try touching the back of your neck. Then you’ll understand the reality of your situation.”

I reached behind my neck and felt around, discovering a lump where something had apparently been implanted beneath my skin. I looked at Sario. I had no idea how old this dog-man was. Was he older than me? Or younger?

“What is this?”

“It’s a conditioning implant, yesh. Whoever holds the controller can press a button to send excruciating pain throughout your entire body. In severe cases, it can even kill you.”

“Who has that controller?”

“The unit commander has it, yesh.”

Apparently, the unit commander was a goblin named Valbo, who commanded the mobile reconnaissance unit.

“Now then, let’s head to the training room, yesh.”

Sario led me to a training room in a section of the ship without artificial gravity. Since he called it a training room, I had expected to see rows of exercise machines, but instead, it was simply a long corridor.

Various obstacles, including poles and rings, had been arranged along the corridor.

“What a strange corridor.”

“Your training involves traveling back and forth along this corridor while avoiding the obstacles, yesh.”

It didn’t look particularly difficult.

“Just so you know, the corridor is in zero gravity, yesh. I think you’ll find it difficult until you get used to it.”

The moment I took a step forward, my body floated upward. It was just like what I had experienced in the storage room. At that moment, I remembered something I had heard about astronauts. Apparently, weightlessness affected the circulation of blood and other bodily fluids, causing facial swelling and nasal congestion. However, I wasn’t experiencing anything like that.

When I asked Sario about it, he explained that the Internal-Regulation Nanomachines I had been injected with were automatically adjusting my body. While we were talking, my head bumped against the ceiling.

“All right, training begins now, yesh.”

I placed my hands against the ceiling and pushed myself forward. The force propelled me ahead, but I couldn’t move in the direction I wanted. By the time I had flailed my way to the other end of the corridor and back, I was utterly exhausted. At fifty-five years old, my stamina ran out quickly, leaving me barely able to move.

“Huff, huff… This isn’t going well.”

“That’s because you’re moving without thinking, yesh. You need to act on the assumption that there’s no gravity.”

Easy for him to say. I was made to travel back and forth along the corridor about fifty times. By the time I finished, I was completely worn out, but I had somehow managed to grasp the basics of moving in zero gravity.

The training continued for several days until I could finally maneuver freely in weightlessness. During that time, I noticed something strange. My body seemed to be growing younger.

I asked Sario whether they had done something to my body.

“You were injected with three types of nanomachines: Antibody-Immunity Nanomachines, Language-Element Nanomachines, and Internal-Regulation Nanomachines, yesh.”

According to Sario, the Antibody-Immunity Nanomachines and Internal-Regulation Nanomachines were functioning together, slightly revitalizing my body. However, since I hadn’t undergone a life-extension treatment, I wasn’t actually getting younger.

Incidentally, the Antibody-Immunity Nanomachines enhanced the immune system, protecting the body against common bacteria and viruses. The Internal-Regulation Nanomachines, meanwhile, supported the body’s health in living environments different from those found on planetary surfaces, such as weightless conditions.

After completing my zero-gravity training, I began practicing hand-to-hand combat against a robot. The robot was shaped like an orc, a pig-man standing approximately two meters tall.

It moved with remarkable agility both in zero gravity and under normal gravity, attacking with its thick arms and legs. Its hands and feet were fitted with something resembling padded gloves and shin guards, supposedly to prevent its attacks from killing me.

Even so, its blows hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes and left bruises all over my body. When I stubbornly refused to continue, Commander Valbo, who had been monitoring our training, appeared.

He stood about 140 centimeters tall, with green skin, an ugly face, and long ears. He looked exactly like a goblin from a fantasy anime. However, his futuristic spacesuit made his appearance feel incredibly incongruous.

“Sario, what are you doing? Can’t you even train a new recruit?”

I recognized that raspy voice and peculiar accent.

“I’m terribly sorry.”

Sario, looking frightened, bowed repeatedly in apology. Seeing that, anger welled up inside me toward the little alien. I glared defiantly at the goblin.

“What’s with that look, you bastard? Apparently, you won’t understand your situation until you’ve experienced some pain.”

Baring his teeth, the goblin reached for something in his hand.

“Please wait! Banatsu still doesn’t understand anything, yesh. Please overlook it just this once!”

Sario pleaded desperately.

The goblin twisted his face into an irritated grimace and glared at me.

“Make sure you train him properly.”

With those words, the goblin left. When Sario saw the dissatisfied expression still on my face, he let out a sigh.

“You really don’t understand, do you? He was about to activate your conditioning implant, yesh. You might even have died.”

Sario told me that there had been cases where lower-class citizens had died of heart attacks after their conditioning implants were activated.

Apparently, he wasn’t lying or exaggerating. I absolutely couldn’t afford to defy that goblin. From then on, I carried out my training without complaining.

However, my fifty-five-year-old body quickly reached its limits, leaving me with terrible muscle soreness. For several days, I couldn’t even walk properly.

After a little over ten days, I finally became capable of completing the training exercises, but there was one thing I simply couldn’t tolerate. The food. It was disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. It came in tubes resembling toothpaste containers, had almost no flavor, and possessed a faintly sewage-like aftertaste.

“Sario, isn’t there anything else to eat besides this stuff?”

Sario and the other members of the Kuushi race apparently lived on the fourth planet of the Korado star system. Unfortunately, he had been captured by space pirates and sold here. He was only eighteen years old, still quite young. Despite the considerable age difference between us, we had managed to develop something resembling a friendship.

Incidentally, standard time was almost identical to Earth’s. A day was divided into twenty-four hours, and a year consisted of 360 days. It didn’t seem particularly different from what I was accustomed to.

“No. All lower-class citizens eat this, yesh.”

These tubes of preserved food were apparently known as complete meals throughout space. Several varieties existed, but they supposedly contained all the nutrients and calories required for survival by most species.

“The Kuushi race has spaceships of its own, right?”

“Of course we do, yesh. Why?”

“If you and the others were abducted, wouldn’t your people have sent out search parties to look for you?”

“They probably searched for us, but I think they withdrew once they learned we’d been captured by goblin space pirates.”

“Why? Even though their own people had been captured by pirates?”

“Because the goblin race established the Gonuvah Empire, which controls three star systems, yesh. If we oppose them, they’ll invade our star system and absorb us into their empire.”

Apparently, the Kuushi were classified as one of the weaker races among those active in space. Even so, I found it difficult to believe that goblins had established an interstellar empire.

“By the way, what exactly am I being trained for?”

Sario sighed.

“You’re only asking that now, yesh? Well, never mind. This supply ship is headed for the Gorgona star system, yesh. It’s a star system whose blockade was only recently lifted. We’re going to fight the orc race there.”

Apparently, the goblins and orcs had discovered almost simultaneously that the Gorgona star system had been opened up, and they were now fighting to claim it as their territory. Incidentally, the blockade had been imposed by one of the Celestial God races. What exactly were these Celestial Gods?

“And the orcs aren’t our only enemies. There are monsters in that star system too, yesh.”

“Monsters?”

The moment I heard the word monsters, my curiosity about the Celestial Gods was pushed to the back of my mind. Sario explained what monsters were. They were creatures inhabiting planetary surfaces and outer space, originally biological weapons known as Star-Calamity Dragons, or simply monsters, that had escaped into space and onto planets and subsequently gone feral.

“Biological weapons? Who the hell would create something like that?”

“The Aurebas Celestial Gods, yesh. They’re one of the three races that possess the most powerful forces and the most advanced civilizations in this region of space.”

There were three races collectively known as the Celestial Gods: the Aurebas Celestial Gods, who had developed biotechnology to its ultimate limits; the Maul Celestial Gods, who had pushed mechanical civilization to its absolute peak; and the Rikagel Celestial Gods, who had brought spiritual civilization to its highest possible level.

Compared to these Celestial Gods, even the goblin empire was apparently no more significant than a speck of snot. That raised the question of just how insignificant the Kuushi were if they feared such a pathetic empire. But when I thought about humanity, whose civilization was even less advanced than that of the Kuushi, I couldn’t help feeling depressed.

Incidentally, it wasn’t that goblins were inherently more intelligent than humans. The goblins were an ancient race that had made contact with a spacefaring civilization in the distant past. After receiving knowledge from that civilization, they had eventually ventured into space themselves.

Consequently, the goblins had no record of developing any significant inventions of their own. They simply copied technologies invented by other civilizations and incorporated them into their own society.

“There’s even a profession dedicated to hunting those monsters, yesh.”

Apparently, people in that profession were called Dragon-Slayer Rangers, and they were something like the adventurers who appeared in fantasy novels. They defeated monsters and recovered valuable materials from them, which sounded much the same to me. The difference was that they hunted not only monsters on planetary surfaces but also those inhabiting outer space.

“So, what sort of creatures are these monsters?”

“The weakest monster found in outer space is the Space Sea Angel, which can grow anywhere from one meter to over ten meters long, yesh.”

Hearing that, the blood drained from my face.