Wizard: Building a Golem Legion From Zero

Chapter 445: Chapter 433: National Selection

A "Steel Knights Conscription Order," personally signed by the King, was broadcast to every city and corner of the realm through the one thousand three hundred and twenty Spirit Communication Towers spread across the Aiselan Kingdom.

"...Hereby, it is declared that to safeguard the future of Aiselan, the Kingdom shall establish the ’Steel Knights.’ All subjects of our Kingdom, regardless of origin, status, or gender, may apply."

"The sole criteria—Spirit Core frequency and mental fortitude."

"The blacksmiths, miners, fishermen, and farmers of Aiselan—any one of you has the chance to pilot a war Mecha and fight the Heart Eaters."

"The fate of Aiselan will no longer be decided by a few high-level Spirit Mages. Every Aiselan can..."

The broadcast’s voice blared from newly installed loudspeakers in plazas everywhere, striking the people like a bolt of lightning into a calm lake.

Within two hours, channel congestion at the Spirit Communication Towers in every province soared to forty times the normal rate. Data monitored by Jarvis through the Allen Network showed that nationwide Spirit Communication call volume had broken all-time records since the network’s inception.

The entire Aiselan Kingdom was in an uproar.

In blacksmith shops, grease-stained apprentices dropped their hammers; deep in the mines, coal-covered miners cast aside their pickaxes; at the port docks, dark-skinned sailors let go of their ropes.

They charged out of workshops, ran from the mines, and flooded the streets, swarming toward recruitment centers like a mad tide.

Within a single day, the number of applicants surpassed one hundred and twenty thousand.

A temporary base had appeared in the western suburbs of Golden Stone City.

The area was originally an abandoned quarry. Half a month ago, it had been leveled by the engineering corps, paved over with large swaths of hardened ground, and fitted with over a dozen temporary steel-frame hangars.

In the center of the site, the eighteen-meter-tall "Zaku" prototype stood silently. Its Thermic Axe and Tower Shield rested on a nearby rack, resembling a silent iron tower under the gray winter sky.

Several thousand Zaku candidates who had passed the initial screening were divided into companies of one hundred and arranged in formation at the prototype’s feet.

At the front of the formation stood a temporary, three-meter-high platform, with a young man standing on it.

Peram.

A Level 3 Spirit Mage, a former Royal Knight, and now, the Chief Instructor for the Zaku-type program.

A mere Level 3 Spirit Mage, parachuted in to be the chief instructor—the top brass in the military had complained about it countless times in private.

Peram himself found it a bit absurd.

He stood on the platform, looking down at the sea of heads below, and cleared his throat.

"Everyone."

His voice, amplified by a Spiritual Energy device, carried across the entire training ground, still tinged with youthfulness and a slight tremor.

"Just half a month ago, I was standing in front of a Mecha."

"Back then, I had no idea what that thing was—" he said, pointing to the Zaku prototype behind him.

"But in the end, I pushed the control stick all the way forward and made it move."

"When I got out, my legs were weak, and my hands were shaking."

He paused for a moment.

"And then I said something."

The crowd below fell silent.

"I said—" Peram took a deep breath, his face turning slightly red, "Mom, I’m piloting a Zaku."

Silence.

Then, starting from the back of the crowd, a stifled laugh burst out, followed by a second, then a third, until the entire training ground erupted in laughter.

Peram laughed along with them.

He waited for the laughter to gradually subside, then his tone suddenly grew serious.

"But I’m not lying to you. Even a Level 5 Spirit Mage would have a hard time taking a direct hit from that axe. And I’m only a Level 3."

"Lord Weisren once said, ’Any able-bodied Aiselan of sound mind can learn to pilot it with three months of training.’"

"He wasn’t lying."

Peram struck his chest with his right fist, and his armor rang with a sharp metallic clang.

"So don’t be afraid. You can do this."

The laughter on the training ground completely vanished, replaced by something indescribable—something visible on the coarse faces of the miners, on the swollen hands of the blacksmiths, and in the bright, dark eyes of a fisherman’s daughter.

Peram turned and looked at the silent Steel Giant behind him.

"Let’s begin."

With the motivational speech over, it was time for the hellish training to begin.

The initial Spirit Core frequency screening was only the first hurdle.

Those who passed were sent into five high-speed centrifuges. These were standard testing devices built according to the blueprints, designed to withstand progressively increasing G-forces and simulate the stress a cockpit puts on the human body during high-speed maneuvers.

The passing standard was to endure four times their own body weight—4 Gs—for a continuous ninety seconds.

At the end of the first day of testing, the results were abysmal.

Four thousand one hundred people threw up within ten seconds, and one thousand nine hundred passed out within sixty. In the end, only four hundred and three walked out on their own two feet.

A pass rate of five point five percent.

But the most glaring part of the elimination list wasn’t the numbers, but the long strings of names bearing family crests.

The pampered children of the nobility, despite possessing prestigious Spirit Art bloodlines, trembled, vomited, and fainted one after another inside the centrifuges.

In contrast, it was the miners, who spent years enduring the fear of cave-ins deep underground; the blacksmiths, who withstood high temperatures and noise day after day before their forges; and the sailors, who battled monstrous waves in storms... They were the ones who displayed astonishing mental fortitude.

Batch after batch, they crawled out of the centrifuges, gritting their teeth.

Their Spirit Cores may have been weak, but their will was as strong as steel.

The pilot slots for the Zaku-type were quickly filled, and the first group of twenty pilots began basic training.

At William’s request, Allen even built simulator cockpits to help the pilots get up to speed quickly.

The screening for the Unicorn Gundam pilots was even more difficult, with far stricter requirements.

As the only Mecha capable of flight, its pilots needed to complete subjects such as target tracking and locking in a high-speed environment, high-speed maneuver and attitude control, and combat simulations involving switching between three different backpack modules.

This demanded pilots with extraordinary nerve-response speeds. In the simulator tests, control latency had to be under 0.3 seconds.

Although there was no hard cutoff, only three people ultimately passed, all of whom were Spirit Mages of Level 3 or higher.

To everyone’s shock, when Chief Instructor Peram personally participated in a demonstration, he perfectly completed all test items with a latency of just 0.28 seconds. His performance surpassed even those of the seven geniuses.

He was not only the best instructor but also became the primary backup pilot for the "Unicorn."

As for the heavier Mecha, they followed a different selection path.

The forty-five-meter-tall "Gale Red" required two pilots with similar Spirit Core frequencies to operate in synergy.

Jarvis directly identified a pair of candidates from the military’s Spirit Core database—two middle-aged officers from the same border outpost who had been partners for seven years.

The difference in their Spirit Core frequencies was only 4.2%.

After entering the simulator, the old comrades were clumsy and uncoordinated at first. The synchronization of the Mecha’s three arms was frequently flawed, and they even had one of its mechanical arms torn off by an elite Heart Eater in a simulated battle.

But during their seventh test, in the middle of an extreme evasive maneuver, the two seemed to suddenly find their rhythm. Their synchronization rate instantly soared to 81%, and with all three arms striking as one, they tore the simulated enemy to shreds.

The "Eureka Striker" required three pilots, and the difficulty of finding a compatible trio increased exponentially.

Jarvis ran permutations on the entire national database of registered Spirit Mages, ultimately shortlisting only eleven trios that met the "triangular stability" condition.

After six brutal rounds of simulator eliminations, the final victors were the most unlikely trio: a young student from the Royal Alchemy University who spouted nothing but theory; a taciturn female Spirit Mage of common birth; and a lackadaisical young noble who had been semi-abandoned by his family.

Their backgrounds were worlds apart, and during their initial sessions, they nearly came to blows inside the cockpit.

But in a desperate situation, they unleashed astonishing potential. During their third simulated synchronization test, they unexpectedly achieved a sync rate of 71%, surpassing the 65% passing threshold.

Pilots for the "Zaku," "Unicorn," "Gale Red," and "Eureka Striker" were successively put in place.

However, the cockpit of the most critical, ultimate trump card—the seventy-nine-meter-tall mountain of steel known as "Gipsy Danger"—remained empty.

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