Stab, block and stab again. COWARD! COWARD! Hard shields left and top. Force fields behind them. Should I use the sword? No, need to master this kit. Block, block, stab. Finally, one down!

  It was his first-ever kill. His partisan worked like a wonder and the last creature charging him head on impaled itself on it. The wings just under the spearhead prevented it from sliding all the way up his shaft. He flicked his weapon and cast cleaning on it, idiotically clean. The carcass came right off.

  Behind him, company members dragged the last of the AaFs into the relative safety of the camp.

  “Nanami, we closing up?”

  “Keep blocking their way! I’ll help.”

  A set of shields to his right should funnel the monsters right into one of the killing zones if he was attacked from that direction.

  Another one charged at him before he could get his partisan ready. Hard shield front, but this time he angled it. The monster bounced right into the ground. Force field feet. He caught it in brittle magic goo and went to work with his weapon. It stabbed right through the goo. Two thrusts and the creature stopped moving. Shit, shield’s not moving around my arm. Slinging a flat shield seemed to cause a problem.

  Something larger came from a distance, and Ioha released the spinning disc he kept prepared above his head. It arced away just as beautifully as that day on the training field. This time he didn’t slice a dummy in half.

  “You OK?”

  “Fine. My left, clean my shield!”

  “What? And are you supposed to give orders to me?”

  Shit! Nanami. Hard shield left and top. COWARD! Need a funnel. Wait, wait — now! Stab. Another small monster killed itself on his partisan. Its partner reached his shield and he blocked it upward and left until he squeezed it between physical and magic shield. Nanami cleaned it away with two economic thrusts.

  There were another four or five attacks, but by then Louise was at his side together with the entire party, and the creatures only lasted for seconds.

  He took a step back and released his shields. They could become traps for them all in the dark if he wasn’t careful. Good! Without the battle standard as well. It wasn’t worth the risk deploying it for something that looked like a bleed rather than a gash.

  He celebrated his innovation with a little strutting. Pinning things with shields and goo was absolutely golden. With that tactic, even he could score kills. It must have been the right thing to do because his display flickered twice. Opening it he saw two very welcome new points, one for his hard shield and one for the goo. It had been quite some time since he last increased them. The display had blinked a few times during the fight as well, and it looked like all of it went into his spear ability. Partisan was a kind of spear, after all, and he guessed he’d raise a separate disarming ability when that day came. But shield definitely isn’t moving the way I want when I need to go two-handed.

  A hard slap on his back pulled him away from his self congratulations. “Good work. I’ll think about you joining the primary later.” Nanami looked at him. Her smile was friendly. “I like your eyes better now.”

  “Thanks!” Ioha looked inside their camp. “What about them?”

  She followed his glance with open distaste in her face. “Let them sleep for now. And we’ll need more guards as well. Damn!”

  Eighteen humiliated idiots they had just rescued. Yes, guards could come in handy even though Ioha found it hard to believe the fumbling morons meant them any harm. They were the Black Flaming Dragon guild, after all. Very heroic. Two of them even tried to join in the defence before they were forced to the ground by a few members of Nanami’s company.

  He scratched his chin. Next time in Isekai he’d get something that passed for a razor in this world. Maybe even an actual razor. Doh! This was where people made a living from crafting stuff that was good at cutting things. He’d have to pump up another one of his outdoors abilities, one that he suspected wasn’t an outdoors ability to begin with. Damn, I need to regroup my abilities. OK, not tonight. He still needed to work on that sharpening ability unless he wanted to bankrupt himself on razor blades.

  He tapped Nanami’s shoulder. “I could package them in my magic goo. Untrained people get stuck for the night.”

  She gave him a strange but quizzical look. “No, Ioha, no packaging.” Then she snorted. “You must have done some seriously bad shit earlier.”

  He shrugged. “Good shit only.” Screwing Anthony up was good shit. Ioha was certain of it. He knew his shit. At least when it came to Anthony.

  With a grin, he returned to guard duty. Tonight had been anything but boring. One extra sleeping shift during the morning he guessed since the attack and unplanned accommodation of a small company had played merry hell with their sleeping. He looked back. They slept, or at least tried to sleep, in the open over half of them. The barn took thirty, so one party went inside.

  Ioha wasn’t entirely clear why they were let inside, but barns were apparently a thing in a place that didn’t use tents.

  Nothing more happened during his shift. Whatever roamed their surroundings was probably attracted to the lanterns earlier. When he went to the barn after a man took over his position, Ioha wondered about the costs for society. Sure, materials collected sold well but keeping a large professional military must put a huge strain on the local economy. Either that or the materials had become an integral part of that very economy with Isekai the exception that simply didn’t understand.

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  Sleep didn’t come easy. He still brimmed with adrenaline, but eventually, he fell into some kind of fretful rest filled with strange dreams.

  When he woke up two parties had already left for patrol and of the remaining two one kept busy with making food, repairing their defences after the night, moving fireplaces and preparing the training field. The square layout with a barn at one side was a Wergaist standard or rather federation standard. It made sense with a large enclosed space. At school, two sides were fenced off, but out here ramparts filled that function. Building a proper gate took too long, so their wagons served as gates on the side facing away from the barn.

  He ate and looked at the three groups of guests, which made him think of an old Swedish ad for coffee, but that reference was probably too obscure for anyone but Louise. To Ioha’s surprise, their guests spoke Japanese with each other. A one-year primer should have changed that, especially since the language training was sped up with magic in a way that made you use the first language you learned almost like a native.

  Today started as a peaceful morning with the smell of wrongness pushed into the background. The patrols would likely amount to nothing or close to nothing. Almost peaceful. Nanami and her vice captain sat speaking with Hiro, the guildmaster of the Black Flaming Dragon guild. He sat representing his company, or guild as he preferred to call it, alone. Ioha wondered if the moron even had the sense to appoint a second in command.

  What’s the topic? Ioha focused his hearing in their direction. He couldn’t block out sound, but he could pick a general direction. With a grin, he wished blocking out had worked. He’d spend a lot more time sleeping in his old room then. Or maybe not.

  “You’re saying they allowed you to take a subjugation mission?” Nanami asked Hiro.

  “Yes,” Hiro answered. “We have good equipment and three parties should be enough.”

  “E-rank all?”

  “Yes, but with so many of us, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Ioha,” Nanami called, “stop eavesdropping and get over here!”

  He got on his feet and sauntered over. “Yes?”

  “Your subjugation mission earlier this spring, how many were you?”

  She must have meant the seniors. “Around two-hundred.”

  “Rank?”

  “We were students,” he protested. “We don’t have formal ranks.”

  “If you had to guess.”

  It was a question worth answering. “If you disregard the lack of experience, mostly D-rank. Maybe two dozen C-ranks.” Disregard experience, however, wasn’t something you did. The two deaths and numerous temporary casualties were probably because of that lack. School was school. They studied to survive getting the experience later. He looked at Hiro. Well, someone apparently handed out badges at random.

  “See. That’s a lot of manpower, and they still had casualties.”

  “People-power,” Hiro protested.

  “Whatever. Historical context. Magic used to be rarer here. Manpower made more sense then, just like back on Earth when you needed muscles to get work done.”

  So she was an academic after all, or at least she had an interest in economic history.

  Besides, looking at Hiro’s company, it wasn’t like he tried to avoid gender stereotypes himself. The girls wore armour best described by what was not there. And that steel bra had to hurt. The girl received a blanket to get through the night, so Ioha didn’t know what was down there, but the fantasy barbarian style gave him a good idea. Her back was chafed from wearing a large scabbard bouncing directly against her skin. Nanami’s medic spat and swore and applied salve.

  “Where’s your planned camp?”

  “A couple of hours west of here,” Hiro said.

  Ioha gave it a thought. Marching in darkness took longer than you expected. Say just shy of half a day west, then. One day further ahead? That was deep inside the zone, dangerously so. Ioha, vice captain and Nanami exchanged glances.

  “Guys, who gave you the mission?” The look Nanami gave her vice captain was worried.

  “The quest was in the D-rank section.”

  So adventurers guild headquarters after all.

  “I apologise for asking, but are you provisional or permanent E-ranks.”

  Ioha bit down on his piece of jerky. He preferred his porridge without salt and downed his bowl before Nanami called him over. This should be interesting.

  “Provisional. The receptionist said there were so many of us that D-rank quests were the best if we wanted to pass the rank test in two weeks.”

  Now that was odd. From the impression he got when he registered, D-rank missions were allowed, but someone should have noticed that the staging point for this group of clowns was deep enough inside the zone to reclassify the mission from D to C, and he had explicitly been told to stay away from C-ranks. Or was it just sheer dumb luck?

  “So you just blithely walked right over to the D-rank section and pulled this as your very first mission?” Nanami’s question was accompanied by a disapproving glare at Ioha. Well, he deserved that, but he at least could blame Heimdall.

  Hiro gave her a nonplussed look. “What?”

  “What do you mean what?”

  “The receptionist said the adventurers guild picks the missions for provisional adventurers. She walked us to the section and gave us this one.”

  “What?”

  The verbal ping pong would have been amusing but for the severity of the situation. Someone deliberately sent the kids out to die? Who? Why?

  “I said that…”

  “I heard that. Let me get this straight. The receptionist chose your mission?” Once again, Nanami exchanged glances with her vice captain. He shook his head and looked at Hiro.

  “Yes, she said it was routine.”

  “Damn!” She turned to Ioha. “Sorry, kid, but I’m removing both trailing parties. You said you were from Spellsword Academy, right?”

  Something was up. “Yes.”

  “OK, the new party stays here. I’ll rotate the other three. Aki, get the leaders over here!” Nanami waited for her vice captain to rise. “And you,” she stabbed an index finger at Ioha, “will help me get the kids in shape.”

  Ioha wanted to protest. Training a bunch of anime nerds would slow down his progress, but he could see where she came from. “OK?”

  “I’ll double your pay. From now on, you’re an instructor. I’ve heard good things about the academy. Also, I want you to learn from watching them. I never want to see the old eyes of yours again.”