It wasn’t till much later that it dawned on him that he was no longer the wimpy nerd he’d been at school. Well, he was still a nerd, and, to be honest, he was still fairly wimpy, but his magic meant that he wasn’t someone you could mess with anymore. The strange thing was that he felt no need to show off to any of these bigger, stronger guys, and he resolved that unless he was directly threatened, he’d keep his magic to himself as much as possible. At least during training. He was enough of a loner already that there was no need to give all his fellow trainees further ammunition to set him apart from everybody else.

Chapter 5

Basic training

The men from the third company were proven to be correct. The new recruits spent their first full day being outfitted with uniforms and equipment in the morning, and after lunch, they were given a tour of the base where all the important buildings were pointed out to them and the location of which they were supposed to remember thereafter. It was a pretty easy start to boot camp. It turned out it was the easiest day they would have for the next two months.

Their platoon consisted of a Sergeant, three Corporals, three Lance Corporals, and eighteen maggots, of which he was one. A real platoon would also have a Signaller and a Combat Medic with a Lieutenant being in command of the whole force, but they didn’t need the three extras for training purposes. The Sergeant was perfectly capable of training the whole platoon himself. Sergeants had always been the backbone of any army, something that Sergeant Hunt made a point of telling them several times as they were shown how to make their beds and pack their lockers, at least three times over for each of them

They were roused out of bed while it was still dark, given ten minutes to do their ablutions, and then get dressed before being led out to the parade ground and taken through a series of calisthenics as a warmup. They were then allowed to have breakfast before being put through marching practice, more marching practice, and even more marching practice. After a light lunch, they were taken to the shooting range and introduced to the AX-3, the main rifle used by the Ostrayan army. In the second session, they were each allowed to shoot off three rounds, whoopty, do! This was followed by basic hand-to-hand combat training and clambering over obstacle courses.

The second day of training was more of the same except that they were introduced to the Fritz handgun, which was the weapon used by officers and specialist troops. They were allowed to fire five rounds from the pistol, woo hoo. They also got to do a five-kilometer jog in full kit, followed by a five-kilometer walk back to the base. The third training day was the same as the first, and so it went for two weeks with no days off. At the end of their first two weeks of training, they got to do a twenty-kilometer route march, which at least made for something different. The route march was followed by their first day off, and most of them simply sat in the barracks and relaxed.