sorry people – late again

The other spell they learned was a lot more dangerous. It was called the slice spell, although some called it the slash spell. It was essentially a modification of the shield spell, but instead of erecting a wall of force in front of yourself, you extruded the force as a narrow plain horizontal to the ground. With practice, you could make it so thin that it would slice through almost anything. They spent considerable time learning to slice the tops off pieces of dowels stuck in the ground at varying distances. The best of them could manage to slice through a broom handle at five meters range. Andrew had no trouble matching the best of them but deliberately refrained from doing any better than the best of the others. He was pretty sure he could slice through a broom handle at ten meters, maybe more. He’d practiced slicing through thicker and tougher things, not really trying for a longer range. Hmmm. He would have to think about trying a few things the next he was on his own.

The next week was spent learning to expand their shields, both their physical shield and their mental shield. The idea was that they would be able to protect the people on either side of them by extending their physical shields or protect people from shrapnel and airborne debris by extending their shields over their heads. With the mental shield, the idea was that they would stop someone from being taken over by one of the enemy mentalists by extending their protection to the people around them. Almost everybody struggled with enlarging the area of their mental shield and making it extend to cover someone nearby. Meanwhile, Sanchez would be trying to take that person over and make them quack using the same spell he had tested them with the first day.

The physical shield they did better at, possibly because being able to color it and see it meant that they had a better idea of how far they were extending it and could push themselves to make the area covered larger. With both types of shields, Andrew had no trouble meeting the requirements and again deliberately didn’t show off when he could have. By the end of the week, they were all able to do the minimum requirement that Sanchez had set, much to his delight. It was probably the first time they had seen Sanchez actually pleased with them.

On the following Saturday, they were lined up after breakfast and inspected by the training camp commander. Major Collins congratulated them on completing their training and informed them that apart from Private Contos, they were all being transferred to the front. Contos was getting promoted to Corporal and would be replacing Sanchez as the main magical training officer.

They were then given two days’ leave with instructions to report on Tuesday morning for deployment orders. Suddenly the war got very real, at least for Andrew, knowing that he would be heading to the front on Tuesday morning. His grandmother’s journal had contained a note that she had increased one of her son’s power by inhibiting his transition through puberty and had listed the spell she had used. She had noted how much stronger that sone had been to the other sons she had had previously, and although it wasn’t a huge sample for comparative purposes, Andrew had used it on himself shortly after reading the entry. Up until now, he had not really had any idea if the spell was doing anything apart from making him not that interested in girls, but now he had to admit it made a good way of explaining how much stronger he was than the others. Actually, he wasn’t uninterested so much as there was no hormonal component when he found admiring a female.

Contos waved and trotted down to the target, where he began fiddling with the shield, trying to work it into the ground.

“You need to make your shield very thin!” Andrew yelled out.

Contos looked like he had heard Andrew and renewed his efforts to dig his shield into the ground. After another minute or so, he quite clearly nodded to himself. He braced and then gave a little signal, following which the sniper opened fire. Contos hardly moved, and the second shot had little effect as well. He returned to the group as happy as anything and gave the Sergeant a jaunty salute.

“Worked like a charm.” He grinned.

“Probably not a good idea to use in a built-up area.” Andrew grinned back.

This brought a general laugh from the others while the Sergeant shook his head, although he grinned a little as well.

“Okay. None of you are to practice that anywhere until I’ve had a chance to talk to Sanchez and develop a proper training drill. Understood?”

“Yes, Sergeant.” They all echoed, losing their happy grins.

Later that day, after training had finished, Sanchez pulled him aside and had him demonstrate digging his shields into the ground and angling his shield, neither of which the Corporal had run across before. The Corporal appeared to accept the story about the football practice and how Andrew had used that to come up with the idea in the first place, and Sanchez informed Andrew that he was to stay with the first group for the next day when they would begin to study offensive spells.

The second group would practice shields against each other under Sergeant Duncan’s supervision. Andrew wasn’t sure how effective that would be, but it wasn’t his place to comment. The offensive spells they were going to learn were fairly limited. The first was a push spell that could be done both in a broad manner, useful in a crowd situation, although the range was fairly limited, with the best of them being only able to push hard enough to move someone out to a couple of meters. The other spell was a needlepoint push spell that would punch a hole through something, including a person. As with the broad push, the range was limited, but the best of the others could project the needle push out to around five meters and could penetrate several centimeters of wood at a meter or so. Andrew was careful not to do any better than the others. Well, not much better. He didn’t mind them thinking that he was strong, but he made a point of keeping the differences limited so that they didn’t see him as being something really special. At least not at this stage of their training. All the practicing he’d done over the last two years was really paying off now.

They learned several spells that could only be classed as nuisance value spells, laughter, hiccups, and spin. They also learned to throw a bright light that would ruin someone’s night vision, and finally, they got onto the two seriously offensive spells. The first was learning how to throw a fireball, which was actually rather easy as it was really just an extension of gathering power together, something most magicians learned straight off as it was usually how they first learned they had power. The secret was to be able to concentrate the energy and then release it as you threw it so that it traveled like a ball at the target you had selected. They all managed to do a fireball that was at least strong enough to kill an individual man after a couple of days which pleased some of them no end, especially the ones that were struggling with the other mental activities they were learning.

“Sanchez has never said anything about anchoring the shields by digging them into the ground or even angling them for that matter.” The Sergeant said. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Andrew thought quickly and came up with what he hoped was a reasonable explanation.

“Football practice.” They all looked at him like he was some sort of idiot. “You know where you hold up one of those pads so the other guy can tackle you or push you, right?”

This at least got some response from the guys in the form of several nods.

“Well, I was thinking about the shields watching the others get shot, and I couldn’t help remembering how in football practice, the big guys would just push me out of the way or push me over and then stomp over the pad, with me underneath it.” This description got a few snickers from a couple of the guys. “So I thought that I’d try digging my shield into the ground when it was my turn to be a target. I’ve done that before but more as an experiment to see if I could do it rather than because I thought it would add to my ability to defend against someone shooting at me.”

And hopefully, they would believe him. He had read about the idea of digging the shields into the ground to defend against bullets from the journal his grandmother had left. He was going to have to be careful about what he did in the future and plan ahead, so he had reasoned arguments for doing whatever it was that he did that nobody else had done or could even do, for that matter.

“Can you color your shield like that you just did so we can see the angle it is at when you get shot?” Duncan asked.

“Sure thing, Sergeant.” He said and then turned and trotted down to the target.

He colored the shield and angled it without digging it into the ground. He tried to brace himself and gave the signal for the soldier to shoot. The bullet slammed into the shield and angled off somewhere. Clearly, the angling worked well as he hadn’t been knocked off his feet or even pushed backward. It had jarred a little mentally but nowhere near as much as the straight-on shot had done. He trotted back to the Sergeant.

“Can everybody see that?” When they all nodded or indicated yes and otherwise, he continued. “I have no idea where the bullet went as it ricocheted up and past me, I’m pretty sure. I’m not entirely certain because I closed my eyes.”

This admission brought a few snickers from the others.

“We’ll leave the angling idea till after I’ve discussed the matter with Corporal Sanchez. Meanwhile, do you want to have another go, Contos?”

Contos nodded. “I’ll try and jam my shield into the ground. It may take me a few moments.”

“That’s fine, Contos. I’ll warn the sniper you might be a little while working out Harris’s ground digging thing.”

Had a request for Maps of Taroniah’s part of the world – I’ve posted these before but here are a few.

“I knew to anchor my shield in the ground, Sergeant. It was something no one mentioned to me before I went down there, so I assumed the lack of information was part of the test. Did they mention that to you, Contos?”

“What do you mean, anchor your shield in the ground?” Contos retorted sharply.

He looked annoyed, and Andrew assumed it was because he had done better than Contos, or anyone else for that matter, he assumed, now that it was obvious that no one had been told to anchor their shields in the ground before being fired at by the rifleman. Clearly, his granny had known things that these people didn’t, which he found surprising, and it also meant he would have to be careful about his assumptions from now on. And how much she showed them, for that matter.

“You sort of dig your shield into the ground. Here, I’ll put up a colored shield, and you can see what I do.”

“What do you mean, color your shield?” Howsen asked.

“You just change the frequency slightly so that it shows up a particular color.”

He brought up his shield and changed the frequency a bit into the infrared, which meant it gained a slight shade of purple.

“Wow. I’ve never seen that before,” Howson said, sounding surprised.

“But how do you change the frequency?” Contos asked.

Andrew shrugged. “I don’t know how to describe it. When you create your energy shield, you pull in outside energy to create it, right? Sunlight usually for me, at any rate. You then naturally use the visible spectrum, which makes your shields invisible because, well, I don’t know why, but it does. So I just mentally tell it to change the spectrum slightly.”

They all looked at him like he’d just escaped from the lunatic asylum. He looked around at the others, shrugged at the disbelieving or uncomprehending expressions on their faces, and then went back to the subject at hand.

“So, having created the shield, you just force it down into the ground a bit. Probably not a good idea to force it down too far in somewhere like an urban environment where there’s lots of underground power and water and sewerage and all that stuff, but it generally doesn’t need to be too far.”

He pushed his shield into the ground slightly to demonstrate. The ground was hardpacked dirt here, so the thin line that the almost non-existent edge of his shield created in the ground was a lot more obvious than what would have been in other circumstances. He released the shield and knelt down to look at the ground and found he could still see a faint indentation where his shield had been. The others got down and looked as well.

“Damn.” Commented Howsen.

“The other thing you can do is brace yourself and angle the shield slightly. Or a lot, depending on the circumstances. It’s like angled armor on a tank so that the effective armor is considerably thicker than the actual armor because of the angle.” He looked over at Sergeant Duncan, who was standing watching and listening to everything but not commenting. “It would be handy to know whether just angling the shield works without digging it into the ground, Sergeant. Can you get your sniper chap to give me another couple of shots?”

Okay. I had a nice holiday – a few days off around Xmas and then a week at beautiful Yamba on the NSW north coast (Google it). I am back at work now, although it is hard getting back into the swing of things.

The Princess & The Travelers is still progressing – it is now the longest book I have ever written, for what that is worth. (over 160k) At this stage I can’t see it getting published until February – the length is adding like a month to the timetable sorry folks. Despite the title the Romans only play a small part in the story… just the way it went….

I have now retired from my graphic design position to be a full time author. So I am now dependent on you guys!!
Being full time will mean I should be writing more although how much more is still to be determined. Up until now I have been writing 1500 words a day in the main story and usually another 500 words in something else every day – 7 days a week. I would do the 1500 session before starting the graphic design and the 500 late in the day or at night. I am leaning toward keeping the total weekly word count roughly the same but using the extra writing time I now have to enable me to have a day off a week… that is one idea, anyway. Another is that I keep working as I was but upping the word count to 1500 + 1000 (I find 1500 to be about the limit for a single writing session) and simply take a day off whenever I want to or feel in need of a break. Not having the pressure of the graphic design work 5 days a week will take me a while to adjust to and it will probably be a couple of months before I come up with the optimum work pattern.

I hope you all had a good Xmas and that 2023 proves to be a happy and profitable year for all of you.

Peter

Sorry for the delay people – just got back from the 1 week holiday I get a year….

The Sergeant looked him up and down while the others all gave him the eye as well.

“Hmmph.” Was all the Sergeant said before he turned back to the group of trainees.

“All right, Howsen, you’re up next.”

The rather plain-faced, flat-chested girl nodded and jogged down the range to where a man-sized figure stood about two hundred meters away. She took up a position next to the figure and then gave a little wave. Bang! The shot was fired from a blind almost next to them that Andrew hadn’t noticed, and Howsen flinched backward slightly. Sergeant Duncan must have noticed Andrew’s flinch, going on the smile that broke out on the veteran’s face. Bang! And then there was a third shot. Howsen waited a bit and then came trotting back up. With each shot, she’d been forced to take a step back and then step forward to be in position for the next shot.

“We have one of the sniper school instructors doing the shooting. For this exercise, you put up a physical shield covering both yourself and the target. You have to brace the shield well enough that the shots don’t knock you off your feet.”

He turned to the dark swarthy-looking guy. “Your turn Contos.”

While Howsen arrived with a grin on her face, Contos looked anything but enthusiastic as he headed off toward the target.

“He had to take two tries to get through the pistol section,” Reynolds said quietly, obviously for Andrew’s benefit.

“Ah. And if you don’t get through?”

“Hmm. We don’t know, but I suspect they’ll form a third group and do further shield coaching, probably adding the other guys from your group once Sanchez is happy with their shields. You must have sure impressed him.”

Andrew shrugged and watched Contos take up his position and wave his hand. Bang. The first shot rocked him back, but he got back in position again in time to be knocked off his feet by the second shot.

“Bad luck,” Reynolds said.

Contos came jogging slowly back to the group, a downcast expression clear on his face. Contos must have been the last to do the test, this time around, as Duncan looked over at Andrew.

“Think your shields are good enough?” He asked.

Andrew shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

He trotted down to the target and set up his shield, digging it into the ground as he had read in the journal. Having come into the test late, he had no idea how hard he needed to anchor his shield, so he did it as firmly as possible and then gave the little wave to signal he was ready. The bullet slammed into his shield, although not violently enough to actually make him move. Hmmm. The second shot followed and had a similar lack of effect. Right. He wouldn’t want to try that against such a high-powered rifle without his shields anchored, and he immediately realized why the others had struggled. He trotted back up to the others.

“How did you manage that on your first try?” Duncan asked, frowning at him.