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.