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.