Chapter 7

Training began the day after everybody was moved to the fort. I wanted to spend the first few weeks on Krav Maga and combine that with training on how to avoid being skewered or crushed by swords, maces, etc. The main idea was that the human should get as close to the monster as possible so that there would be a lot of difficulty in effectively using the monster’s weapon. Once in close, then was when the Krav Maga came into play.

That getting in close was very difficult to teach. For all of their lives, the men had been taught to stay out of reach of the enemy. The problem was, that also kept the enemy out of reach of the common weapons. Of course, with monsters, there was always the chance of being bitten. With that in mind, I was going to try to get a helmet for everyone.

All of these men were really turned on by the opportunity to give back to the monsters and demons some of the tribulations that they had imposed upon the humans. As a result, they all took their training very seriously and did their best to learn what I had to teach them.

Meanwhile, Almo was scouting for weapons for them to use. I wanted every man to concentrate on using a knife and a baton. Hopefully, they could make use of charms, rings, and amulets. Frankly, we could find nobody who had any idea what would happen when a normal human tried to use an item imbued with magic.

Fortunately, we had enough money to buy each man a magic belt, a helmet, a knife, and a baton. Actually, the baton was the hardest thing for us to come up with. I wanted the batons to be made of hardwood, but that was difficult because this area was mostly populated with the softer woods, such as pine. Well, we managed to get enough hardwood for 10 batons, but we were not very optimistic about later on.

At last, I felt that the men would go crazy if they did not have a chance to go after some of the enemy. In an effort to try to keep down the confusion, Almo took five of the men under his wing and I took the other five. In an effort to make sure that there was no sign of favoritism, we drew the names from a large pot. Almo and I alternated in taking a name, and we did not reveal the names until all had been drawn. The men and their wives were there to watch the drawing, and all of them agreed that the drawing had been as fair as possible.

We were going on our first hunt the next morning! Out of curiosity, I wondered how many babies would be conceived that night.

When we left the fort, we stayed well within sight of each other in case one squad needed support from the other one. Of course, we had no control about who we would run into, but we hoped that we would not encounter any magic users—skeletons with bows and arrows would be bad enough. Our only defense against arrows was for all of us to charge and to dodge from side to side erratically while we did that.

Thank God, our first encounter was with some satyrs. There were six of them, so we tried to get them to separate into two sets of three. We may have been too lucky for our own good because that was what happened—three satyrs went after Almo and his group and three came after my group. All of my attention was focused on my squad, so I don’t know any details of what happened to Almo and his squad.

We were lucky that all of the satyrs were armed with stabbing spears, and, to this day I cannot understand why they would choose that weapon because they were really very inept with it. Anyway, three of the satyrs charged us, and I had time to make detail assignments of the men in my squad. I had three men try to rush in to get inside the effective use range of the spears, while two men and I attacked the satyrs from the rear.

I had swapped weapons so that I had a knife in my right hand and my electric sword in my left hand. My intention was not to mess up the training program by letting the lightning bolts wipe out the satyrs before they had a chance to try their own attack. I had the electric sword ready for use in case it was needed, but I hoped that it wouldn’t be so that all of the men could do their thing.

I am pleased to report that the men were quite successful against the satyrs, and I did not need to use my sword. In each of the three cases, the men were able to get inside on the satyrs and kill them with their knives with nothing more than a few bumps and bruises. Their helmets had done well in preventing the men from being bitten on and around the head. As recommended, all three kills had been made by knife slashes across the belly.

I was finally able to glance over at Almo’s squad and saw them kill the last of their satyrs. All 10 of our men had come through unscathed, and there were even 17 gold coins lying on the ground for the men to have as a bonus. Almo and I congratulated our men over their victory and reorganized to continue the hunt.

Our next encounter was of an entirely different character. This time we had a single aurochs to charge at us. An aurochs was obviously out of the trainees’ league at this point, so I yelled at Almo to take care of it with his poison sword. He immediately started running toward the aurochs, and that was enough to get the aurochs to charge Almo. When the beast got close enough, Almo jumped aside, and let the animal charge past him. On its way past, Almo stuck out his sword so that the point dragged along the creature’s side.

The cut was too shallow to entrap the sword, but it was enough to fit with the magic of the poison sword. The aurochs managed to get just past Almo in its charge when it fell over quite dead from the poison. My point here was to illustrate just how effective poison could be in defeating such a large beast. The men were suitably impressed, especially when they were able to find 83 gold coins.

I have no idea how it is possible, but the aurochs also dropped a ring. My identifier charm said that this was a magic ring that would increase the damage quotient of the wearer by 7.2%. There was a gem socket in the ring, but I was going to worry about that later. Here was the perfect opportunity to find out if a magic ring would work for a normal human.

I had every man try on the ring to see if it would accept him as its owner. There were no problems, so it looked like this level of magic would be usable for the ordinary person. I arbitrarily gave it to one of the men to wear, Opso, and we pushed on to see what else we could find.

Our next encounter was with 12 skeletons, all armed with swords and shields. Almo and I had previously decided to try the men’s abilities with fighting sticks if and when we ran up against suitably armed skeletons. Almo still had his mace with him, so he jumped in to slay two of the skeletons before our men began to fight with them.

Each man had been taught how to use his knife as a shield against a sword, and they swapped hands between the knife and fighting stick so that the fighting stick was in the dominant hand. The skeletons were caught by surprise when the men charged them, and I ran with them to be there in case I needed to use my lightning sword to prevent a catastrophe.

The men had been told to get inside the sword’s reach and attack the skeleton’s neck with their fighting stick. The skeletons followed their reputation of being notoriously stupid fighters; therefore, they were easy victims as the men charged in. The men’s batons were about 1 inch in diameter and 28 inches long. The man rushed in close to the skeleton, pushing the sword out of the way with his knife, and striking the skeleton’s neck as hard as he could with a sharp blow just under the skeleton’s lower jaw.

This was sufficient to knock the skeleton’s head off its body, and that was enough to cause the skeleton’s bones all to detach from each other. It was as if the skeleton had been subjected to a small explosion. We were now in possession of 122 gold coins, 12 swords, and 12 shields. There was no problem getting the men to pick up the gold coins for later distribution. I had them save the shields in their belt pouches, and I checked to see if any of the swords had any magic properties.