After such a frenetic time, discovering the new level up and making all these materials and all the work we put in the time we did, you would expect that we would be going to war immediately, sadly that was not how it works, and I was a bit confused, so 3 weeks after we had finished making the training materials and not too long from my 11th birthday, I decided to ask.
- Mom why is the process of selecting the soldiers so slow? – I ask my mother.
- Well son, the process is slow because the demons have created countermeasures so that those doppelgangers can pass most of the normal checks, there are drastic measures one can take but sadly defeating doppelgangers is difficult. – says my mom.
- How difficult?
- Well the last time we had to defeat one without any preparation, it took around 50 people, near 20 warriors and 30 mages to bring him down, even with your discoveries it would be a difficult fight. – she says.
- But if the demons have such a strong unit, why not use it more? – I ask.
- I think is because of the churches and our faith, one of the ways to discover the doppelgangers and make them weak is to make a circle of faith, problem with those is that they are difficult to make, and require a lot of people praying to be able to activate, if we get the doppelganger in that area we can check him out, but if we tried to do it openly they would see it and disappear, maybe even cause a ruckus and kill lots of people, so normally we do it when there are some religious holiday and we get lots of people in the city praying, we make a trap, we did that and checked all of the people of the household, as we said before we got 3 of them. – she tells me and anticipating my next question – if they are discovered in the circle the huge amount of power from our gods pretty much destroys their defenses and a child with a knife could kill them easily, if what you say its truth and we need the divine power of our skills to kill the demons then the ritual overloads the doppelganger and make him as weak as a baby without the system.
- Oh I see.
- Give it a year, from time to time the king and the different dukes ask for a sweep to be made to check the army for doppelgangers, your dad most probably will do this soon, so we will have the troop ready in the next 6 months probably, we are also waiting since the king want some of his soldiers in this troop, so have patience and continue your studies and experiments. – says my mother.
My studies and experiments, I have been studying what they have here in this world and they have made a lot of things, working with their own magical technology, there is a stove, it uses a simple enchantment circle that puts out heat and its regulated by a rune who throttles the amount of mana that goes into the rune, one material that they use for fuel is this magical stones, I used this ones when I was making my sewer system, I also asked my mother why they did not make something like that before me, they have enchanting they should have been able to do it. The response from my mother education and time, not too many people have either the education to do enchanting design or the time to do all the test until it works, we have enchanters but these people only copy existing enchantments in whatever is needed, my mother told me that my enchantments where the first new enchantments in a long time, she brought me to a part of the library where there are around 7 thick books with the most common enchantments that are in use.
So to keep myself busy I kept up my practice with swordsmanship trying to find ways of training that were more effective, kept forging weapons, shields, pots, pans and other common stuff for the people of the city, keeping up with my practice, and my blacksmithing kept going up, I also tried to do some alloys and I did try to make aluminum, all the experimenting gave me a lot of levels, I was also experimenting to get steel since they were mostly working with Iron, I remember a bit about aluminum and well magic would help me there so I was investigating how to enchant something to be able to smelt bauxite into it, on the other hand steel was more practical, it was an alloy, I just needed to find the right amounts, the one I remember the best was 1060 Carbon Steel, since it was easy, iron, carbon, manganese, sulphur and phosphorous, I just needed to find the right amounts.
Time passed and I did try my best, but more experiments and efforts are going to be needed if I want to see results, my 11th birthday came and went, I was happy with the family some of my older brothers were able to come back from the front lines and spend some time at home, some of them had their own birthdays so it was nice, I was also during this last few months be able to use my swordsmanship not only with a greatsword but also with longsword, took me a month to get used to the shield but I was able to gain proficiency on it, and since the shield movement was simple and I knew what I was doing specially with all the info I had gained with my swordsmanship.
Using a longsword alone was close enough to using a greatsword only, all of the basic strokes were the same, but the swordsmanship changed quite a bit once you went with the combo of Sword and Shield, this divided my status and now I had Swordsmanship-Greatsword and Swordsmanship- Sword and Shield, the level for the second one went up fast and thanks to my experience knowing that the lowest level the energy of the different skills taught you how to do the moves, I used my mana sense to learn what movements I had to do and then trained on doing them myself, this allowed me to level up this style to the orange level in 3 months, I asked my third mom for help and we made another set of training material for the Sword and Shield Style, mostly just canvases, also this allowed me to confirm that if we taught our people that they should try and do the moves themselves without depending on the energy of the skill the proficiency would grow faster, this could be the secret to get people at least in training to level up their swordsmanship faster, I gave this info to my dad I continued my training until one day my dad called me into his office.
- Carter, finally we have everybody that is going to make your troop here – says my father after I enter his office and sat down.
- I would like to reveal my status to them dad, mostly because of my age, at least my goddess blessing.
- I know that you are not too fond of keeping secrets but, what will this accomplish? – ask my dad looking at me.
- I don’t know, I thought that if I was a veteran and suddenly they asked me to follow a kid I would like to know why, and well if they know would they not work harder? – I say insecure of my answer.
- On that you are right and we will have to ask them to swear an oath of secrecy due to the training you will be doing, but since they will come to me to swear their oath, I will be the one to reveal to them what I see fit, and Carter I won’t tell them about the goddess, they are soldiers and they have a duty to follow the orders of their commanding officer, also us as the commanding officers we have a duty to not waste the troops lives or their sacrifice for the benefit of the kingdom. – He says and then looks at me.
- I know you are trying your best to do something good for all of us so I do not have an issue with you commanding this troop, I will talk with them and they will follow you, at the same time there are going to be some NCO that will help you keep the troop under control and help you not put your foot too far up your rear. – says my dad.
- You use the term NCO, non-commissioned officer right? – I tell him surprised.
- Should not surprise you I think we have told you before, some info from the heroes we took and made it ours, military organization was one of those. – says my dad with a smile.
With this we had finish the conversation and I waited until he had finish setting all the troops and I could talk with them, it took a bit giving all the responsibilities my dad had, I could see my dad pushing himself every morning trying to train better.
The day came when I had to talk with the troops and start guiding them, so I set prepared myself and went towards one of the training fields, when one of the NCO saw me he called the troop to form, they formed into ranks and I was able to see them, they all looked to be around 20 years old, and there was a group that looked like they did not want to be here, I had talked with my dad the day before just to ask what he had told the troops and he said that the only revelation he did was about one of my special skills, the one that allowed me to change the level of my skills, he only told this to the NCO, the rest it was my job to tell them, but this allowed me to see that I did not need to say everything just revealing that part would be enough.
- Hello soldiers, my name is Carter Edgefall, my father put me in charge of all of you for the foreseeable future, some of you may ask what mission requires all of you here and to be under the command of a child, the mission is simple, to grow stronger, thanks to a special skill that is in my possession our family has been able to determine that the Demonic Bite is a fabrication of the demons, we have shown the King enough evidence of this and he has approved of this project to make you all stronger, we have been preparing for a while and if you see around you, the walls of this training field have pictures, each set of pictures is one of the basic moves of your swordsmanship. – I let them see around and wait a minute before I continue.
- Before any of you complain about the difficulty, let me explain something, when your swordsmanship is at its lowest level, when you activate a skill with that level of swordsmanship a lot of energy is used guiding your muscles to the right positions with the right strengths, your instructors before always told you to not fight this, because this was helping you complete the skill, but this made you dependent on that energy guiding your muscles, once you get to the next level, once your swordsmanship changes its color in your status screen from red to orange, the energy won’t guide your muscles, you have to do that yourself. – I see a soldier that is thinking heavily and well let me do something a bit different maybe it will pay off – Soldier, you appear to have a question, please ask it. – I ordered the soldier.
- Sir but then why is it a level up? If this energy does not help us move then why it is considered a level up? – the soldier ask and I’m happy my gamble paid off, I wanted exactly this question.
- Because soldier less energy of the skill goes towards your muscles so you do not get any guidance on how to move, but that energy goes into your attack, we have been able to see that your attack becomes at least 3 to 4 times more powerful, now can any of you think what does need 3 to 4 soldiers to be killed? – I finish with this and let them think about it, if I feed them more info they won’t think by themselves, also time to train.
- Come on lets starts with some running – I yell at the soldiers and start running, the NCO also start yelling and organizing the troops for our training.
