I tried to talk my way out of it, of course. Me? Training a sudden militia? Well I could think of several good reasons not to do that, and as usual they all revolved around myself. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be humiliated by getting forced to show off my actual lack of experience, and for another I didn’t want to get killed because all the people supposedly defending me had been trained by an idiot.

  Morlo was as receptive to my opinion as ever, though, and didn’t even slow his stride while we marched off towards the deed.

  “You’ll do fine,” he giggled, “these people are even stupider than you.”

  I pleaded, and I begged, and I cajoled, and I threatened. I used every other trick I’d picked up over my short and pathetic life, but not one of them availed me. Ten minutes later we arrived at what I gathered was to be the training hall where I’d do my work.

  Before me was not a few dozen scraggly poor people, but a few hundred. They were all armed, at least, and to a higher quality than I’d have expected, wearing decent gambesons if not the more expensive protection of mail or breastplates. All had halberds, some had guns, and each one of them was looking to me with an expression I’d learned to associate with imminent danger.

  Awe.

  My grin was sprouting before I could think to stop it, and Morlo didn’t waste any time in addressing the group.

  “Gentlemen, I’m sure I don’t need to introduce you all to the famous Kyvaine of Sheppleberry,” Morlo announced. Faces lit up at that and whispers started moving through the ranks. Of course most of the men were young, which made it sting all the more to know I’d be humiliated in front of people my own age before long. But Morlo wasn’t done. “Vanquisher of the demons in the mines, slayer of undead, explorer of dungeons, saviour of Lord Devyne’s most recent siege. A Hero in the flesh!”

  I felt fifty sets of eyes fall on me, and did all I could not to shiver under the weight. You’d think being constantly thrown from one near-death fight to another would make something as petty as social anxiety dissipate, apparently not. I felt it as keenly—maybe more keenly—as I ever had, and like always it drove me to act.

  “I don’t know about Hero,” I told the group, the first honest thing I’d said to any strangers in a while, “but I know a thing or two about surviving through the sorts of horrors we’re about to face, and if you’ll have me I can explain how you can do it, too.”

  There is nothing that will make people believe in your heroism more than telling them you’re not a Hero. Hell, I bet you, the reader, are half-convinced I secretly am one, even now, eh? Just wait until we get to the next time I pissed myself, that one’s a bloody doozy. Anyway, these stupid kids were plenty convinced back then.

  “Anything you say,” one of them piped up with a grin.

  I paused at that, not entirely sure how to respond. Morlo was no bloody help, he’d fucked off before the lesson had even started, and I was left floundering for ideas on directing this pack of idiots to transform them into useful idiots.

  “Let’s start with laps,” I barked out, “give me, uh, fifty.”

  It was an idiotic thing to say of course, because none of these people could run fifty laps. They also hadn’t been properly trained with the weapons they were now holding, and of course tried to run those laps while still bloody holding them. It took three separate accidental stabbings—one of which was serious—before I saw sense and called off the order.

  Things degenerated from there.

  Sparring drills were my next attempt, and though I knew better than to have people practice with edged steel I did not have the ability to micro-manage fifty men at once. The idiots were either too enthusiastic, not enthusiastic enough or, in one case, an actual psychopath who broke his practice spear over someone else’s head while they were already unconscious and reduced my number of trainees to forty six.

  Eight percent casualties, and we were only an hour into practicing.

  I kept trying new avenues of approach, kept desperately thinking back to those few training sessions I’d been allowed to observe around Sheppleberry when the Baron’s men were on parade, and none of it seemed to work. I was floundering, and I kept floundering for that whole day.

  When, at last, it was all over, I could see that much of the awe my new pupils had was gone already. The remaining forty two of them trudged out just as miserably as me, and I said nothing watching them go.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Sixteen percent attrition was, I would later learn, actually close to average for a real battle. Had I known that humiliating piece of information at the time, I might’ve offed myself then and there. Instead I just headed to my quarters.

  As you might imagine, I did not receive much comfort from those I was sharing them with. Morlo was still nowhere to be seen, doing Morlo things, and Gruin, I gathered, was busy beating a local tavern into unconsciousness, which just left Vara to horribly mock me for my attempt at training. Oh, it hadn’t taken her long to find out. The news had apparently outpaced my own walk back.

  “I’d like to see you fucking try!” I snapped at her, seeing an opportunity to vent out all of my manly rage. Vara met it with womanly amusement, which only served to intensify the feeling.

  “I wouldn’t try,” she grinned, “and nobody will make me because…” she cracked up again, at that, “because I don’t have your reputation! I haven’t spent the last year pretending to be as impressive as I could get away with!”

  Vara’s mockery did not stop for even a minute, and it drove me to such lengths of anger that I returned to the training hall the next day with a newfound conviction.

  It did not help in the slightest at all, and that day went even worse. Whatever shred of confidence I’d retained in the lads under my command began to wither, and I was left to trudge into those sessions time and time again. No matter how many pieces of advice I tried to pick up from local serjeants, or how much reading I did on the subject, none of it helped.

  There’s just no way to overcome a lack of lifelong practice within one week, and try as I might things continued spawning one disaster after another. At this rate I could forget the fear of battlefield defeat, my own side would manage to commit a mass suicide before receiving their own orders completely unintentionally. I began to consider the merits of just slipping out of Arvharest and leaving everyone to get fucked to death by orcs without me.

  Sadly, that wasn’t an option. Morlo hadn’t exactly threatened me with this knowledge, but I’d figured out a while ago that he wouldn’t let me slip away so easily a second time. I really didn’t want to see how angry the Thaumaturge got if he caught me following a deliberate attempt at fleeing, either.

  The next few days were an exercise in misery, and they got worse with each one that passed. One failed lesson after another was starting to wring me out, making me desperate, frantic. Eventually I hit a breaking point after one trainee somehow managed to break all four of his own bloody limbs in a single accident. Even I don’t know how he managed that one, to this day.

  What’s more important than the how is the consequences, because that caused a few of the nearby serjeants to be called in and ask what was going on to cause such a mess.

  It was the most humiliating experience of my life, and it was, in the end, what I finally needed to galvanize myself.

  When I returned to my quarters that day, Vara’s mockery just bounced off me. She seemed to pause at the sight, unnerved by my not giving her the response she was looking for.

  ++”That’s not the half of it, I genuinely thought he’d snapped and was going to just massacre those idiots when he went back to train them the next day.”++

  It wasn’t Vara I needed to speak with, though. Nor Morlo.

  “I need your help tomorrow,” I told Gruin, “with training a bunch of people.”

  The Grynkori snorted at that. “And why should I help you?”

  “Because you’ll get to be very mean to a large number of humans, and I’ll buy you a round at whatever pub you want.” He agreed instantly.

  The next day I was not grinning as I showed up to that hall and stared down forty or so sneers.

  “We’re not doing it,” one of the trainees snapped, “whatever idiot thing you have planned next. We’re not doing it, you’re not going to have us all running around getting hurt again.” They’d refused to obey the day before, too, and I’d not had any ideas of how to fix that. I had one today though. I quite calmly walked across the room, found the one who’d spoken, and thumped him right in the face. I made sure to hold back just a little, so he didn’t sleep through the battle.

  He went down hard, as people do when punched in the face by someone who knows how to hit. I took a step back.

  “Today, you’re all going to run with weapons.” At my words, a few of the orderlies I’d been given brought in swords, spears, and other things. All training weapons, all daubed in paint so that their ‘blades’ would colour anything they touched. “The first to slow down or stop get fifty pushups.”

  Outrage followed that, protests. I found the loudest few and beat them up again, then introduced them to my teaching aid.

  “This is Gruin,” I told the group, “Gruin is going to start chasing you in twenty seconds. He is not very fast, but he can run for a long time. Anyone who isn’t holding one of those weapons, Gruin will specifically target for a beating. Nineteen. Eighteen…”

  It took until fifteen for everyone to arm themselves, then they started running, and Gruin did too. I could see him grinning with delight as he gave chase.

  Oh, most of them lasted a while, but the frenzy of being chased by one of the scariest men alive only went so far. Those who were caught fastest had a few bruises.

  “You can rest,” I told them, then watched as they headed off to do so. Waited. Had Gruin ambush them as they sat down and ate. After another pummelling, I explained the lesson. “Don’t let your guard down, you never know when something might try to kill you.”

  More lessons came after that, and I slowly broke down all of the bad habits instilled in my trainees by their earlier education.

  “Don’t stand and fight, that’s how you get killed.”

  “If something looks too dangerous to attack, let someone else try first.”

  “Make sure to take every chance you can to thin your enemy’s ranks, because anyone who survives killing your allies will do you next.”

  I couldn’t teach them how to be soldiers, not even remotely, but I could definitely fucking teach them how to do what I did. Survive. Snivelling, cowardly, pathetically, but surviving all the same. I didn’t ask to be given this job, but if nothing else I was going to see that my casualties were lower than any of the bastards laughing at me in the other squads.

  Within a few days, I started to notice some positive changes.

  Explore more of our books — begin your journey here: