By the end of the first full day of training, I was starting to panic.

It had been all I could do to keep a straight face when I discovered just how little weight my students were able to lift. How could sword saints be so weak? Even worse, their feel for mana was even worse than Kana's. Where she described magic moving through her as causing a warm tingling sensation, these guys could hardly feel more than a hint of warmth. I suspected half of them were just guessing when they tried to describe what they were doing.

I'd thought that Lord Ota had been impressed by my performance, leading him to trust me with training the most important part of his army. Now it was looking more like he had handed me a poisoned chalice. He'd saddled me with the biggest group of incompetent magical swordsmen he could find. When I failed to turn them into a decent fighting force, he'd have an excuse to cut me down to size.

I hoped he only had figurative cutting in mind. Though he didn't strike me as a particularly patient man, I didn't think he would openly attack me so soon after I had proved myself as a valuable subordinate. But if my faux pas of killing the enemy daimyo outweighed my value, well, then all bets were off. Worst come to worst I could try using my magical abilities to escape, but that would make me no better than that stupid fox: living by myself in the wilderness, relying on magic, brute force, and trickery to take everything I needed. I'd rather live like a proper human being, relying on the cooperation inherent in a market economy to make both myself and the whole community better off.

Right now, the community I needed to improve were the bunch of lunkheads I'd been assigned to teach. I'd been idly considering whether I'd need to become a harsh taskmistress in order to get anywhere with my students. I didn't particularly want to do it, but I didn't see any other way.

They had already been through years of training by their family throughout their childhood. Those lessons had been refined through generations of hard work. To go through all that and come out the other side this incompetent, the only explanation I could come up with was a habit of slacking off, combined with family members who couldn't bear to be too rough with their own kin, to get this sorry lot.

I was feeling a bit down as I gathered them together on the second morning. I'd been hoping to develop a more enlightened method of training, perhaps drawing on modern pedagogical methods. Unfortunately, when it came to the truly difficult students, even modern teachers had to be tough on their charges.

"Today," I said, "we'll begin with resistance training."

I saw half the trainees turn their eyes toward the rocks that I had left in the center of the clearing. Unfortunately, it would take far too long to get anywhere training them with dinky little weights like that. Lord Ota expected results.

I sighed, then unleashed my magical aura. Usually I tried to be a little courteous around other people, but this time I didn't hold back. That was the whole point. I pushed it out until all of my students were surrounded by my domain, and even applied some extra pressure directed at each of them to make sure that they felt it.

As one, they staggered. Most of them took a step back. I shook my head and took a step forward.

"Push back!" I said. "Resist!"

While their physical weakness was a concern, I thought the much bigger problem was their lack of mana sense. If they couldn't even tell what they were doing, then there was no way that I could train them in even my less sophisticated techniques. I had developed a decent collection of methods of circulating mana that would lead to increased physical and magical abilities, but it was all useless if I was put in the position of trying to teach blind men how to paint.

Thus, what I was terming in my head "exposure training." If a person never learned how to open their eyes, and you were restrained from physically prying their eyelids open, you could in theory teach them about sight by shining a bright enough spotlight at them. It would illustrate where sight is physically supposed to come from and, worst come to worst, they could learn how to sense through their eyelids if the light was powerful enough. I was hoping that this would prompt my students to open their metaphorical eyes.

A few minutes later, I noticed that the students nearest me were trembling involuntarily. One of them had tears trickling from his eyes, apparently outside of his conscious control. I sighed, and pulled my mana back to my body.

"I suppose I can't expect too much on the first day," I said. "It's a good thing we have a few months to work on this."

If anything, my students paled even further at that remark. I couldn't imagine being exposed to the pressure of another person's mana was a pleasant experience. It hadn't been pleasant for me, although the fox woman's power was to mine as a bonfire was to a candle. If I could tough it out through that as a young child, these hardened soldiers would soon enough learn how to deal with me.

In order to take their minds off the ordeal, I led them on a brisk jog up the side of the mountain. A few minutes into it, I looked around and sighed before I stopped and waited for them to catch up. I set a slower pace after that. Somehow my students had gone through years of training and barely learned to use mana for anything other than the occasional explosive burst of power.

Halfway up the mountain I called an extended halt and gathered them around me. There were a few things I could teach that didn't rely on a profound control of internal mana. They showed some trepidation at being subjected to another lesson, but that turned to relief and even some expressions of joy as I led them through a simple breathing exercise.

After the earlier series of disappointments, I felt a profound sense of relief when my students proved that they could at least breathe, if given proper direction. The exercise would only grant them the tiniest of incremental gains, but at least it was something. Once the foundation was in place, we could build from there.

Once they had all proven their ability to engage in meditative breathing for about five minutes, I resumed our jog. The goal of this exercise was to produce magical soldiers, not monks. Learning to meditate was all well and good, but they needed to be able to translate their ability to the battlefield. Warfare in the real world was not as accommodating as the average animated series when it came to letting you charge up your magical attacks.

One technique that had proven very effective with Kana was to force her to carry extremely heavy weights while distracting her to the point that she couldn't focus on manipulating her mana. The pressure of the demand on her body had eventually caused her to develop the ability to use mana to reinforce herself without conscious thought. Ideally, I would drag my students up to that level.

The problem was that they were starting from such a low point. With their starting strength, it would be very tricky to find an appropriate weight. Too little and the exercise would be useless. Too much and they could die.

I was already going to be skating on thin ice if I returned with incompetent sword saints. It would be that much worse if I came back with less men than I had set out with.

They kept up a little better now that they had their breathing sorted out. Some of the men were showing little signs of using mana to enhance their endurance, which was a relief. Maybe they weren't totally hopeless.

Just as I thought that, we rounded a turn on the path and startled a small herd of deer. They bounded out of a small copse of trees and immediately started to run away from us.

In my previous life I would have exclaimed over their cute little ears and reached for my camera. After seventeen years as a medieval peasant, I had a much more practical reaction.

"Hideyoshi!" I called out. "Go kill them!"

He seemed like a go getter. His willingness to step forward and volunteer, even if the results had been disappointing, spoke well of his attitude. I wanted to add some meat to the pot for dinner tonight, so I decided to send somebody reliable.

He just stood there, giving me a puzzled look. "I didn't bring my bow."

I stared at him in shock for a moment, but hunger let me shake off the disappointment quickly. Not wasting any more time with talk, I raced forward, drawing on my mana. This time I wasn't going for stamina, but speed. The trees seemed to blur around me as I rushed forward, my hair flying behind me in the breeze. It was the work of a moment to catch up with the buck leading the pack and send his head flying. I let the doe and her children go. It was more meat for the future, after all.

Now that my prey had been subdued, I took a moment to look around. I was all alone save for the slowly cooling corpse of the deer at my feet. My students might catch up eventually, but I wasn't going to just stand around based on a possibility. As much as I would have liked to delegate the scutwork, bringing meat to the table was my top priority.

The deer's blood steamed as it poured out on the forest floor. It had come gushing out when its head was severed, but now that the creature's body was getting the message that it was dead, the flow of blood was slowing down. I broke off a tree branch and gathered up the four legs of the corpse. It was a little awkward, but I managed to tie it up to carry with the blood mostly dripping away from me.

My students were waiting back where I'd left them. It was a disappointing lack of initiative, but at least they hadn't wandered off. I led the rest of the run with the deer slung over my shoulder. I hoped they would put in a little more effort with the prospect of a good meal ahead of them.