Nathan

Year 2849 | Month 5 | Day 8

“So, what did you think about our Mana Manipulation class?” Aidan asks with a weary look on his face as he rubs his chest, despite the class having been a couple of hours ago, before lunch. “Because I hated it.”

I raise an eyebrow at him before saying, “It was productive.”

The three girls walking with us all snicker at my answer while Aidan just sends me an amusing look. One that expresses pretty clearly that my answer wasn’t what he was looking for.

I ignore his look as we enter the Magical Warfare classroom, only to find the instructor surrounded by several other military officers in front of the BFS, with the other cadets that’re already in the class standing off to the side as the officers talk amongst themselves.

Well, this is interesting, but I guess it would be difficult for the instructor to teach over two dozen cadets about each and every weapon they chose. So, they’re probably here to help teach us about the weapons.

We walk over towards the shooting range at the far right wall of the area with the BFS in the center of it before setting our stuff down and talking over the next several minutes. During this time, the rest of the cadets all slowly fill into the classroom until the instructor suddenly claps his hands, attracting the attention of everyone in the class as he begins speaking, “As I mentioned last class, you’re going to be training for your new weapons today. If you don’t know anything about your chosen weapon, then I have at least one officer here for every weapon that was on the rack. They will go around teaching each of you about your weapons.”

“And even if you do know how to use your chosen weapons,” the instructor turns to look at the older cadets as he says this, “you should still take the opportunity to get advice on how to improve with them.”

He then waves his hand towards the panel, and the officer standing behind it as he adds, “Lastly, since not all of you have suitable training areas in this room for your weapons, you may ask officer Hawk to add a partition in the BFS that he’d think would work well for your training.”

“Now,” he says with a clap, making several of the cadets flinch from the suddenness of it, “you may begin your training. The officers will go to the cadets they see that have their specialized weapons first.”

“Which in my case is…” Instructor Leo then turns to me before he finishes, “the sniper rifle.”

I look around the room at the other five or six students with sniper rifles before focusing on the instructor again as the officers begin to scatter throughout the room, each going to different groups of cadets to teach. Meanwhile, Instructor Leo walks over to me while pulling his sword out of another one of those fiery portals, followed by a sniper rifle that he takes from the same portal.

He really does seem to like me. Is it because I have three classes with him this semester? Or is it just my fire affinity?

Because none of the other cadets with sniper rifles had fire affinity.

What’s more, is that I highly doubt that I was the only person who had expressed an interest in the weapons when first entering the room, but he still singled me out and told me to pick my weapon first.

Right as the instructor reaches me, Aidan surprisingly asks him a question, “How are you instructors able to make those portals anyways? Wouldn’t they require space mana or something?”

Sophia beats Instructor Leo to answering as she enthusiastically exclaims, “Nope! The instructor is using a spell commonly known as a plane storage!”

The instructor turns to look at her with an impressed look on his face before he asks, “That’s correct. But do you know what it is?”

She sends him a surprisingly smug look as she answers, “Of course I do. To create a plane storage spell, a few things must be done first. First, a magician must use a planar gate spell, which is a spell that uses your mana to safely open the natural barrier between the natural plane and the plane of your element. Once a magician of the Republic does that, they will then be able to use a device exclusive to the Republic – one created by the only known Space Special affinity mage in existence – to save the coordinates of the location in the plane and lock the space around the area you connected with the gate, blocking it from anyone or anything outside of directly opening a hole in the natural barrier within the locked space. After this is done, the magician will be able to use those coordinates when creating a plane storage spell of their own.” She then shrugs as she finishes. “Which is really just a planar gate spell connected specifically to the closed off space you made with the device that allows the magician to use the space as their own personal storage.”

My eyes widen slightly at the long explanation before I notice the instructor slowly nodding his head. He then mutters, “Now I can see why she’s taken an interest in you…”

His words confuse Sophia for a second, but he doesn’t seem to care as he says, “You’re correct. But that’s not the point of this class.” He then turns to look at me and continues, “The point right now is to teach you how to use your weapons.”

I nod my head at his words before noticing another officer walking our way with his gaze locked on the staff in Sophia’s hands. Meanwhile, the other officers all seem to be gathering students together that have the same weapons to teach, including one officer with a sniper rifle of his own who’s gathering the other students with the weapon.

My attention is drawn back to Instructor Leo as he continues speaking whilst moving his sniper rifle to hang on his back by its strap and drawing his sword, “I’d like to get to work training you in the sniper rifle first, but you’ll be dead pretty quickly on a battlefield if you can’t fight up close, so before I do that, you should at least learn how to wield your sword. Even if only a little.”

His words cause me to tense up slightly before I relax again to reach down and grab my own sword, unsheathing it as I do so.

The words of various other officers begin to fill the room as Instructor Leo looks at the sword in my hand and says, “Now, yes, you should know how to wield your sword. But I won’t be getting too deep on that subject. The sniper rifle is, after all, my main weapon. And it will likely end up as yours as well.”

Okay, so that’s good at least. It means he probably won’t be getting to sparring or anything like that during this training.

Which, if that’s the case, his attention might not be a bad thing.

“That said,” he continues after a pause while looking up at my face, “I will show you a few tips to using the sword.”

After saying that, the instructor walks up to me and pulls me over to the shooting range. He then says, “Alright, now, you can either hold your sword with a single hand, or with both hands at the same time. But I would recommend using one hand so that your other one is open for spellcasting.”

I raise my sword with one hand, immediately noticing how light it is in my hand as he nods his head in approval and reaches for my hand to adjust my hold on it. He then moves next to me and swings his sword vertically and horizontally once each before asking me to do the same and giving me critique once I do.

Following this, he continues having me practice these two swings for the next ten minutes until he starts showing me various other types of swings, along with some counters after he sees that I have enough strength to cleanly swing it. And once he feels he’s shown me enough of the basics, he sheathes his sword and grabs his sniper rifle instead with a grin as he says, “Now for the fun part.”

My eyes widen slightly before I follow suit, sheathing my own sword and grabbing the sniper rifle that I had placed on the ground next to the shooting range.

“As you can probably tell, this weapon is a lot more complicated to learn the basics of than a sword,” he says, his opinion probably being both true and a little biased at the same time as he takes one hand off of his weapon and moves closer to me to point at several different spots on the weapon, “and there are a lot of small parts to the weapon, with several of them being detachable or adjustable. Making it more difficult to get a grasp on just the weapon itself, much less how to shoot it.”

The instructor then goes on to explain each and every part of the sniper rifle, from the scope to the rear – also known as the pistol – and forward grips, and even the adjustable bipod at the front end of the weapon, along with how to remove the parts that can be removed before putting them back on again.

He ends up taking longer just to explain the use of each and every part of the rifle than it took for us to practice the sword. And even then, he only moves on to explain and demonstrate the magical parts after over half of the class has passed.

At the same time, various sounds ring out throughout the room during the class, including gun shots, metal hitting metal, and other noises made from the weapons.

“Now this part.” He says while pointing to a large red gem implanted in the pistol grip of the sniper rifle. The gem looks almost exactly the same as the two gems that were implanted in the sword’s pommel, except a decent amount larger. “Is the main magic gem of the rifle, and it acts similar to how the two smaller gems act on the sword you have, but with a different effect. All you have to do is infuse it with mana, and it’ll supercharge the next bullet you fire from the rifle.”

He then lifts his own rifle and points at the same large gem on his as he continues, “Unfortunately, the gems are only able to do one specific thing for each gem, but the ones on our rifles’ pistol grips are extremely powerful and can cause a person to burst into flames from a single shot, assuming it makes it past both their barrier and mana membrane. Which is entirely possible if you give it enough mana.”

My eyes widen at that before I place my palm on the pistol grip, feeling the gem beneath my palm.

“And that should be all you need to know about the sniper rifle itself, along with this one’s build, so how about we get to shooting?” He asks with a near ecstatic look on his face as he begins to move up to the end of one of the lanes at the target practice area.

Okay, his enthusiasm for sniper rifles is… impressive, to say the least.