Dan walked into the gymnasium as the Thoth candidates were finishing up their daily runs on the obstacle course. Much of the Foundation’s training program borrowed heavily from Daeson, Dan’s former mentor and tormentor on Twilight. Other than adding weapon training, the Foundation’s only real change was to remove the unnecessary sadism from Daeson’s training regimine. The necessary sadism, Dan reflected sourly as he watched a pair of panting candidates try to climb a rope while padded beams slammed into them, remained. He still ran the obstacle course each morning, waking up hours before the candidates to ensure that he would have the gymnasium to himself. He didn’t have the same amount of time to devote to training as when he was studying with Daeson on Twilight, but that wasn’t a proper excuse to slack off.
As the candidates finished up one by one, assistants handed them towels and water bottles. Dan approached them as they divided on their own into the three major cliques. Despite all of his and Sam’s brainstorming, they couldn’t find a way to bridge the gaps between the groups. At one point, they even ended up resorting to cheesy icebreakers to try and bring everyone together. It had worked in a way, with all of the groups agreeing that the team building exercises were trash. When Dan and Sam finally approached the Director for help, he disagreed with their very premise. As far as he was concerned, the infighting was useful and friendly competition would drive the groups to greater heights. Dan wasn’t entirely sure about that, but ultimately he didn’t have any way to make the groups cooperate without Ibis’ help, so there wasn’t much he could do.
The only good news from the last two months of training was that the group of gamers that originally wanted to go home came around to the concept of training. Unfortunately, it was for all the wrong reasons. The kid with blue hair from the first day that insisted on calling himself DarkStryke69xX, Reggie Dobbs, convinced the rest of his crew that they would come out of the war in Brazil as super-powered heroes. Already, they were planning endorsement deals and triumphant press tours.
Dan tried to warn them on several occasions that fighting the elves wasn’t a joke or a game, but they were all too wrapped up in their own world for his words to register. At least they finally engaged with the classes and started studying. Maybe they were only in it for themselves, but each of them became convinced that, after the elves were defeated, they would need to compete for limited endorsement dollars. Almost all of them were working on spells that were a little too flashy for Dan’s comfort, but most of the spells seemed to have promise.
Jennifer Finch, the uncrowned queen of the hardworking clique, ambled over to him as Dan set up for the day’s lesson on magical theory. She had finished in the top five of the World of Magic Online tournament, but that wasn’t the most interesting part. For each one of her victories, she only used basic leather armor and her fists. Even with all of his enhancements, Dan wasn’t entirely certain of his ability to take her in a fair unarmed fight.
Admittedly, hand-to-hand fighting wasn’t exactly his forte, but Dan had learned from the best before being thrown into the forge that was Twilight. A year of fighting for his life had honed his reflexes to the point that he could at least keep up with the more promising of his students, like Jennifer.
Once her magic was awakened, Jennifer turned out to be a rare talent, boasting affinities in space, metal, and force mana. Rather than spread herself thin, Jennifer had followed his advice and focused on just her metal and force affinities. The candidate’s training time was limited before they were scheduled to be deployed to Brazil, and if they were going to end up fighting proper enemies one or two powerful spells seemed like a much sounder investment than a collection of superficial ones. It was a lesson he’d learned the hard way during his trip to Twilight. Luckily, his collection of weaker abilities was good at disrupting or distracting an enemy.
“Did you hear the news from Brazil?” she asked Dan, taking a sip from her water bottle as he shook his head. “The elves have started making probing pushes to break containment. They haven’t managed to break out of the rainforest in force yet, but there have been a couple ambushes of the rapid reaction forces sent out to stop them. It sounds like the coalition forces lost a couple of F-16s and an A-10 in the most recent skirmish.”
“A-10?” Dan raised an eyebrow. “Those things are pretty hard to take down. I understand shooting down an F-16 if you manage to hit it with a lucky lightning strike or something, but A-10s are designed to ignore some pretty serious firepower.”
“It looked like they were ready for us,” Jennifer crushed her empty water bottle and screwed the cap back on it. “When the air support arrived, the elven formation fired a ton of tiny explosive spells at it. It distracted the pilots and disrupted their fire control for long enough that someone managed to launch a ten-foot-long metal spear into one of the F-16s. There’s some pretty vivid footage of the plane exploding and a storm of lightning bolts from its wreckage taking out the plane’s wingman.”
“Shit,” Dan’s brow furrowed. “A multi-affinity spell. That’s some fairly advanced magic, and it sounds like it’s enough to take down low flying aircraft. Hopefully they only have one or two mages capable of firing off a spell of that magnitude. Either way, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to count on unmolested close air support when we deploy to Brazil.”
“The A-10 was worse,” Jennifer shook her head. “The elves had some sort of flying lizard with a rider. The thing looked like a wyvern from a video game, but the elf riding it was able to shield it from gunfire with magic for just long enough to tear the A-10 apart. The wyvern must have been at least 25 feet long, and its claws just ignored the A-10s armor. We might have the heavy vehicle and weapon advantage for now, but if they start pulling magical monsters out of myth to fight us, that might not last.”
“They must have a teleportation beacon somewhere in the Amazon,” Dan mused aloud. “Even if they’ve been able to slip void ships past our airforce by teleporting from orbit, I just can’t imagine one carrying a beast that size.”
“Didn’t you teleport to a beacon when you went to Twilight?” She asked. “Why don’t we just end this entire war by having you teleport in with a nuke and then pop back out? One mushroom cloud and the problem is solved.”
“I can’t find it,” he muttered, embarrassed. “We’ve looked for days. There’s an echo of something in the rainforest, but nothing I can lock onto. Doctor Weathers thinks that they’re doing something to conceal the signal. I’m pretty sure I could use it to teleport, but I wouldn’t have any accuracy. I’d just end up somewhere random in the middle of the jungle.”
“Wait,” Jennifer frowned, a hint of worry creeping into her voice, “If they have a beacon, isn’t the current stalemate just us giving them time to resupply and prepare for a major campaign?”
“More or less.” Dan sighed. “Ibis has been pushing the army to move faster, and for all his faults, Bowman is in agreement with us. The politicians just aren’t willing to commit to a new offensive until ‘everything is ready.’ Every time the Chairman gets on a talk show to push the issue, some senator will chime in to call him irresponsible and alarmist.”
“That isn’t what we see on television,” Jennifer continued slowly, concern written on her face. “Right now most of the media has stopped even reporting on the day-to-day of the conflict. We only hear about it when something big like the wyvern attack happens. The rest of the coverage seems to assume that the elven army is contained in the Amazon, and that it’s just a matter of time until they run out of supplies and surrender.”
“I’ll have to talk to Henry,” Dan replied, running his hand through his hair. “He already knows, but it doesn’t hurt to remind him that we might have to expedite things here. None of you have runescripting yet, and even with the magic you’ve learned so far, it’s barely enough to even the playing field against average Imperial troops, let alone elves. If they need us to deploy early, we’ll be better equipped than an ordinary military unit, but we’re going to be sticking our hand into a blender and hoping for the best.”
“Runescripting?” Jennifer’s eyes lit up. Even in the midst of such a dark conversation, she always was thrilled to learn more about the elves’ magical technology. “Like the tattoos you have that give you super speed and strength?”
“Yes.” Dan nodded before suddenly wincing. “Shit, I forgot that we don’t have a whole lot of material for ink. We’re going to need monster parts if the plan is to runescript everyone in the project, and the only way to do that is to collect them. That either means back to Twilight or Brazil.”
“Twilight sounds fun!” Jennifer’s eyes were twinkling. “I’m especially interested in the more powerful monsters that came out at night. They made the most for the most interesting raid battles.”
“Twilight isn’t fun.” Dan shook his head at Jennifer’s enthusiasm. “I’m not sure if Brazil is any better, but most of the creatures I ran into would rip apart any of the candidates. I got incredibly lucky, and I’m not sure we can count on that again, especially if the local governments are on the lookout for foreigners teleporting in.”
“Hey, teach!” One of the awakened security personnel shouted at Dan before Jennifer could respond. “Quit jawing with your girlfriend; it’s time for our theory lesson!”
The man guffawed and his friends joined him. Dan squinted slightly at him before letting the issue go. If he tried to push the point, it would turn into a giant production and disrupt the entire class causing a delay that they could ill afford. He was their commanding officer, and he should have warranted more respect, but their entire clique wasn’t exactly friendly with him. Other than being disrespectful, they left him alone, which was more than either of the other two cliques could say. It never got physical, but the security officers mocked the pro gamers constantly for their naivete and lack of real world experience. Dan did what he could to stop it, but he couldn’t completely disagree with them. He still doubted Henry Ibis’ wisdom in selecting his candidates from a video game, but what was done was done.
On the fly, Dan changed the lesson to opening the mana pathways in the user’s body, a critical step to ranking up without bursting into flames and dying. The lesson had been planned for much later, after the candidates had more experience with their affinities and their beginner spells, but given the information Jennifer had shared, Dan was afraid that his students might need it sooner than later.
The original plan called for six months of training in magic, survival, and weaponry culminating in every candidate, civilian and military, receiving a runescript tattoo. Dan wasn’t terribly enthused about the final step, as it promised thousands of hours of exhausting work for him, but he recognized the necessity of fully preparing the members of the project before they deployed to Brazil. As things stood, he didn’t know if all of his students would even have time to finish learning their first spell let alone receive their runescript before they would be needed on the front lines. Hell, he didn’t even know if Henry had gathered the necessary materials for all of the candidates to receive their runescripting.
Theoretically, the Thoth Foundation had deployed mercenaries to Brazil to hunt the magical beasts that were beginning to grow there in hopes of acquiring enough monster essence for Dan to create the necessary runescripting ink. Still, with the increase in elven activity, it was an open question as to how many of the hunting parties would return. Dan made a mental note to schedule an appointment with Ibis as soon as possible to see where things stood and to put together contingency plans to prepare the candidates. He had a feeling that the wyvern ambush was only the first blow in a renewed campaign on the Brazilian front, and he wanted his students to be ready.
He frowned, noticing Dobbs posting something to social media. Somehow, he had negotiated access to his official DarkStryke69xX press account and the idiot insisted on whinily live-blogging his magical training. Dan wasn’t sure what the hell Ibis was thinking, letting the little shit have access to social media, but orders were orders. Even dumb ones that enabled smug layabouts like Dobbs.
There was no way that Dobbs was ready for Brazil, but on the other hand, these things had a way of working themselves out. He’d read the asshole’s blog, specifically the posts about his tyrannical and dull “drill sergeant,” and he decided that he wouldn’t mind terribly if an elf managed to remove his hands. Possibly his tongue, too. Really, Dan was open to any sort of magical attack that would remove Dobbs’ ability to communicate entirely.
