THROW STONES AT BYGONE ERA VR, NOT HERE. Please =|
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Director Carlyle and Kershaw stuck around for another hour seeking consul about how to go about a proper soldier program but there was really only so much I knew and that was from Poniard. They needed real professionals from within the actual Bureau. Sadly, they themselves did not want to invest that level of time and resources fixing something that was not yet broken.
After a while, though, they went on their way and I took out the artifact to start healing the two custom goblins as they ran without weights. Only the odd one out would run at Poniard's pace and routine but I was now seriously considering raising the values for custom goblins and creating different valued preset classes.
Poniard's style is really the easiest for a goblin, the tanker and berserker were more for larger hobs and trollkin but there was no reason why a goblin could not learn it early. The current tanker, though, was more of a simple swordsman. A proper tanker used a larger body sized shield and a blunt weapon.
Not counting the personally chosen staff and spear techniques, Poniard's class was that of a fencer, white mark was still a berserker, black mark was a swordsman, and there were two prospective classes. Tanker and archer. For the swordsman class I can start their running weight to a thirty-pound plate and body weights to emphasize endurance and the proper tanker can start with the fifty.
"Poniard," I say to get my goblin's attention while walking off toward the equipment sheds. "Today, you're going to start learning archery!"
Entering the easily unlocked shed that had not been bothered until now, I go to one wall containing fiberglass training bows for kids and a simple but dense and large foam target. Wearing a quiver of mundane field-tipped arrows, I leave the shed and walk toward the edge of the property beside the 'dorm'. Here there was a square half-acre of white sand backed by a ten-foot plank wall meant to catch arrows.
Giving Poniard the bow and arrows after he followed me over, I stand him thirty yards from the back wall and then place the target on a low table by the back wall. Returning to Poniard, I take the bow and three arrows from him before explaining the parts of the arrow and bow and how to use it. He might have been familiar with them but I had no idea since there were not any used at his camp.
After this, I showed him how to hold and draw the bow and arrow while lightly leaning the bow to naturally rest the arrow as well as avoid the bowstring. Then I shot the target. From thirty yards away I did not really need to aim at such a large target but I still hit the middle of five round targets on this face of the giant foam cube.
With that first shot, I once again went through the explanation process just like somebody in a video would while emphasizing my actions with words to shorten the process. For the third arrow, I simply let Poniard stand closer to me while I silently maintained the different postures and forced him to examine everything himself. Then I shot the large arrow once again into the middle target.
None of my arrows hit the bullseye but I was not trying to impress the goblin. He would eventually learn for himself how impressive it was to make those shots while barely paying attention. For him, though, it should only be a couple of days before he is backed up to fifty yards for simple target training.
Since the groundwork for training archers had now been set, I set to work on my MP recovery by lying out in the grass under the sun until the third goblin was finally just plain tired of running. I only got up to turn off their machine when I heard them call out but when I turned around they had already turned their treadmill off.
Now they were on their way to rest by the artifact.
By the time my patch of sunlight was cast in shade from the travels of the sun, even the other two goblins were ready to die from running despite the healing artifact. After letting them down from the treadmills I let them rest with the artifact for another half hour while going to check on Poniard. He was doing much better than I expected.
From where I was basically napping while everybody else was hard at work I could clearly hear the sounds of Poniard's arrows. At first, all of them were hitting wood. After fifteen or so many of constant recollecting, he started hitting the target every now and then. Then he started hitting the target more often as time gradually went on.
During the last hour, though, Poniard had only been hitting about fifty-percent of his shots on the cube. Now that I was watching him while walking over, I realized that he had at some point decided to move himself backward. And not just once.
In the thirty-yard location where I had left him were large trampled footsteps made from overlaying his stances in ever so slightly different places. At around forty yards there was another shallow pit of stance prints. Finally, he was already at fifty yards with a crude accuracy rating of about fifty percent.
These foam targets were about half a time bigger than the upper body of a fellow goblin, but for the arrows he was currently collecting to be gathered around and in the middle target of the cube was impressive. There were three arrows he did not remove, which were probably the ones I originally shot, but those were not the only ones in the proper target area.
"Poniard, my boy, you're as impressive as ever," I commend the goblin after waiting for him at his current shooting distance, lightly clapping his shoulder before rubbing the goblin's head. "I bet you could hit one in three from at least eighty yards in less than a week. Come on, food time."
Allowing the goblins the rare treat of eating outside, I let them stay by the artifact while Poniard and I fetch the tubes of ground beef that had been thawing, hopefully, since breakfast. After picking up the trash and putting the equipment away myself I decided not to bother with weapons training in the evening and took the goblins inside. The hobs had already raked the area up into a central pile and were wandering the agility course.
Because I usually stopped them whenever they tried fighting and using weapons, they did not actively pursue the full course. I honestly only reprimanded them at those times because they were using the yard tools and not proper equipment but I could not explain it. Instead, I just put a pair of foam rubber vests, helmets, and heavy wooden training swords in the tool shed.
Even though they expressed interest in the agility course, they were also pregnant. At this point, they were getting fat and round in their bellies and were starting to show swelling in their chests. Since goblins were born with teeth, they only took milk for a couple of days at the most but the mothers still produced it.
Since there were going to be two mid to lower E grad goblin babies, I was going to run a test. Raise one goblin with small servings of human formula and the other just with extra goblin milk. If the hobs were already swelling to the point where a usually blank but muscled canvas was showing nipples, I could soon hire a nurse or vet to come and pump them every other day.
Locking the simple iron bar doors of heated, twisted, and tempered sets of rebar to their room once they were inside and watching a myriad of videos that were unlocked for simple entertainment purposes while I was away, Poniard and I call another ride to come pick us up and take us home.
The next few days passed in similar fashion. Except that the goblins started much earlier in the morning so that they could get more time spent resting with the artifact before putting them through their combat practices. They, of course, remained around the artifact as well as weighted while using their training gear.
The classes for goblins that I was designing would not involve the artifact except for the middle resting period before the second workout. This would make them much less time consuming. Custom goblins could have access to the artifact during training but that was because they cost more.
Poniard, like everything else he did, quickly excelled at his archery practice. Eliza would probably be proud of him, as well as have a lot to teach. However, I did not need Poniard to become that advanced.
My goblins were sold as a personal protection unit, not as a mercenary or self-reliant weapon. While they should be able to rely on themselves, they should remain in the presence of multiple people for shared supports. Sending a goblin under Poniard's intelligence as bait or to fight alone would be trashing the familiar.
A goblin would only be able to use a lesser MP bow, anyway, so its effective range in low grade combat situations would not even be that high. Fifty yards was the perfect range for a goblin familiar without magic or below something like C grade. That was the perfect support range for front line Protectors.
Poniard also practiced his magic on a few occasions after fashioning his own wand. I caught him at home one evening trying to cook or melt his remaining insects in a metal bowl on the stove. After that, he was forced to show me the clay mold he had made from Lucinda's arts and crafts materials.
It was a simple shot rod mold with a thick handle and a tapering body that was about the length of a poniard overall. Since I had access to some tools of my own, I took him to the garage and got a cheap blow torch. With this, we had a thick mess of mixed precious metals in the bottom of the stainless steel bowl in less than a minute.
After pouring it in his mold, he put the largest of each differently colored stone along the body of the wand. After that, he simply gave me the small handful of misshapen pebbled that were left over. Now, he would spend about an hour every day practicing a single element.
Finally, though, the day came when Director Carlyle showed up at my house early in the morning driving himself. Kershaw, apparently, had already gone to feed the goblins at my property. Director Carlyle brought a special scanner from work that looked like a small black crystal ball at the front of a large calculator.
"This is the modern MP scanner people use for measuring mages below S grades," the director explained after showing me the device. "Just put your hand on the ball and focus as hard as you can on what you're about to feel. We use this tool for because it drains a mages MP to include the amount and quality of MP in their grading. For you, it will be the first time you feel MP used FROM your body."
Putting my hand on the ball without any further ado, I watched the director press a single button on his end and the small screen above lit up a faint blue to show scrolling digital numbers. After a while, the first digit turned into a zero and then a one and I felt something like warm air receding from my hand. Then the number began slowly climbing as the warmth began receding from more and more of my body.
After a while I felt all the warmth in me leave my body at once and then I felt nothing at all. My vision blurred slightly and there was a vague throb from within my temples but after that things started going back to normal. Even the warmth started returning to my body.
Less than a minute later, the screen on the device showed three different lines of letters and numbers. "What's the word, do- Director?" I ask, catching myself from insulting actual doctors.
"Your general MP rating that would be shown on your portal raid profile is currently two-thirteen," he informs me with a slight smile curling the corners of his mouth. "Congratulations, you're officially D grade. Aside from that, this device says you have an F grade mana pool which means you have an F grade capacity for magic. Right now. we'll check again soon in before your team is reinstated."
F grade? In the academy, I had no mana pool at all, which was the amount of reserve magical energy my 'body'- or my being- could produce on its own. On Earth, with some training or tools I could cast a few spells a few times a day as a form of training. In a portal with more mana around me, I could double my efforts and recovery time.
"So… what would the average for a basic warrior and then agility type in the way of mana pool at my level?" I ask curiously. "I know most people would be expressing mana at the end of E and learning to actively do it in D."
"For the average warrior like a swordsman or tanker at one-fifty E, they would have a low F pool that was enough to power punch or something like one time in five minutes or so," he says after simply staring at me for a few moments. "By your current low D grade they would have a low-mid F pool that would let them power punch two or three times within five minutes, but they could only recover one in roughly five minutes.
"A hard speed-fighter like you or your friend Eliza have slightly higher mana pools," he continues to explain while holding the scanner toward Poniard. "Yours is already in the mid-proper range and you're still recovering, but I bet your pool is already better than that archer's. let's compare you to your proper magic familiar, for example. They should be around the same current grade as you but with a naturally higher pool."
Three minutes later, "Yeah, no, we can't compare you to your familiar. He's a freak. His overall rating is two-forty-seven but his mana pool is over three-ninety. He's a C grade… shaman and a mid D in general. His recovery rate is also multiple times your own. Listen, just focus on the feeling of energy leaving your body and do something like meditative punches in your spare time. For now, get your shit and come with me."
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