January 10th, 2025
It had been a week since the students moved in, and while all of the instructors weren’t here yet, training had begun at once. They did have one new instructor, however, Jochim von Mandel. As someone who was supposedly an expert mage from Germany, Mandel was the one that would instruct them in the ways that magic intersected with combat. That was one of the reasons Mandel was a rough around the edges type, but that worked just fine for the role that he played at this academy. It also played into the unconventional methods that made training with Mandel an adventure, because they were both out of the ordinary and hard to predict.
One of those methods, which had been suggested to Reinheld, the main instructor when it came to physical training, involved waking everyone up when it was 4:00 AM and informing them that they would be embarking in fifteen minutes on a hike back down to the base of the monastery complex and around to the opposite side of the entrance, where they would pass through the jungle and travel until they reached a nearby village where they would turn back and head to the monastery again. It wasn’t the longest hike, yes. But it would take longer because of the terrain, and because Mandel had informed everyone that they would only have one flashlight, for the person in front of the group. Everyone else would have to navigate in the dark, which was a challenge in itself.
But as Mandel said, real life wasn’t always convenient and being able to work under bad circumstances was key to getting out of bad situations as a hero. If they learned lessons like this now, they would do a better job when they were in the field and something like being able to move around in darkness was a matter of life and death. “We will be leaving in five minutes,” said Mandel’s voice over the loudspeaker system that broadcasted sound across the entire complex, at a volume loud enough to wake up anyone that hadn’t already been startled awake by the original announcement. “Those who do not show up will be fined, so do not report to the courtyard late.”
The message was simple enough. But it got the point across. Get to the courtyard, or get fined. Of course, if someone hadn’t heard the first announcement, they wouldn’t know the reason why they had to report to that area. Still, the warning had been clear, and those who decided that the cost of the fine outweighed that of getting up in the middle of the night would be on their way already to the courtyard after getting on their clothes for the upcoming hike, as well as grabbing at least their basic weapons as the original announcement had instructed.