Recruited Mage by David Fredric

Oldross. I laughed and turned back to my shooting. The next nine hit around the first one. Tain congratulated me; “Well done Sam, the best shot I have seen, have a break.” I sat down, enjoying the luxury of doing nothing. Eventually everyone, still brimming on an argument, finished and collected their bolts. One by one for about half an hour everyone managed to hit the centre and got a rest.
    Tain stood up and turned to us. “It is time for a bit of breakfast. Then you have to go to the others for basic combat training.” We walked back to the shed where there was some bread and jam. We were ravenous after the training so we wolfed it down, barely pausing to chew.
    “Ok then” said Tain and we followed him out and across the compound. We reached a large marked area about one hundred metres across. There were about twenty training dummies arranged in the centre. As we stood around waiting, the men and the commanders appeared from the main building, most likely from a breakfast. They were at a brisk jog and quickly reached us and lined up in a long line of four ranks. Mr Tain gestured for us to join and we quickly fell into line at the back. A huge and scary Commander covered in silver plated armour stepped to the front and addressed us all.
    “This is the point where we divide the hard men from the soft men and then make the soft men become hard men. Now there are two types of fighting we are going to focus on; group fighting as we will battle in a line with your fellow soldiers, and single fighting on your own against enemies as you might in the madness of a siege with no friends around you.” He walked over to a few crates and opened them. Inside there were enough wooden swords for all of us. Also there were proper shields. “You will be using these but you will then move on to swords still in their shafts and finally blunted swords. Now you all should know that practice makes perfect so we are going to practice. We will do group training first so we will split you into two groups.” He then walked to the centre of our lines and beckoned each line to split. Now that we were split in to two groups we handed out wooden swords and the shields to each other. I noticed Donal was on my team. I took mine as quickly as I could. Mine was quite heavy and I had to use two hands to wield it properly but as I had to hold the shield as well I had trouble holding it up for more than a few minutes. We were told to go down to one end of the area and the other team went to the other end. A few of the big men started swinging their swords.
    T his is going to hurt. At least they are smooth and blunt so it should only be a few bruises.
    You have a shield to defend yourself.
    Yeah but I can’t really use it well if this takes a while.
    “We better stay at the back.” I said to Donal and he smiled.
    “Well I am not staying at the front thanks. I do not want to be surrounded by huge men with no sympathy and large chunks of wood with which they can freely bash your head in with,” he said in a light-hearted way. “I want to wake up tomorrow still being able to walk.” We smiled at each other and walked quietly to the back.
    Wimp .
    Shut up you can’t get hurt.
    The Commander walked in between our two teams. “For our first battle we will let you improvise; now the only two rules are anyone on the ground you can’t hit and no hitting anyone’s face. We will not tell you what to do but I will give you a hint; the most organised team will probably win. You will begin...” he said, his voice rising to a shout “…now!” Our team drew together and formed a sort of shield wall whilst the other team, led by a few very big men looked like they were preparing to charge. We tightened up the shield wall and made it wider.
    Yes! We could stop them with a shield wall.
    The opposite team suddenly started shouting loudly then suddenly they all rushed forward. We all stepped back and crouched down. We all tensed and shuffled back. The men