Steel, gunpowder, and spellcasters

Chapter 12 Guaranteed Job Placement After Graduation (Part 1)
After taking over their posts, Winters and Budd patrolled along the military academy walls, carrying halberds. They didn't bring muskets, because muskets were much heavier than halberds.

Moreover, the gatekeepers had no gunpowder or bullets; their muskets were just for show. If Winters were to follow his own ideas, he wouldn't even want to take the halberd.

The Army Academy is not a treasure trove; the Army Officers' Academy is practically penniless. The United Provinces Army's educational philosophy has always been to save money wherever possible, and then use the saved money to establish more schools.

This impoverished place, where even a mouse would leave crying, was crammed with strong, energetic young men.

Not to mention thieves, even ghosts would avoid it.

For the school, the main purpose of night patrols is to prevent individual students from sneaking out of the school at night. But catching two officer students trying to escape from their dormitories is not worth the effort.

At the same time, having officer cadets arrest their classmates was also unreliable. Winters had sneaked out a few times while his classmates were on night watch, only to return in the middle of the night.

He always uses the main entrance, so there's no need for him to climb over the wall.

The two strolled around for a while until it was completely dark, and the lights-out time had passed.

At night, the campus of Lu Academy completely bids farewell to the hustle and bustle of the day, and the dark campus is like a wild beast lurking in the shadows.

Winters often had this feeling during his night patrols: the military academy was not an inanimate object; it was breathing rhythmically every moment.

The surrounding neighborhoods, like the military academy, were fast asleep. Only the distant port area never slept; Winters could even faintly see its scattered lights.

That was the territory of drinkers and service workers who were having a good time.

Outside the military academy's walls, near the residential area, there are some simple stone tables. The stone tables are shaded by several broad-leaved trees, providing shelter from the sun on sunny days and protection from the rain on rainy days.

The stone tables were all built by nearby residents. Small vendors would set up stalls on the tables to do business with the military officers and students.

Winters pointed to the stone tables and suggested to Bard, "Let's sit for a while."

“Okay, sit for a while, I’d like to have a smoke too.” Bud smiled, noticing that Winters was too lazy to leave.

The wind is quite strong tonight, blowing from the sea towards the land. It brings a lot of moisture, and the sky above Gui Tu City is already obscured by clouds.

The moonlight became faint after passing through the clouds, and the road was only slightly easier to walk on than on a moonless night.

Winters frowned. "Judging from the wind and the clouds, it might rain tomorrow."

Rain is not good news for someone embarking on a journey home.

The two sat down at the stone table, and the wind from the sea wiped away their sweat and took away the heat from their bodies.

The daytime heat has dissipated, and now it is a cool and comfortable night.

Bud took an old pipe out of his small satchel. He first put some shredded tobacco into the bowl, then packed it tightly, and then repeated this process of "filling with tobacco and packing it tightly" twice more.

Winters watched as Bard finished filling his pipe, then, with his left hand still in the thumb-press-forefinger gesture, lit the tobacco in Bard's pipe bowl.

This is a small perk of having a spellcaster friend; as long as Winters is around, Bard never has to worry about where to find fire.

"Ike said he envied me during the day. I wonder if he'll still say he envied me if he finds out that the biggest advantage of being a spellcaster is that it's easy to light a cigarette," Winters thought to himself with a self-deprecating smile.

A significant portion of men in this era are either smokers or drinkers, and many are both. The vast majority of people who neither smoke nor drink do so not because they don't want to, but because they can't afford it.

Winters is one of the very few people who neither smoke nor drink, and as a spellcaster, he must avoid any addictive substances as much as possible.

Antoine Laurent believed that addictive "poisons" could corrupt the spellcaster's will, paralyze their senses, and destroy their magical abilities.

Winters claimed he didn't idolize anyone, but that was self-deception, a consequence of the delicate ego of a young man. During his three years at preparatory school and three years at the Army Academy, Winters devoured every book, file, and letter he could find related to Antoine Laurent.

He read what was public openly; what was confidential, he read secretly. If all went well, Winters should be able to begin writing a biography of General Antoine Laurent before he turns thirty…

In short, Antoine Laurent said addictive substances are bad, and Winters resolutely refused to touch them.

Seeing Bud take a comfortable drag on his cigarette and slowly exhale, Winters finally decided to ask the question that concerned him most.

"Have you found out where you're going to be assigned?" Winters asked with concern.

In the dim firelight, Bard remained calm and unmoved by Winters' question.

“I didn’t ask,” Bard replied unhurriedly. “I could guess without asking; they’re just being sent overseas.”

After saying that, Bud continued to focus intently on smoking, a recreational activity that was detrimental to his health.

He seemed quite content, showing no sign of worry about his impending overseas assignment.

“Overseas assignments are not as easy as you make them out to be!!” Winters immediately became agitated.

But Bud smiled at Winters, as if to say, "Don't worry about me, it's nothing," and continued smoking in silence.

Winters looked at Bard, then at the city of Guido at night, then at the sleeping school, and finally sighed helplessly.

Budd did not feel sorry for himself, but Winters felt sad for Budd's situation.

Overseas deployment, strictly speaking, means that military academy graduates are assigned to various locations along maritime trade routes.

The two closest destinations to the mainland are the Holy Shepherd Empire and the Freman Empire. The capitals of these two empires are world-renowned bustling cities, and the Alliance has consulates in both.

Being a military attaché in a glamorous consulate is a coveted job that everyone wants.

But the “overseas assignments” that Winters and Bard mentioned were clearly not such pleasant jobs; rather, they meant being assigned to more distant and dangerous ends of the world.

Tomorrow, Winters will embark on his journey home, where he will spend a year as an intern in his homeland, the Republic of Aquamarine.

By this time next year, Winters will be back at school. Strictly speaking, he hasn't truly graduated yet; this year he's on probation as a warrant officer.

Military academy students dispatched overseas can forget about returning home once they board the ship to go abroad.

Don't even think about attending next year's graduation ceremony, because the round trip will take more than a year.

In name, the officers dispatched to various trading posts were there to protect the Alliance’s overseas interests.

But often they are just officers without troops. They have no soldiers or authority, so naturally they have no opportunity to earn merit.

Want to go home? Either be put in a coffin or endure until you retire.

To understand why Bard was assigned overseas while Winters wasn't, one needs to understand the Army Officer School's graduate placement system.

To understand the job assignment system for graduates of the Army Officer School, we must start from the school's founding.

One of the old marshal's purposes in establishing this military academy was to bridge the rifts between the member states of the alliance, especially the differences between the armies of the republics.

Because the Alliance is not strictly a "nation," but rather an "alliance," its full name being the Free Alliance of the Republics of Senas. The political landscape of the Alliance can be described by the famous quote from former Alliance Secretary of State Humphrey: "Nation? What kind of nation are we? Aren't we just five hostile primitive tribes?"

(End of this chapter)