The dynamics at our Strategy table had changed dramatically. As Master Kathar gestured for silence in his polished armor and laid out the task for the session, my friends, who had ignored me just a week prior, now eyed me as each detail dropped.

  He described the terrain on the map behind him, indicating rolling hills, a central river cutting through the middle, and what looked like a partially ruined fortress on one side.

  “Your force consists of a little over five hundred soldiers! Three hundred are standard infantry, Two hundred are ranged units, and you have ten combat mages. You hold a defensive position within this ruined fortress against a force five times your size. Your objective is to survive for three days until reinforcements arrive. The enemy will not stop attacking. They will test your defenses and harass your positions.” His smile was sharp and wolfish. “Let’s see what you have for me.”

  The room erupted into immediate conversation, teams huddling over their respective maps.

  At our table, Ressa leaned back, stretching lazily. “Alright, what do we do, Adam?”

  I looked to the others for suggestions. They were all equally despondent. Apparently, it was now my job to work it out. I shook my head. “If I’m still stuck here a year from now and we’re still friends, I hope you put more effort into our survival in a real-world scenario.”

  “Sure,” Torma chuckled. “But this isn’t that, and you won’t be. So crack on, twisty tongs. Pull us out of the fire.”

  I scanned the map. “We’re outnumbered, which means the fortress alone won’t hold. If we turtle up, they’ll just siege us and wear us down. Plus, there was nothing in the brief to say we needed to stay there. Sure, we can try to build it up, but it seems like a crutch to me. I say we make a show of holding it, but devise quick escape routes littered with traps and dens only our troops know about.”

  “Why hold it at all if we’re going to run?” Yoru asked.

  I shrugged. “Three days. It’s not so long but we might as well have our troops comfortable and get a good night’s sleep the first night because they won’t get any after.”

  “Depends how fast they come,” Ellaazi said.

  “True. But the vast majority of people who have any training know not to underestimate their opponent. Any general worth their salt would test the defenses first. I say stay while they test. Then when they plan and invest on whatever assault they’ve come up with, we run.”

  “Sounds good,” Torma grumbled. “But what then? Just do what we did in the forest? Hit and run?”

  “Mostly. I’d like to think they’ll take a few hours taking the fortress to hold for themselves. Their plan here is conquest so they’d look to occupy the fort and rebuild. Once they’re in, I want whatever fortifications we work on to be collapsible. Let’s see how many of the bastards we can burry. If we undermine the walls and the main building, we could cause some serious damage.”

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  Ellaazi’s eyes gleamed. “That’s... nasty. I like it.”

  Ressa finally sat up, intrigued. “Alright. Let’s put this into something we can present. We need to work out the logistics of setting up the fort. How quickly can we set up to cause real trouble, and will it be fast enough?”

  “And how do we split our units up?” Torma asked. “Same as last time?”

  “Maybe for a little,” I mused. “Just until we pull them back out of the fort. If that’s where we need to be extracted from, then I want to have a route back. I can imagine Kathar intentionally leaving the defense of the fort open only to screw us over at the end when it comes to extraction.”

  The others all went along with my vague bullshit, but by the end of the planning phase, we had actually thrashed out a highly detailed plan. We added contingency strategies, food rationing, and mage stamina conservation, so by the time Master Kathar called for presentations, I didn’t think we could do much more. If we failed, it would be down to Kathar being difficult rather than anything missing from our plan.

  It turned out we’d be last again, and I listened to all the plans as best I could to see if we’d missed anything.

  Just before the time came to read out our plan, I cleared my throat. “Just to be clear. I did last week, and I’ve already had my head above the water too much this week. One of you needs to deliver the plan this time, and you all helped a lot.”

  They all looked at each other, no doubt realizing I was right, but no one wanting the dubious honor.

  After an uncomfortable minute, Yoru finally sighed. “I will do this. Adam is right. It’s not fair to lay each presentation at his feet.”

  No one moved to stop him, but in all honesty, he would be the one I’d want to deliver the plan anyway. He had a natural, calm authority about him, and I suspected he would do better than me.

  The moment he began speaking, I knew we’d made the wrong decision. He murmured, stumbled, and forgot most of what we’d planned. What was presented sounded half-baked. A nonsensical scheme to explode walls and run around the countryside waving our knickers in the air.

  It got dramatically worse when he had to field questions. I gawped for the first three questions, and held my head in my hand for the final four as he stammered and stuttered and failed to answer a single one.

  As the big Thuris made his way back to us, I found it hard to meet his eye, until I remembered that I genuinely didn’t care about this academy, the lessons, or anything other than surviving it until I got home.

  “Well done, Yoru. It’s not easy standing up there.”

  He didn’t reply. He just sat down, eyes wide and paler than usual.

  I looked to the others. “Did any of you know he had a problem with public speaking?”

  They all shrugged guiltily and looked anywhere but me and Yoru.

  “Well, I’m going to assume you guys didn’t, because… well…” I left the insinuation hanging and moved on. “Next time, we’re going to need someone else to lay out the plan. We are going to take turns because I’m not doing it every cycle.”

  “That’s fair,” Ellaazi said.

  A thought stuck me like a thunder bolt. “Can I ask, who was doing the presentation bit before I came?”

  “No one,” Resa said. “We mainly just learned about strategy. You showed up just as we were putting everything we’d learned all year into practice.”

  I nodded. “So I didn’t miss much, did I?”

  “I’d say not,” Torma agreed as we were all called to silence by Kathar.

  “It’s been a mixed bag today, but the most convincing victory goes to Aeloria’s group. Arun’s group was a close second. The rest of you failed to defeat the opposing force.

  I didn’t care. I really didn’t care. I just liked grinding my teeth. That was all. Aeloria and Arun’s groups came up with good plans.

  If we were ten fucking years old!

  I suppressed the frustration, because I didn’t care.