Chapter 55 Archery Tailning

----------------------------------------

"If we continue at this rate of learning our lesson. we would only need three months to finish the entire curriculum for Sinctail Academy!" Lily muttered. "I wonder how much reduction we will receive among our one million gold debt!"

"Yeah!" We are in our final year of swordsmanship and Mathematics in just two months at Sinctail academy. I suffered during reading poems and writing prose during our third year reading and writing, but the teacher praised our growth regardless.

When we came to the sword lesson, the air was tense, and everyone looked at Lily.

"Huh? What happened? Did I do something wrong?" Lily froze up and looked behind her, and checked her outfit.

"Lily!" The Mercenary teacher shouted.

"Yes?"

"Did you know about Fort Soleil?"

"Fort Soleil?" Lily tilted her head. I then knew what they were talking about.

"It's the fort where the undead attacked," I answered Lily.

"Oh! Yeah, that fort where that bat-face gorilla and bat-face horse looking and that skeleton things!" Lily shouted.

"Well, class. There will be no practical classes for today. Let us hear Lord Lily, who has participated in Fort Soleil Defense!" The mercenary Gabel shouted while everyone clapped their hands.

"Huh? What's this all of a sudden?"

"Lily, Lord Joseph summoned us and said the high council is preparing for the liberation of Northlangard from the undead. He said that every able-bodied person that could wield a weapon would be summoned." Alith explained.

"Ah, I see. Good that they acted fast. It was pretty bad there. When is the Liberation? I didn't hear anything from Lord Edelweiss…." Lily muttered.

"Hmm…. what about the humans? If this continued, we would expose our flank for those humans…." I muttered. I couldn't fault Elven's judgment since what they were doing was for the greater good, but I was concerned that this would expose our rear to human attack.

"Hm…. I haven't heard about that either. Are you sure it's credible?"

"Sorry. I might have slipped up." Alith spoke. The atmosphere then turned for the worse. Somebody then shouted, "Hey, You can't do that! That's a breach of military confidentiality!"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Class! Don't say anything just now. Let us hear from the official source later! Since this might involve military secrets, don't blabber your mouth!" Gabel then shut everyone's mouths. "We then shall continue with Lord Lily's story. We need to learn about our enemy. If you know your enemy, You won't lose the war! That's the principle of the war!"

Lily then told the class about fort Soleil. Gabel was especially interested in the enemy's characteristics, while Alith and Sana were interested in how we defeat them. Most of the class also asked various questions, such as Fort Soleil's soldiers' compositions, locations, defense structure, and strategies.

"Walls and buildings made of stones? Whoa, we must have poured a lot of money into making them. Cement was expensive…." The other kids muttered

"We need to be adept at arrows? We don't have that in our classes, right?"

"Yeah, I could use them to some extent but never trained them." Some tailfolk commented. "Why aren't they teaching us that?"

"Just like tailfolk can ride horses or other animals naturally. Elves are naturally adept at the bow or any other trajectory weapon. They don't see the necessity of teaching that. You guys don't learn how to walk or run in this academy, right?" Gabel sighed. Wait, this is the first time I heard it.

"Lily? Is that true?"

"I don't know. But, indeed, I don't have any trouble riding a horse despite never rode one before. Maybe it is because we have a good balance, maybe?" Lily tilted her head.

"Sarielle! You are an elf, right? Could you teach us how to use a bow? If we got recruited, we need to be able to use it, right?" Anar asked his elven friend.

"Well, sure! It is imperative that everyone should be able to use a bow."

Then Sarielle and the other three went out. While Gabel set up some dummy training, we all went outside to buy some bows. It was ridiculously cheap at just fifty gold a set.

"I can't use a bow," Lily muttered.

"Neither can I."

"It is good that elves value swordsmanship so much rather than archery, right?" I muttered while considering our reputation.

"Yeah, according to history, they valued swords so much because it has a lot of expensive metal, and they could fashion them as fancy as they liked it," I muttered. It never clicked to me why these elves value swordsmanship so much compared to archery. Is it just like the Japanese in my world, where they love swords despite their low mineral deposits?

"Their swords are all expensive!" Lily nodded while examining her saber. Even after cutting several heads, the blade hasn't chipped in the slightest, and the color is still shining white. "Wonder why they value it so much. It is a good sword, though."

"I wonder why they were fixated on swords when their archery was a cut above their sword skills," I muttered. I already knew the answer, though. Apparently, in the elven legend, there was an archer and a swordmaster. When they battled, the swordmaster deflected all the arrows with his sword and then beat the archers. Another legend also said that they teamed up, but when they fought huge swarm monsters, the archer died because it ran out of arrows while the swordmaster killed the remaining enemies. Since then, bows have been treated as a secondary weapon and never to be relied upon.

"We still use bows at fort Soleil though. It would be nice if they included archery in our curriculum so other tailfolk could learn them too." Lily commented. In fact, we rely on bows so much at the fort that we wondered why it was not taught here.

The impromptu archery range was then completed, and as expected, the elves hit all their targets while the tailfolk hit none. The innate talent of these elves was scary. This is the first time they hold a bow, right? Lhorne's skill above these monsters, though. I was glad that he was our comrade.