Re:Demon - Reborn as a Demon Book 1

17

As Nagi had expected, the fight went poorly. She understood, and even accepted, that expecting failure would lead to failing, but when only four out of the nineteen members of her side managed to take someone else out before getting hit themselves, she didn't think any amount of positive attitude would've changed the result.

To her surprise, Wreth managed to take out two, while Phose and Troth managed one each and Nagi herself took three out before she realized that she was the last one left and she could either take on everyone by herself, something she wasn't sure she could do and even if she did, would make her a target for the next year or so, or she could let someone hit her, so she'd stepped into a swing, letting it hit her at the end of its arc so that she barely got impacted.

She'd felt Wreth's disappointed eyes on her, but she would rather do a few extra sets then get beaten on every time they had to do this again.

In the end, the instructors only made them do half the number of sets that night. Nagi thought that even they hadn't expected things to go that badly and had hoped that it would be more evenly balanced, but when the teams were split like they were, she was actually amazed that they'd done as well as they had. She'd honestly expected that maybe one other would be taken out, which made her wonder if she hadn't underestimated the group, but she quickly found out that she hadn't.

The next day they went over the battle in an attempt to figure out what had happened.

"So, why did you lose?" Stegh asked them. Nagi was beginning to wonder if he wasn't going to be their side's coach, either that, or he was still in charge since this had been his group the day before.

"Cause they're too strong," came a cry from the back of the room.

"Incorrect." He scanned the room twice, till he stopped on Nagi and seemed to be waiting for her to answer, so she sighed and did.

"A lot of reasons. First, there was no organization, everyone just ran off to do their own thing. That works fine if you're all strong enough, I guess, but as we saw, it doesn't work when you're the weaker side. That also includes the choice of weapons. Everyone here seemed to go for swords, but we're smaller than our opponent's, so getting close isn't always the best choice."

There was a lot of grumbling at that, so she turned to the class and glared them into silence before continuing.

"Think about it, did any of you manage to get a swing in before you were taken out? And what about those of us that actually took someone down? Out of the seven we managed to take out, only two of them were in melee. Which means five were at range.

"I'm not saying that we would've won if you'd all taken ranged weapons, far from it, but I think we would've done better. Though I have to expect that the other side will be thinking the same thing, so we kinda wasted that chance."

"Anything else to add?" Stegh asked, eying her.

"Not that would be approved of."

He shot her a questioning look, as if he wanted to know what that meant and what she was thinking, but didn't want to do it in front of the other students, probably out of fear of corrupting their minds, so he just nodded.

"She's right. You all rushed forward, which is a fine thing, but none of you had each other's back, except for three of them that got kills and the fourth got a little protection from them. That's not to say that you should always count on having anyone to cover you, but if you do, use them, it could save not only your life, but theirs as well.

"She's also right about your weapons, a number of you overburdened yourselves, even though you'd been warned about that, yet you neglected to take anything for fighting at range. Even a few javelins for throwing on the way in would've helped, and if you got surprised, you could still stab with one of them in an emergency."