Iron Powder and Spellcaster

After taking over the post, Winters and Bud patrolled along the military school wall carrying their halberds. They did not bring muskets, because muskets were much heavier than halberds.

Moreover, there is no gunpowder or projectiles at the gate, and the musket is just a decoration. If Winters had his way, he wouldn't even want to take the halberd.

Luyuan is not a treasure trove, and the Army Officers Academy is nothing. The concept of running schools of the United Provincial Army has always been to save what can be saved, and the money saved can be used to run more schools.

Such a poor place, where even a mouse would cry when he went in, was filled with strong young men.

Let alone a thief, even a ghost has to walk around.

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 cadets who wanted to escape from their dormitory would not be a crime.

At the same time, it is very unreliable to let the officer cadets catch their classmates. Winters had sneaked out several times while his classmates were standing guard at night and came back in the middle of the night.

Every time he took the main entrance, there was no need to climb over the wall.

The two wandered for a while, and the sky turned completely dark, and the time to turn off the lights passed.

At night, Luyuan completely bid farewell to the hustle and bustle of the day. The campus in the darkness is like a beast dormant in the shadows.

Winters often had this feeling when patrolling at night: the military academy is not a dead thing, it is breathing rhythmically every moment.

The nearby neighborhoods were as asleep as the military academy. Only the port area in the distance never sleeps, and Winters can even vaguely see the lights of stars.

It’s the domain of the merry-go-round drinkers and service workers.

Outside the military school wall, there are some simple stone tables next to the residential area. The stone table is shaded by several broad-leaved trees, providing protection from the sun on sunny days and protection from rain on rainy days.

The stone tables were built by nearby residents, and small traders would usually set up stalls on the tables to do some business for officers and cadets.

Winters pointed to the stone tables and suggested to Bud: "Sit down for a while."

"Okay, sit down for a while, I also want to have a smoke." Bud smiled, seeing that Winters was too lazy to leave.

The wind is a bit strong tonight, and it is blowing from the sea to the land. The wind brought a lot of water vapor, and the sky above Guitucheng was covered by clouds.

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

Winters frowned: "Look at the wind direction and clouds, it might rain tomorrow."

Rain is not good news for a person who is about to embark on a journey back home.

The two sat on the stone table, and the wind from the sea wiped away the sweat on their bodies, taking away the heat from their bodies.

The heat of the day has disappeared and now it's cool and comfortable at night.

Bud took out an old pipe from his small shoulder bag. He first filled the bowl with some crushed tobacco leaves, then pressed them tightly, and then repeated the process of "filling tobacco leaves and pressing them" twice more.

Winters watched Bud finish loading the cigarettes, then he kept his thumb pressed against his index finger with his left hand and lit the tobacco in Bud's bowl.

It was a small perk of having a spellcasting friend, as long as Winters was around, Bard never had to worry about where to find fire.

"Ike even said he envied me during the day. If he found out that the biggest advantage of becoming a spell caster is that it is convenient to light cigarettes, I wonder if he would say envious words." Winters thought mockingly to himself.

A considerable number of men in this era were either smokers or drinkers, and many of them were both. The vast majority of people who don’t smoke or drink don’t do it not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t afford it.

Winters is among the rare few who neither smoke nor drink alcohol, and as a spellcaster, he must avoid any addictive substances as much as possible.

Because Antoine Laurent believes that addictive "poison" will corrode the caster's will, paralyze the caster's perception, and destroy the caster's spell ability.

Winters admitted that he admired no one, but that was self-deception, because of the subtle pride of a young man.

During three years of preparatory school and three years of mainland college, Winters read all the books, files and letters he could find about Antoine Laurent.

If it's public, he'll see it openly; if it's confidential, he'll see it secretly. If things go well, Winters should write a biography of General Antoine Laurent before he is thirty...

All in all, Antoine Laurent said addictive substances were bad, but Winters was determined not to use them.

I saw Bud taking a comfortable puff of cigarette and exhaling slowly. Winters finally decided to ask the question that concerned him so much.

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

Under the weak firelight, Bud's expression remained as usual, unmoved by Winters' question.

"I didn't ask about it." Bud replied calmly: "You can guess it without asking. It's just that he was sent overseas."

After saying this, Bud continued to focus on smoking, a leisure activity that was harmful to his health.

He seemed content and not at all worried about his upcoming overseas deployment.

"How can overseas dispatch be so easy for you?!" Winters suddenly became anxious.

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

Winters looked at Bud, at Guitu City at night, then at the sleeping school, and finally sighed helplessly.

Bud doesn't feel sorry for himself, but Winters feels sorry for Bud's situation.

Overseas dispatch, strictly speaking, means that military school graduates are assigned to large and small nodes along the maritime trade routes.

The two closest places to the mainland are the Holy Mulu Empire and the Freman Empire. The capitals of these two empires are world-famous bustling cities, and the Alliance has consulates.

Being a military attache in the consulate in the colorful world is a job that everyone is vying for.

But the "overseas dispatch" in the words of Winters and Bud is obviously not such a good job, but being assigned to a farther and more dangerous end of the world.

Tomorrow Winters will embark on his journey home, where he will serve as a trainee for a year in his homeland of the Seablue Republic.

This time next year, Winters will be back in school. Because strictly speaking, he has not really graduated yet. This year he was a probationary officer with the rank of warrant officer.

As for military cadets who are dispatched overseas, as long as they get on a ship to go overseas, they have no chance of going home.

Don't even think about attending next year's graduation ceremony, because it will take more than a year to come and go.

Nominally, officers assigned to various trading posts were there to protect the Union's overseas interests.

But many times they are just polished officers. With no soldiers and no power, there is naturally no opportunity to make meritorious deeds.

Want to go home? Either be put in a coffin or survive until retirement.

To understand why Budd was deployed overseas and Winters was not, one needs to understand the Army Academy's graduate allocation system.

If you want to understand the graduate allocation system of the Army Officer School, you must start from the beginning of the school’s establishment.

One of the purposes of the old marshal's establishment of this military academy was to bridge the rifts between the alliance's participating countries, especially the differences between the republic's armies.

Because the Alliance is not a "country" to be precise, but an "alliance", its full name is the Free Alliance of Senas Republics. The political ecology of the Alliance can be described by quoting the classic words of former Alliance Secretary of State Humphrey: "A country? What kind of country are we? Aren't we five primitive tribes that hate each other?"