6. I Should’ve Just Taken the Theory Classes…… (1)
Once Jaden no longer had to attend theory classes, he suddenly found himself with far too much free time.
But leaving Jaden to idle around on his own would hardly befit an academy reputed to be the worst in the Empire.
So what the professors came up with was to determine how capable Jaden was in actual combat, and just how skilled he really was.
“Number 13.”
“Yes, sir!”
“From now on, you’ll be moving with us.”
Several men in military uniforms moved out together with Jaden.
Armed with guns slung over their shoulders and all manner of weapons, the men looked nothing like knights.
“Are you Rangers, sir?”
“You’ve got a good eye. We heard you made quite a showing from the very first day.”
“Right. They say you’re good with weapons? Join the Rangers later.”
“Yeah, we’ll treat you well. There’s nothing like the Rangers for building real combat experience.”
Pleased by Jaden’s words, the men began rambling on and on about how proud they were to be Rangers.
Each time, Jaden responded with the little knowledge he had, and perhaps because of their pride as Rangers, they went out of their way to treat him well.
Unlike their initial plan to scare him a little and gauge his skill, they left the academy full of praise, saying the kid had been raised remarkably well.
Since they had already heard that he had slaughtered the lowest-rank monsters, they skipped over creatures like goblins and headed straight for the next level up.
“This may be a safe zone with only the lowest-rank monsters, but you know even low-rank monsters can have mutated variants, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“From now on, we’re heading to an area with hobgoblins and gnoll warriors.”
“There’s also a border region crawling with gremlins, so be careful.”
At the Rangers’ warnings, Jaden nodded and checked the weapons he had brought with him.
In this world, there were guns just like in the real world, but weapons that had gradually developed according to unique scientific technology were mixed together with weapons that seemed completely out of place for the era.
It didn’t quite make sense to say that all of this had happened simply because magic existed.
He had even heard that just two hundred years ago, people had lived as if they were in the medieval era. In other words, they had undergone rapid development.
He had heard that some incident two hundred years ago had caused dungeons to appear, and that afterward, this jumbled scientific system had emerged. But there were no clear historical records left behind.
He had been too busy to investigate such things, and he wasn’t particularly interested in learning the history of this place, either.
In any case, thanks to that, grenades that strangely combined magic and science dangled from Jaden’s body.
He had flashbangs, smoke grenades, and explosive grenades hanging from him by type, and he had arranged two magazines filled with magic bullets outside his pauldrons. His light armor, more reinforced than a bulletproof vest, had pockets like special forces gear, capable of holding magazines, daggers, water, maps, lanterns, and the like.
Normally, since he had a subspace pouch, he wouldn’t need water or food, but because subspace pouches sometimes stopped working here due to the properties of mana fog, he had to carry at least a small amount in preparation.
“All set?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s get going.”
Only four people.
But three of them were veteran Rangers, and Jaden, too, had accumulated enough experience that it could not be ignored.
“Let’s see what our junior can do.”
When several goblins appeared, Jaden nodded, drew his dagger, circled behind a goblin visible in the distance, and assassinated it in one stroke.
Back during the beta test, he had received assassination training to cover for his lack of skill, so a simple ambush like this was easy.
‘There’s really nothing I haven’t done because of my lack of talent.’
Thinking back on the days when he had learned every miscellaneous skill imaginable in order to survive, Jaden smiled bitterly.
“Oh…… isn’t that an assassination technique?”
At the Ranger’s words, Jaden kept his answer to himself with a bitter smile. Then the Ranger beside him looked at the man who had spoken and shook his head. Among those who came to the Northeast, there were people who enlisted while hiding their past, so it was customary not to ask about another person’s history.
“Damn…… Sorry about that.”
“It’s all right.”
Jaden gave a slight nod as if to say it was fine, then continued the operation.
Their current objective was to check whether there were any mana cores that might have formed.
Normally, the official army prioritized dimensional rifts, but since Jaden was only nine years old, they were searching for mana cores as a way of instructing him.
Sometimes, because of dimensional rifts, polluted energy spread wildly into the surrounding area, and even if the rift was removed, the surrounding region was already contaminated, or large amounts of dimensional mana flowed in, causing an abnormal increase in mana.
It was precisely because of this that mana cores formed.
When mana continued to accumulate and accumulate, it clumped together like mana stones, and if it clumped together even further, it became a mana core that generated mana on its own.
One might ask what the problem was with having more mana, and while mana did benefit humans, the fact that it also strengthened monsters meant it was not an unconditionally good thing.
Because mana cores amplified mana itself, if they were left alone without being removed, there were cases where a goblin could become strong enough to toy with an ogre.
That was why, even for the sake of defense, searching for and collecting mana cores was more important than anything else.
In terms of the real world, it was no different from intensively managing an area for decades because of radiation.
This Northeast, too, was a region where a large-scale dimensional rift had occurred, like an area where a nuclear power plant accident had taken place, and it had been managed for over a hundred years.
“Goblin group discovered thirty meters ahead. Estimated at more than twenty.”
“Three gnoll warriors discovered one kilometer to the left.”
“Gremlins discovered seven hundred meters to the right. Estimated to be close to gremlin territory.”
The three Rangers continuously checked what monsters were in the vicinity through the magic tool Hawkeye.
At the same time, they killed monsters without provoking the area too much, continuing to search for terrain where mana cores might be found.
In the process, they sometimes ordered Jaden to kill monsters to test him, or ordered him to go and return from search points.
It felt like they were dumping chores on him, but from the Rangers’ perspective, these were easy tasks, so it was hard to call them mere chore-dumping.
The problem was that once those simple tasks lasted one day, then two, and reached the third day, even Jaden gradually began to struggle. Since his body was that of a child, no matter how much mana he had, there was no helping the fact that his physical stamina was low.
“Well…… there isn’t much for us to teach him.”
“Right. He knows most of the survival stuff, doesn’t he?”
“Hmm…… If we’re going to teach him anything beyond this, we’d have to teach him Ranger techniques…….”
The Rangers looked at Jaden with troubled expressions. He moved as though the basics of survival had been ingrained into his body.
He could distinguish edible plants from inedible ones to a certain degree, marked trees as he moved so as not to get lost, and was excellent at reading maps, ambushing, observing, and hiding.
In particular, though they didn’t know where he had learned it, he seemed to know to some extent how to identify the traces left behind by monsters.
Even his weapon handling was quite impressive.
At this level, it was fair to say he already knew the basic Ranger skills.
“I can understand the swordsmanship, but how are you so good with firearms? Where did you learn?”
“I learned a little.”
At the Ranger’s question, Jaden gave a wry smile. In truth, firearms were the weapons Jaden was most familiar with.
He had used guns while serving in the military in his current life, and even in this place, whenever he was deployed into a large-scale war, he always brought a gun.
You never knew what might happen in life, and if you strutted around relying only on mana while swinging a sword, you were liable to end up dead.
He had seen people like that often, and the other users of God Game, aside from himself, had died one by one that way.
There were many ways to become stronger: magic, swordsmanship, spirit arts, magitech, druidic shamanism, and more. The users who obtained those powers grew stronger in an instant. But the one who survived until the end was not them, but him.
It was all thanks to the fact that, in order to survive, he had learned miscellaneous skills and desperately mastered every survival method he could.
“Hmm…… At this rate, this won’t be much of a test.”
In order to teach Jaden more thoroughly from here on out, they needed to push him to his limits.
And so, they did something insane.
The Rangers suddenly displayed their true skill, spraying bullets everywhere as they slaughtered the monsters in the vicinity. In an instant, the surrounding area began to fill with the smell of blood.
“What are you…….”
The moment Jaden looked at the Rangers in shock, they smiled and said,
“Try following us for just two kilometers.”
“Then we’ll end this test right away.”
As they said that and took the lead, monsters that had caught the scent of blood began to appear one by one.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…….”
Jayden spat out a curse and hurriedly began following the Rangers. For now, the most important thing was to get out of this place, where the stench of blood was everywhere.
Seeing the mutant wolves that had gathered before he knew it, he quickly set off a smoke bomb. At the same time, he threw a bomb to one side, then shot out in the opposite direction.
Then, this time, a group of goblins attacked Jayden, firing poisoned darts at him.
In the air, a dozen or so gremlins circled as if eyeing prey, swooping down now and then at Jayden and the goblins. Seeing this, Jayden checked the surrounding terrain, set off a flashbang, and threw himself downward.
If it was simple survival rather than killing the monsters, flashbangs and smoke bombs were more than effective enough.
In fact, using them to put distance between himself and the monsters, Jayden ground his teeth and followed the Rangers’ traces.
Whenever he encountered monsters along the way, he kept them in check by firing his gun or throwing daggers, moving only in search of the Rangers’ trail.
After rolling through hell like that, when he finally arrived where the Ranger was, the lone Ranger standing there wore an incredulous expression.
“Huff…… huff…… Is it…… over?”
There was only one Ranger standing where he had arrived. The other two had been watching from close by in case Jayden was taken down by the monsters.
But when he truly broke through those monsters and made it all the way to where they were, the Rangers’ expressions stiffened.
The training Jayden had just undergone was a test conducted when applying to the Rangers.
It was one of the tests included in that atrocious training, considered one of the worst among soldiers, and was part of the hellish survival period.
They had never expected that a student who had only just enrolled, not even a military academy graduate, would pass it.
Although the real Ranger test was far harsher and more brutal than this, considering his age, it was more than surprising enough.
“Hmm…….”
“This is awkward.”
“It really is.”
The Rangers looked at Jayden with troubled expressions.
“Since it’s come to this, why don’t you try getting your Ranger certification before you graduate from the academy?”
“Excuse me?”
When Jayden stared blankly at the Ranger with an exhausted expression, they began to smile wickedly.
“Let’s make you the youngest Ranger while we’re at it.”
“Sounds good.”
“Right. If we take him back like this, the knights might snatch him away for no reason. We’ll have to work him a bit harder while we can.”
“Let’s make ourselves a monster Ranger!”
The Rangers, coming together in shared enthusiasm, stayed in the forest longer than planned in order to make Jayden into a proper Ranger.
Of course, the fact that he got dragged through the forest alongside the Rangers in the process was just a bonus.
Unlike at first, when they had intended to teach him only the basics, Jayden already knew most things, so they taught him techniques normally learned only in formal Ranger training one by one and worked him like mad.
By the end, they had worked him so hard that even Jayden took off his mask and cursed, begging them to please just go back.
After being put through the wringer in the forest for more than fifteen days thanks to the Rangers’ greed, Jayden returned, only for the knights to come looking for him next.
It seemed they had heard that the Rangers had taken a liking to Jayden and were trying to pull him over to their side.
Seeing that, Jayden looked up at the sky with dull eyes and said,
“Ah…… I wish they’d all just fuck off.”