Jessy had processed that slowly.

"The new soldier from the academy," she had said, in the tone of someone building a story as they received it. "Who got access to the trial bows by working through the bureaucracy..."

"Exactly."

"And the cost of the bows and rune arrows? Finch and Theodore are going to interrogate me until the end of the world..."

"Castle’s military support, trial equipment. I already filed the paperwork with Larissa’s help to make it look correct in the records."

Jessy had looked at him with the face of someone who knew the story had more layers than were being described, and who had decided that the undescribed layers were, in this particular case, the fair price for the part that was being described.

"All right, leave it with me," she had said.

♢♢♢♢

The bows arrived at the southwest sector through the correct channels, with the correct documentation, and with Ren Patinder’s name nowhere on any of it.

Garret examined them with the evaluation of someone who had seen enough new equipment arrive at the wall to have calibrated what was genuinely useful and what was the well-intentioned effort of someone who hadn’t spent sufficient time at the wall to understand what was actually needed.

Two distinct categories that didn’t always correlate with how official the equipment was or how good it looked on paper.

"You got these?" he asked Ren, in the tone of someone reformulating the question they were actually asking.

"I went through the process," said Ren. "It wasn’t that difficult... I had tried them at the academy and the distribution channel for military trials was already open, it just needed to be connected to the wall."

"And you filled in all those boring bureaucratic forms and requirements that quickly?"

Ren considered that for a moment.

"I took a management class," he said.

Garret looked at him for a second.

"A management class."

"Public resource administration, more specifically."

Garret processed that with the expression of someone evaluating whether an explanation was plausible and arriving at the conclusion that it was sufficiently plausible for practical purposes, even though it had certain strange gaps around the edges. Like the insane efficiency.

"Do you know how to use it?"

"Somewhat..."

♢♢♢♢

Teaching bow use at the wall was different from teaching bow use in the academy training arenas.

In training spaces, the target was static or predictable, positioned where it was easy to see. At the wall the target came from below, at distances that varied according to the creature’s speed and point of entry into the sector, and the positional advantage of the height changed the shot angles in ways that required recalibrating whatever reflexes previous shot had built.

The veterans took a little time to maintain good form while simultaneously channeling mana into the bow.

That was expected, and Ren said so directly before the frustration of the learning delay had time to settle as information about the bow rather than information about the learning process, a distinction that mattered for the thing to keep working. Frustration directed at the tool stopped people from directing it at themselves, where it was more useful.

Dunn was the first to find the correct angle and the correct amount of energy.

Garret was the second, you could see in him the expression of someone who had arrived at the conclusion that yes, it was just a matter of adjusting the calculation and practicing, not that the bow was difficult or impossible..

The first incursion with the bows was the kind of verification that didn’t require subsequent analysis.

The high-Silver mutant creatures that normally reached the base of the wall and that were normally contained from the gaps in the middle section found, this time, that the interdiction range had increased considerably.

They no longer needed to accumulate large amounts of energy and fire at close range to pierce the beasts’ defenses.

A bow from the height of the wall with an integrated element channel in the rune was what it was: greater range, greater penetration against the creatures’ defenses, internal damage from the expansion of the differentiated elemental mana excited by the rune, and the capacity to respond before the creature reached the point where combat at the wall became more complicated to manage.

The same principle as the wall’s positional advantage, extended further outward.

Garret fired four times.

Three connected.

For a first afternoon using something new in real combat conditions, that was exactly the kind of result that kept the thing improving, not perfect, but clearly working, clearly learnable, clearly worth continuing.

"How many management classes did you take?" asked Garret, while reloading.

"One," said Ren.

"You helped us a lot for just one class."

"It was a fairly dense class."

Garret fired the fifth arrow.

It connected.

At the end of the battle their tamed beasts went to recover the arrows, there were many, but they were expensive according to the report.

"Good," said Garret, in the same tone he used to evaluate shot angles. "My turn to teach you something then."

♢♢♢♢

Garret taught Ren the technical vocabulary and some of the military language for giving orders and calling formations, what each term meant in practice at the wall rather than in theory, the shorthand that had developed over years of having to communicate quickly in conditions where longer communication was a liability.

In exchange, Ren taught the bows.

What followed in the subsequent days had the steady quality of something that had found its rhythm.

The veterans used the bows in routine incursions with the frequency the learning process allowed, which increased as the learning process produced results. Each session deposited something in the reflex memory, the shot becoming less a decision and more a response, the mana flow becoming less monitored and more automatic. The ceiling of what the position could accomplish was rising.

They were also getting accustomed to hearing Ren give positioning orders that, strangely, felt progressively even more efficient than Garret’s ones.