Chapter 251 — Drills and a Proposal for Improving Melee Weapons
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
As the domain continued to grow, the population gathered on this land had already surpassed ten thousand, and the Cecil Combat Corps had undergone a new round of expansion in the process. The system, which resembled a construction corps, along with the tremendous boost magic gave to production and construction, allowed the Cecil domain to maintain a fairly high ratio of soldiers to civilians, and at the same time without overly affecting the development and operation of the domain.
Gao Yang had always firmly believed one thing: an age of chaos was coming. Whether it was the monsters in the Gondo wasteland or the wars between human nations, sooner or later they would find their way to his doorstep. And to face that impending danger, forging a powerful armed force was necessary, and inevitable.
And as the Cecil Combat Corps expanded in scale and the various administrative frameworks within the domain gradually took shape, Gao Yang's training of this army grew ever more formal and rigorous. Compared with the crude regulations of the early days of domain construction, many of which resembled nothing more than "three chapters of agreement," Gao Yang enacted military regulations that were clearer, stricter, and easier to tally for rewards and punishments. He stipulated the pay and benefits of every rank of soldier, laid down basic standards of conduct for the troops, and set out how the army was to be supervised, how military merit was to be recorded, and how dereliction of duty was to be punished. And to ensure these rules and regulations were carried out, he ordered the two knights, Philip and Byron, to select from among the young soldiers a group of literate, honest, and reliable men to serve as junior officers. Thanks must go to the night-school teachers for their efforts; more and more people in the domain could read now, and selecting such a group of junior officers was no difficult matter.
Gao Yang himself was not a man who understood military affairs, but fortunately Gao Yang Cecil was an expert in this regard, and combined with the bit of theory he had accumulated as a keyboard warrior in his previous life, he had at last managed to put this framework together.
Once the framework was built and the regulations drawn up, what remained was the nearly brainwashing education of new recruits and endless drilling, forging every rule and code of conduct into conditioned reflexes, carved into the bones of every Cecil soldier.
In the military zone on the eastern side of the domain, the new recruits were undergoing their daily physical training. These men, who not long ago had been ordinary farmers and laborers, were now outfitted in standard-issue Cecil armor, carrying on their backs training packs weighted the same as their combat packs, with steel vambraces bound to their arms matching the size and weight of a magic-conductor terminal. Laden with this gear, they drilled in formation on the open ground, while Gao Yang stood together with the two knights, Byron and Philip, watching over the soldiers' training.
From time to time the curses of veteran soldiers serving as instructors drifted across the field, but today the complaints and catcalls of the new recruits could no longer be heard.
"To be honest, the formation drill you insisted on pushing through really has been a useful thing," Byron said, watching the new recruits who in just a few short days could already stand in neat ranks, and he could not help but marvel. "After a round of drilling, at the very least their obedience has gone up."
Knight Philip, meanwhile, was marveling at something else: "Using a simplified knight's code as the soldiers' standard of conduct, and requiring everyone to meet it—I truly never expected that could be achieved."