I didn’t know back then

Silver rain falling from the sky.

The moonlight flickered off the small fragments as they fell down to where everyone was, and the sight of objects being crushed under their fall was truly spectacular.

"Th, the rock just broke to bits!"

"Help me!"

Total chaos.

Traditionally, for any member of an evil organization, silence is life.

That's exactly why these chicks won't cut it.

Even if a dragon is snoozing right in front of your eyes you should be thinking about silencing your breath and fleeing.

The ones who panic this noisily are the Villain 1, Villain 2 set menus you so commonly see getting slaughtered by a charging hero.

"If you move you die!"

Ohh. Looks like there are still ones that stand out even in this chaos.

The first one who correctly identified the 'umbrella' and the one who's just staring up the sky at the silver rain like someone watching a meteor shower.

The former is one that knows about magic, while the latter is either a lunatic or just simply that insanely skilled.

Either way is fine. Those ones survive quite well.

Especially the latter. Whether they're insane or insanely skilled, the fact that they can afford to act like that in this situation means that it's worth expecting things from them.

Up till now there've been a few of that type. If nothing else they're fiendishly good at staying alive, you know?"

"Umbrella, use the umbrella!"

The kid who first recognised the magic held up the umbrella I gave them and shouted.

"You crazy bitch how the hell is that an umbrella!"

A dumb one picks a fight in the middle of it. If you don't have the eyes to see you need to be able to trust people.

No, if someone without the eyes to see blindly trusts people doesn't that make them a pushover?

"A crazy bitch is better than a retard. You, the one with pure water instead of brain fluid in that sparkling clean cranium of yours. Listen up. If this is rain, then humanity, no, life as we know is completely screwed during the rainy season. Like that other guy said, this is the Empire-style bombardment developed during the last great war. And this is very much an umbrella, a protective staff with engraved with magic defense spells."

That was it. When it rains, one opens up their umbrella. It's a special staff made specifically to block that silver rain of death.

To be honest, it's simply because they didn't think of it, but that magic bombardment isn't something just anyone can use.

Naturally once the Empire used it, all the horrified world powers immediately copied it, and same for the Merdeia kingdom that was completely totaled by the bombardment.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, everyone started using this strat, and on the contrary, the majority of the mage divisions were annihilated.

What's there to hide! My favorite phrase is 'to be cut in the foot by a trusted axe.'

And responding to that faith, what my previous workplace's bosses and I came up with was this defensive strategy!

Under the line of thinking that this magic bombardment strategy would almost certainly be used by the enemy sooner or later, we just simply thought our hardest for ways to give our enemies a giant middle finger, the result of which is that defensive magic staff.

+1 point to the kid who identified it first. For the record, at 10 points you get to graduate early.

"But only the Empire's soldiers know how to use it!"

"If we don't know how to use this, we're dead. Find how."

This batch seems quite usable? It's not like there were ones who didn't recognise what that staff was in my previous cohort, but then there were idiots who just ran off with the staff after hearing those words, that moment was when I nearly recorded my first casualty in my entire time as an instructor.

My previous boss and I weren't morons so taking into account the possibilities that they could be stolen on the battlefield, leaked by spies in our allies or troops, or like me, who stole the finished product and secretly sold it off to the enemy nation for a massive price, so with those considerations in mind we made it so that you couldn't block the bombardment with the staff alone.

To begin with, the bombardment method is carried out by a two mage per team group, not using ice magic, but directly freezing the moisture in the stratosphere and dropping it, so even if they block ice magic with magic barriers, it's a simple chunk of ice with nothing but mass and a very high velocity so the magic barrier goes splat, and as a bonus people also go splat!

As a result, the method of activating that staff is different to activating all other conventional staves. And it's Class 1 imperial classified information.

But so the saying goes. Catch not fish for a man, but teach a man how to fish.

So let's not catch fish for them and teach them how to go about catching fish instead.

"Let's narrow it in a bit."

"Narrowing in."

Don't they say people perform the most spectacular feats right when they're on death's door?

Seeing as how these kids still can't find a solution, I decided to kindly give them a solution instead.

The solution being that if they couldn't find a solution then they would die.

"It's getting closer!"

"Those of you at the edges, run to the center!"

"Damn it! They're seriously gonna kill all of us!"

Sounds of the truly desperate. When humans are on the verge of death, their abilities skyrocket.

Right now their brains are turning over very very quickly. So let's oil their brains a bit to help them turn over even quicker.

"Mix in a few big ones."

"…Are you serious about not killing them?"

"It's for show anyway. Fire them quite far off."

At my words, the communication mage hesitated a bit before contacting the mages in the air, and shortly afterwards human-size blocks of ice started to form pits as they fell.

Thud!

The grand finale right over there.

As a block that seemed roughly 50 metres in diameter left a crater in the ground, an odd quietness fell on the trainees.

"Ah, fuck. That's straight up unblockable."

Everyone was silent. As the kid that was the most proficient in magic, the one that had been coolly taking charge swore, the ones that had only barely calmed down started panicking again.

"Aahhh, looking good."

"This is?!"

It was a comment to myself, but it seems to have been overheard.

It's probably just me in thinking that the communications mage that was standing beside me took a step back while looking at me as if I was a devil or something.

Right?

"Isn't it? A helpless crisis. A crisis that won't ever be resolved no matter how much fight with despair and frustration. Normally the beings called heroes are ones who actively overcome those."

In any event, the beings called dragons are creatures you face while staking the survival of a small country on. But in old hero tales, dragons and demon kings are defeated as par for the course.

"This is not a place where we train heroes."

"Indeed. It is not. The complete opposite. However. When those beings called braves or heroes did appear, every time our organization has suffered tremendous losses."

Even if we look like this we're still the Empire's largest evil organisation.

Even though we cull off hundreds of brats that proclaim themselves a hero every year, the number of times we get seriously unlucky and get fucked over by a genuine hero is at least a two-digit number every year.

"And because of this we need heroes of the villains."

Looking at the sector in turmoil, I smiled slightly.

Ahh. Grow. Grow big and strong my incentives!

But back then I didn't realise. That the creature called a genuine hero would actually be born from this place