Why had I been selected for platoon leader, really? I was a mere farmer, after all.
While my ability to read and write had indeed been one of the reasons, it wasn’t the only one. Apparently, the real reason for my promotion was that a platoon made purely of people from the Gaelius Mountains had been established.
Powerful monsters (at least comparatively, for the central regions) roamed the mountains, and we had always been their hunters.
We had no choice, really. The mountains were so barren and inhospitable that, try as we might, our crops had never yielded enough food for us to subsist on. Hunting monsters was the only way we could survive. We could sell the pelts and bones as raw materials, and their meat was edible too. It was revolting, sometimes, but we had still eaten it—beggars couldn’t be choosers.
If we hadn’t hunted them, we might as well have sentenced ourselves to death. Life was just that harsh in the mountains.
So, compared to the peaceful farmers that lived in other regions, we were experienced fighters. The vast majority of peasants had E-tier combat skills—the lowest combat proficiency that could be expected from NPCs. Gaelians, on the other hand, started at D. Some of our especially skilled fighters were even at C.
Regular soldiers who had undergone an adequate amount of training were being deployed to the front lines. Despite our lack of formal training, we were also being deployed, but our roles were slightly different: We were designated as a commando unit.
Our orders were simply to “act as the situation demands”—in other words, we were free to attack the enemy at will. Furthermore, if we located any monsters that had wandered onto the battlefield, we were to dispatch them immediately.
Of those two directives, I’d say we were mainly concerned with the latter.
Our forces’ troops were squaring off with the enemy army at Croway Plains, a place where monsters commonly nested. Most of the monsters in the plains were unremarkable beasts of low rank, meaning that they weren’t really an issue. The actual problem was that they served as prey for larger, more savage monsters.
The Black Forest (Yeah, I know, the name is cliché as hell, but that’s what it was called in the game, okay?) was an area that lay directly east of Croway. The monsters that called it home would come creeping out of it in search of food during the winter.
On average, the monsters from the Black Forest were C-rank. I was sure that even a group of untrained adult men could defeat one, but it was too dangerous to leave things to chance. Occasionally, a monster of a higher level than the rest of its brethren would appear, and that was when things could go sideways really quickly.
Our role was to kill these monsters before they got anywhere near the areas we were occupying. A simple job for a Gaelian, really. All we had to do was shoot them down from afar. But, on the off chance that we failed to take one down before it approached our position, we’d have to switch to melee combat.