To teach a man to wield sword and stave was such work that only the richest could afford to have it done, and the job never ended until the man retired or died on the battlefield. Luckily for Sorilla and the survivors of Hayden, those times had come and gone with the invention of the firearm. A moderately fit human could become a competent fighter in as little as a couple weeks, assuming you didn’t need him to do anything fancier than hit what he was aiming at. When it came about in history, the modern firearm utterly destroyed the old way of doing things. Monarchy’s, once the only groups that could maintain a standing army, were suddenly displaced by groups of peasants who could learn to be effective militias in a matter of weeks. Without the modern firearm, empires could be ruled by a single family, sometimes a single person. With it, the United States of America declared and held its independence from the preeminent empire of its day. Today, Sorilla was about to put that theory to the test.
