We decided to do formation training first. We told Big Mike what we’d come up with and our strategy of Tanya being leader and calling the shots. We talked about our disaster of a first fight, but how we’d done pretty well against the squirrels. We didn’t even want to talk about the vulture. He thought about it for a bit and then wanted to see us in action. We did our dog and pony show with Tanya directing us with the various calls we’d finally limited ourselves to: T-Up, Skinny, Fat, Drift Left, Drift Right, Turn Left, Turn Right, Tighten Up, Split and Stop. It felt odd doing it without the shield and sword, just the machete. I also felt odd doing for an audience.

He thought about it some more and then said, “It doesn’t look that bad. You’ve got a small group here and you’re not concerned with a lot of the things that an army is. You don’t drill, don’t march, don’t parade, all you need to do is fight. There’s a lot of strategy that you still need like when to fight melee, when to do ranged, how to switch between the two, and how to back away, how to retreat, how to advance as a group, how to attack from hiding, how to respond to an ambush, how to divide up targets. I mean that’s just the start of it.” He paused for a second, still thinking about it.

“But what you’re training for is probably the most likely scenario, facing a monster or group of monsters head on,” he continued. “And, from what I’ve heard and seen, monsters don’t retreat. That rat I fought, no back down. It was still biting and clawing at me even when I could see its brains from cracking open its head with my softball bat. So what you need to do is to utilize the terrain in the best possible way and not die while killing what’s attacking you. That’s pretty much what you did against the squirrels. Your formations are working for doing that. I’ll just adapt what I know to what you’ve already started.” And then he gestured to Consuelo and the two little girls and said, “alright, get in the back line and let’s do this.”

He took his place on the front line, next to me, on the right side. Consuelo moved behind him with the two little girls on either side. The two older ones moved out to the sides, with Tanya being on the right, Janet on the left.

We practiced for a while and there was a difference, a definite difference between the pre-Big Mike formation drilling and the post-Big Mike formation drilling. He wanted precision or snap as he called it in our movements. Same word, way different meaning between when Tanya said it and he did! When Tanya would call out drift left he wanted to know how fast that was going to be, then he drilled us on it. We drifted back and forth across the former parking lot. Turning underwent the same evolution, skinny, fat, all our movements did. It was exhausting, but good. In addition he had Tanya add three more calls, slow, double, and quick to tell us how fast we needed to be moving. And he had exact speeds for each of the calls.

Tanya came up with a surprise for us, she evidently had learned a new spell last night, “Illusion”. It generated, at her current level, a giant rat-sized blob of color. Not really looking like anything, but at least something that we could focus on. They were capable of moving, but not very fast, about a person’s walking speed.

She and Big Mike stepped aside while the rest of us were recovering, well Consuelo and the two little ones were, and talked and when they came back, we started to face off with imaginary opponents that would randomly appear and move toward our formation.

Tanya would call out, we’d respond and then Big Mike would stop us, show us what we were doing wrong and what it should look like and then make us repeat it until we got it right, well, right enough. After about another two hours, everybody that didn’t have the two skills before (Battle Movement and Military Drill) had them now and the little girls and Consuelo were exhausted.