It's probably no surprise to hear that I wasn't all that at school.

I twigged pretty much on day one that my teachers had a limited reserve of patience and energy, and they spent it all on the two extremes of the social ladder. On one end were the headbangers, the kids who spent half their lives in the Headmaster's office, chucking chairs and seeing how many rulers they could snap before morning tea.

In primary school, this was manageable. Even the most useless of teachers can handle a seven-year-old who has the occasional scuffle over crayons and a bit of wrestling that usually ended in someone's face covered in mud. Still, we all had tagged them as unpredictable, wild-eyed little chaos gremlins who could go from happily colouring to reenacting scenes from 'Gladiator' with little to no warning. And we stayed away.

Then, at the other end of the scale were the utter brainboxes. These were the kids who read 'Lord of the Rings' cover-to-cover in Year 3, casually mentioned "finite numbers" during maths lessons, and generally made everyone else want to kick seven shades out of them. The teachers, of course, adored them. They'd cluster around them during recess, showering them with praise for knowing words like "omniscient" and "hypotenuse" while the rest of us looked on, baffled.

Sensing I didn't have it in me to be either, I settled myself solidly in the middle, right in that cosy sweet spot where you didn't have to do the extension activities but also didn't have to worry about losing teeth that had just started growing in.

My entire approach to school from five to eleven was one of strategic slacking, just enough work to avoid scrutiny, just enough interest to keep Mr Juniper happy, and, crucially, just enough of both to avoid ever breaking a sweat.

I honed a finely tuned instinct for when to look busy without actually doing anything. I was the kid who figured out early on that if you timed your questions right, teachers were happy to ramble through half the lesson without noticing you hadn't lifted a finger.

Mum and Dad despaired, hence all my summers at Halfway Hold.

Their thinking was, I think, twofold. One, having an actual academic in the family – albeit a dotty one who specialised in a branch of science that couldn't be easily explained in less than twenty minutes – was sure to have an impact on their relentlessly average son, right? And two, the idea of six weeks of non-stop 'me' was clearly so unpalatable to them that shipping me off to deepest, darkest Worcestershire was a net win in any event.

Aunt M quickly clocked that I was quite a bit brighter than advertised, but she very much endorsed my decision to keep my head down at school. "Be suspicious of anyone whose crowning achievements in life are in the classroom, Elijah," she'd said to me once. "Our worth is not supposed to be judged at ten! Greater things await you, I promise."

I didn't need telling twice. Thus, to mum and dad's chagrin, I nailed being solidly, almost aggressively 'okay'. And very quickly learned that being not too hot and not too cold was the ultimate social camouflage.

However, with puberty just around the corner, then came secondary school. And suddenly everything ramped up like someone had decided to turn our lives into the Hunger Games, complete with extra pyrotechnics, more dramatic slow-mo shots, and a soundtrack of ominous drums and Gregorian chanting.

It was as if every kid was handed a role on Day One: the mentalists took on extreme new levels of violence, upgrading from minor classroom disturbances to full-on demolitions of anything remotely breakable. And these weren't just little kids anymore; these were shaggy-haired demons with a personal vendetta against school property, launching textbooks out of windows and treating every break time as Battle Royales. By lunchtime, I'd begun expecting a commentator in a tuxedo to start giving play-by-plays.

And the brainboxes levelled up too, morphing into miniature academicians with skills bordering on the supernatural. These were kids who'd show up to assembly with armfuls of advanced reading material, who'd bring up Shakespeare in casual conversation, and who seemed to be studying for exams no one else had even heard of. Teachers practically carried them around on golden pedestals.

The headbangers were hell-bent on destroying everything in sight, the brainboxes were locked in a death-match for the highest grades, and there I was, still happily in the middle, still keeping my head down and watching the carnage from a safe distance, just hoping not to get trampled by either side.

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When Griff told me that the key to being good at the job he was grooming me for was to keep my head down, blend into the walls, and pray I didn't get caught in the crossfire, I felt comfortable in letting him know I had some experience in that.

I've gone on this little Memory Lane wander because there's one school lesson I do remember vividly—and that's especially vivid right this second—is the day some poor, crushed supply teacher tried to guide my class through War Poetry on a wet Thursday afternoon.

It was one of those miserable days, too, where the rain rattled against the windows and the teacher, who had the tired, hunted look of someone just trying to get to 3 p.m. alive, handed out copies of Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen.

Now, most of us were too busy trying to fold our worksheets into paper airplanes, but something in that poem cut through the noise. At least for me.

I remember reading that line "like a devil's sick of sin" and being struck by the image of the dead soldier lying there, having coughed up his lungs. It hit me like a crack in the world. Like something ancient and raw had opened up just beneath my feet.

There was nothing grand about it, nothing like the statues and memorials and polished speeches I'd got used to seeing on Remembrance Day. Just this haunting, battered figure, all life drained from him, left there like some discarded sock, ruined in a way that no one should be.

I might not have been interested in learning much at school, but that poem made it clear that dying in a war wasn't about heroism or valour. It was just horror, stripped bare.

And it's funny, because you don't really expect that sort of thing to stick with you at sixteen, especially when half your mind's on what's left of your lunch and whether you might get to see down Mrs O'Reilly's top during P.E.

But there it was, still burned into my memory even now. I've thought about it more than a few times over the years. That fallen soldier who has "the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs."

And now, standing above the battlefield below Anchorfall, I can't help but see him echoed below.

Bodies covered the ground. And I mean covered it.

There's nothing poetic about it. Nothing noble. There were just corpses everywhere, their faces frozen in the last gasp of life, as the sun began to set. It hit me that it was the same horror Owen had written about. The reality of war stripped of all the frills, with all the myths of 'glorious sacrifice' removed.

I mean, Wilfred Owen had probably never anticipated a Steam Cannon, magically empowered Abilities or a tiny armoured woman wielding a massive sword. But still, I kind of thought he might've understood how I was feeling about the blood-soaked, ridiculous mess below.

At least someone might.

It's all fun and games until someone commits a war crime.

"My word," Scar said, turning off the Steam Cannon and taking a breath.

"Yeah," I said.

"Not sure how I feel about that."

"No," I said.

"I guess that must have been why the Steam Cannon upgrade was such an expensive option. I guess we weren't supposed to have access to it until the bad guys would be levelled to their mid-teens?"

"Sounds about right," I said.

Tell you what. You can say one thing for being massively outnumbered by three armies attacking you from all sides. It creates somewhat of a target-rich environment.

"I know this feels like it's not really the moment to mention this, but I've gone up three Levels," Scar said, a note of awe in his voice. "I don't think I've ever heard of anyone progressing that fast before."

I didn't look away from the field of . . . yeah, I don't have the metaphor game right now. Feel free to do your own semantic doom-scrolling. "Do you think that might be because no one has ever thought to marmalise this number of people in one go before? I mean, I'm not anxious to get this particular 'First' achievement, but I'm throwing it out there."

"Yeah," Scar said, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He was busily allocating his Progress Points and checking out his new goodies. The label above his head shimmered into existence as he did so – I still needed to learn how he hid it most of the rest of the time – and showed that he had reached Level 7.

Good for him. If it had taken Scar, what, fifty years to reach Level 4 – during which time he'd obviously seen no lack of action – I could well understand that suddenly picking up three levels from a few minutes' work would feel like a trip.

I looked down at that 'work' again and did my best not to lose my lunch. What was it that the guy who invented the atomic bomb had said? "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Okay, maybe a touch of melodrama is sneaking in here. My village's OP defensive weapon had wiped out a thousand or so low-levelled mobs. It was hardly the stuff of a Hollywood movie that would be massively overshadowed by a musical about an improbably proportioned plastic doll.

I was doing my best not to look at my own notifications. And there were a lot of them. Too many, actually.

I closed them down and pulled up my stat sheet instead.

Yeah, I'd made out like a bandit, too.

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