@-Sleepless- I am ignoring your post, because no, I never said "MC should've never taken damage. So shut up.
@Kanol The reason I say magic training isn't helping with this is because we're talking about him having -combat experience- Learning how to field strip a gun is great but if you spend all your time learning that and never learn how to shoot it, you learned nothing for combat. It's great the MC learend more magic, but until he actual sits down and takes time to learn how to fight with it it's all just a curiosity and holds little practical value in combat.
Now as for the sparring, I'm pretty sure the contract would allow sparring as it's about intention. Also Tomoe and Mio would be great sparring partners. I'm not sure you know how sparring works for learning. The point of sparring is to practice using your skills and reacting to other people's skill so that things turn into reactions and not conscious thoughts. It's the reason a lot of traditional martial arts are totally useless in combat (especially a lot of Chinese ones) because they don't do real sparring. Now if the contract does stop him from sparring, there are Mio's underlings and others in the village. they're not as strong, but it's hundreds of times better than meditating for learning how to actually fight. Even if he just trained how fight with a bow, that would be a huge thing. Because even if he doesn't have a bow in hand, he'd still have practiced evasion and defense and that would apply. So he'd have more tools ready than he does now.
Now what you say about his people, is true, but that's not the whole of it. Yes he can't fix it completely by being stronger, but if he is stronger, then it's another piece of their defense. So if something happens and he happens to be there, especially if it's a high class threat like with Mio showed up. Your part about in town; is almost a good point, 'cept there is one problem, you're basing that on him being in town and going to train at the magic school. He hasn't always wanted to do that, he didn't always know about the teleport gates. Until -very- recently to his knowledge there would still be the possibility of encountering something strong out there, so why wasn't he training then?
My point of mentioning deathmarch was to bring up the fact that the MC has tools and resources they -could- use and there isn't a reason not to use them, but they just don't because the author doesn't want them to, and then later that comes to bite them in the ass. It's fine if they just don't use the resources and it's whatever, but it's bad writing to tell us these resources exist, then have the MC not use them for no reason and then go "Well because he doesn't use them now something bad happens." That's why it's annoying that Sophia is supposedly a real threat.
If Makoto wasn't shown to be diligent, or the author didn't keep hyping up his combat archery, I wouldn't really be annoyed. But they've set him up as the kind of person you would expect to put in the effort and would've been training this whole time. But he didn't. If Makoto was training -for fighting-, and that still wasn't enough, that would be fine too.
Look at it this way, after this fight, nothing about Makoto's character is likely to change. He might develop new techniques after it after realizing his flaws in combat, but it wont make him more serious, cause he already is, it won't make him realize the world is dangerous cause he already does, he wont suddenly decide to train, cause he's already heading to the magic school. So then what narrative is the 'purpose' of this fight? All I can see is it's purpose has nothing to actually do with the MC other than giving him a chance to meet the heroes. So the MC is randomly dragged into a dangerous fight, that holds likely little to no narrative benefit for him, that sounds like it's a fight just for the sake of a fight, and that's annoying. There isn't even anything really at risk.