“The practice of training soldiers since very young was not unheard of. In fact, if you just cared to browse the history books, you would learn how many nations, regardless of whether they portrayed themselves as virtuous or not, would often train warriors who were so indoctrinated for loyalty unto death from childhood. Religious orders were often guilty of the same.

And yet, despite the generally negative connotations of such practices, there were also those who were simply children that grew up in a warrior family. Maybe their parents were soldiers themselves, or maybe they were children of mercenaries. It was not strange to see these children train from a young age to later join their parents in the same line of work once they were able, though there was naturally far less indoctrination happening there.

My own personal unit is little different. All of us, myself included, were children whose parents were part of the republic’s soldiery, and it was our dream from a young age to be able to aid them in their duties and obligations, to help defend the nation we were born and grew up in like them.” - Scipius Cornelius Barca, Famed general and strategist of the Democratic Republic of Caroma, circa 62 FP.

“Oof!” said the little blonde girl as she fell onto her back. Yet, rather than just fall as a little child her age - all of five years old - would have normally done, instead she leaned into the fall, then took it into a backwards roll that ended with her back on her knees in the same smooth motion. The serious look on the little girl’s face, with the stick that looked more like a quarterstaff in her hands, looked somewhat amusing, but the determination in her eyes could not be hidden by it. “Again!”

“Sure thing, lil’ Aly,” said her ‘opponent’, who was also little more than a youth himself. Unlike most kids who were barely ten, however, Gustav was easily as broad, if not broader than many adults around the shoulder, even if he was rather short and squat in build. The child of a dwarf and a great ape therian, he shared the looks of his parents, had shared a resemblance to an ape that grew a beard, though also one with truly massive arms compared to most others.

Since he was the shortest amongst the older kids, he usually served as Alycea’s sparring partner, since even if Aly did hit him with her stick, he wouldn’t have even felt it, and despite his rough looks, Gustav had good control over his strength, and would take care never to hurt Alycea for real. At most, he would just gently shove or trip her, when she messed up, and children her age were surprisingly resilient to falls and injuries.

Alycea already had a few scrapes on her elbows and knees, but kept fighting as if they had not existed. Much like many of the other mercenary kids, she too idolized her parents, and wished to join them as well. While she might act cute and spoiled in Reinhardt’s presence, when he was not around, Alycea trained quite extensively, especially considering her age.

“Keep it up, Aly! Smack the big goof on the balls with that stick!” came an encouragement from the sidelines.

Erycea happened to be resting after some training of her own, and watched her adopted little sister’s training while she filed her claws to keep them at their proper length. If she left her claws to grow too long they might become a bit troublesome for daily activities, so Erycea always filed them down to the proper length while maintaining their sharpness once a week or so.

While Erycea filed her claws, a quartet of smooth glass orbs revolved around her like moons orbiting a planet. The orbs were of glass she had transmuted herself out of sand, and she kept them spinning around her to practice her control. Erycea had awakened her magic at seven, and while the glass affinity was not normally seen as being useful for someone who wished to take up arms, it had not taken long for Elfriede to think of an idea on how to use it in combat.

To actually be effective with it though, Erycea would need to be able to control multitudes of small glass fragments at the same time, hence her practice. Each of the glass orbs that revolved around her were in actuality composed of a multitude of much smaller grains that fit seamlessly against one another to form the orb. Her training was to keep them in place even while she kept the orb moving, entirely with magic.

These days, Erycea kept them revolving around her most of the time unless she was sleeping or training with her mother, at times, while physically juggling them with her hands, focused on controlling the separate grains and making them stay together while the whole thing moved around. Her sense of control had greatly improved, but not enough to be able to keep them afloat and in one piece while focused on sparring with her mother yet.

Unlike her, though, little Alycea looked up to their father more, and the few lessons she had gotten were mostly from the others who used a pole weapon like Reinhardt. If her little sister - and Erycea did consider Aly her little sister, adopted or not - kept up with the hard work, the girl would likely go far as she grew older.

Erycea couldn’t help but smile when she saw her little sister, who she had watched grow up from infancy, try her best to “beat” at Gustav, the half-dwarvish boy kindly sparring with her using a stick of similar size to her own, which looked almost like a small branch in his huge hand’s grip. Despite his bulky build, he moved swiftly and calmly blocked Aly’s strikes, before he spotted her leaving a big opening and swept her legs out from beneath her, depositing the little girl on her behind.

When Aly got up, rubbed her bottom, and yelled for another round, Erycea couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight, and since she finished filing her claws, she got up and picked up a pair of weighted sticks that her mother advised her to use for strength training.

Each of the sticks weighed at least a couple kilos, easily as heavy as a full-sized one-handed sword, and she swung them around as she went through the moves her mother had taught her. Despite their weight, Erycea was far stronger than most children her age, due to the constant and rigorous training she had gone through for years, and she kept swinging them for a couple hours even while she maintained control over the glass orbs that revolved around her.

The girls only stopped their activities when old granny Ursula banged on an empty pot, a signal that it was time to eat, and they ran boisterously back towards the tent city where the mercenaries’ dependents and support staff lived in at the time.