“No matter how good the steel, it becomes worthless unless forged and tempered properly.” - Old dwarven saying.

“Come on, you maggot! Strike harder! My dead grandma hits harder than you even at seventy and that was decades ago!” yelled Nina fiercely as she effortlessly parried a blow from a trainee’s wooden sword using her long cudgel. She, along with other senior members of the mercenaries were helping train the more promising recruits in combat techniques, as they had the leisure and free time to do so of late.

It was also part of Lars and Reinhardt’s harder training program. All too often young and new mercenaries who had some skill with weapons got too cocky and overconfident, which at times ended up costing them their lives or more on the battlefield. As such, they pitted such rookies against the nastier and more experienced senior mercenaries to beat some humility into them, with a tirade of insults to boot.

Sure enough, before long Nina shoved the trainee’s wooden sword aside as she pushed against their shield with her knee, which unbalanced the trainee and caused them to fall on their back. Then Nina mounted the hapless trainee and struck once at their wrist to make them drop their sword, followed by a second strike to the ribs. Of course, she used the blunt end of her cudgel, not the spike-capped end, but the blows would still leave painful bruises as a reminder for the trainee.

Not far from where Nina taught the trainee a painful lesson, Kari did the same to another young trainee, who looked every bit the farmer boy he likely was. The boy was skilled enough with a spear that he was tossed to the group, but Kari made short work of him as she deflected a thrust with one training knife and charged in close to the poor boy.

A painful rap to the back of his hand made the boy loosen his grip on his training spear, and the follow-up strike to the inside of his elbow made him drop in. Kari then stepped on his foot with one of hers, before she kneed the boy right in the crotch and caused him to double over, even as she placed one of her wooden daggers right against the side of his neck.

“There, you’re fucking dead now. Don’t think just because you got the longer weapon it means you could forget about learning how to fight up close!” said Kari viciously to the trainee. It had been eight years since the once weak girl and her brother had joined up with the Company, and nobody sane ever thought of them as “weak” anymore. Her brother Alva was recently promoted to the archer detachment’s second-in-command after the retirement of some seniors, while Kari had been part of Elfriede’s crew for over six years now.

They were proof on how one could succeed in the arguably brutal line of work as a mercenary with little more than dogged determination. The siblings went from a former prostitute who merely had basic skills with a bow from hunting in the woods and young woman who was half in despair as she carried a child by rape to term into a pair of hardened killers who had sworn never to be the victims ever again.

Alva was nowhere near as skilled as Salicia was at long-distance archery - but then again nobody amongst the mercenaries was - but he had a knack for guiding a group of archers to strike at a general area with good accuracy. Kari on the other hand, had relied on determination and guts to work her way into her current position, with a recklessness that at times bordered on the suicidal. Still, given the nature of the kind of work Elfriede and her crew did on the battlefield, she fitted right in with them.

When Reinhardt looked at the young woman he couldn’t help but to glance a bit further away, where the group of children that followed Erycea did their own training, amongst whom was Kari’s seven year old son Roven. She cared for the boy, though she had a difficult time being truly close and loving with him, partly because of the circumstances of his conception. Lars had placed the training location for the trainees within sight of the children on purpose, in the hopes that the sight of the children’s training would shame the trainees for being lazy by comparison.

Sure enough, it was not long before Cassie brought that into the attention of the trainees she looked after.

“Tired already? It’s only been an hour! What sort of weakling are you all? Look at those kids over there!” she yelled, as she pointed towards the group of young children who practiced by the hill a bit further away. The kids had been practicing from before the trainees were present, and they had yet to stop for a break, even the younger ones like Alycea and Roven who were barely seven to eight years old. “Even little kids had more stamina than you! Aren’t you bloody embarrassed to call your fucking lazy asses adults!?”

As if to punctuate Cassie’s tirade, repeated deafening noises of metal striking wood resounded, loud enough that even the trainees could hear it clearly. The source of those noises were Erycea and Beth, Clara’s daughter who was a couple of months older. Beth was a quarter-therian girl who inherited much of her mother’s blood, as evidenced by her horns and hooves, and she trained to become a shieldbearer.

Said training involved maintaining a steady posture without moving even a step back while others whaled on the shield she held up with her left arm. It happened to be Erycea’s turn that day, and she used her pair of new weapons which struck the shield with great force that had caused Beth’s arm to go halfway numb over time.

Erycea’s own weapons showed no signs of warping or damage despite the repeated impacts against the hardwood shield. Hogarth had made the weapons out of a personal alloy recipe of his, which gave the weapons extremely good durability combined with a hint of flexibility, which when put together allowed the force behind each strike to fully transfer to the target while minimizing the rebound for the user.

The only drawback of the alloy was that the resultant metal was hideously heavy, as the alloy incorporated a high percentage of adamant compared to most other similar alloys. Each of Erycea’s weapon, despite their one-handed construction, weighed almost as much as a pair of greatswords. That the girl not only managed to wield them one-handed, but also kept swinging them around for hours on end was in no small part thanks to her therian heritage, which granted her a faster physical development than humans.

In the end, the two young girls only stopped their training another half an hour later, when Beth finally had to call a pause to their training since Erycea’s last blow had sundered apart the hardwood shield she wielded. Erycea’s fur was matted with sweat by then, and she was breathing hard, but the girl looked satisfied with what she managed.

So was Reinhardt, as he looked on from afar.