“Humans baby their young until they have spent a good fifth of their lifespan. While some mocked and decried us as animals for it, we strongly believe that the young do not need so much coddling.” - Garull Mane-of-Silver, Head Shaman of the Kosva Tribe from the Western Isles.

“Angle shields! Low wedge!” yelled Vladislav from his position slightly off the center of the shield wall’s center. Erycea had no need to give them orders. Vladislav had joined the Company ahead of them for a couple years when he was fourteen, then returned to their fold last year to teach them tactics and strategies related to the shield wall charges his grandmother, uncles, and aunts were known for. Erycea fully backed his command of the shieldbearers of their group and gave her full confidence behind him.

While the bandits had reacted surprisingly fast to their presence, and had immediately welcomed them with a rain of arrows, the shield wall at their front took out the brunt of the projectiles, and the few that passed through them were swatted out of the air by the more dexterous of the young mercenaries behind. Erycea herself had split her large orb of glass into six smaller orbs and used them to smash many arrows off-course during their approach.

As the shield wall approached the fence - their one obstacle in their headlong charge to the bandit camp - the shieldbearers followed Vlad’s command and held their shield at a steep angle as they braced the upper side against their shoulder and even held the top of their shields with their other hand. The low-angled shields simply crushed through the bushes of thorny brambles like they had not existed, and only paused when they collided with the fence.

For a brief moment, that was.

The instant they felt the resistance against their shields, Vlad, Tasha, Vera, Gustav, Valeria, and Beth - the only ones in the shieldwall who had shields large enough to cover their bodies from head to toe - pushed hard with their whole bodies, their free hand holding the shield in place, and heaved. It was a contest between muscles, the earth, and wood. The earth lost that contest as the buried part of the fence was literally uprooted by the efforts of the six young mercenaries.

As if what they did was just a minor thing, the six young mercenaries continued their advance with barely a hitch in their steps, as they rushed straight at the surprised bandits within the camp. Some had already left the camp and headed towards the other group of rookies assigned to the mission, but such was life. Besides, if they wanted to be mercenaries, they should at least manage those bandits who went their way on their own, Erycea thought.

There were sentries atop the trees on the side they mounted their assault on, but as the group of young mercenaries passed, those sentries dropped from their perch atop the tree. Ayrie took one out with an expertly thrown dagger that took the bandit in the neck, while Aurora - Cassie and Arne’s daughter - Took the other out with a shot from her crossbow.

When the young mercenaries clashed with the gathered bandits, bodies were thrown through the air.

The entirety of the bandit gang were humans, many of them barely even in fit shape, so the effect achieved when several young bear therians, each easily taller than even the tallest humans and weighing nearly half a ton each, struck them forcefully while running at full speed, the results were to be expected. Several of the bandits were simply shoved aside, less fortunate ones found themselves hurtling through the air with broken bodies.

As if on cue, the shield wall then split to the sides while forcefully pushing aside the bandits, as the twins Tasha and Vera led the push to the left, while Vlad and Gustav did the same to the right. The rest of the shieldbearers guarded their flanks and kept the bandits on the sides occupied, while the rest of the young mercenaries charged right into the throng of the gathered bandits.

They were outnumbered nearly two to one, but they did not care.

Just as the bandits noticed the young mercenaries behind the shieldbearers, Erycea split her orbs of glass into thousands of tiny, razor sharp shards, and hurled them wholesale at the gathered bandits at eye level. Screams echoed from the gathered bandits as the shards of glass pierced through their face, with the unlucky ones catching some directly in their eyes or in their open mouths, and to say that they were distracted at the moment would have been an understatement.

Erycea and the rest of her group descended on them like a hurricane the next moment.

She herself led the charge from the very front, with her pair of metal truncheons in hand. The first bandit in her way - one unfortunate man who must have had dozens of glass shards embedded all over his ugly face and was busy clutching said face - probably never saw her coming as the truncheon in her right hand struck from above and shattered his skull with a single blow, sending bloody shards of bone and gobs of gooey brain matter hurtling through the air.

Rhiannon stabbed the bandit to the left of the one Erycea brained, the leaf-shaped blade of her swordstaff embedded through the gut of the unfortunate female bandit. To Erycea’s right, Ayrie slit the throat of another bandit with the short sword she held, even as her other hand hurled a dagger into the gut of a different bandit.

The bandits behind the frontmost line were less affected by the barrage of glass shards, mostly because the ones up front had taken the brunt of the assault, so the next bandit Erycea encountered fought back. He tried to swing his axe towards her, but failed as she swiftly pierced through his wrist with the spike on the end of her left-hand truncheon.

Before the bandit could even scream in pain, Erycea’s second truncheon brutally struck his jaw from the side and directly tore the man’s entire jaw right off his face and threw it hard into a second bandit further to the man’s left, who panicked at the sight once they noticed just what had struck them in the face. Erycea then swiftly ended the man as she pulled her first truncheon out of the man’s wrist and used the spike on its pommel to pierce through the man’s skull from the side.