“Despite what popular stories and tales might tell you, it was a rarity for a battle to end with the utter annihilation of one side. Such things made for good stories and ballads precisely because of their rarity, though some people might take them to be the norm instead if they were unfamiliar with military matters.

In an actual battle, it was common to see a battle decided before one in ten soldiers on the field had died or been wounded badly enough to no longer be able to fight. Other than rare exceptions, it was rare for an army to take more than a third to half of their number in casualties and still persist in battling their opponents.” - Siberat Gover, General from the Third Elmaiyan Empire, circa 159 VA.

“Rhia, how are those prisoners behaving?” asked Erycea when she noticed her long-time friend’s approach. At the moment Erycea was helping some members of the platoon carry one of the logs they used as a trap towards the side of the road, with others carrying the other logs. The road they seeded with traps was a public road after all, so it would not do to leave their traps behind.

“All but one of them’s been quiet and behaved themselves. Just the one Rory and Ayrie shot being noisy,” reported Rhiannon as she walked alongside Erycea, who had not paused her work even while she talked. Rhiannon together with a small group had taken the surrendering riders prisoner, as well as gathered the horses which were uninjured by the traps along the way.

“And what’d you all do with him?” asked Erycea as she heaved and dropped the log at the side of the street, where it would not hinder the traffic. The previously muddy ground had been turned back to its solid state by the collective effort of several earth mages in the platoon. While each of them alone was weak, together they were able to re-solidify the ground to passable conditions. In the same way, Ayrie had worked for the whole day together with a couple other minor mud affinity mages to create the morass in the first place.

“Conked him in the head to keep him quiet then trussed him up like a pig,” said Rhiannon with a smile in reply to Erycea’s question. Erycea looked towards where others in the platoon had gathered the dozen or so surviving horses from the raiders, and saw a trussed-up bundle laid across the back of one horse, much like a piece of luggage. “Yeah, we just tossed him up there. Betting he wouldn’t be walking quietly either so it seemed the best way.”

“Good enough, I guess,” said Erycea in reply as she nodded to her old friend. Both of them then turned as they noticed the approach of a dark-skinned human youth and Ery nodded to him in acknowledgement. “Hakim, how’s the roadwork?”

“We’re just filling up the last of the pits right now,” replied Hakim who had been assigned to fill the pits the platoon had dug in the road. His group had been the ones to dig them in the first place, and they kept a detailed map on the location of the pit traps, so it was a matter of time and manpower to fill them once more until the road was smooth.

As for the other traps, they had been dismantled, the stakes brought to be reused at a future date - it was not strictly necessary to gather them up, but given how the Company had shifted to more irregular tactics, they never lacked a use for some good stakes either - while the ropes were neatly rolled and stored back. The branches and logs were even packed in Erycea’s larger storage - given to her by her parents, though it was standard for platoon leaders to have one - to be used as firewood when they returned.

Since they had a dozen horses to bring with them, the regular-sized - since a horse would probably die on the spot if Vlad or his cousins tried to mount them - members of the platoons took turns in riding the horses, while their captives were tied by a rope that connected the bindings on their wrists to the horses’ saddles. The platoon went back towards the east together with their captives that way, only stopping briefly to strip the dead raiders out of everything valuable on their bodies.

The stripped corpses they had simply left by the side of the road, a bit deeper into the forest, so as to allow the wild beasts to claim them without luring them too close to the road itself. More than a couple of their captives paled at the nonchalant and irreverent way the young mercenaries treated the dead, and eventually one of them could hold it in no longer and protested against such a treatment.

“That was Sir Ojibwa of house Muog! How could you savages treat a noble knight’s body that way!?” yelled out one of the captives.

“Quiet, you,” said Aurora who happened to be marching next to said captive nonchalantly as she punched the man right on his mouth. Despite her rather small size - she barely reached Erycea’s shoulder - Aurora could pack quite a bit of force into her punch, and one of the man’s bloody teeth flew out from between his lips. She must have hit him hard enough to either make him accidentally bite his tongue or cut his cheek against his teeth as well, given the bleeding in his mouth.

“Funny,” noted Erycea coldly from nearby, having caught wind of what the captive said.

“What’s so funny about desecrating the dead, you barbaric savages!?” yelled the captive once again, which earned him another punch from Aurora, this time sending three of his teeth flying.

“I just thought it funny that now you called upon your oh-so noble status as knights and whatnot. Where was all that nobility when you were busy burning villages and murdering defenseless villagefolk?” replied Erycea with an incisive tone to her voice. “You wanna be treated like some noble sir knights and slaughter helpless people at the same time? Can’t have it both ways, jerkface.”

“For us all you fuckers are just what our contract asked us to handle, shitty raiders of unknown background. What our employers would do with you when we hand you over, I neither know nor care. They ain’t paying me to ask questions,” she continued just as relentlessly. “As for those dead shitbags? We ain’t being paid to bury ‘em, so of course we’d be happy to let the beasts have their fill.”