“Those who worked hard for something were bound to cherish it more than those who merely did what they had to and received it without hardships involved.” - Old folk saying.

“May we have a moment of your time?”

Erycea looked up from the campfire she and a few others from her group huddled by towards the source of the voice. Given the time needed to properly search the bandit camp for salvage and other possible loot, and how the day had already turned dark, both her group and the other group of rookies, together with the adults who served as observers for their first mission, decided to camp by the bandit camp for the night.

The source of the voice turned out to be Hakim and Malika, who Erycea remembered were the ones in command of the other group. Neither of them looked that well off, with most of Hakim’s arm and upper torso wrapped up in bandages since he had taken many wounds all over, while Malika’s left arm rested in a sling while her left shoulder was heavily bandaged as well.

“Sure, have a seat,” said Erycea with a welcoming gesture as a couple of her crew shifted slightly to make room for the newcomers. The room left for them was directly across the fire from where Erycea sat cross-legged on the ground, right between Vlad and his twin cousins, which might have inadvertently intimidated their guests a little bit.

“Have some,” said Gustav as he passed a pair of wooden tankards over to the newcomers. The tankards were filled with strong dwarven ale - a gift from his dwarven mother to commemorate his first missions that Ery had helped carry in her storage - that the group had just recently cracked open and indulged themselves on. The strong smell of alcohol that wafted from the tankards made Hakim cough as his eyes almost watered.

Eventually after his coughing subsided, Hakim gathered his courage - and a bit of pride since he didn’t want to get laughed at by the bunch of younger kids around him who quaffed the drink back like it was water - and took a drink from the tankard, only to cough even worse to the laughter of the group. Malika also coughed a bit after she took a drink, but quickly recovered and took another drink from the tankard to the cheers of the surrounding kids.

“Not much of a drinker, huh?” asked Gustav as he proffered a tankard of water to Hakim, who thankfully received it and drank it down before his coughing subsided at last. “Woulda thought ya can hold yer liquor, since yer pretty big an’ all.”

“Never had anything more than stuff that’s watered down to heck back at the village,” explained Hakim as he gave a thankful nod to the therian-dwarf hybrid. Hakim was a head taller than Gustav, but Gustav was easily twice as broad if not more, with each of his arms almost as wide around as Hakim’s waist. “I don’t think da ever got a taste for it even now. Besides, aren’t most of you too young to drink this sort of stuff to begin with?”

“Me Ma’s a dwarf, man! Been drinkin’ ale since me was a wee babe!” replied Gustav with a booming guffaw that elicited more of its kind from the other kids nearby. While it was rather common in human lands to limit harder drinks to adults, and only give watered-down stuff to younger kids, the mercenaries were clearly not one to care much about said rules and traditions. Some like Gustav were pounding down on tankards of the strong ale as if it was water indeed.

“So what brought you here?” asked Erycea to the other group’s leaders. “I don’t think you’re coming over just to share the fire and mooch off some booze, no?” she punctuated her words by taking a swig from her own tankard, sighing in pleasure from the kick of the alcoholic drink. “Though it definitely is good booze to mooch, to say the least.”

“Your group did way better than ours,” stated Malika bluntly as she finished off the last of the ale in her tankard. “We’re mostly curious on how you achieved that, if I may be blunt. We sort of fucked up out there.”

Gustav passed Malika another tankard of ale, which the young woman gratefully accepted and immediately took a swig from.

“Eh, for what it’s worth, I think you two did your best out there. You kept the others together, rather than panic and lose your heads running around uselessly. That’s not bad for your first outing,” said Erycea with all seriousness towards the pair of youngsters. “Had you panicked and lost control of your people, there probably wouldn’t be much of you left at all. Getting out of that shit with only one dead, which is more or less their own fault? That’s good work.”

“We still should have done better,” claimed Hakim bitterly as he looked down. The boy’s voice was full of anger, but it was easy to tell that all that anger was directed towards himself for what he perceived as a personal failure more than anything. “Our plan proved to be useless, and if your group had not hit them when you did, there’d be many more of us dead out there.”

“There’s a reason we got the adults as observers, you know? Those in the previous years had often flunked their first mission even worse. You guys are like the best batch we’ve got out of the rookies in the past few years, I heard,” said Erycea lightly to soothe Hakim a bit. “And you got a harder mission compared to them, to boot!”

“You’re saying this as if you weren’t a rookie yourself?” asked Malika with some curiosity. The way Erycea spoke made it clear that she had not considered her group to be part of the batch of rookies to be blooded this year.

“Well… let me put it this way. How long have you and yours trained before this mission?” Erycea asked back.

“Two years, give or take a few months for some,” replied Hakim off the top of his head. “Most everyone in this batch joined after I did, so I was one of the first of the batch, and I was there for around two and a half years of training before this mission.”

“There you go,” said Erycea with a nod as if that explained everything.”A couple of mine had joined the Company earlier and rejoined our group out of friendship and loyalty, but disregarding that, most of us here? We’ve been training from when most kids were still playing in the mud. Even those who joined us later must’ve worked hard and trained for at least half a decade if not more by now.”

“I’ve been training for this since I was five myself.”