Ranvir stifled a chuckle as Mihail waved his hands through the air emphatically as he finished his story. “So the Captain finally caught me. My bare ass hanging from the balcony and no way to go but down.”

Sabas, said captain, shook his head. “He’s embellishing.”

Ranvir spooned another mouthful of stew into his mouth. It differed from what he’d grown up but was no less tasty. The stew from back home tended towards thin more often than not, at least until he’d gone to the academy where food had been more plentiful. This stew, apparently from one of the northerly cities of Korfyi, was an intensely savory affair. He could only eat it in a brief bursts before it almost overwhelmed all other sensations in his mouth.

“Still getting used to it?” Alexis asked. The kid seemed to have relaxed after everyone sat down and the meals were served. “I know how you feel, well I don’t actually know. I don’t have any points in Perception, but-“

“I think that’s enough, Alexis,” Sabas put a gentle hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Let the man eat his food in peace.”

“Right, uh, sir,” then he nodded to Ranvir. “Sorry, sir.”

Ranvir waved him off. “Its fine.”

Alexis smiled awkwardly before returning to his own bowl, which Ranvir noted he seemed to take breaks as well.

“So what’s the embellishment, then?” Mihail asked. “Was I not hanging from the balcony? Was I not bare-assed?”

“It was a first-floor balcony for starters,” Sabas replied quickly. “You were almost touching the ground, and your junk wasn’t hanging out, your pants had just ridden low.”

“What could’ve possibly made you hire him after that?” Amalia asked, enjoying her own bowl of stew.

“I’m just that good,” Mihail said with a wink.

Amalia ignored his gesture, looking towards Sabas.

“Don’t mind him,” the captain said, waving his tracker off with a dismissive gesture. “We sent him to jail. A year-and-a-half later, I was in a position of needing a tracker, but our funding was running a little low, however one of the prison administrators owed me a favor. I got him on temporary release and on the pay of a normal mercenary, rather than a tracker.”

“Don’t worry, love,” Mihail whispered to her. “I’m on a proper tracker’s pay now. He couldn’t swindle me for long.”

Sabas sighed, but didn’t interject again. Clearly, this wasn’t the first time he’d been accused of swindling by the roguish tracker. Examining the rest of Mercy’s Redoubt, Ranvir didn’t doubt that Sabas treated his crew well. They were clearly well ordered, from the top to squads with a clear and strong hierarchy.

They’d even quieted down when they found out Amalia was a spy and Ranvir had points in Perception, at least until Sabas seemed to have cleared them.

“Is it expensive?” Ranvir asked, genuinely curious now that he’d developed a much better understanding of money and the value of currency and hard work. “Keeping a mercenary company?”

“To a point,” Sabas replied, shifting on his makeshift seat and adjusting his weapon belt. His spear rested next to him and the knife at his hip looked better at carving wood, or food, than monsters. “Realistically, very few people want anything to do with an unknown and untested company, so you need to build a reputation and strength elsewhere first. Then, once you have a little, you might get a few contracts as favors. If your company is new and most of your braced are middle-Kistios, then the pay is shit. You’ll barely get enough to pay for the food, let alone your men. That’s where most companies fail. You have to invest in your people.”

“Invest? As in—“

“I make sure every single one of my men reaches at least Tier 7. The long term hires get extra benefits and we raise them to Urityon.”

“That sounds really expensive.”

“It fucking is,” Sabas agreed. “There’s a lot of buying either katapetra, or buying contracts from the Sentinels to clear folds. Raising a lot of men costs a lot of keys.”

“But it’s worth it?”

“Let’s put it like this,” Sabas said, leaning forward with a gleam in his eyes. “People don’t really want to pay for mercenary company that’s only marginally stronger than if they went out and got a hundred randoms to do the job. But a hundred Urityon? Even Tier 10s and 11s? Much better pay.”

“So then, why not keep pushing? Wouldn’t people pay more for Tier 15s?”

“Arguably,” Sabas said. “But you run into other issues when raising someone’s power that high. First among those is a Tier 15 can cause a lot of damage.”

Ranvir nodded along to this. He technically had the draw of someone around Tier 15, even if his Ability Scores barely half someone of that strength. He still remembered the ratlings and the devastation he’d wrought on that fold.

“Getting a single Tier 15 into a big city can be difficult. Getting a group in takes month. Getting a hundred in is called an invasion,” Sabas continued explaining, a slight grin on his face as he explained the intricacies of his work. “So you don’t really want a company full of Tier 15 braced. Even then, most people don’t have what it takes to raise their Levels that high, which means you’ll go through an incredible number of employees, in which you’ll lose a ton of keys. But that’s not even the real issue…”

Ranvir watched the mercenary captain as he let his speech taper off. “What is the real issue, then?”

“The number of people that need and can recruit a full complement of Tier 15 braced. Your organization, the Sentinels, could, but you know things are going to be bad, when a plane spanning organization with multiple times your number is recruiting. The big merchant guilds, Quill and Pen, Slumbering Drake, you know the kind,” he waved and hand and smiled. “Merchant contracts, guilds especially, are always a win. They’ll take a contract at a loss to build their connections and protect their goods. The most important thing to remember with them is to remember that the company is a connection, the soldiers are just numbers.”

He leaned in intently. “My mentor told me. ‘Always a get a Loss Clause when working with merchants, or they’ll spend your men like they will keys.’”

“Loss Clause?”

“It’s a statement in the contract that basically stipulates that if a mercenary group loses a certain number of soldiers, be it percentage or a hard number, they can either call in a blood fee which triples the original price, or call off the contract.”

“That’s kind of morbid,” Ranvir replied, leaning back from the conversation. “Isn’t it? You’re saying: ‘I’m willing to lose this many members before I can quit.’ No?”

“We’re mercenaries, Ranvir,” Sabas said. “Every job has a cost. We pay with our bodies and our time, just like you.”

Ranvir nodded in acknowledgment after a while. “I guess I’m just not used to thinking about it in such stark detail.”

“That’s normal for the newer recruits,” Sabas replied. “You learn and adapt, or you don’t and eventually quit.”

Ranvir remembered the conversations he’d had with his teacher back at the academy. Ayvir talking about how most of his class had died on his first day at the front lines.

“Anyway, we were talking about high-Tier contracts,” Sabas said, getting them back on track. “There is one last group of men and women that could pay for a full Tier 15 company.”

“The Arkrotas?” Ranvir asked, his brows furrowing with the realization.

“The Arkrotas,” Sabas said with a solemnity that made Ranvir uncomfortable. “These are reason enough to never have a company that strong. When I say that the Arkrotas are monsters, I don’t want you to think, ‘oh they’re powerful,’ I want you to think that four-hundred-million people live on Korfyi and there are only four of them.”

“A group of Tier 15s work on the scale of cities when they fight. The incidental cost of life can become massive if the battlefield isn’t properly prepared. Korfyi isn’t big enough to prepare a battlefield between any of the Arkrotas. They might call it recruitment, but how can you say no to someone you don’t even know how to kill?”

Ranvir licked his lips. “They are really that powerful?”

“It’s said that so much mana rages through them they’ve become one with it. Even if you damage their form, they’ll just restore the damage from the ambient mana, and that’s a capital if.”

“So basically, avoid rising too high or risk getting the attention of people whose eyes you really don’t want on you.”

“Are we still talking about mercenary companies?”

Sabas looked away, a slight grin on his face. “Sure… uh, I should probably call Mihail back.”

Ranvir turned to follow his glance, finding the tracker had slipped around the fire and was now sitting next to Amalia. “Probably,” the woman didn’t look that aggrieved at Mihail's attentions. Not interested, but also not angry.

Ranvir glanced around the camp, making eye contact with Alexis. The kid looked flushed and uncomfortable. “Are you okay?” he asked, leaning closer.

“I- I-“

“I think that’s enough,” Sabas said loudly, “Time for bed everyone,” then he got to his feet, clapping Alexis on the shoulder before repeating himself louder for the rest of his men.

“Goodnight,” Alexis said and fairly fled into the dark.

“Tumultuous, isn’t he?” Latresekt observed, then growled low to itself.