“A good combination is when the result is greater than the sum.” - Labraz el Cavirse, Royal Tutor to the Imperial Family of Elmaiya, scholar and former general, circa 109 FP.

“Seriously though, how do you people do it?” asked Scipius with obvious curiosity as the banquet wound down and both sides prepared for the second exhibition match. He looked at the gathering mercenaries with obvious wonderment, especially the groups that had people from every sort of race amongst their numbers. “How do you get people from so many different races to work together so seamlessly?”

His question might have seemed ignorant to some, but it made sense when one considered his background. While the Clangeddin Empire welcomed all races, their populace remained predominantly human, with an estimated nine out of every ten citizens being one. As such, they never had the numbers to deploy people from other races on a larger scale.

At most, the Empire’s military typically had scout units composed of elves or dwarven engineer units. Orcs, therians, and goblins were too rare in their territory and far less likely to join the military to compose units from them. The main reason for this setup was because the various races had their own characteristics, which made cooperation in a mixed unit harder.

For example, dwarves had long arms which could lead to them hitting their own allies if they stood too close to each other, which wasn’t good for unit cohesion. The dwarven armies from Knallzog and the Kingdom Down Under typically had looser formations that were balanced out by the heavy armor their soldiers wore. Clangeddin on the other hand was clearly unwilling to invest so much into so few soldiers, especially since their value as combat engineers were far greater than as warriors.

Similarly, elves had longer limbs and a grace humans could rarely match. When they were made to fight in closed confines, it was often the case that the human members of a unit would get in the way of their elven compatriots, leading to a sharp decrease in effectiveness. As such, the Clangeddin Empire chose to prioritize unit cohesion instead and divided their army units by race.

The Free Lances clearly had no such intention, as most every platoon of their contained members from most every race, other than the former Warforged who were all humans. As mercenaries, they also tended to prioritize personal prowess a bit more than unit cohesion, which many viewed as suicidal in the formation-based battles prevalent in the current age.

Scipius knew better after he faced the mercenaries in combat, however. The lack of unit cohesion mattered little when the mercenaries were capable of breaking their enemy’s cohesion in short order and forced a chaotic melee upon them. Under such circumstances, the more individualistic mercenaries reigned supreme over the soldiers who were used to and mostly trained to fight in cohesive formations.

The way the mercenaries arranged their platoons was something he found intriguing as well.

Where the majority of the Caroman military were line troops, soldiers who were meant to hold the line in formation, the mercenaries designated each platoon by their purpose. They also had a couple platoons who were designated as line troops, namely the ones led by their strategist and the westerners Scipius had been introduced to earlier, but most of their troops had different roles.

Two platoons were designated as archer troops, who also doubled as light skirmishers, given their unusual – at least for those from the former Empire – approach to archery. Similarly, there was a platoon of goblins who served as scouts and slingers at the same time, while two other platoons served the role of scout and light infantry.

What probably formed the core to the mercenaries’ line and tactics were their three strike platoons. Those platoons were composed of two distinct groups. There was a smaller group of shieldbearers who typically wield massive tower shields that held the line and pushed into the enemy formation by brute force, and a second group of hardened killers who would be let loose once the platoon was inside the enemy formation to wreak havoc from within.

Those three strike platoons had also gathered most of the largest and fittest of the mercenaries – some of them being therians three meters or more in height – amongst their numbers, which made their charge nearly unstoppable by human armies. Scipius had learned that he and Astra had faced the third strike platoon, the newest one that had only been established a little under a year ago.

Other than that, the mercenaries also had several all-rounded platoons, which were intended to be able to do whatever was needed of them, be it holding the line, charging through enemy lines, or whatnot. Coincidentally, the leaders of the three platoons considered of this type were the captain himself and his daughters. Scipius thought that the mercenary captain probably hoped that the flexibility needed for such a unit to work would instill good commanding habits in his daughters, as they were clearly groomed to lead the company in the future.

Which wasn’t too surprising as he had learned long ago that the Free Lances was a family business for generations.

At the present, Scipius was most interested in watching the exhibition match set to start in a bit, as on the Caroman side was an army led by none other than his own parents, the Marshals of Caroma. His father had even brought his personal bodyguard unit for the hundred men he directly commanded, while his mother had taken some of the best fighters from her personal soldiers.

The other three hundred-man units were commanded by veteran officers trusted by his parents, and the soldiers under them were similarly elites who had gone through many battles. Even so, Scipius couldn’t help but sweat in worry when he looked at the mercenary side and saw the collection of nearly a hundred massive individuals that formed the first strike platoon of the Free Lances.

On their side, the mercenary captain – Reinhardt – himself was leading them into battle, along with his wife, who led the smallest platoon in the company. That platoon was one that gave Scipius the shivers, as even from afar, he could tell that just about everyone in that platoon were killers, likely with more than a few that found pleasure in killing amongst their numbers, at that.