“Everyone can boast of having achieved certain feats and make themselves look better than others. On the other hand, nothing beats concrete results when it comes to observing progress on a subject matter.” - Anduin Veros, Minister of War of the Third Elmaiya Empire, circa 230 VA.

It was early summer of the same year, roughly a little over a year after the Free Lances arrived in Levain and started to drill their militia, that the first large-scale exercise to showcase the fruits of the training they had given were scheduled. It was mostly done for the benefit of the public, since the council was naturally kept up to date on the progress the militia had made over the year.

As such, everyone involved took care to make it look extra impressive, to raise morale.

Twenty-five thousand of Levain’s militiamen were neatly lined up in formation, as they formed a long rectangle on the plains south of the city. The rectangle itself was divided into five smaller square formations of five thousand men each, each of which was in turn further divided into ten five hundred men units. Those units were in turn organized into five hundred-men platoons.

Each small unit knew their position and role as part of the larger unit, and worked in unison with one another, showcasing great discipline as they marched in an orderly manner and assumed various formations for the people watching to witness. A large part of the city’s adult population were spectating the exercise, some watching from the city walls, while others spread out in the plains around the area the exercise was held in.

The gathered twenty-five thousand militiamen represented the results of the training the Free Lances had instituted upon them over the past year. The men and women marched with precision, discipline, and confidence, seemingly untiring even as they sweated under the rays of the summer sun. The men and women were no longer rookies who barely knew how to fight, but proper soldiers.

Due to the amount of militia that Levain could tap into – they officially fielded a force of forty to fifty thousand, but most of the adult populace were part of the reserves, which allowed them to field up to two hundred thousand if needed – it was difficult to train them all in the span of a year. The physical training was easy enough to do en masse, but things like battlefield tactics and cohesion as a unit needed more specialized teaching, and the Free Lances lacked the people to do everything in one year.

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Instead, they started teaching a small part of the militiamen first, then incorporated those same men to help them teach the next batch over the following year. Under that model, Reinhardt approximated that they should manage to teach the entirety of the Free City’s officer corps within three years in total. The Free City could have probably done the rest on their own after the first batch, but they wisely decided that paying a little extra to ensure that everything went correctly was the smarter course of action.

Like most other militaries fielded by regions that belonged to the former Clangeddin Empire, the militiamen were equipped and trained as light infantrymen. Fast on the foot and flexible, masses of light infantry had always been the core of the Clangeddin Empire’s combat force. It was a choice driven by necessity due to the nature of their neighbors, in many ways.

As the Empire bordered the predominantly dwarven land of Knallzog to the south, the Elven domains to the east, and the lands claimed by the orcish and goblin tribes to the north, they quickly learned that fielding heavy infantry was pointless. Heavy infantry were too slow to catch up with the nimble elven raiders, would not survive under the brutal arrows launched by orcish bows, nor capable of matching the dwarves at their own specialty.

Because of that, it was a long held military tradition to field mostly light infantry, whose speed and flexibility allowed them to be more effective against the empire’s possible foes. The forces that emerged from the carcass of the dead empire mostly maintained a similar military doctrine, though they had turned to fighting each other more.

A typical brigade in the empire’s olden days would consist of ten light infantry regiments, backed by one to two regiments of archers, and another of light cavalry. Heavy cavalry was mostly the domain of the knight orders due to the expenses needed to properly outfit and maintain such a force, and were rarely fielded in particularly large numbers.

Following the infantry’s parade and exhibition, two thousand riders – the same ones that Ze’phane and Soledad had been training over the past year – rode out from within the city and joined the exhibition. Their appearance caused cheers to erupt from the spectators, as the riders rode in formation and seamlessly integrated themselves into the infantry formation.

They split into smaller groups and rode confidently through the narrow gaps between the parts of the infantry formation, before they exited out from the sides and gathered together once more. As they did so, they formed themselves into wing formations at the flank of the infantry, neatly aligned beside them and further impressing the spectators.

Like the infantry, they were the first batch of cavalry to have completed their training. The city council wished to raise more cavalrymen, but Levain lacked the warhorses needed for such an endeavor at the time. With Ze’phane’s help they had managed to setup a horse ranch to the north-east of the city, and as of that spring, it was estimated that they would have enough horses to train another three thousand cavalrymen.

While to the common citizen of the Free City everything looked as if it could not be better, their leaders were nursing a headache, as they had just received an urgent report from the southern border during the exhibition. Reinhardt was naturally called upon as well, and the news was one that he had expected to happen.

Namely that the coalition of smaller regions to the south had launched an attack towards Levain, with an army easily fifty thousand strong seen marching northwards.