“The victor of a battle isn’t the stronger or the more courageous one. It’s the one who remains standing at the end.” - Old military saying.

Of all things, the members of Elfriede’s platoon who were at the back of the pack had not expected to be hit from the sides.

It was less arrogance or overconfidence, and more because they fully trusted their comrades holding the sides to hold even under heavy assault, which made their failure to do so all the more surprising. As such, when the enemy elites burst through the lines of their fellow mercenaries on the flanks, they caught those troops further in mostly off-guard.

A few of them were cut down on the spot by the first enemy soldiers to reach them, but that brief moment was enough to warn the rest of the incoming danger, and the soldiers who pushed through Alycea’s platoon soon found themselves faced with strong resistance from the rest of the mercenaries they managed to flank.

While Elfriede’s platoon members were headhunters and assassins, role-wise, most of the platoon members were from the more savage, darker side of society, the sort of people who had little regard for their own lives. Many of them reveled in violence or take pleasure from it, and while they were hard-pressed by their enemy’s numerical advantage, they fought back with all the viciousness in their bodies regardless.

Kari had been one of the members who were further on the back, and she happened to be on the right flank at that. While she managed to react fast enough to avoid a fatal blow from the enemy soldier that flanked her, she still took a deep cut to her leg, which prevented her from moving as much as she liked. Instead she stood her ground and stubbornly fought off the enemy soldiers that came at her.

To call Kari one of the more talented or skilled members of the platoon would be a bit of a stretch, but the girl managed to secure her spot in the platoon over the past two decades regardless through persistence and perseverance. She fought with a reckless disregard to her own well-being which often unnerved her opponents and allowed her to triumph over them in the end.

In the same way, she fought with that dogged persistence that day, often trading wounds with her opponents, allowing them to cut flesh so she could cut deep into their bones. By the time reinforcements from the front half of Elfriede’s platoon had arrived, Kari was bathed in blood, partly her own, partly her enemies’. The corpses of six enemy elite soldiers lay before her feet.

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“Whoa there, Kari, you all right?” she heard somewhat vaguely from beside her. Kari also noticed that other people were pushing back the enemy soldiers, so she turned to see that it was Silva who asked the question, one of the platoon’s oldest members who was usually seen together with the Lady Boss as one of her confidants in the platoon.

Also one of the least fucked-up person in the group as a whole, though the now old man was certainly not shy on dishing out violence like the rest whenever called for.

“Maybe,” replied Kari somewhat woozily. She had been feeling rather lightheaded and weak for a while by then, likely due to the blood loss from the wounds she took in the battle so far. She had been so busy trying to survive and kill off her opponents that she never had a chance to take a closer look at her injuries until the reinforcements came. “Not feeling too good, honestly.”

“Rest up and try to at least get those wounds bandaged for the time being. You ;look pale, must’ve lost a lot of blood,” replied Silva with a somewhat worried tone of voice. The fighting was moving away from where they were, so they could afford to talk for a little bit. “Here, use this. Slather on your wounds. Should keep them from getting worse and help stem the bleeding, at least,” he added as he passed a small vial to Kari’s hands.

The older man then turned and rushed over to the frontline of the fighting. As one of the oldest members of the platoon he had seniority over most of the others and served as one of Elfriede’s lieutenants in the platoon. If his fighting skills were greater – or if he was not approaching an age where he was likely to put down his weapons and retire, for that matter – he might have been considered for a higher position in the company.

Meanwhile, Kari took the chance to rest. She sat down on the stacked bodies of two dead enemy soldiers without a care – not like her own clothes weren’t already soaked through with blood anyway – and poured some of the viscous medicinal paste from the vial Silva gave her onto her hand. After carefully wiping off the worst of the blood from her wounds using a piece of cloth taken from the dead enemies, she slathered the paste over her injuries, hissing slightly at the stinging sensation the action caused.

Everyone in the Free Lances carried some emergency medical supplies in their storage artifacts, and Kari was no exception. She dug out a roll of clean cloth bandages from her storage and used it to wrap around her injuries as best she could, even biting down on them to hold them in place when she was wrapping the cuts on her arms.

Once she was done with the rudimentary treatments, she sighed and looked up to the darkening sky as the rain started to fall. She survived another day on the battlefield, as much by her own skills as by luck, and from what she could tell the battle was starting to move away once more, the mercenaries having been pinned in place for a bit when they were struck from the flanks.

Wordlessly, she picked up her weapons once more, and marched forward along with the other members of the platoon. Injured as she was, she likely wouldn’t be made to fight again that day unless things grew desperate, but one never knows…