Chapter 598: Those Left Behind
I proudly looked at the three surviving trainees, Raccoon not in their number. I didn’t bother with a fancy speech, they didn’t need one, they probably wouldn’t register it anyway.
“Congratulations. You’ve done it.” I told the three malnourished, sleep-deprived, shivering - well, I couldn’t call them trainees anymore, could I? They were Rangers now, through the same hellish initiation I’d gone through.
Two of them passed out on the spot, and I gently caught them with my [Mantle], lowering them to the ground. Sticks for a pillow? Sharp rocks in their side? Didn’t bother these two new Rangers. The third one staggered slightly, and slowly turned his head towards Auri.
“Does that mean we get food?” He blearily asked. I gave a sharp jerk of my head to Auri, who put a big flaming ! over her head before rushing over with her baked goods. He sank gratefully to the ground and started to mechanically eat her soft buns.
I discreetly put away the badges I’d prepared. They could wait until another day.
I was jumping the gun a little. ‘Properly’, there should be months of training, classes, and drills before making the final selection in a grand ceremony. It’d increase the weight of the title and the event, which would help with class quality.
At the same time, I was already down to three people. Any fewer and I’d have to axe the entire thing. I couldn’t call one person a one-man Ranger team, that wasn’t how teams worked. There was also the obvious lack of senior Rangers to show them the ropes on the job, how things actually worked, and I suspected between Iona, Nina, and myself, that we’d be helping the Rangers out for the first few years, showing them the practicalities of being in a community, helping out with various problems and disputes, and the biggest task of all: Slaying monsters, no matter what skin they were wearing.
I’d had time to work on the classes needed and the curriculum. A lot of sparring and team building at the start, the ‘fun’ stuff after the Hell Months they’d been through. A few of the easier classroom learnings to help show them what was next. Ease them back into ‘yes, it’s alright, you made it’ before getting into the more difficult topics.
They were going to have it the hardest. No matter how much I tried to hold their hands, no matter how I worked on helping them, they were still the first, and would need to blaze their own trails, defining what it meant to be a Ranger in this new era.