"Follow me!"
"Listen to my orders!"
"I'll keep you alive!"
Shen Le stood at the front of the formation with an urgently sewn backpack on his back, shouting sternly. More than a hundred people before him pricked up their ears and listened.
"Half the people standing here trained with me for a year. You know what I'm capable of! The rest of you have heard my name too. You know where the good life of these past years came from!"
"That's right!"
A young man standing closest to Shen Le nodded vigorously.
"I can't beat you. If we each led ten men, I'd be even less able to beat you! I'll listen to you!"
Shen Le smiled at him. By seniority, the speaker was his clan uncle, though he was only three years older than Shen Le.
When Shen Le had first organized and trained the family retainers, he had relied on spells to cheat, enhancing his own strength and agility just to barely defeat him. But when it came to command, well...
He was not bragging, but just a little of what he had learned during military training exercises would already be enough!
"I'll listen to you too!"
"Young Master, we'll all listen to you! If we follow you, we'll have full bellies!"
Shen Le smiled and nodded to them one by one. Then he stepped forward and raised his voice.
"I can't promise that every one of you will survive battlefield combat. But if you listen to me, you'll survive outside the battlefield. And on the battlefield, if we stick together and aren't scattered, none of us will die a miserable, pointless death!"
Over the years, he had personally trained these strong young men. He had left half with the family and brought the other half to war.