Encounter
Encounter
It was a harsh world.
Not a world of dreams and romance, but one of reality, so it was teeming with monsters and madmen, and plenty of people struggled just to scrape by while being tormented by such bastards.
Given that plenty of people also died young without ever once having a chance to hold a sword, maybe it was more common than one might think for those with a few bad circumstances piled up to end up as thieves or bandits.
Still. Even so.
It was also a place where, if you grit your teeth and searched, you'd find a way to survive somehow. That's just how it is everywhere people live. These fuckers simply chose, out of all those countless methods, the one where you capture and sell other people who, unlike them, were living just fine or were working hard to live well.
I meant they were bastards with zero room for extenuating circumstances.
"And I just decided to kill every last one of those bastards, that's all!"
In a world where everything rose except my goddamn paycheck, I'd already been a slave to office work, exhausted and struggling to survive on a pittance. And now I was being forcibly class-changed into a slave with no human rights at all? If Itisel had at least made the slave business legal and these assholes had played within the bounds of that law, I might've let them be, but this was unforgivable, okay.
"Where the fuck did that lunatic come from!"
"The crossbow! Get the crossboooow—!"
The movements of the bandits grew frantic after they saw one of their own, who'd been shouting for a crossbow off in the distance while turning his body, get hit by an arrow shot by Asilie from the tower and follow his captain to the grave in one shot.
"Fuck, he's not alone! An arrow came from the tower!"
"Wait, then the boss..."
I understood their urgency, but no matter how much distance there was between us, did they have to take their eyes off me? I didn't know what gave them such confidence when someone was dropping dead with every single swing of my sword.
"He's dead as shit! He's scoping out your spots in the underworld right now, so hurry up and follow him to lend a hand!"
"Aaaagh!"
There was no system to them, no sense of purpose. The moment their captain vanished amid a sudden ambush, these bastards who'd sold others out just to save their own skins began acting according to their base natures.
Whether there were thirty of them or forty, it was nothing but a hassle, not a threat in the slightest.
While I was diligently harvesting bandit heads like a farmer cutting rice stalks, five bandits clumped together and started putting up resistance, forming a formation against me. The problem was what they were holding weren't shields, just some boards that could barely pass for a shield imitation. The one real shield was the one the bastard in the center held.
"Oh, what's this? Did a deserter drop by or something? You almost managed to set up a formation, sort of?"
"Who the hell are you?! Who are you to just show up out of nowhere and pull this shit!"
I took back the word 'resistance.' It just looked like a struggle to survive by any means.
Did who I was really matter here? If it was truly important, they should've captured me and cut off at least an arm and a leg before asking. Even the behavior of the guy who was yelling while holding the shield that most resembled an actual shield looked to me like nothing more than an escape from reality.
"I don't do self-introductions when I'm killing everyone. No point, right?"
"After suddenly committing slaughter!! You spout shit like that!! Do you know who we are and still do this?! Do you think you'll be safe if you kill us all?! The bandits around here are a alliance! The moment word spreads that you attacked us, dozens of bandits will come charging with fire in their eyes to kill you! The noble backing us will hunt you down and kill you too!"
Huh. A alliance, he said. For a bunch of bandits, they were really pulling out all the stops, weren't they. Still, feeling a bit proud that he'd volunteered information that wasn't in the documents, I decided to solve at least one of his questions for him.
"You're really a friend who never learns, aren't you!"
"What...?"
"You saw me kill your captain the moment I got here, and you feel nothing?"
The other bandits besides the one who'd been yapping didn't seem to get it either, just glaring at me with puzzled expressions. Watching that, curiosity struck me as to whether I could instill some terror in them, so I answered while putting on the most vicious smile I could muster.
"When I'm dealing with rabble, I go for the head first. So, before I took on a mob of rabble like you, who do you think I went and killed first?"
"...Uh, aaah. Th-that's impossible..."
"Of course it's possible!"
The face of the bastard who was smart enough to hold the baton of command, shrewd enough to judge that he had to try talking his way out after seeing my skills, began to turn pale.
"Your sponsor, the slave merchant group, is all dead as hell. Not just the merchant group, but the noble bastard who sponsored them is politically on the verge of being dead, too. Now that your curiosity's satisfied, let's go!"
"Wh-where to?"
"To hell, obviously!"
As if a sloppy formation put together by bandits who hadn't done a lick of real training could possibly work against someone who could kick an iron gate hard enough to buckle it.
-WHAM!
"Urgh!"
The moment I drew up all the Magic Power I could and drove a kick into the guy in the center of the formation, which was already wobbling precariously just from my charge, he went flying a good two meters. In the meantime, I threw wild punches, expecting the bastards on either side to stab me, but perhaps I'd overestimated them, because no counterattack came at all.
Watching the two who got clocked by my swung fists have their breath snuffed out futilely, the remaining two threw down their boards and started running.
"M-monster!"
"Aaaagh!"
Without fail, Asilie's arrows, precisely aimed at their vitals, mercilessly took the lives of those two as well.
"Oh. Is it over?"
When I looked around, it was nothing but corpses. While I checked whether there was anything else within my field of vision, just in case, Asilie, who had descended from the tower, approached my side.
"What are you looking for so hard?"
"Nothing, just wondering if they were all dead already."
"They're dead or they ran. Those guys standing guard when we came in? They ran off without looking back."
"Huh... Their situational judgment is astonishing."
I trudged over to the bandit who'd been kicked flying a ways off, and saw the bastard still clutching his shield with both hands, eyes wide open, panting heavily. Looking closely, he hadn't actually managed to hold onto his shield; his arms were broken, his ribs were shot, and he was more or less pinned under the shield, unable to move.
"Hey. It seems like about five bastards ran off. Do you think they'll go begging for help from that bandit union you were talking about earlier, or will they just run without looking back?"
"Fuck... just die...!"
"Yeah? I was gonna give you a potion to fix that broken arm and ribs of yours if you answered. Your call."
"What?! W-wait...!"
It wasn't a situation extreme enough to warrant holding him down and torturing him just because he didn't want to talk, so I beheaded him without hesitation.
There seemed to be no more enemies around, so as I wiped my blade and sheathed it, Asilie, who'd been quietly observing the bastard, tilted her head and spoke.
"Wouldn't it have been a decent idea to keep at least him alive to get some information?"
"If we ask the spirits anyway, we can roughly figure out the locations of the bandits in the forest, so I just killed him. It'd leave a bad taste in my mouth if I left him alive and he went off to sell people somewhere else."
Low-ranked adventurers, not much different from village thugs or whatever, might still have room for rehabilitation, but people who caught and sold other people weren't subjects for negotiation by my standards.
"Yet you were going to give him a potion if he answered?"
"I said I'd give him a potion. I didn't say I wouldn't kill him. I was gonna heal him up and then kill him."
"Well now... That's torture well-suited to bastards who capture and sell normal folks."
"Obviously."
Still, we'd razed one hideout, so we decided to quickly loot the pockets of the dead and the tower where the captain had been.
Honestly, given the surprisingly good condition of these bastards' gear, I'd worried they might've invested most of the money they made dealing with the slave merchants into their equipment. But contrary to that worry, the chest we found under the captain's bed held a fair amount of silver coins.
"This is roughly a gold coin's worth, I'd say? There are three potions too, though the quality doesn't seem that great."
"The scale aside... maybe he was quite the big shot among bandits."
"How fortunate that our paths crossed like this and we could rip them out by the roots."
There was other quite usable gear besides that, but we decided to give up on taking it. Times like this, it would've been really nice if I had some kind of inventory like in a game, but a bag enchanted with storage magic was a horrifically expensive thing, so we didn't have one among our possessions.
The thought of entire field packs' worth of stuff fitting into a pouch the size of my fist was really, really appealing, but at a price of 20 gold coins, I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger.
"Ah. I wish a storage magic bag would just fall out of the sky somewhere."
"Pfft."
"Tell me, what part of this pure wish do you find so amusing? Teacher?"
"Nothing. It just suddenly made me think of old times."
"Old times?"
I asked again, wondering if there was some amusing episode about someone who'd been looking for a storage magic bag, but what came out of Asilie's mouth was, surprisingly, a memory we shared together.
"The day I first met Eldi. The bandits were making a huge fuss over that piece-of-junk sword, calling it a Demon Sword."
"Ah, that time. Right. That happened."
"Back then, watching those bastards freak out about it being a Demon Sword, I unconsciously thought, what kind of moron goes around dropping a Demon Sword."
"Heh. Honestly, I kinda thought that too."
Looking back, even that tense moment was now a memory. To think the day would come when I'd feel this way. Time really did work its magic. Once again, I felt a sense of pride in my own growth and in myself for living so diligently.
Just at that moment, Asilie stifled her laughter and let slip a remark that shattered that pride of mine in an instant.
"But just now, when Eldi suddenly said that, you kind of overlapped with them in my head."
"......"
It was a stupid thing to say that I couldn't even begin to refute, so the smile that had been about to spread across my lips, feeding on pride as I reminisced, vanished in an instant.