Sparing the Bandit

A bandit, plainly put, is a thief who lives in the mountains. To ordinary eyes they are villains through and through—some bastard's get, and nothing more. The bandits themselves, however, treat the work as a business and take a remarkable pride in it. Shabby as the pride may be, they fancy themselves an enterprise aimed at foot traffic, and they fret with great seriousness over where, exactly, they ought to seize the road.

The great highway and the railway linking Cheonghwa and Rostov, for instance, carry a tremendous flow of people, but it is wise not to go sniffing around them on a whim. Rostov and Cheonghwa each hold those routes under grim watch—one with its guard, the other with government troops—and unless a band is armed far beyond reason, picking a fight there is an excellent way to be the one stripped bare instead.

So a bandit band, as a rule, hunts the side paths ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that stray off the main road. However large a garrison grows, it cannot defend every gap between those savage ranges. Trees and terrain choke the view, and when a punitive force shows itself, running is easy.

Which, once you follow the thought that far, raises a question. If the highway is perfectly sound, why do people leave it and circle around by the side path? The road is rough, and there are bandits.

Because wherever one goes, someone always feels a guilty prick passing a checkpoint. Smugglers, traffickers, criminals crossing the border to launder an identity, innocents on the run beneath a false charge—there was never a shortage of people who had to get through. The Chilseongbo, and Red and Blue, whom Lupin had met once before, were regular customers of those side paths as well. Under the circumstances, a side path had no choice but to endure.

"Halt! Stop right there! If you want to live, put everything down and back away!"

A pink-haired beast who had been wandering that very side path without a thought in her head threw both hands high and froze where she stood. The trees pressed in thick on every side, and from the dark between the close-set trunks came a rough shout.

Thump. Thump.

What did a steampunk bandit even look like? Lupin, out walking off a meal, let the corner of her mouth climb as she glanced around, anticipation written plain across her face.

Disappointment arrived almost at once, from every direction. Crunch, crunch. Crack, snap. The bastards were tramping through the leaves and twigs in their boots as if they meant to step on every last one. If the men with guns were going to carry on like men with knives, why had they bothered hiding at all? Make that much noise in front of Lupin—Auditory Detection, Rank X—and if you died, the fault was entirely your own.

"Keh heh heh. Some sow of a bitch, sneaking across the border, and we caught her dead to rights. Strip! Every last stitch! We'll take real good care of you!"

Lupin, of all things, began to think. She had eaten her fill of a good meal, and the prospect of a bandit's treasure chest had her acting, for once, almost like a person. Thieves were usually idiots, yanked this way and that by whatever the boss decided. Idiots like that wouldn't dare pipe up before the boss had spoken. They certainly wouldn't try to have a woman first while the boss was standing right there. Ah. So the loud one is the boss.

The thought finished. Her hand drifted down, tapped her shoulder, and reached for the sword—and the voice bursting out of the trees swelled huge, as if he had swallowed a locomotive's boiler whole.

"Oho! Don't get cute. I told you—move without thinking and there won't be a whole patch left on you! If you want to end up a cheese full of holes, then by all means, be my guest!"

Before the words were even done, Lupin unfolded the fifth form of the Shadowless Sword Style and hurled herself toward the voice. The Winged Robe already summoned upon her had left her body all but weightless.

The name meant precisely what it said: Swift Advance, loosed in a wild barrage. If Swift Advance ended an opponent in a single advance, Swift Advance Flurry kept the sword as close to the scabbard as possible, drawing and sheathing again and again, with the aim of dropping many enemies at once. A mountainside this thick with heavy trees only made it better. So long as Lupin's stamina held, every trunk she kicked off added speed—a hundred strokes, two hundred, she could spend them all. The distance she covered grew geometrically. However far an enemy stood, she could reach him.

Lupin was already gone from where she had been. The afterimage lagged a beat, and the man who registered it a moment late cried out.

"Wh-what?! Where'd she go?!"

And this was Lupin, who had barely made a sound pushing off anything even without the Winged Robe. Lighter still, she was an arrow that killed of its own accord, riding wherever a whistle of wind led it. They could not track her path by sound. Anyone of lesser skill was left ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with nothing to do but hear his allies dying a moment too late, and wait for the death bearing down on him.

"Agh."

"Aaaagh!"

"Ghk!"

"Agh…!"

"Mother!"

A rush of wind shook the branches and passed. The boss's right hand burned. Something hot ran down it, and when he looked, the fingers that ought to have been there—and the pistol—were gone.

"……Graaagh?!"

Lupin discarded the fingers, kept only the pistol, hooked it at her waist, and slid ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠out of sight. Screams kept rising all around, one after another, and the inside of the boss's head went white. By the time she came back to stand before him, he was already curled in on himself, shaking.

What's this familiar feeling….

Only the face was a little different. He was the same breed as the forearm-tattooed punks who shook people down for change in the alleys. And that was when it clicked. These so-called bandits….

"You guys wouldn't happen to be a human-trafficking ring, would you?"

Didn't they look an awful lot like the Milwi traffickers she had run into when the Secret Chest journey first began? They resembled the mafia outfits she had seen in Rostov, too. Skulking through the damp dark. Armed with guns and knives. The sort who charged in whooping, then shrieked and fled at the sight of a pigeon. A rabble.

The boss only groaned and gave no answer, so—click. Lupin thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and made as if she might put a round through his head at any moment. Cold metal touched his temple, and only then did he come to his senses and flatten himself against the ground.

"I-I'm sorry! I f-failed to recognize someone so exalted, and I was terribly rude!"

"Rude, whatever. Just tell me what you were doing out here. You are a bandit, right? Lord of this mountain? Something like that?"

Only then did the shaking begin to ease. He had been certain she would slam a bullet straight into his skull, and here she was, of all things, asking to talk. He swallowed once, steadied his chest, and spoke.

"Aigoo, not at all. A lord? Absolutely not…. I am merely the humble keeper of a single stronghold among the 108 Green Forest Strongholds scattered across Cheonghwa…."

"The Hundred-and-Eight Farm-and-Forest Strongholds? What's that, you knock out a hundred and eight bows morning and night? You're not even shaved bald…. You don't look that full of Buddhist zeal."

The novels Lupin had read were, for the most part, fantasy. A teacher had once told her that studying would help her get a job, and she had studied hard enough that English words sat far more naturally in her head than oracle-bone script. Drifting through the sea of information, she had picked up a rough sense of realms such as the Peak Realm, the Transformation Realm, and the Profound Realm. Tell her "108 Green Forest Strongholds," though, and it did not register as a bandit confederation.

"No, wait. Right. You are bandits, though?"

"We are, but…."

Lupin was dumbfounded.

"If you're bandits, shouldn't you look like bandits? Bushy beards, leather clothes, hair a wild mess? Why the sports cut…?"

The bandit boss still had to offer information. If he wanted to live, he had to keep her pleased.

"Well… the Green Forest bandits are all like this these days."

Only then did Lupin barely grasp that Green Forest meant bandit.

"Huh, seriously? All of you wander around in shabby shirts and trousers with a gun or a knife just dangling off you?"

"Leather fetches a high price these days. Selling it at market turns a better profit."

"…? What, it goes into making luxury goods or something?"

"As expected, you catch on quick. It's one of our Green Forest's main sources of income, so I can say it with pride."

When the world changes, bandits change with it. At this rate they were leather merchants who did a little banditry on the side. Still, they had meant to strip a person clean and live off it. There wasn't much about them worth pitying. Lupin, however, did not suffer from the particular madness that demanded she kill every villain she saw, so she decided to give the boss one chance. She was fairly generous toward mosquitoes that buzzed and begged to be allowed to live.

"I'll give you a chance to repent."

"R-repent, you say…?"

"You rat out every hideout of those other Green-Forest-Eight-Treasure-whatever guys, and then you go quietly be a hunter who strips hides and sells them. You're not getting it, are you. Live on nothing but dirty work, and your brain just won't turn that way?"

To the boss, those words sounded like a declaration that she would strike down the reigning king and raise the whole Green Forest anew. And when he looked at her… there was a chance! Even to a boss who didn't understand much, Lupin's martial power was tremendous. Follow her, serve her, and a great reward was sure to follow. Her lower half was as grand as a great jar, besides. The thought occurred to him that someday, just once, he might get the chance to be pinned beneath that backside. Feeling the blood rush to his groin, he flattened himself and offered his name.

"I, Nokho, swear to lay down my life in loyalty to the new Stronghold Chief! Murder, robbery, kidnapping, plunder—I'm confident in any of it!"

He should not have said that. A strange light flickered in Lupin's eyes, and before she knew it she had drawn her sword.

It was a stationary draw, meant to be learned before Swift Advance, and it was called Red Flash because the cut fell in perfect quiet, without so much as the sound of the sword leaving the sheath.

A soft slide. A dull thump.

And so the boss's allotted span ran out as he watched the forest tip onto its side. Realizing her hand had been faster than she thought, Lupin sighed.

"Damn it. My treasure-chest hound."

But she did find one thing on the dead boss's body: an iron token at his waist, declaring him a member of the 108 Green Forest Strongholds.

The others wore similar tokens. A wicked idea took root. Lupin pried off the two emblems already hanging there and hung the iron token in their place.

"Do it like this, and I can find the treasure chests without even fighting the bandits, can't I?"

A solid bout of training with her master, and her head was whirring along beautifully. Lupin giggled and left.

It was a historic moment. The 13th Seat of the Rounds, hero of Rostov, cast her lot into the martial world of Cheonghwa as a Green Forest bandit.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the folded ranges where Rostov and Cheonghwa shared a border, Ekaterina was thoroughly lost, nine clones lost along with her. Whichever way she turned, the forest looked exactly the same. Map and compass could be in perfect order, and she still could not find a way out.

"Damn it. Why has every last mafioso in Rostov dried up and vanished…!"

She had a reason for leaving Rostov and coming all the way to Cheonghwa. As it happened, Rostov had no treasure chests left to find—thanks to a certain pink-haired beast. Dongbaek was a small country, with no room for that sort to run wild, and reaching any other nation meant crossing an enormous mountain range. So hadn't they all simply spilled over into nearby Cheonghwa? Ekaterina, set on finding treasure chests, had had no choice but to come down this far herself.

The problem was that after a full week of every effort she could make in the mountains, her map was still a blank page. She had kept her qualifications as one of the Rounds, so there was no particular need to obey Lupin's orders. What she looked like, instead, was a pitiful slave tasting domination for the first time, straining however she could to complete the goal she had been given, if only to keep her master's hold on her intact.

"……!"

Sensing something amiss, Ekaterina called a clone to the spot—thud! She knocked out a bandit who had been hiding behind a tree, watching her. A little farther off, another presence made itself known. One of the unconscious man's crew, by the feel of it. A second summoned clone stepped out, crisp, and this time blocked the path of a bandit mid-run.

"Hey. What are you people, exactly? A woman like this is wandering the mountains alone. Isn't that dereliction of duty for a bandit? Shouldn't you be jumping me this instant, taking everything I've got, and having your way with me?!"

The bandit, if he felt wronged, had reason to.

"Th-that's… well. What good would it do us to go picking a fight with one of the Rounds…."

Burning with the obsession of finding a treasure chest, Ekaterina had spent days on end roaming the mountains in her Rounds uniform and cape. That was the fundamental reason her map was still blank. But so what? She had a lead by the tail now. Finding the treasure chest was only a matter of time.

"If you don't want to die, take me to your boss. Now."

At this moment, Ekaterina needed a treasure chest every bit as badly ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as Lupin.