Slaughtering the Bandits
Lupin didn't usually take any pleasure in killing people.
Enjoy that, and you're a proper crazy bitch, aren't you?
Even so, now and then—truly, only now and then—when she hungered for revenge and the revenge actually landed, the pleasure came.
"Gyaaaaaah."
"You dare lie to me? There's nobody here!"
It was usually right after someone had scammed her with a treasure chest.
"Huuuh. Huuuuh. I was wrong, I was wrong, Great Hero. Please. Please, mercy...!!"
Once it reached that point, Lupin never let the trickster off in one piece. First she tore out all ten fingernails and all ten toenails, one by one across ten separate goes; then she bent each finger backward from the tip, joint by joint, and snapped every knuckle. If they were still holding on, she ripped the limbs off by raw strength and punched holes between the ribs with something sharp.
Blood drying, the victim howled in agony until the voice slowly failed and sank into quiet. When rage had blown her reason clean away, Lupin enjoyed that gradual arrival of silence.
...But the stronghold chief already has no hands or feet.
So instead of nails, she pulled or tore out something else. What she grabbed depended entirely on her mood in the moment. The chief screaming now was losing his hair.
"Gyaaak. Aaaaaaaah!!!"
Riiiiip.
Scalp peeled clean off, the chief couldn't endure the pain and fainted almost at once.
"What. Already?"
Lupin had no hobby of waking the unconscious just to keep torturing them. Which was why, for all the perfection of her punishment plan, not a single person had yet experienced the full course and died of it.
Sure enough, the chief's head came off a moment later. The body soon followed the head that had already started rolling, and the two of them slid together down the slope.
"Ah, damn. Should've used the deadly poison."
The Five Deadly Poisons, remembered a beat too late, were laughing in Lupin's harness again today.
Anyway, that was revenge done. The anger slowly settled. When her head cleared and she looked around—oh dear.
"Hm."
Where is this?
Who am I?
She'd wandered around having such a good time that the sun was already well down. The mountains were folded so deep on deep that she could barely tell one place from another. Still, it was about time to head back. Stay out too late, and Master would assume the training had gotten too hard and she'd run away.
Annoyance crept over Lupin again for no good reason. If the chief had just not lied, it would have been clean.
Ah, the stress!
"At times like this, it really is nothing but a pigeon."
Even so, having a pigeon meant she wasn't purely depressed. They say the pigeon you call when you're disappointed is just that good at finding treasure chests.
Tak!
The summoned King Pigeon took one look at Lupin's face and spoke with worry.
"Your expression is none too fair."
Now that Spirit Affinity had risen to the fourth grade, he even knew how to mind his master's mood. Why do these things keep turning into cuter and cuter pets? I wonder if he'll start speaking formally later. Formal speech and King Pigeon don't quite seem to match....
"I came up empty. Could you find me just one vault? I'll go eat once I've found that."
"As you wish. Shall we take wing together?"
Flight was perfect for shaking off a rotten mood. Lupin broke into a hehe grin and kicked off the ground. She shot high, tapped her shoulder, called the wing-cloak, and sent King Pigeon flying on ahead. He streaked forward in a low diagonal. The place he was headed wasn't far at all.
"It was right in front of us. If you were going to get caught anyway, why lie and hurry your own death?"
The chief who had died a moment ago couldn't have dreamed Lupin possessed a talent for detecting treasure chests....
Ekaterina could not get her trembling heart under control.
Ten chests on each of the ten carts the 108 Green Forest Strongholds had owned. A hundred treasure chests, complete at last.
"Could it be I actually have a natural gift for finding treasure chests?"
Still, she found it odd that bandits would pile their wealth up chest by chest like this. The strongholds they'd thrown together were little more than dugouts and wooden huts on the verge of collapse, and yet the treasure chests hidden in the burrows were crammed full of gold, silver, and jewels. With riches like that, they could simply have carried them off and settled in a city. She suspected that at some point it had stopped being about money—that they'd gone mad for slaughter and pleasure, and acquired a taste for plain banditry over coin.
...Seen that way, she suddenly felt ashamed of how she'd once obsessed over lust. What made her any different from a pack of bandits living without a thought in their heads?
That she'd simply been strong? A little stronger than others, enough to catch the eye of the Rounds? Anyone could do that. Even Lupin, a stone rolled in from nowhere, had secured the 13th Seat without trouble.
As the thought deepened, the clones standing before each cart gazed quietly at Ekaterina, their original. They asked all at once.
"Yeah... why?"
Ekaterina had been pulling women into her arms as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Because she'd nearly suffered something dangerous at the hands of a boy her own age, and come to loathe men? No. If that had been the direct cause, she'd have gone around slitting men's throats and been locked in Ginnungagap long ago.
Ekaterina had simply been sick with a disease that let her live only by dominating women. She'd carried a strange mission in her chest: every woman must submit beneath her feet.
"Come to think of it, it's already been a week...."
How was she getting along perfectly fine now? Because she was running toward a definite goal? Had it really been a problem that simple to solve? In the first place, why had Ekaterina—who could live only by dominating—come to want domination at all?
Thinking about it, of course, produced no answer. It was probably tied to childhood memories she had forgotten.... Well, it didn't matter.
She shook the worry off at once and was just about to haul the carts along.
Rustle.
A great bush heaved as if it were alive. Not one of them—two. She'd thought she'd killed them all, but something was still living. Perhaps one of the stronger bandits had avoided a vital point, plugged the bleeding with aura, and was holding on.
Where do you think you're running.
Ekaterina summoned two clones at once in front of the bushes. The clones' arms, transformed into blades, split the brush in two, and the situation behind it lay bare: several bandits with their heads ducked low to dodge the strike. The one who looked like their leader roared.
"Scatter!"
It wasn't one or two. At least ten were gathered in each bush. That was because Ekaterina had only swept the surface and hadn't bothered with the underground linked to the stronghold burrows. Not that she'd ever actually cleared out a bandit gang in her life.
"Where do you think you're running!"
Even if the fleeing enemies numbered about twice as many, catching them wasn't particularly hard. Every eye and ear on her clones was Ekaterina's own eye and ear. Move the main body as well, and taking them all would be the work of an instant.
Lupin landed lightly atop the cart piled highest with cargo and raised a happy racket.
"I'm losing it, I'm losing it!"
She had reason. An outrageous number of chests were stacked neat and tight, as if begging her to open them once and be on her way.
"They've laid the whole gift bundle out on display. Who went and did something this pretty."
For a while the sound of lids coming open was loud. Loose as it was, she wore the basic fashion of the 108 Green Forest Strongholds with a bit of blood spattered on her—enough that you'd believe a woman bandit had appeared mid-slaughter of travelers. But was this the time to worry about her outfit? Every time a chest opened in succession, her happiness gauge rewrote its maximum, until her mind went hazy.
A little later, having opened all one hundred chests Ekaterina had gathered, Lupin lay flat on the ground, rubbing her belly like someone who had eaten a hundred bowls of noodles.
No more. I can't eat another bite.
Even the most delicious knife-cut noodles would be too much past this...!
How long had she been lying there. A piercing voice struck noisily at her ear.
"Hey! Get up, quick!"
Yeesh, that startled me.
At Lupin's waist, the stronghold chiefs' iron tallies—now swollen to two—glinted. It was her foolish notion that more was simply better. However many iron tallies you carried, all a bandit would think was, Ah, this one's cut down two chiefs already. Better stay away. But the short bandit, attention elsewhere, failed to notice in time. He didn't even recognize that one of them was a chief's tally, more ornately decorated, and like an idiot took her for a comrade and ordered her to move already.
"Ah, anyway, you move too, quick! Stay like this and everything we worked so hard to gather gets stolen!"
She'd thrown on a single layer of standard bandit dress, and even then Lupin's presence was something else entirely.
Stolen, though?
The treasure already had an owner. Now that Lupin had opened it, of course it was going back into Yegor's arms. But when she looked around—what was this. Bandits had poured out from somewhere and were busily hauling chests, crawling off with them. Ekaterina had swept through once, but because she hadn't touched the underground burrows, the survivors had seized the moment and started moving everything below.
They called them burrows, but they were practically anthills; you could go in on this mountain and come out on that one. When they met someone strong, running and dodging every which way was the one thing bandits did better than partisans.
"Where are you moving them?"
Lupin hefted four or five chests at once. Startled for only a moment by that strongman's strength, the little bandit who had been chattering at her picked up a fist-sized chest beside him and led the way. From his side of it, this was a situation where he'd have borrowed a hand from anyone—even a monkey.
"This way!"
Suddenly joined to the bandits' evacuation column, Lupin soon stepped into a dark, damp burrow. An ordinary person would have had their breath catch at the sight of a long, straight tunnel of darkness, but the moment Lupin went underground, the corners of her mouth twitched. How could she not have a feeling like that. Follow this burrow, and another treasure chest she hadn't found yet seemed sure to pop out....
Catching twenty bandits wasn't particularly difficult. Even with only ten of them—clones and main body combined, half that number—re-summoning the clones a few times and shifting position was enough to put them down in an instant.
The problem came when Ekaterina had subdued them all and returned.
"...What is this?"
The treasure chests that should have filled the carts had vanished without a trace. Thinking she might have seen wrong, she searched under the carts and scoured the surroundings, but the result didn't change. Ekaterina, who had gathered a hundred treasure chests, was destitute in the blink of an eye.
The deadline was today, and the sun had already sunk a good way toward the west. In a few hours it would drop behind the ridge entirely, and the whole mountain would sink into pitch darkness. Once that happened, her search would be impossible too, so sunset was effectively the deadline.
Terrified, she turned her head and asked the pigeon sitting on her shoulder.
"Um. The deadline. Could we extend it a little......"
The pigeon tilted its head, then stared hard at Ekaterina. Of course it did. Pigeons can't speak human language. If that felt unfair, she'd have to achieve Avian Affinity Rank X.
After a long staring contest with the pigeon, Ekaterina let a tear slip.
"I get it... I just have to gather a hundred again...."
