Multi-Species Alliance 3

To a superhuman who can reinforce their body ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with mana, ordinary civilians feel impossibly fragile. Their flesh is like the clay a child kneads for play; their bones, like the thin reed sticks you handle in elementary art class.

A slight squeeze of the hand twists a wrist and splits the skin open. Beneath that flesh — already past bruising, blood streaming freely — the bones themselves would have lost all shape and crumbled. Work the arms and legs over like that, and a person's limbs go soft and dangling, like a broken toy.

"I-I'll t-talk, please, pleeease!"

The time it takes to turn a person into something that used to be a person is a mere five minutes. Even that was only because of the care spent regulating force so nothing snapped clean off by accident. They say the human body is seventy percent water, and this bandit had become a liquid human to match, writhing on the ground.

All of it was a method learned from an information guild agent. With my crude, overwhelming strength, delicate torture techniques never suited me, so the advice had been simple: pulp one of them first, then start. And honestly — the bandits I run into aren't brainwashed assassins raised by some secret order. Why bother with finesse?

"I-I'll, I'll talk, I swear…"

A mere thug or bandit was never going to keep silent in the face of limbs crushed to paste and nearly torn free of the torso. And if you listened politely to those types from the start, without making them suffer first, they'd only lie.

Now the five bandits had become four willing assistants. Men who'd thrown in with monsters just to eat had neither the mental fortitude to stay calm watching a person get kneaded into dough right in front of them, nor the loyalty to keep any secrets.

"……"

"Ah, right. There's something I want to ask."

A half-liquid corpse that barely held a human shape but could no longer hold a posture. Only after what had been their comrade was left sprawled in ruin on the ground did I open my mouth for the first time — and the men, whether bandits or highwaymen, slammed their heads to the dirt in a hurry.

They didn't dare meet my eyes, but the desperate cries of people who still wanted to live burst out of them all the same. Voices closer to wailing and shrieking spilled from their mouths.

"H-hiiik—!"

"Me! I know more than these guys!"

"Y-you bastard! No! That, that one doesn't know a thing — he just followed along!"

And so began a four-layered explanation.

The kingdom's west was a harsher land than the east. Not as bad as the ice-locked north, but the west's whole concept was wasteland, wasn't it? Burn the forests for farmland and there still weren't roots or tree fruit to forage, and even the occasional deer that might grease a meal was hard to find.

So while poor fief-dwellers in the east cleared forests and became slash-and-burn farmers, most of those in the west turned into bandits and highwaymen. In a neighborhood where a poorly guarded merchant caravan on the road was more common than rabbits and deer living in some scrap of woods, it was only natural.

The four in front of me were the same. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Men who'd fled a noble's lands for failing to pay taxes, only to fail at clearing a village of their own and fail at being taken in by any other. They couldn't just starve, so they became a robber band as a matter of course.

"W-we didn't, didn't usually kill people! We just took a little food as a toll from the merchants' packs, that was all…"

"Th-that's right! With only five of us we couldn't just hit any caravan we wanted, so for the few merchants who wanted to avoid the hassle we'd take some food and a few coins and let them go — then suddenly, suddenly the orcs just—!"

The story that followed was a fairly predictable one. The roads merchants used were fixed, so these men had built lean-tos nearby and camped rough, shaking down easy targets for tolls — until dozens of orcs showed up and kidnapped the bandits the same way they kidnapped villagers.

The difference was that villagers and merchants got bound tight and locked in dugouts or wooden cages, while the bandits became the orcs' servants and did the village's menial work.

Washing growling wolves, locking up people who'd been tied with rope and knocked out, keeping them barely alive on crude food, sorting the plunder the orcs had brought into a warehouse—

"Um, Roland?"

"What is it?"

"I-I found the people who were being held. There are some signs of abuse, and Grace says it wasn't the orcs…"

Well. They'd been working out their stress on the captives, then.

The orcs hadn't laid a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hand on anyone — people had done it to people. Call it "abuse" all you like, but among the captured merchants and villagers there was no way there hadn't been a single woman. One look at gentle Irene's voice trembling with rage made it obvious without needing to see.

The men's faces lit up at the sight of Irene in her nun's habit, then immediately slammed their heads back into the dirt under her sharp glare. They'd been sharp enough to survive under hot-tempered orcs, but they never lifted their heads again.

Lily had already handled them cleanly before I even needed to step in.

"Nothing more to hear, right? If you do it, it gets too messy."

"What can I say? This is all I ever learned."

"You mean you refused to learn anything else, don't you?"

Still bowed in place, four heads rolled free without ever knowing they were dead, bidding farewell to their own bodies. Taking Irene — who'd whipped her face away from the red blood soaking the dry wasteland — I headed toward where she'd come from.

There were the people taken today, and the people who'd already been taken.

Merchants who'd been traveling west to east. Villagers on their way to another settlement for barter. Cheap wooden-plaque mercenaries who'd come all the way out to remote villages hoping to scrape together a few coins.

"…The orcs just held them and left them alone?"

"Yes, sir. And for reasons we don't understand, every so often a few of the hostages were sent west."

People who had never been particularly mistreated by the orcs — only bound and kept.

The orcs had been building a forward base.

What the hell is this, seriously?

Kidnapping people, using people to pad their numbers, and little by little constructing a forward base. Raising tent villages from the wasteland out beyond the wasteland to seize a wide stretch of territory, and solving manpower shortages by snatching up nearby bandits and the like. Even if the area they had to manage grew larger, they rode wolves of unknown origin, so it hardly mattered.

Humans who'd turned bandit for lack of food lived without complaint under orcs who fed them ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and didn't care if they touched the kidnapped women — and they naturally became the orcs' loyal hands and feet. Mobility solved with wolves, numbers solved with bandits: a smart method, uncharacteristic of orcs.

"I never thought we'd see orc-worshippers of all things. Devil-worshippers from the stories, sure, but this…"

"What on earth is going on…"

The party each tossed out a line at the sheer absurdity of it. A world where the Goddess's grace filled the land, where a blessed forest sat square in the kingdom's heart, where priests occasionally received divine oracles. In a world like that, how far outside common sense was it for humans to serve orcs?

Of course there were orphans, wealth gaps, people suffering under the class system — but it still wasn't a world where you had to go kneel under monsters.

"Hey now, we've got to clear the quest first. It's a chain quest — you can't just drop the orcs halfway and have some other monster show up. It's an orc chain quest, so orcs come out. And all you people who hyped it as the world's first chain quest… keep it up and I'm running a chat autopsy, got it?"

Whether the party was taking it seriously or not, the viewers were starting to feel bored. Having just watched a rideable golem right before this probably made the comparison sting. Hell, if it were me choosing between climbing into a six-meter robot to mess around and a story about pig-heads kidnapping people, I'd pick the robot every time.

Still, public opinion was public opinion. As a gamer you couldn't just skip a chain quest — but as a streamer, you couldn't completely ignore the people watching the broadcast either, could you?

"For now, since we've killed all the orcs and the bandits, there shouldn't be any danger. We need to head west."

"Your weapons are still here, so take them with you. Cross three hills to the southwest and you'll reach a village."

And so a forced-march schedule was set. I'd have preferred to pull in a subjugation force through my connections, but we still hadn't found Lily's companions, so we had to keep running.

With tents and rations already in the inventory, the decision was made to push into the wasteland as we were.

Even the captives held by the orcs were mostly traveling merchants — in other words, people who wandered this rough fantasy world with nothing but a pack on their backs. Roughly twenty of them, each with a sword in hand, and any half-baked bandits wouldn't dare touch them.

Watching the freed merchant group leave the tents behind, loading up what goods remained and taking the women and villagers with them to get out of the wasteland, we turned our steps once more toward the deep interior.

Watching Han Se-ah's quest window update once again.

…Hmm. Maybe I should do a little opinion-shaping as Jjanhae-jwa.