2. Even Bandits Come in Handy. Sometimes.
The night after Laura's two hands had shredded the mountain of paperwork down to a mere handful of sheets, I was left alone in my office, hood pulled up over my head and a handkerchief clamped over my mouth, shifting this way and that in front of the full-length mirror to check my appearance.
"Hmm. Yeah, that really… looks suspicious as hell."
No matter how I looked at it, I was the spitting image of a highway thug about to mug a passing traveler. The one visible eye didn't help either — sharp, slanted, and predatory.
"Maybe I should have put more effort into the character creation."
I'd picked the basic preset, 'Teenage Male A,' because I figured I'd install mods and enjoy the game properly anyway. Who knew I'd regret it this much?
It wasn't a face worth complaining about, but if I'd been handsome, wouldn't that have come with at least some kind of perk?
"……Not the time for this."
One last glance down the corridor, then I opened the wooden window and perched myself on the sill. A vicious gust of wind swept over my body. My office sat roughly four or five floors up by modern standards, and with no railing of any kind — just a sheer vertical drop — a faint wave of dizziness washed over me.
"I can do this. I can… do this!!"
I slapped my own cheek with a crisp smack! along with the self-encouragement, and then—
"…Let's go!!"
I kicked off the windowsill with a quiet shout and leapt into the empty air.
My body dipped down just slightly, then stopped dead — and rose again, like a squeezed balloon bobbing back up to the surface.
"Ugh, for crying out loud… the levitation magic scares me half to death every single time I cast it."
When I use magic, I simply imagine 'Would a spell like this exist?' — and that instant, spells of that sort come flooding into my mind, and I pick out whichever one I need. To put it in familiar terms, it's like asking a certain AI with the surname 'Chat.' You could say a list of usable spells lines itself up inside my head.
The only catch is that the list is all it is — there's no way to know how to use them or exactly how powerful they are until I've tried them myself. Take this very 'Levitation' spell: it took mistake after mistake before I finally got the hang of it.
The activation condition was 'Jump from a height at which falling would endanger your life.' In other words, using it anywhere short of that was completely useless.
So whenever I needed to fly out somewhere, I had to take a leap of faith out of my office window, in secret. There was flight magic too, but… its condition was 'Use Levitation thirty times.' A long way off, still.
Having confirmed the levitation was working properly, I spun once in midair. A transparent membrane spread over my whole body, and moments later I had melted seamlessly into the night scenery.
The easiest spell I'd ever mastered — Invisibility. Thanks to it, not once in my entire time here had anyone ever caught me flying around.
Finally, I focused my gaze on the shoes I wore. The soles gave off a faint glow, and suddenly my feet could stand on the empty air as if it were solid ground.
A leisurely nighttime stroll across the sky. If I could name one thing worth liking about being dropped into the Middle Ages, it would be this — the stars in the night sky were simply countless. Gazing at that endless sea of stars made all the worries I carried feel somehow… small and trivial.
"I wonder if one of those stars is where I used to live…… no. Not the time. Focus."
I felt that F-rank sensitivity welling up inside me again, so I hurriedly shook my head and pulled a piece of paper from my coat. It was the official notice about the bandit horde I'd read earlier that day.
◇ The bandit horde has been confirmed to have established an encampment in the vicinity of the northeastern hills.
◇ Estimated strength: at minimum thirty, at most around forty.
"No wonder they were acting so high and mighty."
Our domain's farmers numbered about sixty at present. Thirty to forty bandits against that was practically a full-blown bandit army.
The rule of thumb was to attack only with one-and-a-half to three times the enemy's numbers… and regrettably, we had no such forces here.
But I do.
Granted, that was on the assumption I didn't get caught — but I was, myself, walking asymmetric military power. Which meant this was noblesse oblige, the duty of those who had. It was absolutely not me being on the verge of bankruptcy and out to shake down what they had!
I stepped lightly on the air and leapt upward. That feeling of taking flight, ready to shake off every worry I carried — it never failed to feel exhilarating.
Before long I arrived at the bandits' camp and looked down at it from directly above. The encampment was bigger than I'd expected. Descending slowly and vertically with all sound erased, I could hear their racket growing steadily clearer.
I touched down in the dead center of the camp, and nobody noticed a thing. I'd used sound suppression on top of invisibility, after all. Naturally so.
"Agh, damn it. That woman crying earlier today keeps playing in my head."
"Which woman? I've seen so many crying women I can't keep them apart."
"The one with the goat! The one she raised at home — told us not to take it!"
"Ah, the old bat?"
"She whined so much I gave her a few good smacks, but she just wouldn't stop bawling… ugh, killed my appetite."
"Should've just killed her. One look at her and I could tell — one good knock on the head and she'd be done for."
Just from overhearing the two of them — who looked like exactly the sort of lackeys you'd expect — my face was already screwing up in disgust. The rest of them were busy holding their own 'I'm the Bigger Bastard' contest. What even was this… was seeing who could be more unhinged how they wrapped up their day?
And here I was hoping maybe one or two of them had a shred of remorse… what a wasted worry.
If any of them had stolen out of desperation and actually felt guilty about it, I'd planned to let the stolen goods slip away and send someone later to talk them into honest work.
Instead, I'd been spared the pointless agonizing entirely, and could get straight to plotting how to deal with them so it would look natural.
Much as I wanted to go, 'Nobody can see me anyway! Heehee, all spells, full power!' — I couldn't. If I tried to solve things with magic that brazenly, then…
Do not let your magic be discovered. If detected, a penalty will be applied.
Because this damned thing would pop up. Judging by how relentlessly it warns me, that so-called 'penalty' was surely no joke either. I had no particular desire to experiment and find out.
I glanced up at the night sky once more, for no real reason — and the moon, unusually high and bright tonight, sparked a good idea in my head.
Why not just get them to beat the hell out of each other?
Time passed, and by the small hours of the morning there wasn't a single bandit left sober.
"Uuurp… I'm wasted. …Huh?"
One of them, thoroughly plastered and hiccupping, dropped his trousers beside a tree. Having relieved himself with blissful ease, his bleary eyes caught sight of a monkey.
"The… huh? Where'd a monkey come from all of a sudden?"
Granted, it was an unusually large monkey wearing clothes — but to a bandit who'd been drinking booze like water, his eyes lacked the discernment to tell the difference.
The monkey snatched meat off a table, wandered over to the liquor barrel, and began guzzling that down too.
"You damned beast!"
The food he might have tolerated — but a mere animal coveting his precious liquor? The bandit snatched up a club on the spot and brought it down on the back of the monkey's skull.
Squawk! Kreeee!
"Take that! A beast doesn't get to! Act so! Insolent and! Smug!"
The monkey waved its hands as if to say, 'Why are you doing this? Stop it.' But the bandit paid it no mind whatsoever, raining down blows in a proper thrashing.
Before long, the monkey lay sprawled out dead. The bandit puffed out his chest triumphantly and looked around, and…
"Huh? You goddamn bastards…!"
Every direction he turned was packed full of monkeys glaring at him savagely.
"Insolent beasts… daring to sit at a man's table? You're all dead!"
Raising his unfocused, bloodshot eyes, the bandit failed to notice a single odd thing.
Where had all those dozens of comrades who'd been here moments ago gone?
How had such a massive troop of monkeys appeared without making a sound?
And above all — why were the monkeys dressed in clothes and carrying weapons, just like him?
Questioning none of it, the man, steeped in heroic dreams of driving off the monkey horde, charged.
"Die! Die! Die, you damn monkey!!"
"You cursed pig! Where do you get off wearing clothes and pretending to be human?!"
"Drop dead, you mangy wolf! Drop dead, drop dead—!!"
The bandit camp had turned into a veritable inferno of pandemonium.
Their eyes utterly addled, the bandits swung their weapons in indiscriminate attacks on the very men who had been their comrades only minutes before.
Well, that worked a treat.
What I'd done was simple: I'd cast an illusion spell across their entire camp. The condition for the illusion to take hold was 'the target's rational mind must be impaired.'
Could there be a more perfect match than a bandit horde that had been guzzling booze until dawn?
The result… they had fallen hook, line, and sinker into the illusion, and were now killing each other in earnest. Judging by the shouting, everyone but themselves appeared to them as a beast.
The noise dwindled, then faded. By the time the last sound had stopped, I was surveying the inside of the camp. Just as I'd predicted, the bandits' civil war had annihilated them. The only ones still breathing were the first two I'd seen — and even they were on the very edge of death.
With the spell dispelled, I strolled boldly inside. There wasn't a single soul left to stop me.
Bandits felled by each other's blades, bandits with skulls split open… I strained to keep my gaze locked straight ahead, fighting not to take in the carnage. Why on earth is there no magic for protecting one's stomach?
"Let's see… oh-ho."
I didn't even need to wonder where they'd stashed their loot. There it was, piled high around a wagon parked in a corner of the camp.
And there was a goat, and a foal… even a cow. Good grief, they'd looted thoroughly, the damned wretches.
"Now then — what story do I tell to walk off with all this?"
"Haaah, sleepy… this godawful dawn watch… just wait, when I make rank, I'm quitting for sure."
The sentry stretched through a long yawn, bundled up his blanket, and stepped out of the barracks. The whole place had been rather noisy since morning.
"You're just waking up? Move it! We need every extra hand we can get."
"What? What's going on, this early?"
"The lord has issued a summons! Every soldier — and every farmer too!"
"The lord? Don't tell me… has war broken out with another domain?"
Another soldier, bustling about, answered by pointing down at the base of the castle wall. There, a crowd of soldiers who'd woken earlier were dragging wagons together.
Sacks of grain and flour, chests of coin. Wagons loaded to the brim, with livestock trailing along behind them.
"…Wh… what is all that? What's happening?"
"The lord was out on his morning walk, wandered near the bandit camp, and turns out the bastards ate some hallucinogenic mushrooms by mistake — tore themselves apart in a mutiny and wiped themselves out. So now we're hauling back everything that was there."
Looking closer, I saw farmers swarming around the arriving wagons, the whole scene a riot of people collecting the goods allotted to them.
"All right, everyone — form a line, state your name, and collect your goods! Every household will receive at least two sacks of flour, so no lunging and no shoving! Anyone caught stealing will be punished to the full extent!"
Laura, his chief aide, had been frantically managing the crowd since dawn herself. Her gaze drifted toward Reus, hauling sacks down from atop the wagon.
"Thahnk you, thank you! You've given ush back our goat, Merry…!"
"There, there. Don't let anyone steal her this time. Raise her well."
"We thank you for your mercy, my lord!!"
"Mercy, my foot — pure dumb luck, that's what this is. Here, a sack of flour! Mind your back!"
He worked with an easy, amiable smile, but thanks to the goods he'd uncovered, he hadn't only been able to help the farmers — the domain's finances, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, had been neatly rescued as well.
That strange air of composure he showed yesterday… don't tell me he actually anticipated all of this?
Laura's eyes narrowed. She had heard the hunters' reports — that the bandits' camp sat on ground where amanita mushrooms, the kind that induce hallucinations, grew in dense patches.
No, surely not. If he were really that calculating, it would've shown by now.
She soon let out a soft snort and brushed the thought away. Given how flustered he'd been yesterday, it was clearly a case of a cow's backward stumble accidentally kicking up a mouse — sheer luck.
And yet, in a corner of her mind, tiny seeds of suspicion had begun to sprout.
— What if, just what if, Reus had intended all of this, and had sat on his hands for two months waiting for it?
— What if he'd deliberately left the bandits alone as they raided domain after domain, fattening up on the goods they accumulated?
— What if his eating the hallucinogenic mushrooms was pure luck — but his letting them settle on that mushroom-ridden ground in the first place was not?
Thought of that way, that foolishly grinning face of his began to feel like an act from beginning to end — and Laura swallowed, hard.