The Truth of the Rumor
The sun had fully set, and the moonlight lay buried behind a shroud of black cloud. A hard wind tore through the dark, and the roar of the rain drowned out the world. The village sank into perfect, unbroken night.
A short stretch of road away from the houses, some fifteen bandits huddled together in the gloom.
"You fucking idiot. I told you to check the village and come back. You go and kill people?"
The man with a scar cutting from his eyebrow across the bridge of his nose—Thenic—spat the words like a curse.
"Kh, sniff. That's not it. Those bitches were watching us."
The small-framed man he'd just torn into, Cok, answered in a stuffed, nasal whine. He blew his nose hard onto the ground as if the whole thing were a grave injustice, then smacked his lips. The club in his hands still ran with blood the rain hadn't managed to wash away.
"I stashed the bodies off to the side. They won't know yet."
"Don't give me that crap."
They needed to hit the village as fast as possible, and the idiot had gone and piled on an extra complication. For Thenic, who wanted this job handled with care, it was enough to make his teeth grind.
"Weren't we going to kill them all anyway?"
Marvin, who'd been watching from the side, opened his mouth. One side of his face was swollen, and a slimy little smile sat on it.
The words weren't wrong. Once they hit the village, the plan had always been to kill everyone. But if the village noticed three women had gone missing, they might actually prepare for something. Of course, they might just as easily figure the women had gotten lost in the rain or were running late. It hadn't even been a full day. Thenic still didn't want variables if he could help it.
Just have to hope they're stupid.
Thenic lifted his head and checked the village. Late as it was, with the rain coming down in sheets, a deep dark had settled over the houses as well. They didn't seem to know the women were dead. If they had, someone would already have been moving with a torch, searching.
"We finish this fast."
It had already happened. When a variable cropped up, cutting it off quick was the oldest trick of survival he knew. Thenic spat once on the ground and gathered the bandits in.
"We move now, before they notice."
The longer the women stayed gone, the more questions the village would start asking. There was still time before those questions hardened into certainty. They had to end it before then.
"Listen up."
Before he quite realized it, he had become the center of the pack. Most of them were Marvin's men. The arrangement had already been talked through. Thenic knew that, which was why he'd stepped forward.
"Priority one is killing the mage."
The man in that village was a Combat Mage who had hunted Demonic Beasts. Not someone you killed by walking up and looking him in the eye. Marvin and the rest didn't seem to think much of it. Thenic did. If the rumors about that hunt were true, everyone standing here could be wiped out.
"We get there first and put a knife in his gut before he can even react."
"Didn't they say he's got guards?"
"Yeah. Seven of us hold the soldiers. The rest storm the house."
While the startled soldiers came pouring out in a panic, the others would hit him in his bed. If that worked, the rest was easy.
"Once the mage and the soldiers are dead, do whatever you want with the rest."
The others nodded. One of them was already grinning, practically vibrating with it.
The bandits moved fast, riding the dark. The mage was staying at the very heart of the village—the village chief's house. They cut straight across toward the center. No fires burned anywhere on the outskirts, which made sense. Rain this heavy would have killed a torch even if someone had bothered to light one. They sank into the dark completely, and before long the village chief's house came into view, along with the carriages standing in front of it.
"Cok."
Thenic, running at the center of the pack, called him up.
"Yeah?"
Thenic's eyes went to the carriages parked before the house. Two large ones sat conspicuously in the courtyard, looking for all the world like barricades thrown up to defend the place.
"Those carriages originally parked there?"
"No. They were farther out."
Cok pointed. Originally the carriages had stood outside the village chief's house, not in the yard.
"...They moved carriages that were just sitting there?"
"Guess they got bored."
A tiny, almost nothing sense of wrongness snagged at Thenic's nerves. Was that really a coincidence?
"Wait—"
The moment he started to put that unease into words, something else got there first.
"Now!"
The shout came from behind the pack. Not from among the bandits. Farther back than that—from the darkened houses they had already passed.
A sudden voice, and the malice riding on it. The whole group froze in an instant.
Doors and windows of every house around them burst wide open at once. Torches flared to life along the sills and thresholds, and bright light rolled out across the street. In a single heartbeat, the advantage of having hidden in the dark was gone.
"What the—!"
"Fuck!"
The bandits' eyes scattered in every direction. Their pupils, blown wide for the dark, couldn't see a thing in the sudden glare. And in that gap, several figures came bursting out of the houses.
"Die!"
Those were supposed to have been the bandits' words. The men roared as they swung their weapons.
"Agh!"
It had happened too fast. The ones on the outer edge of the pack were slow to react. Blades flashed in the torchlight, and in a single stroke three bandits had their heads split open.
Only then did the rest of them get a look at who had charged them. Soldiers in armor. The mage's guards.
"These sons of bitches knew!"
"Marvin, you fucking bastard!"
Curses ripped out of the pack from every side.
"Aaaaaaah!!"
And that became the signal. Following the soldiers, the others who'd been waiting inside the houses all came pouring out at once—men clumsily holding shields, wearing leather armor of mismatched sizes. The villagers Joseph had equipped.
Clubs and blades came in from every direction at the same time. There was no way a pack of startled bandits was going to stop all of it.
"Urgh!"
Three more went down. Riding that momentum, one of the villagers plunged deep into the group.
"You filthy thieves!"
He brought his club down vertically onto the nearest man's skull. Thenic exploded out of the center of the pack and drove his sword up under the swinging villager's arm. It was over in a blink.
"Guh—!"
Thenic kicked the blade free, ripping it out of the man, and roared.
"Get your heads on straight, you idiots!"
A neighbor was dead. The villagers' charge faltered for a breath.
"Look! Five soldiers, and the rest are amateur pieces of shit who can't even put armor on right! Kill them one at a time!"
The bandits started to pull themselves together. Marvin came leaping in between the clumsy-looking villagers and the soldiers. The soldiers couldn't swing freely—one wrong cut and some fool of a villager would catch a blade.
"Uwaah!"
A startled villager swung his club. The arc was obvious. Big. Slow. Marvin was a different animal. Being a bandit meant killing people as routinely as eating. He slipped the blow and opened the man's chest.
In a handful of breaths the fight collapsed into a brawl. Thenic peeled back out of the center of the pack and swept the surroundings. Light was coming in from every side, bright enough to see by, not quite enough to pick out faces. That didn't matter.
Where is he!
He was looking for the mage. The man would be hiding himself, watching from a distance. If that bastard started casting in this mess, a massacre was only a matter of time.
There.
Mages were all the same in the end—the only difference was how much they liked to show off. There was no chance he'd be dressed like an ordinary villager. One figure in a robe stood holding a staff, muttering something under his breath.
"Fuck!"
Thenic ripped a dagger from his belt and threw it. The rain may have thrown the aim; the blade missed the mage and buried itself in the wooden wall beside him. That was enough. The casting stopped. That was what mattered.
Startled by the sudden attack, the mage flinched and crouched. His eyes went to the dagger stuck in the wall. Marvin's words flickered through Thenic's head—that mages were just overhyped idiots.
So the rumors really were bullshit.
If something comes flying at you, you look ahead. Why are you staring at the thing that already went past? Proof the man wasn't used to a fight. Fine by Thenic.
He moved like a snake, sliding out of the pack—between soldiers, villagers, and the men locked up with them—and kicked off the ground, charging the mage in a straight line.
The five soldiers who were supposed to be guarding him were currently hacking away in the middle of the brawl. A golden chance. Kill the mage and the whole mood of this fight would turn. Banditry—no, fighting—came down to momentum. Long years had taught him that. No matter how strong a force was, it came apart the moment you broke its center. That was why, on a job, you smashed the head of the one who looked strongest first. He meant to do the same here.
"Hic—!"
The mage swallowed a breath as Thenic came at him.
Too late, you idiot!
Close enough now to see the panic on the man's face. Swinging the sword would be faster than whatever he was about to try.
Except the mage was a little strange. His eyes had been on Thenic—then they slid, just slightly, to the left. Not at Thenic. Not at the guards. Toward a lit window of the village chief's house. Right there.
Then a voice, spoken so calmly it didn't belong in the rain at all.
Goosebumps ran up Thenic's spine. His body stopped on reflex, and his eyes turned toward the window.
A thin, hissing whir cut through the rain. A man stood inside the window, staring him down. And just beyond the glass, a white sphere was rising, spinning as it came.
What... what did I miss?
Thoughts tore through Thenic's head in a rush. Cok, who'd gone and killed the village women on his own. The carriages parked like a wall in front of the chief's house.
Is that all of it?
The bandits who'd laughed off the rumors about a Combat Mage. Marvin, who'd lied to him and shoved him into this raid.
"I told you something was off, Marvin you son of a—!"
He never finished the sentence.
The sphere slammed into Thenic's face.
A nauseating crunch, then a wet burst. With a sound that didn't belong to anything living, the bandit's head didn't just cave in—it came apart.
The bait villager, watching from close enough to feel it, recoiled in horror. Joseph vaulted the window in the same motion and snatched the staff out of his hands.
The man with the ruined head went flying and crashed into the center of the pack. In an instant, every movement on the street stopped. It wasn't simply because someone had died. A human being had come sailing through the air—and in a state where even the shape of a skull no longer remained. The sheer absurdity of it knocked every thought in the street dead for a breath.
Joseph, of course, took the opening. He fired four Mana Orbs he'd already summoned at the ones who still looked most intact. White spheres came screaming in, and the men threw themselves sideways in a panic. Forget the blades in front of them—a man's head had just exploded. Those came first.
Joseph didn't bother correcting the orbs' flight to hit them. Above the men who'd flung themselves aside, he spoke a word.
⟨ Iceberg ⟩
The Mana Orbs became massive chunks of ice in a heartbeat. Tens of kilograms of frozen weight appeared in midair and fell, gravity doing the rest. It was nothing like a club in a man's hands. The bones of the ones who'd tried to stop it simply crushed.
After that, cleaning up didn't take long. He'd wondered if anyone might still put up a fight, but watching the one who looked like their leader have his head explode seemed to have snuffed out whatever will they had left.