Rooting Them Out
The sun had slipped from the sky, and darkness settled over the land. The air had turned properly chilly. Knowing a night raid might be coming, I found it hard to sleep.
Of course, there was no way of knowing how the bandits would come at us until we actually saw them. In this particular field, bandits were unmatched experts. There was a chance they wouldn't raid us tonight at all. If that were the case, we'd spend the day fighting an enemy we couldn't see — and that alone would be a win for them.
"Hooo... hooo..."
Luna had drifted off, making those cute little sleeping sounds. Maybe it was the hard life she'd lived, but she slept easy even in a situation like this. I checked the time on my luxury pocket watch — it was past two in the morning. I climbed down from the carriage.
A campfire burned brightly at the heart of the camp, and four sentries were making their rounds. None of them looked slack, thankfully — a result of my warning that the bandits might hit us tonight. Tension sat plainly on their faces.
"Master Walker! What brings you out at this hour?"
A tall, handsome blonde slave called out to me as I looked around near the campfire. He was the one who'd commanded the other slaves during the fight that afternoon.
Ordinarily, a slave being sold had no right to speak to a merchant unbidden. It had been the same when I'd first been sold to Derick Walker. But these men were both my merchandise and my escort force. And this one looked like a premium product — the kind that would fetch a good price.
"Can't sleep. Anything to report?"
"No, sir. Nothing yet."
Even as he answered, he didn't let his guard down, his sharp eyes fixed on the road stretching out ahead. The way he'd commanded the troops so skillfully during the day had left quite an impression. I'd looked into his background — a country youth who'd committed a crime in his hometown and been enslaved for it.
"You looked pretty comfortable commanding troops this afternoon. Were you in the local militia back home?"
He didn't so much as flinch at the sudden question, answering calmly.
"Yes, sir. I protected the village from monsters and bandits. There were a few of us in my hometown who fought professionally, like I did."
Most militias were a side job for people who already had a trade. Farmers, blacksmiths, tailors — they picked up weapons when trouble came. It was a common arrangement in the rural parts of Solari World. Anyone skilled enough to wield a weapon professionally usually went beyond the militia and became a mercenary.
"There was a man in my hometown who'd served in the Royal Knights before retiring. The promising ones among us trained under him."
"Oh-ho. Is that so. Served in the Royal Knights, did he? From the way you talk, he sounds like a commoner. That's impressive."
For a commoner to enter the Royal Knights was harder than an orphan getting into a top medical school. If your station was low, you had to be vastly more skilled than the competition.
"If you trained under someone like that, you could've gone professional as a mercenary... What crime did you commit?"
"I killed a swindler who cheated me."
So he had a hot-blooded streak. Not a bad quality in a man, having that kind of guts. Swindling bastards deserved to be torn limb from limb anyway.
"Killing a swindler shouldn't have gotten you enslaved, though?"
In the Myles Kingdom, legislative and judicial authority were the exclusive rights of the local lord. That was why a lord reigned like a god over his own territory.
The laws of Coulon Territory were incomparably looser and cruder than anything from the real world. Slavery was officially recognized by law, for one thing. But most of the laws across the continent, including Coulon Territory, had a strongly emotional character. The same act of murder, for instance, could be ruled not guilty if you'd killed someone who'd wronged your family.
It almost felt like the law encouraged taking matters into your own hands. Got a problem? Don't bother a busy magistrate — handle it yourself. In this world, a judge was the lord, or some high-ranking person the lord had delegated judicial authority to. Judges in the real world had high social standing too, but nothing like this. So it was impossible for a magistrate to rule on every criminal case. That was why personal self-help was recognized so broadly.
"The swindler was a prominent local notable in my hometown. The magistrate showed up the very next day."
That figured.
Money talks, no matter where you go. It was the reason I was doing this job in the first place.
The carriage door creaked open. Luna stepped out into the moonlight, dual blades in hand. A brilliant moon hung in the sky. As a member of the Moon Tribe, she received bonus stats beneath the moonlight.
Her dry brown hair had turned silver, gleaming in the light. Her eyes shone a sapphire blue, just like her surname — Bluemoon.
"I sense a presence. Approximately ten of them."
A night attack. The bandits were something else, I'd give them that. Registering on Luna's radar meant they'd closed to within fifty meters, and I still couldn't sense a thing. Nothing reached my ears but the atmospheric chirping of insects in the grass.
"Enemies?"
The blonde slave tensed, gripping a conch-shell horn. It was the tool for waking the camp if enemies appeared. I raised a hand to stop him from blowing it, then confirmed the enemy's exact status with Luna.
"Just the ten of them?"
"Yes. They are moving very slowly. I do not sense anyone else."
Ten was a paltry number to attack a group of nearly a hundred, but these men were masters of the night raid. In pitch darkness, they were the kind of vicious bandits who could take on ten men apiece.
Limiting themselves to ten was a calculated trick. Any more and it would be hard to move stealthily. They'd allocated their numbers just right — true professionals who'd perfected the art of being underhanded.
"Even if we cut off their tail here, they'll keep harassing us the whole time we're in these mountains. Cleaner to just pull out the roots."
Obviously, these ten weren't the whole band. Bandits this organized would have decent numbers, and a base of operations.
A bandit hideout was worth far more money than hunting monsters. Being criminals, they stashed cash and goods they could liquidate at their base — raiding that alone would be a tidy profit. And I could sell the bandits themselves as slaves. That was a perk of being in the slave-trading business.
"They're getting closer. They've closed to within about twenty meters."
"Can you take them all?"
"Five minutes should suffice."
Luna answered without the slightest hesitation.
"We need to know where their hideout is. Leave one alive. Kill the rest."
"Yes, sir."
The moment she answered, Luna's body vanished. With the moonlight bonus, her abilities had risen far beyond their usual level. A full moon granted a 1.5x stat amplification; even without a full moon, the boost was at least 1.2x. And 1.2x meant a twenty percent increase in her stats.
Luna returned in exactly four minutes. In her left hand she held a dead bandit's severed head; in her right, a young bandit blubbering tears and snot. Judging by his age, he couldn't have been twenty yet.
"I'm sorry! Please, just let me off this once! I was wrong!"
The young bandit's face was corpse-pale — probably from watching his comrades get slaughtered in an instant right in front of him. The blonde slave stared at Luna in disbelief. Even I hadn't expected her to wrap things up this fast. Moonlight bonus or not, she was too strong.
"Good work wrapping that up so fast. You. I'll get straight to the point. Where's your hideout?"
I crouched down to meet him at eye level. The terrified bandit's eyes wavered wildly. I immediately slapped him across the face.
Crack!
"Ghk!"
His head snapped to the side. Blood exploded from both nostrils like a firework. Not answering my question right away? He still didn't understand how this worked. Time to give him a taste of how the world really operated.
"Luna. Cut off this idiot's fingers."
"Which hand shall I cut, sir?"
"The left."
"W-wait! I'll ta— GYAAAAH!"
Luna sliced through his fingers without a shred of hesitation. Human bone and flesh were reasonably tough, but they might as well have been tofu before Luna's dual blades. I'd figured she'd cut off a single finger. Instead, she took every finger on his right hand.
In an instant, the promising young man's right hand had become a round, fingerless stub. He'd only have used those fingers to rob people anyway, so from a utilitarian standpoint, this was actually a net gain.
"GYAAAH! My right hand!"
"Ah. My mistake. It was the right, not the left."
Seeking to correct her error, Luna cut off the fingers on his left hand as well. She did not, of course, put the right ones back on. That was rather outside her skill set.
"GYAAAAAAH! I'll talk! I'll talk! Please let me talk! PLEEEASE!"
He kept repeating that he'd talk, then his eyes rolled back and he passed out. Luna gave his body a hard kick, and the unconscious man snapped awake. He wore the look of a man who'd just swum a 1,500-meter freestyle across the River Styx and somehow crawled back.
"Buhihit! That's more like it! Lead the way!"
"Hic...! Hic...! A-are we... going there right now?"
The look in the weeping man's eyes suddenly changed. I hadn't even used a mind-reading technique, but I could practically see what he was thinking. Did he figure he could turn the tables if we went to his hideout? I couldn't tell if he was naive or just stupid.
"We're going right now. Blondie, you hold down the fort."
"My name is Tevez, sir."
A name that sounded like he ought to be good at soccer. Whatever — a name was a name. I took Luna and headed in the direction the bandit underling indicated. Along the way to their hideout, I extracted information about the gang from him.
The bandit gang numbered about sixty, he said. They were the only bandits based in these mountains — about three years ago there'd been a war between rival gangs, and they'd come out on top. A war between bandits wasn't something to laugh off. It meant the ones who ruled this mountain were the vicious survivors of industry competition.
"How many women?"
"Th-there are no women in our gang. We sell them all as slaves, or... use them as playthings for a while and then kill them."
Tch. No women. That was a bit of a shame. Even if there'd been a stunning beauty among them, she wouldn't have held a candle to Luna — but I could've snacked on her the way you eat junk food. Still, sixty able-bodied men was a hefty profit all by itself. Well, minus the ten Luna had killed in the raiding party, so about fifty.
"About thirty of the total are combat personnel. The rest sell off the plundered goods, maintain the weapons, or cook."
A large gang, and the roles were well divided. Skilled slaves sold for more than ordinary ones. All the better for me.