None of them were ninja, so there was no question of silently cutting down the entire camp, even if the occupants were drunk.
Their goal was silent murder, as many people as possible, before bursting into the crowd of deserters, bringing goodwill and dispensing justice.
Fortunately, there were no problems with that. They were several times stronger than the biggest brutes, faster than the lightest athletes, and more motivated than anyone else.
Leviathan's sensitivity was a great help in their task. Even during those relentless forest dashes with Master Jun, Levi firmly took her place in their team as the sensor.
If anything, only she could occasionally find the hiding sensei, warning them of danger.
Thus, Levi marked in advance the houses where the sleeping, hungover deserters were located.
There were many houses, and they could easily lodge alone or with just one companion per house.
This played a cruel joke on them.
When a prana-strengthened hand grabs you by the throat, the most you can do is convulse as the knife is plunged into your heart time after time.
Each of Jun's students repeated this ritual. Stas and Eiji each took down one deserter, while Mei took on two.
The only thing Stas felt when he squeezed his victim's neck was disgust.
The man lying in a bed soaked with his own vomit was literally made to break that weak barrier that still remained in the earthling's consciousness.
He had never had to kill someone in their sleep before.
A knife to the heart, and relief that the man died so quickly.
With Stas's strength, it was even too easy. As if he wasn't killing a person, but some kind of fake.
But even so, not everything went according to plan.
As it turned out, not only enemies could notice them. A man emerged from around the corner, clearly a villager, judging by his crumpled and torn kimono. He was the one they were supposed to save, in theory.
But seeing the heavily armed warmasters, as indicated by the clan emblems embroidered on their armor, he was about to scream instinctively.
Mistake.
Mei's yatagan flashed in the sunbeams, cleanly decapitating the man with a single blow. In the same second, the warmaster, having thrust her yatagan into the ground, deftly caught first the body and then the head.
Everything happened too quickly and irreversibly.
Judging by the girl's widened eyes, she only now realized what she had done. However, this realization didn't shake her much.
After all, her victim was just an ordinary peasant whose life didn't mean much in her eyes.
'Could have been me,' Stas grimly noted, watching as the man's body was quietly stuffed into the gap between the house and the foundation. 'Had my life not turned out so fortunately, I could have become this senseless victim of a pointless war.'
So they moved from house to house, obeying Stas's silent signals, who was listening to Leviathan's soft hissing.
Unfortunately, in this way, they were only able to kill just over a dozen people when it became clear that the remaining part was currently entertaining themselves on the village square with the remaining locals.
But the last house they went to clear together turned out to be unusual.
Firstly, besides the two deserters, there was one of their victims.
Eiji, who was on the side, worked flawlessly. Coming in from the side, he deftly intercepted his opponent, who was busy greedily ogling as his comrade pounced on the resisting girl, and then stabbed him in the back a couple of times.
But Stas, already raising his spear, suddenly froze.
The rapist and the victim, engrossed in the struggle, were so close that the spear would have killed them both. And despite the many deaths of innocents on Stas's conscience, he didn't want to add another one.
However, a knife strike was impossible. Or rather, it could be done, but there was a risk that the deserter would manage to scream. Knowing the thickness of the local flimsy walls and the proximity of his comrades, this could become a problem.
Suddenly, the struggling girl froze.
Her eyes, dark as the abyss, stared at the figures standing behind her assailant.
Mei made a sharp gesture, which could unequivocally be translated as: 'Finish them both! Or she'll attract attention!'
But Ordyntsev hesitated, looking into those eyes, so remarkably calm for the situation.
Puzzled by the lack of resistance, the rapist paused, then looked carefully at his victim, who, smiling at the bandit from the corner of her mouth and sharply twisting around, pulled her knees to her chest.
The girl's strength wasn't enough to throw off the man, but that was unnecessary. Her kick lifted the rapist just enough for Ordyntsev's fingers to clasp dead around his throat.
After stabbing the deserter in the back several times, Stas looked with some detached curiosity at the face of the girl he saved.
She was very young, having just ceased to be a child. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.
An ordinary, thin face, long, straight black hair that was monstrously dirty and tangled at the moment. And, of course, her remarkably black eyes, which had earlier caught the earthling's attention. They looked at the world calmly and imperturbably, unmindful of the body gasping its last breath beside her.
A movement from the side drew Stas's attention, and he sharply turned to stop Mei, who had stepped towards them.
"She won't scream, right?" he asked the girl, and she nodded calmly, prompting Mei to just shrug irritably.
The clan warmaster would have preferred a more reliable solution. Perhaps she even thought she was helping the girl settle scores with life after the disgrace.
"What do we do next?" Eiji whispered, cautiously peering out the window. From their position, they had a view of a corner of the ongoing "fun." "There are still more than three dozen of them out there, and they clearly know which end of the spear to hold. They've obviously been serving as ashigaru for years. They might get us in a melee."
"We need to distract them," Stas suggested.
"And somehow gather them together, to boot," Mei snorted irritably. She was a little shaken. Killing by her own hand hadn't been easy on her psyche. "So we can hit them all at once with techniques. But how are we going to do that?"
"I can help," the eyes of the trio sharply focused on the young girl who approached them.
Ordyntsev squinted, puzzled, as he looked at the girl, who fearlessly regarded the three professional killers capable of slitting her throat at any moment. He was amazed that she hadn't run away yet.
"What can you do to help, you little snot?" Eiji snorted, not taking her words seriously.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
"I will attract the attention of those who killed my father and destroyed our home. I'll gather them all around me, and then you'll destroy them with your magic," the girl's words made Eiji pause and look at their interlocutor with a different eye.
In this world, noble suicides were loved. In local society, leaving life gracefully was sometimes as important as living it gracefully.
Ordyntsev suddenly noticed how strangely Leviathan was behaving. The serpent, crawling right up to the girl's feet, sniffed her diligently, as if trying to understand something.
"What about you?" Stas asked quietly, looking at the almost child standing before them.
"Don't think about me, kind master," the soft smile on the lips of the beaten girl was like spit in the earthling's soul. "Where should I lead them?"
"Over there," Mei pointed to the opposite, completely open part of the square. "Then there will be nowhere for them to hide."
"Okay." The girl nodded, then headed for the exit. "I'll do everything."
The warmasters, exchanging glances, hastily followed her. They still had to take up a suitable position.
"Mei, Eiji, I have a request. If you can, please don't kill her."
"What, fell in love? Oh, come on," Eiji chuckled at Ordyntsev's dead stare. "I promise nothing," the lad shrugged. "You understand, I haven't mastered the technique well yet; I might accidentally hit her."
Mei just shrugged her shoulder. She clearly didn't like how Stas was risking their mission for some peasant girl.
Not far from the first bandits, the saved girl suddenly started twirling in dance, her torn yukata fluttering in the wind, followed by joyful laughter.
"What's this nonsense?" More and more bandits turned their attention to the strange girl spinning in a dance. The peasants serving the bandits did the same, looking at the familiar girl with pity.
"Is that the wench that Michi and Ochi took with them? Look, guys, she seems to have completely lost her mind from what the guys got to show her. Look at her go!"
The girl herself stopped right where it was agreed and began to dance, shouting words that instantly took all the fun out of the deserters.
"I know, I know! I saw, I saw! How they carried gold and silver. I saw! I saw how they buried it and hid it. I saw, and I'll tell. Gold! A chest!" Even though her speech was incoherent and her dance jerky and unnatural, the key words were heard by all.
"Be damned, did she say gold?"
"There's gold hidden here somewhere? Come on, wench, tell daddy where it's hidden!"
"Hey, why are you asking her? Maybe she wants to tell me? Come on, girl, let's step aside..."
The bandits jumped up, looking at each other suspiciously, and then threw themselves at the girl who had suddenly sat down on the ground.
'Her legs gave out,' Stas mentally noted, hiding behind the nearest house and preparing his knives. Leviathan stretched out beside, ready to pounce.
"Where do you think you're going, you freaks?" When more than half of the bandits had gathered around the fallen girl, their leader started pushing through the crowd, shoving everyone around. "Have you completely lost your mind? Get lost, or I'll shove your spears so far up your asses you'll be able to scratch your teeth with them!"
But the leader's words, on the contrary, only caused muffled, discontented murmurs.
Yes, the bandits made more space around the girl, but they didn't disperse. They definitely didn't trust the fate of the gold to the leader alone.
This was the moment Eiji and Mei chose to attack.
In addition to running through the forest from Master Jun, they had been diligently learning each new technique shared with them by the sensei.
Their leader was very annoyed by the lack of deadly long-range abilities in their team, so Mei was given an earth technique, and Eiji received a water one.
And now the young warmasters were about to show what they had learned.
One of the features of elemental techniques is the ability to invest more prana in them than necessary. In such cases, the technique's power increased, although it still remained weaker than its higher-class counterparts.
Right now, Mei and Eiji invested in their attacks as much as a quarter of all the prana they had.
"Water Technique! Lesser Water Tornado!"
From the lad's hands, a water tornado hurtled towards the enemies, its thin base starting at his palms and widening towards the foes.
As soon as the technique left its owner, it sped toward the frozen-in-horror deserters.
The vortex noisily began to suck in its first victims, then, after spinning them well and twisting them inside, threw them with force in different directions.
It was easy to imagine what would happen to a human body if it was hurled to the ground, walls, or even ten meters up at a speed of twenty or thirty kilometers per hour.
The technique, like a mythical worm, continued to act as a vacuum cleaner, capturing not only people but also the earth around, digging real pits.
From the other side, Mei launched her attack on the disorganized and fleeing cluster of human bodies.
"Earth Technique! Stone Bullets![1]" From a hillock that had buckled under the girl's feet, dozens of monstrously accelerated and prana-strengthened stones, resembling pebbles, flew out, instantly covering a short distance and embedding themselves in bare flesh.
Of course, their energy wasn't enough to penetrate bodies as deeply as real bullets, but there was plenty of mass to splendidly break bones, crush wooden armor, and shatter limbs to smithereens.
Despite their successful hits, their techniques were only able to kill or incapacitate no more than fifteen to twenty people. The remaining dozen and a half of the most armored or agile still posed a threat.
"They're over there! Form up! We'll strike all at once!" The leader, who managed to survive the technique's blow, was straining to gather his people into a squad. "We... Ah!"
The main deserter twitched when a passing knife scraped his face. The man only managed to touch the numbing cut when the world spun around, and he fell to the ground, foaming at the mouth and nose.
A couple more knives embedded themselves in random fighters, carrying a lethal dose of poison.
Although Stas still didn't possess destructive techniques, he had spent a lot of time practicing throwing to be useful.
The death of the leader completely destroyed the already poor fighting spirit of the remaining deserters.
Some of them decided that their own skin was closer to the body, and it was time to skedaddle.
But the warmasters had a different opinion on this.
Ordyntsev mercilessly thrust his spear, skewering the man running towards him. One move reinforced with prana, and the nearly dead man clawing at the shaft flew to the side, sliding off the raised spear.
The second fighter rushing behind tried to stop, shouting something, but Stas wasn't listening.
He wasn't interested in the words of a dead man.
The wooden armor, cracked from a hit by one of the stone bullets, couldn't withstand the spear's tip.
This time, because of the armor, Stas had to step on the corpse's chest to finally pull out the stuck spear. Attempts to shake off the body didn't work.
The third attacker didn't even try to speak, attacking right away. He, too, like Stas, was armed with a spear and even knew how to use it.
But his problem was that Ordyntsev didn't intend to play by his rules.
The earthling's spear deflected the opponent's spear to the side, and at the same moment, Leviathan, who received the command, bit into the exposed enemy's neck, completely severing the spinal cord.
Stas took a deep breath and surveyed the battlefield.
No more attackers. They simply ran out.
Mei and Eiji were finishing off the last bandits that tried to break through.
The mess made by two medium-class but still quite weak techniques kept slightly moving and moaning. Someone there was still alive, albeit not for long.
'The girl!' The thought pierced the earthling's consciousness. Frowning, Ordyntsev quickly approached the pile of bodies, then froze.
Because the water tornado sucked in the earth, pits formed in the square, hiding the bodies of some of the deserters.
In one of those pits, the girl whom Stas considered already dead, with a knife she had obtained from somewhere, was busily cutting the throat of a broken killer of her relatives.
The enemy was gasping, bubbling, but could do nothing. Judging by the strange position of his head, he broke his neck when he fell and was paralyzed.
'Irony – you're a heartless bitch,' Stas smirked crookedly, inspecting the other "pits" and finding a couple more bodies with slit throats: 'The kid clearly didn't waste time. However, she worked in vain; we would have killed them all anyway.'
As if feeling his attention, the girl suddenly turned around, meeting Ordyntsev's gaze.
'I'm willing to bet a lot that she's not just a peasant girl,' Stas carefully looked at the saved young girl. 'Remarkable acting skills, the ability to slit throats, and no fear of death. Who are you, kid?'
As if coming to her senses, the girl dropped the knife and, jumping up, awkwardly bowed to Stas.
"Thank you very much, kind master, for saving our village and avenging the killers of my father. This Noriko will never forget your kindness and will carry it in her heart until the end of her days."
"Nonsense," the man's mood lifted a little. His fears were unfounded; the girl survived. The enemies were killed, and he didn't have a scratch. "Go, hide somewhere. Maybe not all the bandits have been killed yet. We need to finish the job."
"I understand," the young girl ran towards the nearest house, from which the locals were peering out.
Whispers immediately began to come from there. The peasants were clearly trying to find out from the girl what to expect from the fearsome warmasters.
'Master,' Leviathan crawled to Ordyntsev's feet and, rubbing, coiled around them a couple of times, 'I sensed an unusual smell from her.'
"What do you mean?" Stas looked at Levi with interest.
'She smells at the same time like a human and like a warmaster. She has a lot of human energy. And something else. You don't have it, but Eiji and Mei have something different.'
'Wait, what are you... Lineage!' Stas realized and looked at the house where the girl had hidden with completely different eyes, 'But then why didn't she resist those deserters? Such potential from birth? Something doesn't add up. Where did the acting and killing skills come from then?'
Ordyntsev shook his head and nailed with his spear to the ground a deserter trying to quietly crawl away.
The strange girl intrigued him with her secret. Ordyntsev had not yet decided what to do with her, but it was obvious that such a large potential should not be wasted in a village about to perish from hunger.
It was still too early to make plans, but even so, the earthling was sure that he had something to offer such a promising person who had suddenly lost her whole family and, most likely, her purpose in life.
In addition, Stas hadn't forgotten for a second about the mysterious lineage of the girl. Did she get it from her parents, or was she related to that terrifyingly rare list of natural lineages that arose on their own?
Ordyntsev involuntarily licked his lips. Lately, he had acquired such a strange and frightening habit without noticing it.
One way or another, he will soon find out the answers.
[1] Author's note: The Romans used lead bullets for slings, and the Greeks inscribed insults to the enemy on their "bullets." So don't tell me that there can't be bullets.