Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 21. Slaughter.
“So you were actually this strong!” Jin said excitedly as Laien and Yin mounted their horses. “It’s just barely, but you are at the level of weakest martial masters,” he added while nodding to himself, pretty convinced that the two would be happy to be complimented. Alas, the boys ignored him and rode forward instead.
“Just how strong are they…?” Liza leveled herself with Ruan and asked, no longer able to calmly keep labeling Laien and Yin as only talented young masters.
Ruan glanced at the two’s backs, pretty sure they also heard Liza’s question. “What I saw and heard places them around the level of martial masters of the seconds rank,” he revealed after seeing that the boys weren’t about to object; they apparently didn’t care much. At this rate, this group would have learned of their real prowess sooner or later anyway.
“You must be shittin’ me” Liza accidentally spoke with a strong accent of her homeland. She coughed and blushed, angry at herself for this slip of the tongue. Ruan used to be a courier so he must have recognized where she was from. However, despite appearing to have recognized her origins he didn’t bring them up at all; for what she was quite grateful to him. She didn’t want to talk about her country or her past; she had left all of that behind when she became a mercenary.
“They are comparable to the martial master of the second rank?” Jin asked in a loud, surprised voice. “How can that be? Didn’t you have a dream you mistook for the reality?” he asked with a contemptuous smile, not taking Ruan’s words seriously at all.
“It’s fine if you don’t want to believe me,” Ruan said and shrugged his shoulders. “You will see it for yourself, pretty soon too if you keep provoking them like you did a few days ago,” he reminded and looked over his shoulder to see Jin’s expression, but the man only snorted, still refusing to believe him, and quite obviously failing to recognize the subtle warning contained in this reminder.
“Ho,” the black-cloaked expert smiled to himself once again. “Truly rare talents. It might just turn out that this old fogey had kicked a steel plate by commencing the Shadow Trials for those two,” he thought quietly, all the while smirking to himself under the cover of his black hood.
As for the remaining three members of the group, by the looks of it the only ones who didn’t have the strength of the experts in the Realm of Heroes in this party… the three were at a loss for words. They had already been regretting their behavior that day in Shire’s house when Laien rose to prominence, but now they were feeling like they had wasted a chance to make friends with the future supreme expert of their Kingdom; or even worse, they had already been on good terms with him, but had thrown all of it down the drain.
“How is developing your martial art going?” Yin asked, reminded of this matter by their brief fight. He and Laien had ended up focusing on their new Sword and Spear arts after creating them, so he totally forgot to inquire about Laien’s new martial art.
“I already pretty much understand the parts I want to take from others,” Laien replied with a sigh, avoiding any specific terms. Yin would know what he was talking about; those in the group, on the other hand, didn’t need to know about their secrets. “I only wish I had a top-level water element martial art to compare so I would know what to do. It’s so strange, you know? I don’t get it why do I need a martial art anyway; is there something wrong with all of our Qi Origins and we need martial arts to ‘repair’ them before we can control our Qi properly?” he complained, feeling a bit frustrated about his lack of improvement. He was pretty much stuck and didn’t know how to move ahead.
“I wish using Qi was more like using spiritual energy. Then everything would be so simple,” he added with a sigh. Controlling spiritual energy always came to him very naturally so why did controlling Qi need some stupid martial art to be perfected?
“It’s just like you said, Qi Origins aren’t exactly perfect in the beginning,” Yin said with a laugh. It was quite an amusing thing to hear someone be selfish enough and yet also daring enough to question something like the need of using a martial art. The body-refining arts had been created by the countless old generations who kept refining them and adding their own elements; without all this accumulated knowledge martial artists would have never gone beyond the level of the fifth mortal realm; if such a term had ever come to be to begin with.
“Also,” Yin added with a little smirk. “Using magic the way you do shouldn’t be possible either. I told you already, right?” he said with a chuckle. If all spiritual practitioners could use their spells in an instantaneous manner and with just as much strength as Laien was doing, then it wouldn’t be a common knowledge that spiritual practitioners were weaker than marital practitioners in duels and small skirmishes. Laien was simply a freak; well, both of them were freaks.
“You are thinking we are both strange, huh?” Laien asked with a laugh, getting the vague meaning of Yin’s thoughts from their spiritual bond.
“Yup, but in a good way,” Yin responded and smiled at Laien. Not to mention their respective talents, were there really that many twelve-year-olds who would go straight into a carefree chit-chat after killing over a dozen of people? Not to mention they hadn’t been nervous at all during this small fight; this ‘honing’ themselves in the Anarchic Lands might, after all, have been a pretty silly idea considering that their opponents were mere thieves and bandits.
“Ah, whatever,” Laien said resignedly. “We are here, so why not kill some bandits along the way? We will do a good deed or two,” he suggested and unintentionally made all those who were listening in to his conversation with Yin fail to follow. How did this talk suddenly shift to this subject again?
“Sounds like fun,” Yin agreed after a brief moment of consideration. Be it as it may, they needed to get used to killing people efficiently and to fighting against many opponents at once. Was there a better way to do that than to jump into the den of thieves and start killing them? Perhaps, but this option was the best one currently available.
“There goes hurrying onwards…” Liza commented quietly and sighed. This time though she didn’t argue with the boys; something was telling her that Ruan wasn’t lying about their strength and if so, then it would benefit her more if she changed her attitude. A kid comparable to a martial practitioner of the ninth rank was a genius, but a kid as strong as a martial master of the second rank was an absolute freak of nature; and there was two of them. Making friends with those two would benefit her so much that she was willing to suck up to the young masters she usually detested; all for the sake of making her life easier and more convenient.
---
“Please don’t ki-!” a woman pleaded on the ground with her hands raised, but Yin paid her words no heed and swiftly ended her life with a slash of his sword. “I’m done here,” he called out after walking out of the large tent-like house and looked around to see how others were doing.
“Same,” Laien said casually, the blade of his spear dripping with blood. “It was quite a large camp. Makes one wonder why so many weaklings are allowed to play bandits and no one does anything about them,” he mused aloud. Their Sarkcente Kingdom alone officially had over two thousand martial masters, while unofficially it likely had over four to five thousand. Just a few hundred of them would be able to sweep through the Anarchic Lands and purge them whole, so why was this not done yet?
Thinking about it he suddenly began regretting he hadn’t been more engaged in Tei’ru’s lessons. This old man probably knew all those things and much more; he could have learned so much from him had he been more curious and engaged instead of sulking… and instead of hating him because of what he was trying to do to Siana. He took a deep breath and scratched the back of his head; there was no point thinking about this now.
“The presence of the Anarchic Lands is beneficial to everyone,” Ruan began explaining before he could bite his tongue. Seeing the curious looks from Laien and Yin, he sighed and conceded. “There are many benefits to having a lawless region nearby, but the main one is that the criminals of your countries will almost always head to live there. There isn’t much crime in the south, but whatever there is we can control with a good margin of safety, to what the Anarchic Lands contribute,” he elaborated from atop his horse, watching somewhat disdainfully how Liza, Jin and the other three proceeded to pillage the bandit camp after helping the boys purge it.
“Hm, does that really outweigh the benefits of having so much more land? The Anarchic Lands is like one-third of the southern region,” Laien inquired, mounting his black War Horse and waiting for the others to collect what they needed so they could set out. Unlike the rest of their team, he and Yin weren’t interested in whatever riches those bandits managed to accumulate so when Liza offered to help in exchange for the items of those they were killing they agreed happily. With two martial masters and three well-trained practitioners at the late stages of the mortal realm things began going much more smoothly and in just fifteen days they managed to get rid of about a thousand random bandits and thieves.
“The ground here isn’t fertile.” Ruan shook his head. “Moreover, you’d be placing yourself in the pincer between the southern Kingdoms, the more and more often raids from the east and the countless problems pouring in from the west. There is no country with enough military power to make this investment worth it,” he explained, but quite clearly wasn’t in the mood to be chatting with the boys. They had been killing bandits for over two weeks now; enough was enough, this was slowly becoming a pointless slaughter. They should just cut in through the Anarchic Lands at one go, not go around acting like some headhunters.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Look at that, someone had an unhealthy obsession with gold.” Liza laughed, twirling an interspatial ring between her fingers while checking its contents. “There must be at least ten thousand gold coins in items here. Where do those bandits get so much gold from? Do people just come here to get robbed by them?” she asked, admittedly pretty amazed by how wealthy those rogues were. Maybe she shouldn’t have become a mercenary, but should have joined some bandit group instead?
“It’s usually the poor people they get money from,” Jin spoke with a smile, causing everyone to open their eyes wide. He of all people was actually trying to explain something? Did someone happen to hit his head a bit too hard in this small battle? “Hmph, what do you know? I had countless lovers and after sex, they usually started talking about whatever. One of the ladies I bedded last year was a daughter of a rich merchant; she told me that it’s usually those poor people who cut costs on guards to earn more profit who get robbed,”
“You’d think they would have learned their lesson after seeing their friends dying, no?” Liza argued, finding it hard to believe that so many people would willingly take the risk to cross the Anarchic Lands just to get killed year after year. Was the world really filled with so many desperate idiots or greedy bastards?
“Who knows,” Jin said without a care. “Going by my experience, people don’t learn from mistakes. Even those women who said they regretted sleeping with me would come back to be comforted sooner or later,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders and jumped into the saddle of his horse, failing to realize that everyone was looking at him with a ‘seriously bruh’ kind of expressions on their faces.
“Everyone ready?” Ruan asked resignedly and when everybody confirmed, he gestured the boys to lead the way. He didn’t want to keep going around and killing people because he saw it as pointless, as an act akin to asking for something bad to happen, but what could he do? As long as these two weren’t bored of it he had little to no means of discouraging them.
“Mm, let’s go,” Laien said contentedly and headed back to the road, following the same hidden forest path they came here by.
---
“Greywolf, are you sure they will be passing through here?” one of the local bosses asked impatiently. He had committed his men to Greywolf’s plan just like many others in the area because he knew the man had the most experience in directing battles out of all of them, but it was done out of necessity, not because of his respect for the man or anything alike. He didn’t trust Greywolf and he didn’t think any of the other bosses did either; no one would trust a former turncoat soldier.
“If they won’t, my scouts will tell us and we will change the spot for the ambush,” Greywolf said angrily and looked at the man threateningly; the local boss frowned, but looked away and backed down. After Greywolf broke through to the Realm of Heroes last week his position in the region soared. Willing or not, the locals would obey him unless the top brass said otherwise.
“Those who managed to run from that group always say the same thing,” Greywolf went ahead and began explaining, tired of having people complain to him every half an hour. “No matter how well-hidden they were, they are always spotted and attacked before they can pull those guys into a trap. I told my men to keep their distance and stay far in the forest while waiting for that group to cross any of the roads. It will take more time, but we can learn where they are going without revealing our intentions,” he explained in a rather loud voice, making sure even the minor bosses who were standing a bit further away from him heard clearly.
The man who had complained just before frowned, but nodded to himself and forcefully calmed down. Greywolf was a double-crossing bastard, but he knew what he was doing. They needed him if they wanted to take down a group consisting of multiple martial masters. Even with their numbers, Greywolf was the only Realm of Heroes expert in their ranks. He himself was at the peak of the ninth mortal realm, just like the other two major local bosses. Apart from that, they had ten men at the ninth mortal realm, one hundred at eighth and seventh realms and eight hundred at the sixth and lower.
With this many people, they should be able to take down a few martial masters of the first or second rank, but they still needed to be careful and plan their attack out properly. Assaulting martial masters wasn’t a joke; their bodies were so tough that usually, no one below the eighth mortal realm would even be able to hurt them. They needed to overpower this bunch with numbers, then use their own experts to kill them quickly and efficiently.
“Take your posts,” Greywolf said all of the sudden, his lips curving into a pleased smile. He saw one of his scouts gesturing that their target was coming through the road they were waiting at; now this mob needed to execute the simple plan he had laid out for them and everything would be simple. If only those arrogant idiots hadn’t been so stubborn when attacking his former unit and listened to his advice, then they would have easily wiped them all out. Instead, they got themselves killed and he and his two friends needed to flee for their lives… eh. Bandits and their lack of training or obedience.
“Aye, aye sergeant,” one of the local bosses said sarcastically, ticking Greywolf off just a bit. The others chuckled at the words, but since their target was approaching didn’t waste any more time on making fun of Greywolf, who soon calmed himself down.
“Let’s see what they can do,” Greywolf murmured, withdrawing his sword and heading over to his subordinates. The plan was to use those common thugs as meat shields, see what this team of martial masters was capable of, then to either attack or retreat. Those dull-witted bosses from the area wouldn’t even recognize that much though; they thought his team would be the main attacking force just because it was waiting in the forefront. How naïve.
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“Something is wrong,” Yin said quietly, squinting his eyes and looking around in search of anything suspicious. He had been having a bad feeling for the past while, but he couldn’t find anyone waiting to ambush them even when he was looking really hard. Could it be there were some tough opponents waiting for them this time? Did they provoke this by killing a few too many bandits that last days?
“We should turn back and rush through some other path,” Ruan suggested, his voice filled with anxiety. “We killed so many of them, what if the leaders got so angry they decided it’s time to deal with us? There might not be many martial masters in the Anarchic Lands, but there is a few dozen of them,” he warned, preferring to be cautious than to face all obstacle head-on and with the recklessness of the youth. Those two wanted to test themselves, but what if the enemy proved to be too strong for them to handle?
“Unless elite martial masters appear we don’t have much to worry about,” Laien said confidently, though kept paying attention to his surroundings, ready to act at any time. He licked his lips, his heart thumping in his chest. He was feeling just like Yin; nervous, but at the same time excited.
Ruan groaned secretly, his patience reaching its limits. The next time they camped he would have a serious talk with those two and urge them to stop fooling around and checking their fortune. Enough was enough; if they didn’t agree to stop taking so many foolish risks he would abandon them and go hide somewhere in the continent where the Cail family wouldn’t be able to reach him. He had enough powerful friends and acquaintances for the Guild of Shadows to be unwilling to target him by any ‘reasonable’ price in gold, so he doubted anyone would go out of their way to make a request for his head.
Yin’s eyes went wide when hundreds of swishing sounds were caught by his ears, coming from both sides of the forest. There was little to no time between the moment when he noticed the attack and the shower of arrows and crossbow bolts which came from everywhere. He didn’t panic at all though and swiftly jumped from his saddle, flying above the barrage and already heading towards one of the assaulting groups.
As for Laien, he snorted in contempt. Firing shots from hundreds of meters away was a way to prevent them from noticing the ambush, but the projectiles wouldn’t carry much strength after passing such a long distance. Alarmed by Yin, he had acted faster than he usually would and created a small platform of water to help himself and jump high up into the air, following the direction Yin chose. The two of them knew each other’s abilities well and shared a spiritual bond; in face of large numbers, they would naturally prefer to work together as that would make them considerably stronger than if they were to work separately.
The remaining seven didn’t have as much luck in reacting so fast, and most of the arrows and bolts had been directed towards them too. They kept their cool though and simply guarded their eyes with their forearms, the projectiles tattering and cutting their cloaks and clothes, but not doing much otherwise. Merely a few of the most powerful arrows managed to give them a cut or two, but with how strong their bodies were even if the arrows had been poisoned they wouldn’t be able to do much ill to them.
The War Horses... well. They were magical beasts; those arrows and bolts startled them a little, but their skin was so tough the projectiles failed to harm them in the slightest. The only horse which moved about, very displeased by the few bruises he got was the special breed Ruan was using. His courier horse was more suited for the job, but it wasn’t as durable as the War Horses the other six were riding.
“Attack! Separate them and kill them!” Greywolf yelled the orders out calmly, but deep inside was thoroughly shocked. He expected the guards to be tough to deal with, but what was up with those two crazy kids? Not only had they dodged the barrage of arrows, they rushed into the forest without hesitation! They were coming into the opposite half of the battlefield though, so he wouldn’t have much time to think about them for now. First, he needed to make sure those guards were dealt with!
Ruan cursed hideously, seeing the hundreds of bandits pour out of their hiding spots and charging at them from everywhere. He quickly glanced at Laien and Yin and saw that the boys had already begun killing the attackers to the left. “No way around it, we have to kill them first. The lecture comes later,” he thought angrily and jumped off his horse, taking his broadsword out.
“Keep together and slaughter them!” he shouted over the clamor and swept horizontally with his large weapon, turning four bandits who attacked him from the front into a mincemeat.
“The killer gets to keep the spoils!” Liza shouted, both amused and excited. She could tell there were no martial masters nearby, only cannon fodder and thus, she wasn’t too worried about the outcome of this battle. One thousand men in the mortal realm? So what? It would be hard for them to kill one martial master of the first rank, not to speak of their group!
“Arh!”
“No!
“S-save me!”
“Monsters! Run!”
“Flee!”
Meanwhile, as the skirmish on the road was only beginning, the hundreds of bandits from deeper into the forest to the left began crying out miserably. They were being killed in dozens by flying shards of ice, whenever they tried to approach a burst of water would tear their bodies apart. At the same time, lightning would keep flashing everyone, sending heads flying and cutting people apart into pieces along with the passage of a blurry dual-wielding youth.
There was only one word suitable to describe what was going on. Massacre. A total and utter massacre.