Carver signals for the three men he stationed in the bushes to begin the plan. The plan is simple, which is a good thing, because simple plans tend to work. Cuts and Shotty limp out of the woods, with Lucky supporting them both, and conveniently stand in front of the on-coming wagon. Carver licks his lips as the wagon stops, and the driver(a human woman) holds a whispered conversation with a crossbowman(an elven male) in the seat with her, before they both turn to start speaking to the ‘injured’ men.
“Now.” Carver commands bluntly, motioning his hand to Case and Skivs beside him, and they fire their crossbows immediately. The first goes wide, but Skivs’s shot punches right through the crossbowman’s temple, killing him instantly. Carver leaps out from behind the trees and dashes forward, as Cuts and Shotty draw their weapons, which they were hiding behind Lucky, and Lucky himself starts ‘negotiating’.
“No hard feelings, love, but we’ll be taking that wagon with us. Oh, and also you. You know how it is. Step down nice and slow, I’ll take care of y-” Lucky tries to start walking towards the woman, who is frozen in fear, still holding the reins.
“Shut up, Lucky! You forgot the important part of shit like this, as always!” Carver says as he approaches, slowing his pace as he reaches the horses. He jumps up onto the horse formerly occupied by the woman’s elf companion, and forces the reins out of her grip from across the gap between them, threatening her with his sword as he does so. “What’s your name, missy?”
Carver only gets a blank look of dread and fear in response, and takes that as a good sign that she’ll off herself quickly after what the boys will do to her, and he won’t have to listen to her scream for as many nights. He sheathes his sword, then shoves her off the horse, and dismounts himself.
“Lucky, take the wagon to the rest of the lads, Cuts, Shotty, Skivs, you go with him. Skivs, make sure no one touches the girl before Mace gets his turn, he scoped this haul out, after all.” Carver issues his orders to those men, absolutely confident that they will be followed. He turns to Case, who is struggling to carry both his light crossbow and the case that he's nicknamed for. Carver takes the crossbow out of his hands, then holds his hand out for the case of spare bolts. “Case, you and I are gonna haul the body out into the woods and prepare the next ambush site, got it?”
“Yes sir!” Case answers quickly enough, and Carver thinks he sounds a little sad that he won’t get a piece of the camp’s new toy until much, much later, but that’s irrelevant to Carver. He takes the boltcase from Case’s hands and immediately starts reloading it.
“Lucky, once the boys have the cart under control, ride the two horses back here to pick us up, got it?” Carver shouts it at Lucky as he spots the others tying the girl up and throwing her back with the rest of the wagon’s contents. He nods in satisfaction and Skivs is the one to actually guard her, and the rest start taking inventory. Lucky nods back, and starts the horses off towards the clearing they made for unloading wagons like this.
That ranger skill of his is almost too convenient for shit like this. Carver thinks, as he watches Lucky manage to control two horses at the same time while also managing to hold a full conversation and eat jerky and not even face forward on his horse. Control Tamed Creature, was it? Seems a hell of a lot more useful than the archery or sword tricks other rangers use, I’ll say.
It takes Case and Carver a decent chunk of time to find the next best ambush site, a couple hundred feet down the road from the previous one. It’s worth it, though, since cleaning the blood off of the previous site isn’t feasible, it's better to move the ambushes to a different location entirely, as well as to scope them out a day or so in advance. Carver feels like he’s had to explain why to most of his crew so many times now that it’s become a running gag around camp, but none of them will argue with the results. ‘If we don’t hide in the same spots, their guards will stay home instead of coming after us’ is a sentence he has to repeat every day, and Carver is pretty sure Mace and Bruce only make him say it to fuck with him. Sunner and Barb really are dumb enough to need reminding, though.
By the time Lucky swings back around with the horses to pick them up, Case and Carver have found enough really good hiding spots for eight men, more than enough to raid anything short of a proper caravan, so they don’t force Lucky to help, and simply take the ride back to camp. The long walk up the hill sucks, sure, but with the amount of work Jeet and Seka put into cutting a decent trail, they can take horses with them now, which is nice. Bruce and Pidger have also started building some posts to attach the leads to, so they can keep the horses too, as long as they steal enough horse feed, of course.
In the two weeks since setting up here, they haven’t actually done any raids on the village, only ambushing carts and wagons for supplies so far. Carver has consistently insisted on a moderate amount of discretion, since going for a full-scale raid right after Sunner’s fuckup will be like walking into a hornet’s nest after poking it. Carver has started cooking up a plan in his head for how to hit some of the farms on the outskirts without getting bogged down in a chase afterwards, though, and if Seka ever gets any good intel on when the best time to strike is, they’d probably all go.
As it turns out, Sunner’s fuckup hadn’t been as colossal as Carver initially thought, since Jeet and Seka don’t have wanted posters up, and they’ve been able to keep their noses clean enough around the village to actually have access to most things. Their disguise is that they’re adventurers, out here because of the rumors of ‘goblins and bandits ‘round here’, which technically means they’re here to hunt themselves, even if the village doesn’t know that. It’s been phenomenal having two people inside the village for knowledge on both when good targets are going to show up and when bigger fish are nearby and they should lay low.
There are some interesting rumors, too. Apparently, at least from what Carver has been able to learn via Jeet, there’s an old abandoned dungeon around here somewhere, and a couple months ago some adventurers went in, but didn’t come back. The villagers seem to think some cult is hidden there, since a string of kidnappings had been happening right before they’d sent the adventurers, but they’ve apparently not had any kidnappings since. Carver’s been considering the merits and demerits of having Jeet and Seka accept the ‘quest’ to clear the dungeon, and then having all the boys do it to claim the reward. Two hundred gp for one small cult? Sounds like easy money to Carver, but taking on a cult to a dark god could be risky, so he’d like to have Jeet and Seka convince some other, cockier adventurers that might come through to ‘soften up’ the potential cult. And if it turns out to just have been a dusty old dungeon, the boys will kill the adventurers and take the credit.
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That's the summation of his planning for the time being. A potential raid on some farms, a potential plot to steal some money from a quest, and the next trade wagon headed for the nearest city, which Seka’s scoped out, leaving in two days. Carver tosses an apple into the air, and catches it again, an action he’s been repeating to drown out the sounds of manly grunting and more womanly crying and screaming from the tent occupied by Bruce, Mace, Lucky, and the camp’s newest ‘recruit’. This deep in their safe little cavern, any sounds made by anyone can be heard by anyone else in the cavern because of the reverberations. This is good, because it means Carver doesn’t have to shout to give orders, and whoever is posted as sentry can still shout down to the rest of them, despite this distance.
It is, however, extremely annoying when it's not your turn with any of the gang’s playthings.
--
Max starts cracking his knuckles slowly, letting the energy from Godsblood and Titan’s Hand build up in them until it finally reaches an uncomfortable level before finally finishing the crack and moving to the other hand. He can hear his party reading the letter out loud behind him, but after he heard the words ‘By request of His Majesty, King Solomon Riverta, the presence of the adventuring party Edora’s Hand is requested at the royal capital for…’ he’d stopped actually listening. He’d even turned away so that the girls wouldn’t have to see just how angry and twisted his face was at the news.
“The last line that matters to us is ‘failure to send adequate response to this request within thirty days of its estimated time of arrival, the third day of the fall season’ that’s today, by the way, ‘will be considered a refusal of the request, and the crown will be forced to take further measures to ensure your cooperation in these…’ blah blah blah.” Vaye finishes reading, and Max hears her sit down. He tries even harder to stare a hole into the wooden door of their room, but fails in spontaneously developing laser eyes. What is a ‘laser’?
“So what, we’re ‘requested’ at the capital for this prophecy business now? Like hell we’re going!” Kayle nearly shouts her opinion, and Max would agree if he didn’t know what Setris’s exact response was going to be.
“If we refuse, then what? He sends a royal decree? Maybe some soldiers? Even if we fought them and ran we’d still be fucked.” His oldest companion voices her concerns over acting rashly, as always. Max knows that the next girl to voice an objection is always-
“Fuck em’! If they don’t want to respect Max’s desire to stay the fuck out of their shitty games, then they can die when he doesn’t want to help them!” Marra’s opinion revolves, as always, around what Max would say, which is entirely fair, considering she’s the only one who literally knows what he’s thinking whenever they’re in a fight.
“We could always go, put on appearances, and just… leave, if we don’t like where it’s going. Could make up something about having ‘prior obligations’ or ‘children to take care of’. Anyone would believe either of those things, it's us.” June’s suggestion surprises Max a little, but supposes that hers is the one most likely to be accepted by the others, which is what June’s opinions usually are, rather than what she actually thinks. Max pokes the Mindlink with Marra, asking her to have the letter read again.
“Max… reading it again won’t change it…” Marra says in a rather pitying tone, which gets her a more frustrated Mindlink poke back. “Fine, fine… Kayle, read it again…”
--
Marietta waves the butler out of the room, annoyed at how long it took her to convince the servant that she doesn’t need her food brought over to her, leaving on the tray, just inside the room is perfectly fine. Having to explain away the light moan that had escaped her lips at the end of what would’ve been her last sentence had only annoyed her more.
She pulls off the blanket she’d been covering herself with, and undoes the [Minor Image] she’d used to hide how much larger the blanket actually was. She stares down at James, who has his troublemaking tongue hanging out of his mouth as if to mock her.
“Did you have to do that right as he was about to walk away?” Marietta asks, a little bit of exasperation in her otherwise playful tone. She glares at him with genuine frustration, and he stares back for a moment, before sighing, and responding.
“Sorry… It was funny, though, you should’ve seen the look on you-” Marietta forces the moron’s head back down with her right leg and left hand, making sure to be painfully forceful about it as she does.
“I didn’t say you could stop, but do not do that again.” Marietta commands, and she leans back against her mountain of pillows again. She spots the prying eyes of her maid poking through the slightly opened door of the large closet, and she gently waves at her.
Naturally, having a maid that enjoys watching is one of the many ways to ensure that said maid will stay quiet about this sort of thing when necessary, and Marietta is very thankful for that. Getting to have moments like this is one of the few ways she can truly relax, despite the chaos and frustration caused by her life as both a princess and a Bearer of Prophecy. That position is also the only reason she gets to experience this position with James, as without the clout from her title, she’d never have been able to stop the court from using her beloved’s life as a disposable bomb.
As all good things, though, it will pass too quickly, as the two need to split up for their differing roles in their father’s plans tomorrow. Marietta taps James’s head, and he pulls his body up to simply lay beside her at rest. She presses her body into his, and grabs one of his hands with both of hers.
“I’m sorry we don’t have more time… but we really do need to sleep if we don’t want to be zombies tomorrow.” Marietta says gently before planting a kiss on James’s wet lips.
“That’s… just not how necromancy works, like, at all…” James says as his free hand finds its way up her chest. He wraps his arm around her back, and pulls her closer. “But I get it… Do you know where dad is sending you, yet?”
“Out to uncle, he wants me to give speeches and rally the people so they don’t start to doubt what uncle will be doing.” Marietta lets her other hand find its way… elsewhere, and she gives James her best begging look. “You?”
“Don’t look at me like that after… Fine… I’m going out to the border again, with a larger retinue this time. Some of our brothers have been getting a little jumpy at the chance to be the heir if I have to… Sorry…” James’s voice trails off in a sad tone, but he recovers quickly. Or you’d like me to think you recovered quickly, at least. “Anyways, I’m off to make sure that no one starts a premature war just to try and steal a chance at glory.”
“What do you think will happen first, my prophecy, or war with Etrest?” Marietta asks, doing her best to keep the ‘mood’ alive despite the topic of conversation.
“Honestly… I think the prophecy. With how many adventurers dad’s sending looking for the cause of it, we’ll probably run into that first, before anyone in power on either side gets jumpy enough to go all out.” James sighs after giving his opinion, and moves in for another kiss, which she returns earnestly. “One more before bed, then we talk more in the morning?”
“Yeah.”