“Here are a few maps of where there may still be people.” The village leader brought out a pile of unsorted maps.

He looked apologetic for the mess he handed me, but I didn’t mind so much. Each map was sketched by a different person. He had used various scouts, and their reports, and none of that information had been sorted. It was a complete mess, and even the village head himself struggled to make sense of it. For me, it was no problem at all. I glanced at each map, letting it update in my Map skill. In short order, I was able to update my skill with all the information and see it as a whole.

Despite what we were led to believe the last time we were here, there were actually quite a few pockets of people still living out there. They had either been harassed or overlooked by the Bandits. Some of them gave the Bandits bribes and women to stay afloat. Even this village contained several women who had been traumatized by being made the Bandit’s entertainment for a few nights. If I didn’t have a worse enemy I was going after, I wouldn’t be willing to work with these people at all.

At least, when I was done, they would all be slaves, and they would literally pay for their crimes by working under me for the rest of their lives. I would see to it. Unlike other Slavers, I could instantly collect any slave who tried to run from me. All it took was bringing up my Map and selecting them and creating a Portal. In fact, since my Map filled out based on where my slaves went, they’d be doing me a favor by traveling to far-off places and allowing me to expand my portal network.

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Maybe I should have been making slaves of people and sending them off long before this. I might have had no trouble getting around. Well, maybe not slaves. There were other means of marking people on my Map with skills. As long as I got a job with an appropriate skill, then I could mark any number of people. A better option might be to tame monsters. If I tamed a low-level monster, like goblins, and then just ordered them to walk off in every direction, I could create a map that reached every corner of this continent in a year or so.

Well, that wasn’t something I could worry about right now. Instead, I had to focus on the areas indicated. I needed to bring those people into the relative; safety of Deeksville. The more people I gathered here, the more interest the Bandits will have and the more likely they are to notice us. At that point, I’d need to come up with a way of getting control of them. That might involve using Salicia and her former status as the Bandit King. I wasn’t certain yet. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew that we had to get this done and we had to do it quickly. A plan would come to me eventually, it always did.

“Going to get the other survivors. That’s what we tried to do last time. Then we ended up dying.” Shao warned.

“This is different. We won’t be challenging the Bandits directly. There is no point in killing them, anyway.”

We were going to be safe this time. I didn’t want another accident like last time.