After a few days of traveling through the grasslands, a small village appeared in the distance around the road we traveled.
“Huh,” I commented to Marshan. “I thought Roko would be… a lot bigger.”
Marshan laughed. “It is. That’s just a small settlement.”
I didn’t remember seeing any villages between Mirut and Roko on the map I had purchased, and told him as much.
“Small villages… come and go. It can be hard living outside of the major cities and towns. Despite that, every now and then a group of people get it in their head to try and establish a new place to live. Sometimes, rarely, it works out. Personally, I would love it if this village succeeded and grew, as it would make the journey to and from Mirut a lot more tolerable. Roko is still dozens of days away. The road is long. I’d kill for a quality inn right about now. This village is new, and nice enough, but without strong walls I can’t see it lasting.”
I nodded at that. While I hadn’t seen any terrifying beasts, I knew they existed, and I gathered a beast attack was an eventual inevitability.
I had misunderstood. As we started to close the distance to town, we were attacked. It wasn’t beasts that were the problem.
“Bandits!” one of the guards shouted, and immediately the wagons started to circle in, protecting the cargo and the non-combatant merchants. The guards fanned out to form a perimeter.
The group of bandits attacked without mercy. Unlike the ratman raid and our encounter with other passing beasts, this was a group of men and women who set out specifically to do us harm. They wanted what was ours, and would kill us all if it meant they could have it.
I moved to the center with Marshan, who had a fierce expression on his face, and the other merchants and tamers who mostly just looked afraid.
“That’s quite a large group,” Marshan murmured.
I had intended on staying put to maintain my cover. I was supposed to be a regular–well, maybe not regular, but at least approachably peculiar–ten year old boy and a merchant’s apprentice. As I watched on in horror, I saw the first guard fall. Shortly after, I saw a second, one of the young adults I had become friends with.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I dropped my cloak and mounted up on Buda. “Treepo, guard Marshan,” I said, and before the man could object, Buda charged into action.
Buda full on tackled the first bandit, and I whipped out my baselard to parry a blow from another. Metal clanged against rusted metal, but my strong steel blade bit into the cheaper rusty iron the bandit was wielding.
“Keep charging and take out who you can from behind!” I shouted at Buda as I leapt off his back, my acrobatics skill allowing me to gracefully land without dropping my guard.
The bandit swiped at me again, his poorly maintained sword ruining itself further against mine. I parried and countered, slashing across the bandit’s arm. He sneered, teeth broken and yellowed, but didn’t drop his sword. He lunged again, and my footwork was automatic.
Years of practice, sparring and training. Countless battles against beasts in the jungle. More life-or-death situations than any ten year old should ever have. I didn’t stop and think.
I knocked the blade aside and buried mine in the man’s stomach.
Another came at me from behind and I spun in time to catch the attack. I saw one of the guards approaching the bandit from behind, so I jeered and taunted, and he failed to see the attack from behind coming. The guard’s blade ran the second bandit through.
I turned, my eyes scanning the battle, and I saw a bandit slashing wildly at Buda. I ran towards him full-tilt, sliding across the dirt road, dragging my blade across the back of the man’s knees. He cried out and dropped to the ground and Buda reared back, stomping down hard and trampling the man to death.
The battle became a blur as the details faded away, replaced with the overall flow of battle. I saved another guard friend, and watched one of the older men fall. I cut down a bandit, only realizing afterwards that it was a young woman. Her eyes would haunt me later, but for the moment I kept up the fight.
And then, with no real fanfare, it was over.
I glanced around at my surroundings, not even particularly breathing that hard. The bandits were poorly trained, and only had the numbers, desperation, and element of surprise going for them.
Looking down at the pitted and rusted sword at my foot, my eyes traced up and over the pitifully maintained weapon to the body. I reached down to the bandit at my feet, moving automatically to touch the body to drop it in my inventory–
–then ripped my hand back, recoiling. This wasn’t a beast to collect and dismantle into loot and meat. It was a human being. My breath caught in my throat.
I noticed a few of the young guards eyeing me, and glanced down. My armor was splashed with blood, my strength skill-boosted muscles bulging against it. I realized that I had probably killed more bandits than any of the young adult guards.
Several of the older guards clapped me on the back as they passed me by, murmuring thanks. They were collecting the bodies, stripping the usable armor and weapons in what appeared to be a practiced post-battle tradition. The bodies were then dragged from the road and left in the grass.
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I finally understood my parents’ concerns better, and why Marshan had said that small start-up villages didn’t survive without walls. It wasn’t beasts of ridiculous strength that people needed protection from. It was other people.
Marshan walked over to me, looked me up and down and clucked his tongue. “Well. Aren’t you just full of surprises?”
* * *
I sat next to Bilgus on the wagon for the rest of the ride into the village, slightly numb at the whole affair. Bilgus was somewhere between wary of me and thankful I had been there. The whole group was, although some were more thankful than others. According to Marshan, I had saved a number of lives. A bandit raid of that size could have killed more than half the guards, putting the convoy at risk until we reached Roko and could hire more on.
Marshan screamed at the leader of the small village for not warning the convoy of the bandit situation on the way west to Mirut. The convoy had been lucky enough not to encounter the bandits the first time through.
The village apologized profusely, repeatedly thanking us for taking care of the bandit problem. As food became scarce, many of the younger men and women of the village had turned to banditry, and it was escalating to the point where the village had thought about abandoning their settlement and heading for Roko.
Marshan told me in private later that the village leadership had probably hoped for the two groups to clash, to either allow the bandits to stock up for winter and appease them in the short term or to have the convoy guards wipe them out. We had inadvertently done what they needed from us, and it cost us good men.
I was slowly shaking off my stupor, coming to terms with the situation. Humans and beasts weren’t that different, in the end. They needed food to live and when deprived, it came to violence. It was only a wealthy civilization which could keep our basest actions at bay, and even then, many disenfranchised people still commit horrifying acts for other reasons. Bad people would do as bad people do, and in some cases, all one could do in response was put them down.
The thing that was bothering me the most was actually something else. I pulled up my profile menu, staring at the numbers that told a story of who I was in this world, and was concerning me deeply with what it now said. I had gained thousands of experience points from the bandits. Entire years worth of hardcore training against appropriate strength beasts couldn’t come close to comparison. Recollecting after the fact, I had been appraising the bandits while operating on autopilot, and they hadn’t even been that strong. They were low to mid teens in level, mostly, but they pushed me all the way up to level 19. Buda even maxed out his level from the battle.
I finally understood how men like my father and Master Vorel could be at such a high level.
They must have killed people. It was likely they killed quite a number of them.
Mirut did not have a bandit problem. If it had, I would have heard about it from Timur and other guards. The jungle made living outside of Mirut an impossibility for anyone who would leave town and resort to banditry. My father had all but confessed to not being a powerful slayer of beasts when asked on the sly about some of the beasts that I had fought, like the draconewt, while sneaking out to train in the jungle. Without healing magic, it wasn’t even a truly viable avenue for gaining that much experience.
What kind of life had he led, then, before joining the town guard?
* * *
I awoke from another nightmare, sweat pouring off my body as I sat up with a start, reaching for my sword to defend myself and strike down my phantom attacker, before I realized I was safe. The danger had passed. No bandits, no rusty swords swinging at my head. They were all dead.
I had helped kill them all.
Shaking, I slipped out of camp, walking through the cooler night air to clear my head. It was too full of my recent horrors.
Think about something else, I told myself. Work another problem to focus.
I started mulling over an idea I had been forming about trying to use fire magic inversely, using it somehow to extract heat from a source instead of adding heat to a source, in effect creating a refrigerator. If I could solve the problem, I could probably apply the same method directly to water to make ice, which was a major goal of mine with elemental magic.
Not that I was any closer to figuring that out in practice. Elemental magic just didn’t seem to work like that. Stubbornly, it only performed in exactly the ways I had found written in my mother’s grimoire. I had made some minor variations, and my own use of it was certainly quite clever, but I couldn’t really do anything novel with the elements.
Of course, I still wasn’t sure what “elements” even meant. I certainly couldn’t control all the periodic elements with 4-point magic. My gold would sit inert no matter what I tried to cast on it. When I was younger, I had theorized that I was actually controlling oxides, which–
–the image of a rusted sword swinging down at me filled my head again–
–I hadn’t ever found a way to test.
Huh. I could never really prove or disprove that theory in the past. I had tried to control pure carbon and pure hydrogen to no obvious success, and I couldn’t tell whether or not I was manipulating pure silicon or silicon oxides. Air had oxygen and gaseous oxides in it, making it even more difficult for me to test.
My pace slowed, then stopped, images of rusted swords and magic circles racing around my brain. I had explored the idea, but only from one angle. Had I internalized the notions I had been taught about 4-point magic only controlling the “four elements” and only ever tested against those, without testing against further samples of oxides? That was no way to conduct an experiment.
I pulled out one of my underwater sea treasures from my diving days with Vlad: a piece of heavily rusted metal, original purpose unknown. Then I pulled out my biggest 4-point magic circle. If I was going to try this, I would want to be able to channel my magic as strongly as possible.
Nervous, I sat, placing the lump of metal–the lump of ferric oxides–in front of me. I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach this test, but I decided to start the same way as I would if I were working with silicon oxide.
I began to push my MP through the circle and into the object focusing on the point of the magic circle that I used for earth magic, but wasn’t getting a response. No, this is wrong. I had to abandon the false idea of points entirely, raising my understanding higher, using the entire magic circle. I needed to use raw elemental magic… no, raw oxidation magic.
With a gasp at the feeling of MP drawing from my body, I watched the rust peel away from the object, circling and twirling in the air around me. The remaining mass further collapsed into a pile of rust, the rest of the iron oxidizing as I poured in my magic and surrounded myself in a thick cloud of dark red particles, as I finally unraveled one of my oldest magical mysteries since coming to this world.