บท 113: Sheer Chutzpah
-.
-.
Now, the obvious question arises – {"Wait, doesn't Monika have some sort of threat radar that's kilometers in radius? Why didn't she detect this ahead of time?"}
The answer is: Of course she did.
However, unless these people attack, it's not like we can fault them for anything. Ambushing the ambushers would make us the murderers. They could simply be some random group of people walking at night. Heavily armed random people.
… Look, it's these small technical details that separated a real Adventurer from any random murderhobo, all right?
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The arrows perforated the wooden hull of the carriages, but went no further. Because the nice thing about the [Boom Tube] is that, though we lacked a convenient [Inventory] system, it could be linked to a predesignated warehouse. At night, when the horses did not need to bear the weight, steel plates could be brought in to reinforce the walls of the carriage to sleep in safety.
Technically, [Boom Tube] meant that there was no reason to sleep in the carriages at all, we could all be much comfortably sleeping inside an Inn during the night – but that felt immensely unfair to the guards who would have to sleep outside and stand watch over empty wooden boxes. Removing even that slight inconvenience of travel felt like the sort of pampered self-importance of useless nobles.
I reached up and plucked an arrow caught by the [Air Shield] out of the air. I got up and shouted "Aim to subdue but kill if you have to!"
Garm, the wolf beastkin leader, made a set of whistling sounds and gestured left. The Mismede guards leaped to action into the forest.
And Lyon yelled "Men! Take them down! For the Crown and for Belfaast!" The much more well-armored Belfast guards went to the right.
We were surrounded, but three sides were forest and the fourth was across the road. The arrows came from there. Another volley of arrows came out from the dark, but given that most of the guards had already gone east and west into the woods that just left me and Lyon standing near the campfire. Another [Air Wall] stopped the arrows cold.
I could sense the archers had decided it was time to cut their losses and skedaddle. Being across the road meant that they'd have a head start trying to get away. Light cavalry were useless trying to chase people into the woods unless on foot.
I opened my palm out to display the tactical map again.
Four horse-riding guards each from Belfast and Mismede, plus carriage driver and archer guard per carriage … that's twelve versus twenty. Since the four enemy archers had decided to leave rather than help, that was twelve versus sixteen – close enough odds.
Boom.
The carriages were practically sealed shut with metal, the only way out was via [Boom Tube].
Elze came out running, followed by Linze who cast a long-burning ball of fire acting like a flare to expose the attackers. The Belfast guards yelled "Uooooahh!" brandishing their swords to meet the attackers armed mainly with axes and boiled leather for armor.
To the left, the Mismede guards didn't need illumination as much. Yae joined them, skillfully running at full speed through the forests. Short but intense battles lit only by moonlight and flashing steel commenced.
"Raaargh!" the bandits surged forth, shouting and roaring.
"Come Water! Swift stabbing shards, [Ice Daggers!]"
The Mismede soldiers lowered their heads and raised their arms, blocking most of the incoming ice shards on their bracers and helmets. So that was the reason why everyone went around with half-plate and/or breastplate armor, despite how expensive it may be to equip everyone. There were few who wore middle-of-the-road protection like jack of plates or chain/ring mail, because the prevalence of magic affinities meant one was better off with being able to shrug off hits or avoid them entirely.
Behind the group of attackers was a well-dressed person – an adventurer who knew magic. "Ice, entangle! Freezing Curse – [Icebind!]"
One of the Belfast guards dropped from his legs being frozen over. One of the attackers, a bearded heavily muscled man in furs, chuckled and lunged to chop him down with his axe.
Whapow!
Elze punched the axe. The edge chipped under her fist, and the axe head recoiled to strike its owner right in the face with the blunt end. The bandit toppled backwards, his nose bleeding, and struck the ground completely knocked out.
"Wha-?!" the enemy adventurer boggled as Elze pushed forward, backhanding another bandit. The rest of the Belfast guards struck down the rest. "Stay back!"
Elze punched a tree. Then she picked up the shattered tree trunk and threw it at him.
"I surrender!" the adventurer screamed out as he ducked.
We just finished bashing down sixteen enemies. The bandits had eight more people in reserve, and charged down the middle towards the parked carriages.
"Dark come forth! I desire the proud beast wrapped in silver, [Silver Wolf!]"
"Bawooo!" Yumina's summoned Silver Wolves sprang out of a magic circle, howling and snarling. Five of them, adept forest predators, swung the advantage of fighting in the forests well in our favor. Linze began blasting fire and ice magic from behind them.
Lyon Blitz rallied the rest of the Belfast troops to deal with these remaining bandits.
Yae and the Mismede guards finished dealing with the bandits and adventurers on their side, with the wolves chasing down those that didn't engage.
The archers were getting away. I smiled.
"Lyon!"
"Yes, Sir Zah?" he answered from the other side of the carriages.
"Deal with securing the area. I'm going after the stragglers."
"Understood!"
Whumpf. I sprang up with a [Jet Boost], following the fleeing archers. Through the tree cover, my HUD still showed them as red targets. The archers had decided to split off into pairs in opposite directions. That was fine.
I picked the scrambling pair to the left, and slammed through the leaves, landing with a shocking bang right in front of them them. They were thrown up into the air and slammed against the trees. No time for quips, I punched both of them with a [Stunning Fist] to the head.
The other pair of archers began to run even more frantically at the loud sound behind them. I jumped high again, and rather than crash into their midst, I sprang down to a nearby branch and slapped them both with a [Homo Stasis].
While they both were frozen in time, I approached the two retreating archers. They looked like adventurers, with good boots, no armor except strong weather-resistant clothes, and a jaunty green hat. I took out two small yellow magic stones and inserted them into the brim of their boots.
Then I stepped back out of view and cancelled the [Homo Stasis] spell.
They stumbled for a moment and looked backwards in confusion. Whatever wrong feeling they had was put aside as Silver Wolves howling in the distance spurred them to just get away no matter what.
-.
Olga Strand could only sit in the darkness and hug her sister. With the steel sheets inside the carriage, it was impregnable to everything short of perhaps being set on fire.
There was a click of the carriage door being unlatched from the outside. Olga hugged her sister tighter.
Boom. A heatless white light filled the carriage. Gloves pushed down on the ridge of the steel plates, making it sink through the portal to fall down into a distant warehouse somewhere. "It's all right," said Lyon. "The bandits have been defeated. You should be safe now."
"T-thank you. I'm sorry for causing you any trouble…" Olga whispered, a shaky smile and a blush rising on her face.
"Ah, n-no need for that. This is but… this is all part of my duty, don't mention it, really!" the young knight spoke up, whatever cool he had before shattering into a flustered mess.
The foxy lady giggled softly.
-.
"Are… are they dead?" Arma whispered in a scared tone as she watched us pile the bandits, all twenty-six of them, onto the side of the road.
"No, just knocked out," I replied. "Don't worry. We should be safe for now. Why don't you get some rest?"
Arma looked around carefully. She saw Yae and Elze dragging bandits from the woods, and me just standing there not helping. Her small eyes narrowed. "Are you a lazy clown?" she asked.
/"… What, of course he is."/
"Oh! Miss Fairy!"
/"He's right though. You and your sister are the Very Important People that should be protected here. There's not much more than can be done tonight, you should be a good girl and go back to sleep. We're just going to tie up and send away these criminals."/
"… I guess. Okayss..." the little foxgirl mumbled and kicked her toes at the ground abashedly.
Elze and Linze accompanied the Strand siblings back to the second carriage. Meanwhile Lyon, Yumina, Garm the Misemede Guard Captain, and I went into the other carriage.
Once inside, I opened up the tacmap again and showed the region around us, lighting up the insides of the carriage with a sharp blue glow.
I enunciated very carefully "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design."
/"Now hang on there, Sheev (1),/" Monika waved a palm at me. /"Before you get all too impressed by yourself, explain why letting people get away is a good thing."
"This is only possible due to your [Enscribe] Null magic. Behold, the [Spygem]!" A ghostly hologram showed the fleeing enemy archers. Using a passive version of [Air Sense], we could not only show exactly what they were doing, but what they were saying.
-.
-.
"What… what was that?!" one of the archers gasped. "That was worse than what we were told! Damn useless bandits! Now the rest of the guys… the Poison Snakes are done for!"
"Tch. We should've known that much money was too good to be true. But a job's a job."
"T-think we should still let Leader know? We could just go run away and hide by ourselves…"
"Poison Snake and Steel Fangs are one. If Leader doesn't hear from us, his bro's going to send the Steel Fangs to hunt us down and make our death slow since it's gonna look like we're traitors who sold 'em out. The only way we can get the guys back is if the Steel Fangs fight 'em next time."
"Ugh. Workin' with bandits. This is gonna get us black-listed by the Guild. Maybe we should go give ourselves up to the Guild instead, we wus only followin' orders. It's one thing to rob merchants on the side, gettin' called bandits means we're gonna get killed when we're caught."
"Right. Right… we had a good thing going being just Blue Rank adventurers. We can always join another party, right? Wait, you all right? You've got somethin' going there with your chin."
"Huh? What? I don't see- ghlurk!"
The other archer, while his buddy was distracted looking down touching his chin to check if he was wound or something, swiftly drew his knife and stabbed the other through the side of the neck.
As his fellow adventurer collapsed, gurgling and bleeding to death, he quipped "Yeah, you got something going on there, like some sort of disloyal mouthole."
The sole surviving archer ran on towards the next town.
-.
-.
"Interesting…" I hummed. So it was a good thing we used two [Spygems]. "If we send a horse rider out, the only way is to do so immediately. If we didn't know about this and spent time tying up the bandits or waiting until morning, the rider we sent would probably be ambushed and killed along the way."
"This… this is some powerful magic," said Captain Garm. His eyes flicked towards Monika's tiny fairy-like form sitting on my shoulder.
"This is why I am the stick."
The beastkin captain stared at me oddly. Lyon coughed into his fist and said "Sir Zah, what is your plan now? Do you still want to wait until he reaches his 'Leader' so we can hear more about why they are attacking or perhaps who sent them?"
"We don't have the ability to carry along with us twenty-eight prisoners. But at the same time, they're even more useful as bait." I looked up from the tacmap. "Adventurers are rarely cavalry, right?"
"Yes, horses are expensive," said Lyon. "If they're going to ambush us again, they will have do so on foot and block the road somehow. Attacking us while we were supposed to be sleeping meant that we could act as cavalry or just have the carriages run away."
"Hmm. Well the solution seems obvious. The runner we send should be capable of defending himself from being stabbed in the back."
/"So you're going?"/ said Monika.
I nodded. "That's the risk that I'm going to have to absorb."
The goal was to keep tempting bad guys to attack us, get them to escape, and lead us step by step to their ringleader. Torturing was such a slow process. Even Truth Magic spells can't give out information that stooges were never given in the first place.
-.
-.
/"Wait, Player. Your parents were rich, but they're not *that* rich. Where did you learn to ride horses?"/
"World Equestrian Games Simulator!"
/"..."/
"More seriously, there were some farms in touristy areas that allowed for some horse riding lessons at much more affordable rates than clique equestrian clubs. Dude ranches never really went out of style. In fact, the more we advance as a technological society, the more interesting it gets to just be paying people to work in their goddamn farm."
-.
-.
And much to my surprise, I reached the next town of Kaplan safely. I introduced myself to the mayor and the town guard commander and informed them about the situation. We had prisoners, but we couldn't just drive them to town because there's too many of them that if they decided to make a break and run for it in different directions enough would be able to escape.
On the other hand, the town itself didn't really have that many guards to spare and quartering the prisoners would be a hassle since their jail wasn't big enough to contain almost thirty people. I had to assure the mayor that we had no interest in whatever bounty these bandits may have, we had our own urgent business and needed to move on by the day.
It was still the middle of the night and mayor looked irked to be woken up for mere procedural issue. The earliest they could send the town guard out would be in the morning. For all he knew, this was a ruse to weaken village security for actual bandits to pull shenanigans.
Then someone slammed open the door to the guardhouse to offer an unconventional solution.
The leader of the Steel Fangs was a tall, burly adventurer with a neck beard that extended up past his jawline to his ears. It severely flattened the front of his face, but didn't disguise well how he was starting to get a little fat from the years. He beamed happily as he introduced himself to the mayor.
"So, I heard you fine fellows need some prisoner transport security. You're going to send the town guards out for this? Why don't you allow us to help out? No charge! I'm Sacha, leader of the Steel Fangs, and if you need bandit clearing missions after this, just keep us in mind."
Even I was struck a little numb by the sheer chutzpah.
-.
-.
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVl_sjUrNQE
สถานะพลังงานรายสัปดาห์
-- การจัดอันดับด้วยพลัง 
-- หินพลัง