บท 88: Operation Clean Sweep Begins

"They're coming." A croaking voice said.

"Haha. This is a fat cow, boss." One of the bandits by the side laughed.

"Focus." The man who spoke first, and was also the leader of his bandit gang, chastised the latter.

"I don't know how they went through the first blockade but we have to prevent them from doing the same thing here."

"Haha. Don't worry. Gideon's squad is not only weaker than us but also smaller. It's only natural for some small folks to sneak past their eyes with bit of effort. However, this is where we have an advantage. Not only are we bigger in count, but we also have more stronger teammates." The man smirked.

The middle-aged man was the leader of the bandit group that was currently camping out for a caravan.

The bandit group was one of the nine smaller ones but had more than fifteen members. There were about seventeen of them, including the gang leader who was a peak rank second-stage Guardian mage. Apart from him, there was one other second-stage bandit at the early rank, who also happened to be the person he had been talking to. Five others were at the the first-stage of the Guardian realm; two at the peak rank, one at the mid rank while the other two were at the early rank. The rest were peak Human stage mages.

This bandit group was one of the weaker ones out of the fifteen so they hunted along the periphery of the road. Because they were lacking in considerable strength, they only targeted the weaker merchant caravans that came into the road or harassed those along the outskirts. Even so, suitable targets were quite few, after all, those who ventured into this risky road tend to hire powerful mercenaries for protection.

Occasionally, the bandit group would depart from their base and commence raids on the more rural villages far from the cities and towns, or even assault travellers in the wild. However, they always kept their activities limited and had a long cool-down period before their next raid, to prevent catching the attention of the provincial guards. Even when they did so, the group would leave in a hurry, returning to the 'safe zone' known as Panama road.

Right now, they had been informed by their scout of an incoming merchant caravan with limited forces that was suitable for them to target hence the reason why they were now hiding in the woods and staring at the road.

"There they are." The vice leader of the gang, the early rank second-stage Guardian mage said.

Down below, a caravan consisting of fifteen men and two carriages was making their way through the road. Of the fifteen men, two were controlling the horses drawing the carriages while the remaining thirteen split themselves into teams to protect the carriages. Four men hitched a ride on the carriages; two to each carriage. The men didn't look like guards or carriage drivers but instead merchants. The bandit leader suspected that they were the owners of the goods inside of the carriages and the merchants who had decided to carry out this journey.

As for the remaining nine men, they looked like the guards charged with protection of the carriages.

Two guards rode horses by the left side and another two by the right side. Behind the caravan, two men rode horses and protected the back while in front were three guards with one who looked to be the leader of the guards.

"Such a small force. They are either cocky or stupid." The vice leader smirked.

From this distance, they could feel the aura of the guards. None of them gave off a threatening sensation and the mana that oozed out from their body indicated that most of them were at the Human stage with only four at the Guardian level, one of whom was at the second-stage but of the early rank. That mage was the guard who stood in front with the other two guards.

"Hehe. Definitely stupid but also greedy or maybe even poor. The other trade routes charge a lot more to use but the ones such as this doesn't. I'm guessing that they either didn't want to pay for the usage of the safer routes because they were poor or just stingy. Doesn't matter though, their wealth will soon be ours." The bandit group leader licked the blade of his weapon.

"On my signal, we attack…Now!"

Five of the bandits hurled spells at the caravan while the others, except the vice and leader, charged at the guards while the vice leader went for the second-stage Guardian guard. The leader of the bandits got closer to the caravan but didn't join the battle. Instead, he watched his men charge forward and remained behind, preparing to lend a helping hand when necessary.

"Die. Haha!"

The bandits grinned maliciously as they swung their weapons at the guards.

Right at that moment, the guards suddenly smiled strangely. The charging bandits didn't notice this but the leader who was standing behind did. He didn't know why but he suddenly got chills on his back and felt like something was wrong.

Before the bandit leader could even consider what the problem could be, the guards protecting the caravan suddenly lunged towards the approaching bandits. The bandits were a bit shocked but their momentum didn't falter as they pushed forward with their attack.

Right then, the energies of the guards exploded as their auras were completely released. Within the blink of an eye, they were all Guardian mages of the first-stage with some still showing signs of not stopping. Just as the two groups were about to clash, the aura release of the guards was completed. It turned out that four of them were at the peak of the first-stage of the Guardian realm while the remaining five were at the second-stage.

The bandit group were thoroughly outmatched.

Bang.

The first clash began and strangely, despite not using any weapons, the guard team was able to clash barehanded with the bandits' attack. In fact, they did more than that.

"Ah!"

"Ha!"

"Help me!"

In just the first clash, five bandits were thrown away by the guards and the remaining were taken down in the very next second. Even the vice leader of the bandits had only managed to take three hits from his opponent before he was knocked out unconscious with a few broken ribs and a broken arm.

The bandit leader stood in his hiding place, eyes wide open as he couldn't comprehend what had just happened. Only one, or rather two words clicked in his head at that moment.

'A trap.'

He prepared to run but just as he was about to turn, he caught a glimpse of one of the carriage drivers staring at him. Just that one glance had frozen him to a complete stop.

It wasn't that the bandit leader didn't want to escape, but his instincts alerted him that if he took one step, he would die in that instant. On a regular day, the man would have thought he was overreacting, but after seeing the strength of the guards as well as the easy and efficiency they used in dispatching his group, the bandit leader didn't plan on taking any careless risk.

"What do I do with him, sir?" Savio asked the man who was sitting right beside him.

"Same as before. Capture him and force out any intel from him as quickly as possible. We can't keep this up for long because the other groups would soon become suspicious. We have to change our strategy but before that, we need to confirm our info on the structure of the groups. You know what that means right?" Luther, who sat beside Savio while disguised as a merchant, spoke as he remained staring at the bandit leader.

"Yes, sir." Savio replied before disappearing from the spot.

The bandit leader suddenly felt a deadly sensation closing in on him and, without bothering about the risk, he tried to escape. However, there was no way he could outrun the third-stage Guardian mage Savio.

Although following Asher's instructions, Savio had his mana level suppressed, the physical boost from being a true-blue mid rank third-stage Guardian mage still existed as well as his battle experience and skills. This was why even though his magic level was suppressed to the mid rank of the second-stage, he was still confident of defeating a peak rank second-stage Guardian bandit.

'That makes this the second squad.' Luther thought.

The group had departed two days ago but on the way, Asher had divided them into two groups of fifteen men, lead by Aaron and Luther respectively. With the information in hand, the groups were to hunt down bandits along the way from two different paths.

Although the Panama road was the merchant route towards the Kingdom of Terra, there were a few branch paths that connected to it within Red Maple province. Aaron had taken one such path with his team while Luther had led his group through the main path.

Luther had ordered his men to disguise their outfits and look like a typical merchant caravan to fool the bandits. To complete the look, they suppressed their strength using a special talisman Asher had given to them.

The talisman was an essential item for this mission as it was what they used to suppress their strengths down a level. They could suppress it further but if they couldn't undo the effects to recover their true strength unless they destroyed the talisman. In other words, for the fourth-stage Guardian mage Luther, the talisman would suppress his level to the mid rank of the third-stage. He could also influence it and bring his strength further down but once he undid that, it would only return to the mid rank of the third-stage and not his true level which was the fourth-stage of the Guardian realm.

While this didn't seem like anything special, this feature of the talisman allowed the group to disguise their strength and play the pig to eat the wolf, taking down a bandit team already with this one making it the second one. What was more impressive was that this was just their first day traversing Panama road.

The duration for the bandit elimination mission was one week, of which two days had been spent reaching the destination. At the rate Luther' group was moving, they could take down a third and maybe even a fourth bandit group by the next day; and this was only one team out of two.

'Maybe, this is doable.' Luther thought.