Chapter 277 - Marcus, You Cowardly Bastard

"They hid something in the woods. I followed the tracks, and that's where they led."

Pin had a talent for tracking people, too. People always left traces wherever they went. The scent changed, footprints remained. Even a single branch snapped against someone's body left a telltale sign.

Those were the things Pin had found. Having met all sorts of people in his travels across the continent, Encrid guessed she had once worked as a bounty hunter. Her past was none of his business, of course. He simply thought her skills useful.

That was how they found the village's hidden burrow. The village bordered a small wood and lay somewhat to the north. Far in the distance, they could see the Penn-Hanil River.

The bandits had dug a burrow deep in the woods to hide demonic beasts. Every one of them was stupefied by the drugs it had been fed. Among the wolf demonic beasts sprawled with their tongues hanging out, they saw traces of the alchemist whose arm and leg Encrid had cut off before splitting his head.

That bastard really had stuck his hands into everything.

One wolf demonic beast had the legs of a deer. When this sort of fusion succeeded, the world called the resulting creature a chimera. Neither monster nor demonic beast, it was a horror made by human hands.

"Who are you!"

There were five men, either trainers or emergency rations for the demonic beasts.

"Attack and you die."

Encrid gave the blunt warning. They attacked. He killed them. A man hanging back, his eyes darting about, saw this and released the remaining demonic beasts.

SKREEE!

A lion with a snake's tail charged. The half-finished chimera, made to resemble a Manticore, lost its balance mid-charge and tumbled across the ground.

Encrid split the unfinished lion chimera's skull. His blade whipped through the air, cleaving its head in two and spilling brains and dark red blood.

Jaxon and Sinar lent a hand as well. Esther merely climbed a nearby tree and watched.

The man who had released the beasts tried to flee when he spotted an opening, only to die with a handspan-long bolt buried in his head. Pin's handiwork.

"Not so fast."

He wasn't getting away. The launcher she had fired was something Encrid had previously taken from a Black Blade bandit.

'She's twice as good with it as that bandit.'

She had hidden the muzzle beneath her sleeve and fired at the back of her target's head when he looked away. Unless someone had exceptionally sharp senses, there would be no avoiding that arrow-shaped ornament in their skull.

The released demonic beasts displayed their ferocity.

GRAAAH!

SKREEEE!

Human-faced hounds implanted with snake venom glands sprayed poison everywhere. But they were all botched creations. There was no reason killing them should take long.

Killing them all, clearing out the village, and tidying up took more than half a day.

"The next one is four days away on foot."

Encrid nodded at the Fairy Company Commander's words.

After that, it was just like a traveling circus's tour. Find a village, go in, batter, beat, kill, and clean up. The same thing over and over.

Seeing their chiefs and demonic beasts all dead, most of the village bandits fled. That made the work easier.

"You think the higher-ups will let us live when they hear about this? They'll think we staged a fucking rebellion! Anyone who wants to live, follow me!"

A bandit with some brains reached that conclusion and fled, gathering a force of his own as he went. Every organization had its ambitious members.

Encrid didn't bother chasing them down one by one to eliminate them. That would have been a waste of time.

"Something's wrong. This doesn't feel right."

Some bandits with good instincts fled with those words. Only a tiny handful remained. The villages Encrid struck soon grew quiet.

Some villages exchanged information and prepared, but it made no difference. When five men guarding various parts of one village died with their carotid arteries cut, without so much as a groan, the bandits were terrified.

"Fuck! Is there a ghost out there?"

The first-rate assassin in charge of the village was gripped by fear. Something impossible was happening. Six of the bodyguards protecting him vanished without a sound, yet he hadn't sensed a thing.

No, he had seen it with his own eyes. In a corner of his bedroom, a hand reached out of the darkness, seized a guard's neck, and twisted. It moved with the skill of someone who had broken hundreds, thousands of necks.

The most frightening thing was that the neck twisted without a sound. More frightening still, the dying guard seemed not to realize he was dying. There was no shock on his face. His sharp eyes were still scanning the room, his mouth tightly set with tension, when his neck broke and he died.

"There!"

The assassin-turned-village-chief swiftly threw a poisoned dart. Coated in a toxin said to kill with a mere scratch, it vanished into the darkness. Several guards stabbed their spike-like swords into the place where their comrade had disappeared.

Their probing revealed a horrifying sight. Behind their comrade's body was a hole in the floor. When had someone made it?

"When?"

Those were the chief's dying words, his last testament. A single line whipped down from above and sliced into his neck.

A string knife, an assassin's tool made through alchemy. The slender, razor-sharp blade, thinner than a little finger, cut into the chief's throat and suspended him in midair.

"Aaaah!"

Finishing the few remaining guards was no trouble at all. In their panic, some even stabbed one another. Jaxon watched while hanging upside down from the ceiling, then ended it with two silent knives.

After something like that, what else could they do? The villagers were all desperate to flee. What had once housed a whole band of people grew so deserted that a ghost might appear at any moment. A gust of wind whistled through the village center.

"All we need is a wraith to pop out somewhere, and the picture would be complete," Pin said.

Encrid agreed, but had no intention of slowing down. Of course, they weren't going to leave the villages like this forever. Once they had dealt with the fighting men, slit the chief's throat, and turned a village upside down, Sinar sent off a crow.

CAW!

She stretched her arm toward the treetops, and a jet-black bird flew down to perch on it. The trained crow flew straight to Border Guard with the news. That meant troops would be moving out to occupy the villages the fleeing bandits had abandoned.

Meanwhile, Encrid's party kept moving toward the next village. They bought horses and rode when necessary, and when they weren't needed, released them again and crossed the cliffs. Parts of the route required them to cling to cliff faces, but rough mountain paths were hardly difficult for them.

Loose grit crumbled and scattered beneath their feet. The entire party clung to a cliff so high that, however lucky someone was to survive a fall, they could forget about ever walking again. Yet none of them felt in danger.

Pin drove a dagger into a crack, hammered it deeper with her elbow guard, then pulled herself up on it. Climbing with practiced ease, she looked down and said, "It'd be pretty funny if someone actually fell to their death here."

It was an understandable remark. Never mind the people. What about the panther following them? Its claws dug into the cliff as though it were mud, as if each were a peerless blade. It looked little different from walking on level ground.

Naturally. Those claws and skills could scale a perfectly vertical castle wall. Encrid, Jaxon, and Sinar went without saying. They could all take proper care of themselves.

Encrid climbed steadily, one step at a time. Jaxon looked as though he had coated his hands in glue. Sinar even made jokes as she nimbly picked her way up the cliff.

"Have you ever kissed on a cliff, my betrothed?"

"... Do you think I have?"

"Sometimes I wonder if my betrothed is still a virgin."

She joked as though it made no difference whether she was in a drawing room leisurely sipping tea or on a cliff where a fall would shatter her legs if she was lucky. Encrid's ability to take it in stride was remarkable in its own right.

In any case, one of them falling to their death here was about as likely as a crow being bitten to death by an ant.

They reached the next village. There, among a large collection of slaves, Sinar found three of her own kind. She didn't so much as frown.

"Fools, letting yourselves get caught."

The three offered no answer to her scathing rebuke. As soon as he was freed, one of them, a male Fairy, picked up a fallen dagger and rushed a clean-shaven, smooth-faced bandit, stabbing him repeatedly in the belly.

"Spa—ugh! Gah!"

The man had been groveling for his life and was utterly unprepared. He received the gift of six holes in his belly. There was something like a grudge in the Fairy's manner.

"A peach not even a worm would eat."

Overhearing the male Fairy's muttered words, Encrid pondered their meaning. Thanks to the Fairy Company Commander, he had grown used to Fairy expressions. It had been spoken in the Empire's common tongue, not the Fairy language, so he understood the words.

Leave peaches to grow unattended, and practically every last one would get worms. What did that make a peach that even worms refused to eat? An utterly worthless piece of human trash.

It wasn't hard to tell where his grudge came from. The two female Fairies seemed to have suffered the same treatment. Someone had lusted after their bodies. The male Fairy had been subjected to it, too.

'So he didn't care whether they were men or women.'

The bastard had broad tastes. It was an ugly sight, but across the continent, how many such things must be happening? Could he cut and slice through every one of them with a sword?

As a child, he had thought becoming a knight would make it possible. After leaving his village, he had learned it wasn't. It wasn't a question of talent. Nor was losing to a boy barely in his teens the problem.

Encrid had been young and shortsighted. That changed as his understanding of the world expanded from a village to a territory, and from a territory to a continent. Only then had he understood.

Even as a knight, even as a scourge of the battlefield who could slay a thousand men with one sword, he could not cut away such things.

So should he give up and let them be? Remain a swordsman with nothing but a splendid exterior? When he had wanted to become a knight, had he only imagined himself in gleaming armor, radiant with glory? Had that truly been all?

Of course not. He had never once thought that way. The knight he dreamed of becoming was not merely a tool for slaughter that happened to wield a sword well.

As these thoughts crowded his mind, Jaxon approached.

"Do you want to wipe it all out? Burn it all down? You can. I'll help if you need me."

His eyes blazed red as he spoke. It didn't look like a considered remark. He seemed simply intoxicated by the moment.

That made Encrid wonder, 'Is something wrong with him?'

The man said strange things every so often. Gathering his thoughts, Encrid asked, "Where did that come from?"

"Your eyes are burning."

At Jaxon's words, Encrid briefly closed his eyes and opened them again. The flames from before were gone. At least, the destructive fire Jaxon had seen had vanished.

"Let's go."

Encrid focused on the task at hand. Had becoming as skilled with a sword as a proto knight given him room for other thoughts? That couldn't be it. The ember within his heart had always burned. Only now was it showing.

"Well, look at that. Dwarves, too?"

Were they playing some sort of race-collecting game? This village hid slaves in tunnels dug all over it.

"Fuck, who are these bastards!"

The moment several bandits resisted, their throats split open beneath their vocal cords, and they died gushing blood. Jaxon's handiwork.

Along with his silent footwork, he used the things he had picked up to conceal his presence.

"I was given a useful artifact."

Saying that so shamelessly after looting a dead man's belongings proved he certainly wasn't normal either. Not one of the bandits reacted when he got behind them. One by one, he slit their throats with his dagger.

After eight noisy bandits died, the rest dropped to their knees, trembling. The man who served as village chief was long dead by then.

This one had been neither a mage nor an assassin. He hadn't even been much of a swordsman. He had only kept trying dirty tricks, looking for openings. He had laid several traps in his bedroom, but with Sinar and Jaxon before him...

'That says it all.'

Once again, Encrid hadn't needed to step in. No, he had swung his sword just once. When two of the village's supposedly capable fighters attacked, he received them with the Flowing Sword Technique and struck with the Snake Sword.

THUD! THUD!

Two sounds of parting flesh, two corpses. After that, no one attacked Encrid.

Having subdued the village by such bloody means, they freed all the remaining slaves and cut down anyone who still resisted.

Most of the villages were much the same. A few supposed experts attacked, were cut down, and the rest surrendered or fled.

Five villages in all. Searching for the settlements the Black Blade Bandits had so cleverly hidden, traveling between them, and fighting took two months. A mere two months, one could say. Given what they had accomplished, that was no exaggeration.

The Black Blade officer only learned of it after half the villages he had established were ruined. That was how fast they moved. By the time he realized, the other half were already beyond saving.

'Those mad bastards!'

BANG!

Rage boiling over, the officer slammed a candlestick into his desk. It gouged the center of the rosewood surface, splintering the wood and sending fragments flying.

"Hah, hah!"

Still, the Black Blade officer's fury didn't subside. No, it only rose higher. Finally, he hurled the silver candlestick out the window.

CRASH!

The expensive stained glass, colored red, yellow, and blue, shattered in a shower of fragments. The silver candlestick fell into the garden below the three-story mansion.

A gardener trimming the trees with shears flinched in alarm and ducked. He soon retrieved the fallen candlestick and went to find the butler. Something seemed to have happened.

Of course, there was nothing they could know. The officer concealed his identity well. Most of the mansion's servants knew him only as a court noble and government official.

He seethed, but there was nothing the bandit officer could do. Some new guild had appeared in the royal capital and was unifying the backstreets at a terrifying pace.

'What the hell is a Language Revival Guild?'

Even the guild's stated purpose was idiotic. Several of the criminal guilds it was battering were under his patronage. That meant he couldn't extricate himself.

'Damn it.'

He could do nothing about the people targeting his burrows right now. In truth, even stepping in himself would change nothing. Naturally. He had no troops left, no swordsmen to send.

The enemy was better prepared, too. They were attacking the villages with clear intent. He had no choice but to send word to headquarters. The thought that this might get him killed filled his mind.

'Fuck, fuck!'

His enterprises were all smashed. The villages, the business he had devoted his life to building, were gone. He wanted to scream, but his attendant stopped him.

"Will you throw away your worth like this? Find out the name of the man who did this. That's the best thing you can do."

Sound advice. The officer strained every nerve. He showered the information guild with gold coins and hired numerous mercenaries.

That was how he obtained the name.

"Marcus, you fucking bastard!"