HOT NOVEL UPDATES

By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 6 - Chapter 35




Hint: To Play after pausing the player, use this button

Chapter 4 Episode 35: The Bandits’ True Intentions

They looked at me with disbelief.

“You serious?”

“He’s seriously gonna die!”

“I don’t know what your background is, but you’re bandits now, aren’t you? Are you really in any position to complain about being killed? Besides, I said I wouldn’t kill you for no reason, but if you’re going to be defiant and try to run away, I have no reason to go out of my way to keep you alive.”

Bandit extermination missions generally involved killing them all. The reward could be higher if they were captured alive, but it wasn’t a requirement. It was different if there was some need to extract information from them, but the adventurer’s life tended to be the top priority.

“I’ve still got some questions I want to ask, if you’re willing to talk,” I said.

“Y-Yes! Of course! I’ll tell you anything! I don’t want to die!” the one cooperative man said again.

“Then I don’t need all of you, so it’s not much trouble for me if one of you dies.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“How can you just kill someone like that?!”

“As if bandits like you should talk. You’ve killed people with those swords, right?” I said. At the same time, the suffering man passed out. I figured I’d done enough to scare them at that point. “Well, I should have warned you about the collars sooner, so I’ll let you off easy this time.” I ordered the slime collar to enlarge a bit.

“Hey...”

“Is he alive?”

“Who knows?” I said.

“What do you mean, who knows?”

“His chest is moving, so I’d guess he is. But if he dies, he dies.” I got close to him, but not close enough to confirm if he was alive or dead. I didn’t want someone to hit me in the back of the head while I was checking. “Besides, human blood, flesh, bones, and organs are all enjoyed by my familiars, so his corpse wouldn’t go to waste. Don’t worry about that.”

The conscious men shuddered. Understandably, nobody cares how well their body is treated after they’re dead. I was living life over again here, but I had no idea what happened to my body on Earth.

“Anyway, you’ll be fine as long as you don’t struggle. Just listen to me, and I won’t kill you,” I said. They finally went quiet, so I asked about the swords. “I’m looking for a missing person. He was traveling on the road up above in a carriage full of weapons heading to Keleban. Your swords are the same sort he was delivering, and they’re all new too. I also checked those wooden boxes, and they contain metal. To get straight to the point, did you attack him?”

“Yes! We just stole these swords the other day. Same with what’s in the boxes. I don’t know the name of the guy or remember what he looked like, but that was probably him. He was on the road up there too.”

“Sounds like I’m right, then. How did you attack him? All I learned when I asked around was that he used this road, but nobody saw anything suspicious.”

“Yeah, we were just going to stop him and take his stuff, but one of our arrows hit his horse and it went berserk. He ended up tumbling off the side of the road. We’re used to hiding any signs of our attacks, so we buried the wheel tracks and covered up the grass on the cliff where the carriage fell off, then took all the goods from the carriage and ran off.”

“What happened to the coachman?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t know how that could be. It’s not like the carriage could’ve gone anywhere without him. “Don’t hide anything. You killed him, didn’t you?”

“No, we didn’t! He was knocked out by the fall, so we just tied him up, and our pal here who’s been sleeping this whole time used magic to make grass grow tall enough to hide him under it. Then we just stole his goods and left. We don’t know what happened to him after that! It’s true!”

“You really didn’t kill him?” If they wanted to hide their crime, there was no sense in leaving the victim alive. I suspected that they were lying to make themselves look better.

“We didn’t! He had no intention of killing him to begin with, we just wanted his food and goods! We weren’t trying to make him fall off the road! We’ve never killed anyone, the coachman included!”

“What? Never? Aren’t you bandits?”

“Our job was just to clean up after jobs and little things like that. The boss handled the main job to make sure there were no mistakes, so this is the first time we’ve attacked anyone personally. This goes for all of us, even the guys who were talking themselves up. The worst we’ve done before was burglary or picking pockets.”

“So you were scared, is that it?” I looked around, and one of the men who snapped at me before was glaring.

“I mean, we were bandits and all, but what’s wrong with being afraid to kill people?! We’re not like you or the boss, we can’t just kill people like it’s nothing!”

“Nonsense,” I said. I felt my head cooling after hearing their points. “Is there something wrong with being afraid to kill people? No, that’s the right way to feel. But I can’t say I believe it. You say you were too scared to kill the man, but you didn’t exactly help him either, did you?”

“So what? You saying we should’ve carried him back to town?”

“Did you look into what caused him to faint? Even if you don’t have any medical knowledge, I’m sure you know that he could’ve been in danger if he banged his head. He might’ve looked safe outside, but you don’t know that his head was fine inside. He could have died before ever waking up.”

Not only that, but while there were few dangerous creatures in this region, it wasn’t unusual to encounter goblins just about anywhere. The gods assured me that the Forest of Gana was relatively safe, but they were there too. If he was found unconscious and tied up, they undoubtedly would have killed him.

“You mentioned you don’t know where he is, so you don’t even know if he’s safe. You weren’t trying to make him fall off the cliff? You didn’t kill him directly, so you claim not to have killed him? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Plenty of people die from accidents. That could include anything from traffic accidents to children engaging in dangerous games. Tons of people die all over the world every day. But accidents have no perpetrators. If it was a consequence of their crime, it’s a murder. They violently robbed this man, and now he could be dead as a result. Then they left him without checking if he was safe. They couldn’t claim that they didn’t kill anyone after that.

“Gone silent again?” I said. “What happened to all your energy from before?”

“What, you’re gonna lecture us, kid? What do you know?”

“A lecture? This isn’t a lecture. You’re saying you don’t want to kill anyone, but all the while, you may have left someone to die. It disgusts me that you can boldly make these claims, that’s all.” And I had no time to waste with these people anyway.

“Wait! Wait a second! I helped you, didn’t I?!”

“I’m not going to kill you, I just don’t like you. Instead, I’m going to make you take me to where the carriage fell.”

Three days after an incident on Earth, the rate of survival that much time after an incident dropped considerably. And that was assuming they had food, water, and a way to keep warm. Without those, depending on whether there was an injury or not, the time limit was even shorter.

I opened my Dimension Home “I’m not going to kill you either, but you’ll be staying in here for a while. Next time you come out, you’ll be outside a guard station in some town,” I said as I picked up the bandit who slept the entire time and got to work confining him.

■ ■ ■

“Over here?!”

“Yes! No mistake about it, Young Master!”

“Quit calling me that, it’s creeping me out.”

“My apologies!”

I carried the man on a makeshift seat strapped to my back as we climbed up the unbeaten path. I had ordered the apologetic man to provide directions, and as expected, the scene of the crime was on the road near Keleban. But the bandits wandered the mountains for days and the only way they could find the way to the crash site was to head back to the road first. We gave up on walking straight to the crash site and decided to go to the road first. Thanks to the limour birds ahead of us, we didn’t get lost.

“I have another question,” I said.

“Of course! Anything you want!”

“You staged your attack two days ago, right? Why were you still in the forest? Normally you’d want to get away as soon as possible.”

“We climbed down the mountain at first, but there was nothing but plains and nowhere to hide. We’d look suspicious if we ran into anyone in these get-ups, so we just had to go back to the mountain.”

“Then if I hadn’t captured you, what were you planning to do?”

“Nothing much.”

“You didn’t even have a plan?”

“We had our hands full just running from bandit hunters.”

“How did you make it this far without a plan?”

“We had food from odd jobs before the bandit hunters came and still had it when we fled, so we ate that as we traveled here. But we ran out three days ago, so we had to steal from someone.”

That’s when they happened to target Pedro, presumably. “Why did you take the goods if you just needed food?”

“Our boss had ties with some merchant with whom he exchanged stolen goods and money for food and weapons. So we thought the goods could come in handy.”

“And do you know who that merchant is, exactly?”

“Well, no, but if we ever did get the chance to sell something to them, it’d be unfortunate if we didn’t have anything on hand, you know.”

“So you had absolutely no plans at all, got it.” I did often just operate on instinct too, but I was never this reckless. “I’m impressed you were able to survive as bandits at all.”


“I just did random errands and followed orders. Cleaning and laundry were things I did back in my home village too.”

“I think you’d be better off going home than staying as a bandit. Is there some reason you can’t?”

“Yes, well, I punched the mayor and got exiled.”

“Alright, I knew they had power, but you got exiled just for a fight? Why did you do that in the first place?”

“I think this is similar with most villages, but the mayor collects taxes to pay to the feudal lord. He and his family also manage the collected crops, and they can also write and do math. They take advantage of that to pocket some of the crops and money for themselves.”

The man claimed that he ditched work and headed to an unpopulated area when he happened to pass by the mayor and his son discussing embezzlement behind a hut. He asked them about it and got no answer, so he got upset and punched the mayor. They drew a crowd, and the man was accused of the crime of threatening the mayor’s son to steal taxes.

“They acted like the son was resisting and the mayor came to tell me to stop. I was the only one who heard the truth, so in the end, the villagers trusted the mayor over me. They all looked at me coldly, and the mayor exiled me for an attempted crime. And if I didn’t leave the village, they threatened to tell the tax collector that I tried to steal taxes and get me the death penalty. I had no choice but to leave.”

Any attempts to take a feudal lord’s taxes would inevitably result in punishment, if not necessarily the death penalty. But the mayor only took extra from the villagers, while paying the proper amount of taxes each year. That was all he needed to convince the tax collector of anything. They wouldn’t bother to do a proper investigation. Bribes could get tax collectors to turn a blind eye to some things, according to the man. I didn’t know how much of this was true, but at any rate, this was why the man left the village.

“And then you became a bandit?”

“I worked at a shop in the city for a while, and tried adventuring, but I failed at everything, so that didn’t last long. I had to steal to eat, and when it looked like I’d get caught, I ran away and eventually ended up as a bandit.”

“Does the same go for the others?”

“I’m sure they’ve got similar stories. You never know where life will take you. But if I had a good head on my shoulders, I never would’ve become a goddamned bandit to begin with. Oh, sorry! Excuse my language!”

“It’s not like I asked you to speak politely.”

As he was being self-disparaging, he accidentally let his feelings out. We didn’t talk much after that, so we just silently climbed further up until I heard a limour bird call.

“Hey, we reached the road. Where do we go now?” I asked.

“Let me see here. It wasn’t that high up, it was closer to the foot of the mountain.”

“Left, then? Let’s proceed along the road now. Tell me when we get to the right spot.”

“Right.”

We met up with my limour birds and kept walking for another hour.

“Wait!” the bandit said.

“Here?”

“Probably. Can you turn me around?”

“Is this good?”

“Oh, yes, it’s past here. The path is around a corner a little to the right.”

We went a bit further until the path zigzagged and we came to a corner hidden from view by trees when looking from a distance. It wouldn’t even warrant mentioning if we didn’t know what it hid, but there was a patch of weeds too.

“Here?”

“No doubt about it.”

The man got off of me, then I tied a rope around a nearby tree and prepared to descend.

“What is it?” I asked. He was trying to look down off the cliff.

“Just wondering if he’s alive,” he said. It seemed a bit late now, but I guess he felt guilty.

“That’s what I’m going to find out. Are you going to wait here?” I asked, but I was going to take him with whether he liked it or not.

“You’ll find him faster if I guide you there.”

“Alright, hold this,” I said. If he was interested in going himself, I was having him descend himself. I handed him a rope and tied one end of it to the slime serving as his handcuffs. At the same time, I removed the bindings around his legs. “Whether we’re taking him back alive or dead, you’ll get in the way if I carry you, so climb down with your own legs. You can walk now. I’m having my bird familiars watch you and you still have that collar to contend with, so don’t do anything stupid.”

“R-Right.”

I glared at the surprised man, then descended the steep slope. It didn’t take long to find the missing person after that. Thanks to the guide I brought along, he wasn’t difficult to locate. I cut through the weeds hiding him.

“Pedro! Can you hear me?!” I cried. He was still breathing. “I’m an adventurer! I’m here to save you! You’re safe now!”

“Adventurer?” he mumbled. I kept talking to him as I rushed to remove the weeds wrapped around him. But I took the utmost caution not to put any burden on Pedro.

“Are you okay? Can you describe what state you’re in?”

“Back... hurts...”

“Your back?”

I could see his face now, and his muffled voice became clearer. But his face was covered in sweat. I checked his forehead, and he had a high fever. He also showed signs of dehydration. It seemed like he had used up a lot of stamina. Thankfully he could still respond to questions, but he needed to be taken to town to receive treatment quickly.

“Hey! Get over here!”

“Right!”

I called the bandit over to the man he nearly killed, then handed him a feeding cup and a bottle from my Item Box. “Feed him the contents of this bottle. Don’t force it, just a little at a time. Got it?”

“Y-Yes,” the man said and timidly fed Pedro the water mixed with salt and sugar as I continued my work off to the side.

“Ugh?!” Pedro groaned and coughed.

“A-Are you okay?!” the bandit asked.

“Pedro.”

“Ngh, my back...”

“Your back, right. Does your head not hurt?”

“My head’s fine...”

His voice was much better after drinking water, but he was shivering. I checked if I had a blanket. “Ah, here we are. I’ll put this blanket on you.”

The weeds somehow seemed to have protected him from the cold wind at night up until now. I finished cutting him free from them. Next, I took a stretcher out of my Item Box.

“You’ve sure got a lot with you,” the bandit said.

“I’m here on a job, of course I brought anything I thought I might use. Anyway, we need to take him back up. I’ll free your hands now if you’ll help.”

“Right.”

The whole carriage had fallen. Considering he passed out after that, there was a chance that he banged his head as well. I carefully placed him on the stretcher and opened my Dimension Home. “You grab the other side. We’ll cautiously carry him inside.”

“Got it.”

This was the best way to transport Pedro without rocking him too much.

“Hey...” Pedro said.

“What is it?”

“Thanks, both of you...”

It was unclear if he remembered the bandit or not, but he thanked us. The bandit looked away awkwardly.

“Let’s go.”

Maybe he felt some internal conflict, but I wouldn’t let sentimentality stop him from assisting me. We had to get Pedro to town as soon as possible so he could get medical treatment.

“What?! Wait, hey!”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t kill us if we played along?!”

“I won’t, but the situation has changed. I need to restrain you more thoroughly so you can’t move at all.”

The one obedient man and I restrained the other bandits to make sure they did no harm to Pedro, then we both ran to the nearest town.



Share This :


COMMENTS

No Comments Yet

Post a new comment

Register or Login