Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! Volume 7

by Funa

  This time, Mile bound the men not with fishing line but with normal rope. There were a lot of them, and she got the feeling that they might resist being forced to migrate, so she was worried that if they struggled too hard within the fishing line, their fingers or even their heads might pop right off.

  They’d fall like ripened fruit. That’s so grooooooooosss!!!

  Mile was truly a girl of many worries.

  Soon it would start growing dark, but they could not make camp now. Still, there was no way that they could make it back to Zarbef tonight, especially given the matter of the men entombed along the way. Naturally, Mile had no intention of making them spend the night like that. She didn’t mind if they ended up a bit perturbed over the experience, but it would leave a bad taste in her mouth if they were attacked and killed by wild animals, and it would be creepy if worms started crawling from them…They would probably smell pretty bad, too.

  Therefore, Mile proposed that they at least get back to the spots where she had buried the men, a proposal to which everyone agreed. After Mile applied her smelling salts, Mavis used a judo-like resuscitation technique, and Pauline and Reina kicked them in the sides repeatedly, all the unconscious men finally awakened. The men who had not passed out looked on, their faces drawn.

  “Now then, let’s get moving! Hurry up and follow me!” Mile said, pulling the rope holding the bandits behind her. However, the bandits did not seem particularly interested in complying with her instructions.

  Of course, this was no surprise. When they arrived in town, what awaited them was a lifetime of servitude, probably in the harshest locations possible. It was only to be expected that they would waste the girls’ time by grousing, hoping to invite negligence or give them time to launch a counterattack and escape. No matter how strong these girls might be, they were still just four little girls. Even with their hands tied, if the men rushed them all at once at a short enough range as not to grant their captors time to incant a spell or draw a sword, or if they pulled the ropes free from the girls and ran in different directions all at once, there was still a chance that they might be able to do something. Their feet were not tied, after all.

  Thinking this, the bandits made the unilateral decision not to walk. However…

  Drag.

  “Huh?”

  Drag drag drag…

  “Whaaaaaaaaat?!?!”

  The bandits suddenly found themselves being dragged along the ground by the rope in Mile’s hand.

  “Oww! That huuuuuurts!!”

  Even if the road was not paved with asphalt, the packed dirt still had rocky portions, pebbles scattered here and there. It was a bit like getting dragged along a cheese grater. Straight away the bandits found themselves scraped and bleeding.

  “Wait! We’ll stand up! Please just wait!”

  The bandit’s sudden fearful cry came less from a place of being shocked at the superhuman strength Mile must possess to drag all of them on her own and more at being unable to bear the pain of being dragged violently across the ground.

  Still, there was no use in showing kindness to thugs like this. Even after standing, they did not seem particularly inclined to walk, so Reina hurled a firebomb beside them.

  “Gah!”

  “Wh-what’re you tryin’ to do?!”

  It had been a small firebomb, using the bare minimum of her power, but if it had hit the men head-on it would not have been pretty. They would not have died, but losing a limb or two would have been unavoidable.

  The first bomb had struck into the ground about a meter from the bandits, but then there came a second at 60 centimeters’ distance, then 30, inching closer and closer by degrees. And the fourth would…

  Frantically, the bandits began to walk.

  Still, given that it did not appear they would be camping for the night, the men were probably already scheming, planning what they would do during their march the next day when they were nearer to town. If they dragged their feet enough, they might not make it to town the next day, either…

  Realizing this, a look of utter boredom spread across the Crimson Vow’s faces.

  No matter how skilled they might be at battle, there was no avoiding menial tasks such as this one.

  ***

  “Huh, there’s two riders coming up, moving at high speed. Let’s clear the road!” Mile announced.

  For once, she had learned this not with her surveillance magic but with her own two eyes. They pulled the roped bandits to the side of the road to open up the path.

  “Oh hey, those guys are probably heading toward Zarbef, too! Why don’t we ask them to forward a message to the Guild? They’ll probably be making camp soon, but they’ll still arrive in town well before we do tomorrow. If we play our cards right, we might even be able to get the Guild to send out reinforcements…”

  “Hm, I wonder…” said Mavis. “They seem like they’re in a hurry. If they’re knights or high-speed couriers or something like that, they’ll probably just ignore us…”

  “Still,” said Pauline, “no point in giving up from the start. Never hurts to ask.”

  “Seriously though,” chimed Reina, “we have no idea if they’ll even stop for us to begin with, so let’s not hem and haw over it now. It’s not like we can block the road and force them to stop, anyway.”

  The girls all fretted, waiting to see if the riders would even stop to speak with them. The two riders approached and then halted as they reached the girls and the bandits, before they even had a chance to pass them by.

  “Just who are you lot?!” shouted one of the men.

  Judging by their dress, the riders were not knights or couriers but hunters.

  Mile casually replied, “Oh, we’re just travelers. We captured some bandits who attacked us, so we were planning on taking them back to Zarbef in the morning. We were hoping that, if you all are going to Zarbef, if you would put in a request for the Hunters’ Guild to send out some reinforcements…?”

  “Hm…?”

  The riders appeared perplexed. There were seventeen or eighteen men attached to the ropes and four young women, two of whom still appeared to be underage. The riders were frozen in place, eyes wide and jaws slack, as they took in the whole scene.

  When the men finally recovered, the members of the Crimson Vow were able to speak with them and learned that the two men were the advance scouts for a party of hunters who had taken a job escorting a merchant caravan, riding ahead to make sure that there were no enemies lying in wait. Naturally, it was prudent of them to come and investigate the group of around twenty people who had been spotted not far ahead of their party.

  If they saw anything suspicious, they were to turn around just before they reached them and go back to tell the others, but as this did not appear to be a bandit ambush in the making, they had approached, ready to turn around and ride back at any time, if necessary.

  If possible, the merchants were hoping to reach Zarbef tomorrow while it was still light, so they intended to travel a bit farther tonight, even after sunset, to cover a little more distance and save time the next day. Traveling through the woods in the dark was its own matter, but traveling along the highway in the dark was no big deal, really. Of course, they still could not push it too far, as traveling in the pitch-black raised the risk of the horses slipping and hurting their legs.

  After the Crimson Vow explained the situation, the riders were surprised, but they agreed to the party’s request before riding back to the rest of their troop.

  “Don’t you think they bought that a little too easily?” asked Mile as the men rode away. “If we were allied with the bandits, we could just wait until the merchants showed up and suddenly have the bandits slip out of their ropes, drawing concealed swords or something. They didn’t even consider that…”

  “Don’t be a dummy. If we were trying to deceive them, do you really think we’d tell them some tall tale about four civilian girls capturing nearly twenty bandits all on our own?” replied Reina, shooting Mile do
wn. “If we wanted to deceive them, we’d have to tell them a bit of a better lie than that. This isn’t one of your Japanese folktales, after all…”

  A short while later, the mid-sized merchant caravan finally arrived from behind them. There were twelve wagons with two riders on horseback at the front and back. Naturally, they could be expected to have ten or more other guards, at the very least, within the wagons themselves.

  The caravan caught up with the girls and then stopped. A man who appeared to be a merchant, along with an elderly hunter, disembarked from a wagon that was near the center of the lineup. Judging by the circumstances, these two appeared to be the representative of the merchants and the leader of the guards.

  “Greetings,” said the merchant-looking man, “I am Cerivos, representative of this caravan. On behalf of everyone, I extend to you our deepest thanks for capturing these bandits, the most dire enemies to our trade… That said…”

  Cerivos looked over the bound bandits, clearly stunned at the circumstances.

  “Honestly, I can’t even believe my own eyes…”

  His surprise was to be expected. The other guards, descending from their wagons, were similarly wide-eyed and paralyzed with shock. If ordinary girls like these could wipe out a group of bandits all on their own, then what place did guards like them have in the world?

  Still, there was little chance of this caravan, with its four guards on horseback and ten or more riding in the wagons, being attacked by some bandit army of four-score men; such groups scarcely existed in the first place. There were rarely targets that would fetch that much of a profit this far from the capital, on the roads near some backwater town, and such activity would warrant the attention of the local lord—or even the Crown, if the bandits were particularly unlucky.

  Therefore, given that there was such a small chance of this particular caravan getting into any scuffles with bandits to begin with, the thanks that Cerivos offered was not on the behalf of their group specifically but on the behalf of merchants as a whole.

  “It seems like a huge bother to transport all these men with just you four—and dangerous, to boot. We would like to do everything that we can to help. We’ll camp the night here with you,” Cerivos proposed.

  “Oh, thank you so much!” Mile happily replied. “This is a huge help! We do need to travel just a little bit farther before we make camp, though…”

  From the get-go, Cerivos had already intended to travel a bit farther before nightfall, so he had no objections. And so, with the bandits lashed by their necks to the wagons, forcing them to walk at the wagons’ pace lest they be strangled, in the “Pauline bandit-transporting style,” the newly formed party proceeded down the road.

  ***

  “………”

  The merchants watched, eyes filled with dread, as the Crimson Vow magically excavated first the second group of attackers, the mock bandits, and then the first group, the newbie bandits, from their dirt prisons. Cerivos and the three merchants, twelve drivers, and sixteen guards (including the two original riders) all stood, wide-eyed and wordless, at these scenes.

  To leave someone not only buried in the dirt up to their neck but with the dirt around them magically packed in, leaving them utterly defenseless to the wilds in the middle of the forest on the side of the highway, was a hellish act, the horror of which was beyond the pale of the imagination. What if wild beasts or monsters found them? What if they were left there and help never arrived? It was too frightening to think about.

  Plus, even if the men were found, who knew how much time it would take to safely excavate the magically packed dirt? It was highly unlikely that any traveler who chanced to pass by would just so happen to be carrying a hoe or a pickaxe. More than likely they would simply give up, saying, “I’ll inform the Guild when I reach the next town!” and run away as fast as they could.

  And of course, even in that scenario, the men did have signs beside them proclaiming, “These guys are bandits,” so their prospects were rather dim.

  The biggest problem here—though, of course, it was not really a problem per se—was the fact that the immensely strong individuals, who had captured three separate groups of bandits without so much as a scratch, were four little girls who appeared to be nothing more than average civilians.

  “The meat’s ready! The soup is done, too!”

  The noble girl had produced everything from ingredients to cookware to tableware, all from her storage.

  Her maid had not only used magic, the likes of which they had never seen before, to cleanse and purify the clothing and bodies of the bandits who had soiled themselves, but she had also healed one of the drivers’ wounds instantaneously when they stopped to repair a wagon wheel.

  The apprentice knight had prepared the kindling for their bonfire in the blink of an eye, not by gathering it—oh no, but by chopping a fallen tree into logs with her own blade. Normally, swords capable of performing such a feat were not forged, and even if they were, no mortal who possessed the power and skill to complete the task existed. Or rather, they should not have existed.

  At least, the redhead who had lit the fire felt normal. In this, the caravan group found their one, sole comfort.

  It was better that they were unaware of the truth. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them…

  ***

  “Breakfast is ready!”

  The next morning, Mile furnished breakfast for the caravan, just as she had with dinner the night before, a meal that had been sumptuous, full of fresh meat and vegetables. They had only just departed Zarbef the previous morning, so it was believable that they would still have fresh ingredients in storage and equally feasible that if they were turning back toward town anyway, that they would rather use these ingredients up before they went back. However, the amount that the girl had stored was, in and of itself, still flabbergasting.

  The four merchants, including Cerivos, looked at Mile with an envious gaze. The hunters, who had seen her pull out an entire orc the night before, had their eyes peeled also.

  Once they had finished breakfast, Mile raised a request to Cerivos. She wished for him to send one of the riders ahead to the Guild, carrying a letter she had penned the night before.

  “Of course!” he replied. “Leave it to us!”

  The thought that Mile and the others might be plotting something did not cross the man’s mind once. Having just one fewer guard present out of over a dozen made little difference to their defense. With the fighting force they currently had among them, it would take many scores of bandits to bring them down.

  The captured bandits’ physical states and the ropes that bound them had been double-checked when securing them to the wagons. The almost fanatic way in which they had been bound was not something they would be able to worm their way out of anytime soon.

  Plus, there was no reason that a group like these girls, with their excessive storage, healing magic, and swordsmanship, would ever have to turn to a life of crime just for money. Cerivos would stake ten gold on that.

  At some point, shortly after noon, a number of riders on horseback appeared from the road ahead, stopping just before the caravan.

  “I am the guild master of the Hunters’ Guild of Zarbef!”

  It was obvious that if one requested assistance from the Hunters’ Guild on such matters, one would generally receive it. What was more surprising, however, was that the guild master himself had arrived on the scene.

  The guarding hunters and the merchants relaxed, and the caravan halted. The newly arrived riders approached, all of them climbing down from their horses in front of the Vow, who were still on foot.

  “I presume you all are the ones who sent this letter? Well, judging by what I can see here, it’s pretty clear you weren’t deceiving us…” said the guild master, looking warily over the leashed bandits.

  Though the girls had never seen this particular guild master before, as usual, he was an older man, middle-aged, perhaps approaching elderly. After all, it normally
took about that long to acquire the skills and knowledge that such a position required. It wasn’t a job that any young whippersnapper fresh out of D-rank could do.

  “So, there are three bandit groups here,” Mavis explained in her capacity as leader. “One is the real group, and the other two are just small fry. Please see to it that the arrangements are as we wrote.”

  “Sure thing,” said the guild master with a nod. “Good work here. You can leave the rest to us.”

  Of course, the wagons that would transport the bandits moved slowly. Until they could all be assembled on site, the group would have to continue the way they were for a little while longer. After speaking with the merchants briefly, the guild master, two of the men who had accompanied him, the chief of the real bandits, and two of his subordinates, all clambered into the first wagon. The guards who were riding in that wagon climbed out, and three of them took up the horses that the guild master’s crew had rode in on.

  The reason for this soon became obvious, as a short while after the caravan began moving again, there rang a bloodcurdling scream from within the first wagon. However, none of the rest of the party paid it any mind… At least, none of the merchants’ group or the men who arrived with the guild master.

  Yes, the only ones who showed any distress were the other bandits and the members of the Crimson Vow.

  Sometime after that, they rendezvoused with the transport wagons. After seeing that all of the bandits were loaded in and issuing a strict gag order to the merchants, the guild master left the transport to his subordinates and started his own ride back to Zarbef.

  ***

  “We shall now begin the official inquiry regarding the bandit activities occurring in the vicinity of the town of Zarbef.”

  It was three days later, in the manor of the lord who governed the territory in which Zarbef was situated. Within the grand hall, which usually housed balls and parties, something akin to a trial was now taking place. It would be a great bother to examine each of the three bandit groups one by one, so they had all been gathered in the same place.