The Ronaheim forest was a wondrous woodland area, comparable in beauty to the nicest places in the whole kingdom. Leafy trees full of life, scenic roads and exotic wildlife made the area truly breathtaking. If the area was just that, it would be the ideal spot for a summer cottage.

  But the area wasn’t just a forest, was it? In addition to the beasts lurking in the woods, in recent years humans had started doing the same. The Ronaheim forest was infested with bandits belonging to the Crimson talon—a notorious organization with a peak silver rank leader. They terrorized the forest routes and surrounding areas, making travel between the western cities and the capital much more difficult.

  “Why doesn’t the king or city authority just send a gold rank adventurer or two to destroy the bandits?” Valar asked as they neared the forest. “They cause a lot of trouble, and I’m guessing the organization would fall easily enough.”

  “It’s a question of rules, regulations and adventurer culture,” Rodrick said. “The culture around high rankers is that they shouldn’t meddle in the business of lower ranked ones. If a gold rank adventurer destroyed the bandits, a huge swathe of silver and bronze rankers would lose opportunities to progress.”

  “Also, it would be different if the bandits attacked that gold ranker first,” Carla added. “As a high ranker, you are allowed to defend yourself but not deliberately hunt lower rank threats. It’s an inefficient system, but it guarantees that adventurers at lower ranks don’t get fucked over.”

  “Language.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Can’t the king make an exception?” Valar wondered. “People are dying!”

  “He could,” Carla said. “But honestly, a silver rank threat isn’t enough if they don’t challenge a city directly or completely block travel through the woods. The bandits are playing a dangerous game, but right now they aren’t enough to warrant higher rank attention.”

  “If it was up to me, I would send a gold rank party,” Rodrick growled. “But I understand that the threat isn’t technically big enough. I’m pretty sure they would be crushed instantly if they tried to expand though.”

  Their discussion ended as the caravan neared the forest. The party moved to formation around the wagon, Rodrick at the front, Ciel and Arthur at the sides, Valar on top of the second wagon and Carla at the back. Carla, Valar and Ciel prepared the spells they would need, and the caravan entered the Ronaheim forest.

  As the caravan full of precious loot and wealthy travelers entered the forest, it sped up to over double its normal speed in hopes of blazing past any potential ambushes. Hopefully, the bandits wouldn't be active this evening…

  The caravan progressed through the forest quickly, and the adventurer team was hard at work. Rodrick, Ciel and Arthur needed to drive away and kill beasts frequently, but that was to be expected at their speed. A higher speed attracted more beasts, but at least they would be out of the forest sooner.

  The first sign of trouble was Rodrick’s groan of annoyance, the second was the tree lodged across the forest road and the third… Well, bandits jumping from bushes around the caravan usually meant that the caravan was being attacked.

  From what Valar could see, this group of bandits was a much smaller one than the one they had encountered two months ago. Eight bandits, everyone at the start of bronze rank, was not a sufficient number of attackers to take on team Cookie Sandwich. Valar was quickly learning that the team he was trialing for was not the general adventuring team the bandit group expected. Every single adventurer in the team was well above average for someone at the start of bronze rank.

  The team absolutely dismantled the meager group of bandits. Five died quickly, mostly due to Ciel, and 3 managed to escape. It was a complete bloodbath. The forest road echoed with the screams of bandits that had gotten over their heads and the laughter of a woman who seemed more like a demon than a human. The team didn't need anyone else. Ciel was plenty enough.

  Carla and Arthur still shot some ice lances and arrows, but they didn’t put much effort into it. The bandits could of course fight back, and they did, but getting past Ciel, let alone Rodrick, was an exercise in futility for someone who wasn’t a true trained fighter. And that was the subject where most bandits came short.

  Practically every adventurer worth their salt had been trained at one institution or another. Mages were of course trained at academies, but martial fighters didn’t just waltz into the guild and start adventuring either. Instead, they trained at different schools, with their adventurer parents or even in the guard before they ever took on a contract.

  Bandits didn’t usually enjoy that kind of luxury and were at most trained by their peers or higher ups in the organization. That led to them being significantly weaker in combat than a person of their rank was supposed to be. Of course there were exceptions—bandit kings or skilled rogues that split off to do solo work—but they were exceedingly rare and were not those who ambushed random caravans on the road.

  That led to an important question: Why would anyone ever become a bandit?

  If bandits were consistently weaker than adventurers, were hunted by guards and couldn’t even enter cities, becoming a bandit should’ve been the stupidest thing one could do. In some ways, that was true, but there was a caveat. Nobody started their career by becoming a bandit, but if you got rejected from the adventurer’s guild, guard, private schools and you still wanted to rank up… Banditry was one of the only options left.

  Not the only option, as solo adventuring without the guild’s support and other ways of progress were possible, but certainly the easiest.

  This band of misfits, now five fewer in number, had bitten more than they could chew. If the caravan had been severely mismanaged and understaffed, they could’ve maybe eked out a victory, but an adventurer party full of competent fighters was way too much to even try. This attack had not been ordered by the bandit king of the Ronaheim forest, that was sure.

  As the caravan blazed onwards, leaving five corpses for the beasts of the forest, Valar pondered on the team he had just joined. Honestly, he didn’t know much about any of the team members.

  Rodrick was the one he knew most about. He had even met the man’s father, and that gave him a lot to go on. He was an axe wielding warrior seemingly trained purely by his father and the Lyndale guard. The man generally didn’t like rulebreakers, acted politely and fought ferociously as the party’s frontline threat. In fact, he was what Valar had always imagined a warrior to be. No petty tricks, just pure strength and skill.

  Carla was similar to Rodrick in that she fit the image of a mage in Valar’s head perfectly. She was an ice mage that had gone to school in Thornton and seemed to be very competent in her field. Valar still remembered the spell she had cast on the large group of bandits, Winter’s bloom, and the young woman had given him some motivation to study himself. He was only guessing as he didn’t know her surname, but Carla seemed like the nobles at the academy. Even though she seemed to try and act lower than her station, she seemed like a noblewoman. Better not ask too soon… Maybe she doesn’t like her house?

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  The last two members of the team were the ones that broke the stereotypes in Valar’s mind. Arthur seemed initially like a normal archer, but his fighting style was completely nonsensical in the boy’s eyes. The man fought way too close to the enemy, dodged in irrational directions and seemed more like a hybrid mage with an affinity for his bow. Valar couldn’t explain it, but the man just seemed like anything else but an archer. In addition to that, his personality matched his skillset. The man was relaxed and even dreamy, but could suddenly turn to anger at the most random times. He was hard to understand, but at least the man was nice to him.

  Ciel was scary. Really scary. The normally reserved pale dark haired woman seemed to turn into a different person when the fighting started, and that other person was a demon of the abyss made manifest. Dark magic, scary looking daggers with handles that looked more like bone than wood and a maniacal laugh made her an opponent the boy would never ever want to face. Also, if Valar was even remotely right in his assessment of the team members, none of the others would even stand a chance against the woman. She just felt different. They were all competent, but she was just…. elite?

  “What are you wondering about?” Ciel’s voice snapped Valar out of his thoughts. “What’s wrong? You look like you saw a ghost. I can assure you there are no ghosts here.”

  “How… How so?” Valar mumbled his question.

  “Ghosts form with the presence of death magic or its residue, miasma,” Ciel explained with a casual tone as she ran next to Valar’s wagon. “Even though the Ronaheim forest is full of scum and villainy, death mages don’t dwell here. Trust me, they would have been hunted down this close to the capital already.”

  “Is death magic prohibited? I thought that no affinity was strictly outlawed.”

  “Having the affinity isn’t outlawed, but using it to create undead is,” Carla yelled from the back. “Death mages can essentially only use their magic offensively or as a shield, no rituals or raising the dead allowed. More often than not, they still try…”

  “Ciel, back in formation!” Rodrick shouted from the front of the caravan. “We could still be attacked again.”

  “Sure… sure,” Ciel muttered. “I need to go now, but feel free to come chat anytime!” The woman’s wide smile was anything but disarming.

  She seems so nice, but she’s also way too scary. I don’t even know what to think about her! Perhaps his opinion on the dark haired whirlwind of death would form over time. No need to decide his stance on her right now. If he were to join their team properly, he would have plenty of time.

  True to Rodrick’s prediction, the caravan was attacked again. Not one, not two, but a whole three times! Each attack was similar to the first, with way too few attackers to truly challenge the team protecting the caravan. The second to last attack was a bit bigger than the earlier ones, and every team member had to chip in in order to defeat the group cleanly. Even Valar got to participate, as Rodrick asked for a Lesser Fortify when he noticed the amount of attackers. That spell came in handy too, as he managed to shrug off bigger hits than normally.

  During this same attack, some of the bandits tried to take out the presumably easiest target, that being Valar. That idea was curtailed quickly as Carla cast an ice shield over him to protect the boy from the flying arrows. The team did not react well to that slight against their intern healer, and Valar got to see something that he wouldn’t have believed the day before.

  Rodrick cleaved three men down. With a single swing.

  The fact that the bandits were weaker than the adventurers was obvious, but the sheer feat of swinging his axe one time and cleaving through the torsos of three men was frightening to say the least. Sure, two of them were iron rankers, but did that truly matter? The roar accompanying that swing was nearly as impressive, as Valar was pretty sure the men had been stunned from the sheer sound of Rodrick’s bellow. The boy was forced to reconsider his thoughts about how the party members ranked in strength. Maybe Ciel wasn’t that much higher than Rodrick after all…

  The last attack before they got out of the forest wasn’t any worse than the others, but the party members were tired from the previous attacks. Valar wasn’t specifically targeted this time and the attackers didn’t pull off any fancy tricks, so they were defeated relatively easily. However, the tiredness of the party member led to Carla’s endless tirade of curses as they finally got out of the forest.

  “Fucking shitbags dared to shoot an arrow at me! I fucking hate that abyss cursed forest!” her shouts were mixed in with groans of pain as she sat next to Valar on the wagon roof.

  Unfortunately, Carla had been hit by an arrow that went through the left side of her stomach. It hadn’t hit any vital organs, but the wound obviously hurt quite a bit.

  “When can we just pull out this fucking arrow and be done with it?” Carla’s question was more of a shout to Rodrick. “Valar can heal me right up after we just pull the arrow out!”

  “I know!” Rodrick shouted from the front. “But our stop for the night is only a few minutes away! It’s way more defensible than the open flatlands!”

  “I don’t care! This fucking hurts!”

  “Lan-. Actually, nevermind. Curse as much as you want!”

  Needless to say, the rest of the way was filled with colourful expletives about bandits, their gruesome deaths and their smaller than average family jewels. Apparently, Carla had checked. Valar did not know what to think about that…

  The first thing the team did when they arrived at the campsite was pulling out the arrow lodged in Carla’s stomach. Rodrick pulled the arrow out, guided by Valar who had studied applications of life magic both in the academy and during the week in the infirmary. The trick was to pull it out from the back decisively so that the arrowhead wouldn’t catch on Carla’s flesh and cause more damage to be healed.

  Right after pulling out the arrow and being in the front row seat for Carla’s performance on all the different curse words in the realm, Valar cast Lesser Restoration on the young woman. The process of healing wasn’t fast, as the damage to her flesh was quite extensive compared to the wound on his thigh earlier in the day, and he needed to start relying on the magic flowing from his gate pretty early during the channeling. In short, after Carla was healed, Valar was ready to drop.

  “Thank you, Valar,” Carla thanked the young life mage. “That healing would have been much more painful and slow if I had to use a life potion. So, thank you.”

  “It’s my job,” Valar said from the ground. He was already laying down and was pretty sure he could fall asleep right then and there. His head hurt from channeling all that mana. “I think it’s my job at least. Right now it seems like a pretty bad job.”

  The young woman chuckled and extended her hand. “Come to eat, and maybe it isn’t that bad anymore. Food’s ready.”

  True to Carla’s words, the job of an adventurer healer didn’t seem so bad when he had a bowl of windsoar canary stew on his lap. Bronze rank meat was delicious even when cooked badly, and Rodrick was not a bad cook.

  As Valar enjoyed his tasty meal, he looked around the campsite. When they had left the Ronaheim forest, which honestly sucked, the caravan had entered the wasteland left by the Devouring Maw, a diamond rank beast that the king had killed when Leoria had been founded centuries ago. Also, the crocodile monster had been pink.

  The problem with finding a good campsite in the wasteland was that practically the whole area was flat. There were few easily defensible positions, but that didn’t mean there were none.

  The campsite they had chosen was a basin formed in the ground that wasn’t filled with water like most of them. While not optimal, the campsite at least provided the group with a place where most beasts couldn’t see them from kilometers away. The best solution would have been to trek to the military outpost a few hours away, but the day had already turned to night. Nobody wanted to travel during the night.

  “Arthur, go show Valar our cabin,” Rodrick said after they had eaten. “I’ll take the first watch, and Valar can’t take any since he’s iron rank. You’ll be next though.”

  “Do I really?” Arthur whined. “I need my beauty sleep!”

  “You’re the team scout for gods’ sakes! Of course you’ll take a watch!”

  “Fine… The second watch sucks though…”

  “You say that about every single one of them,” the big man grunted. “Go show Valar the cabin, please.”

  The cabin was nothing special, but it had a bed for everyone, a table and an illusory window that showed a view of the campsite. It was essentially the same as Valar’s cabin on the way to Rhondell, but had 4 small beds instead of 1 big one.

  “These two beds are taken by me and Rodrick,” Arthur pointed at the beds closest to the window. “But feel free to choose which remaining bed you want. Although… that bed is better.”

  Arthur was pointing at the bed with a curious look on his face. “That bed is definitely better.”

  “How so? They look exactly the same, and they are even the same distance from the door.”

  “I don’t know? Do I?” the archer wondered out loud. “A gut feeling, I think. Yeah, a gut feeling. That’s it.”

  Valar looked at the tanned man with confusion, but eventually shrugged his shoulders and went to the bed. It was on the same side as Arthur’s. “I don’t see a difference, but I’ll take it. Better to listen to your gut feeling than none at all.”