“I told you I could find another knight to replace him! Meet ‘The Silent Knightess’, you must have heard about her. She has a bit of a reputation in the nearby town”

  The group was made up of five people. Some guy with a bow. Some elf girl that looked like a cleric. Some big guy carrying a big axe. Some girl dressed like a mage, and equipped with attributes that could probably snap her spine in half… And lastly, there was the guy who had come to fetch me.

  I knew more about him since he couldn’t help but keep talking while showing me the way. He was actually a spellblade. This was supposed to mean that he was both a proficient swordsman and talented mage, but as far as I remembered, it usually means: Someone who is mediocre at both but uses them together to hide the pile of garbage that they truly are.

  Since the adventurer group seemed rather good considering their equipment, I assumed that he was at least only a small pile of garbage.

  As for the rest… The archer has the face of someone incapable of comprehending hypothetical scenarios. The cleric seemed fine, but I just knew that every man in this party wanted to be with her.

  There was no point in trying to elaborate. It was just a gut feeling. Men just want the cute cleric girl. I just know they do.

  The big guy was just staring at his axe… He definitely gave that thing a woman’s name. I can’t prove it, but I know he talks to it instead of talking to real women.

  The ‘big’ mage girl looked like she was constantly upset about something… Personally, I was just curious about how she managed to turn around or make sudden movements with fat lumps attached to her chest. Wouldn’t their inertia cause her to lose balance a bunch? And where does one find clothes that can accommodate those sorts of things?

  I may be a woman, but I didn’t know the answers to those questions. I had always been as flat as a board.

  The spellblade… I already hate this guy. Way too goody two-shoes, he acts overly nice without ever stopping. I hope he dies in a fire.

  “Excuse me, Miss Knight… But calling you this or ‘Silent Knightess’ is a bit weird… Could you perhaps write down your name on a piece of paper for us to know?”

  It was the mage who proposed the idea, and I merely shrugged, wondering what name I should give them… Mara or Nebulo were a bad idea. Mara was too uncommon, and I didn’t want certain people to hear about a quiet knightess named Mara… As for Nebulo, it was an obviously awful idea. People knew that name because of my brother.

  Well… I have more than one name…

  It wasn’t common for those who were not bourgeoisie or above, but I had more than one name. I had also been given the names of my two grandmothers, whom I had never met.

  My full name was Mara Maeve Maya Nebulo. It sounded a bit silly to have three names that started the same, but the names themselves weren’t bad.

  So when they gave me a piece of paper and a quill, I wrote down ‘Maya’, it was the friendliest-sounding of the two, at least according to me.

  “Maya? What a cute name!”

  The elf girl had that cutesy personality, the sort whose smiles brighten the day of others, and who is somehow always happy about something. Typically, the sort of people who are hard to get mad at. It would feel like getting mad at a dog for being too excited to see you.

  …Mmh… No, she’s not little sister material.

  I promptly ignored them as they told me about their names, and just listened to what they were capable of. They were a rather mundane adventurer group, all things considered.

  A healer, a hitter, a hitter but with magic, a hitter but with arrows, and a hitter with a slight bit of magic. I was replacing the guy who was supposed to go in the front and get the attention of the enemies. Apparently, the usual guy could do this very well because he had some sort of way to enrage people and creatures.

  I couldn’t do this, but it didn’t matter. I just followed the group as they headed for the area where the bandits were said to be hiding… Everything went without a hitch, and the group arrived just on the outskirts of a very much not hidden camp.

  Am I the only one who can tell that this is suspicious? Am I the one being led into a trap, or are they stupid?

  “Mmh… I was expecting the camp to be better concealed than this… And there are quite a lot of people there…”

  The archer was the first to actually say something about the situation.

  “Well… With how many bandits there are, maybe they thought that they could afford not to hide themselves? Maybe they think they are big enough for the local authorities to be unwilling to take immediate action?”

  The spellblade offered a somewhat plausible solution, but that would only work if this place were isolated. If they need to, the so-called local authorities could request some assistance in the form of asking for forces from other nearby towns or cities, publishing a quest to get pretty much all adventurers on board, or request help from the crown, even.

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  If they just saw a bunch of bandits and decided to tremble in their boots without doing anything else, then they were either complicit or wholly incompetent. Unfortunately, the latter option couldn’t be crossed off. This could genuinely be the case…

  In any case, it was time for me to ruin everything.

  Those idiot adventurers were thinking about waiting for the night and using stealth… Madness, how am I supposed to upgrade my combat skills by stabbing people in their sleep? And how am I supposed to get everyone killed without a little bit of sabotage?

  Earlier, as we were walking through one of the most boring forests I had ever seen, I had manifested a few bolts, keeping them hidden in my sleeves until I found an opportunity to take them out.

  Using ‘Steel Manipulation’, I lifted the bolts from where I had dropped them. One advantage of my abilities in this form was that both ‘Steel Shaping’ and ‘Steel Manipulation’ were more akin to innate abilities than spells. The former only needed steel and no energy whatsoever, and the latter also didn’t rely on any energy, so the mage and cleric of the group were none the wiser to my actions.

  I could probably send the bolt right through the back of their heads right now… But no, I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t have some sort of passive barrier or defensive spell in place.

  So instead, the bolts zoomed past me and the adventurers, launching themselves straight into the bandit camp and into some bandits, naturally.

  One of them was shot right through the eye, dropping dead in an instant as his brain was penetrated, another was unfortunately seen crippled in his ability to reproduce–This was done on purpose–And one, who wasn’t the brightest, was struck in the throat.

  In his infinite wisdom, he pulled out the bolt, only causing a geyser of blood to rush out, leading to quick death.

  What do they teach people these days? Everyone should know not to take out something that’s stabbed right through you. It just allows blood to pour out faster.

  Damned amateurs… So many people couldn’t have been brought together without at least one strong guy. Where is the danger?

  Whilst I was wondering about that, the adventurers were cursing and gearing themselves for a fight. My little stunt had attracted all attention toward the direction the bolts had come from–Namely, exactly where the adventurers had been hiding.

  The group considered just taking off running, but the bandits brought out chained beasts, and it became clear that they wouldn’t be able to outrun these, and if they stopped to fight, then the bandits would certainly catch up and surround them…

  So they might as well use the energy they would use to run to instead fight immediately. They were up against disorganised bandits anyway, and indeed, it quickly became clear that none of the bandits were trained fighters, just a collective of brutes with numbers.

  The mage, whose element was water, sliced and diced them with compressed slashes of water.

  The axeman turned people into lumps of red meat. He was probably at least four times stronger than any given bandit… Just one kick or punch, and the criminal scum would be turned into mangled bodies.

  The archer was precise with his arrows, but he didn’t intervene much at all, only acting to take out bandits who showed up with their own manners of ranged weaponry.

  The spellblade was more slick about it, but he was just dismembering people, so instead of making piles of ground flesh and broken bones like the axeman, he was making piles of neatly sliced arms, legs, and heads.

  As for the cleric… Well, no one was getting hurt, and the enemy was significantly weaker than the adventurers, so she wasn’t doing anything. It seemed like she didn’t even know any offensive means of attack.

  On my end, I had unsheathed my sword. I had worked quite hard with ‘Steel Shaping’ to make that weapon alongside a sheath for it.

  After all, since I could manifest steel, I reasoned that I could probably create several sorts of it, and indeed, I was able to add some nice golden decorations to it all, making the weapons look less like something a smith had done without any attention, and more like a genuine, unique blade.

  It gave some character to The Silent Knightess, making her seem more like a person. Otherwise, the lack of speech and constant armoured look might put some people off.

  “Impressive… You’ve managed to deal with my underlings”

  …No way someone capable of thought said that.

  Some bald man with a head covered in an absurd amount of scars stepped out of a large tent. The bandits that were still alive stepped out of the way to let him through, and it was rather easy to tell that, unlike the rest, he actually had some skills and power.

  Nara, any way you can deduce anything about this guy, or…?

  At a glance, he seems like a normal human. However, I detect that the strength he achieved was not through conventional means, such a physical training or physique-enrichment via energy

  I am not one hundred per cent certain, but I believe that this man is a practitioner of ‘Communion’, and precisely, of Dragon Communion

  I would wager that your idea that the authorities wanted adventurers to test the waters to have been correct. It is pretty much impossible to know what this man is capable of without seeing him in action

  It is likely that people are observing what is happening from nearby elevated positions, either collecting intel, or preparing to finish the job if the bandit leader were to emerge victorious after showing his cards

  Impressive! Aren’t you a smart girl, Nara?

  …It is nothing much…

  Ah, if you had a face, I know it would be blushing right now…

  So, you’re telling me that this guy could potentially breathe fire or something else at us?

  Potentially, communion isn’t a way of power with a linear progression, not even close. It depends on the individual and several other factors. For example, if this man doesn’t have at least one specific dragon that he communes with, he probably doesn’t have any special abilities

  And if he does, it would depend on whether the dragon actually cares, the distance separating them, and his own will, as well as innate talent

  At the very least, he should be physically powerful compared to a normal human, and considering his confidence, he must be quite strong

  Indeed, or he is an idiot…

  “Maya! We don’t know how strong this guy is, so instead of taking hits for us, take care of the remaining bandits!”

  Goody Two-Shoes strikes again. I give him a thumbs up and happily go to slaughter defenceless victims.

  Looks like we’ll get to see the show from afar.

  Indeed