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1151 Words
When they learned of the team being on The Path, the rest of the group accepted his story without question. Weird Talents were commonplace for The Path, and those that hit above their Tier always had them. With that, most of the questions were avoided.
It didn’t matter that [Hail] wasn’t explained. So long as no one questioned it, he wouldn’t have to offer up an explanation. Killing the golems was their goal, not learning the minute details about the skills and oddities of the other fighters.
Basil was in the lead and was slowly gathering speed. He was one of the few who had also explained his Talent. He gathered momentum and released it in his first attack, which meant his first hit in a fight was always devastating. But when they ran, he slowly grew faster as he increased his stored energy.
Matt increased his pace and got ahead of the man, along with Geraden. The earth mage was somehow able to nudge trees out of the man’s path as they traversed an untouched part of the forest.
Before they encountered the party they were being sent to rescue, they ran into a squad of golems with a party of humans.
Matt’s first reaction was to assume that they were engaging one another. But as he took in the details, the picture painted was far darker. This was a group of humans selling other humans to the golems.
The ones being sold were stripped of their clothes and bound together in a pile on the ground. Matt saw a golem handing one of the dressed and armored humans a sack as his team crested the hill.
No one needed to speak, and when the slavers noticed the rescue team, it was already too late. Matt and his comrades were already on them.
Their camp had heard of this from the others, but they hadn’t yet encountered it personally. How the golems and humans communicated was still in question, but apparently, they offered nice rewards, if the goods recovered from apprehended slaver groups were any indication.
No one hesitated to correct the injustice, and the rescue team dismantled the golems quickly. The group of slavers dropped to their knees and put their hands up with shouts of surrender.
Matt looked around after the battle. They were three-quarters of the way to their intended rescue targets. They were close enough that his AI was picking up intermittent messages bouncing off the mountains.
Basil spoke up first. “What do we do with them?”
Matt didn’t answer. He knew what they needed to do…he just didn’t want to do it. Letting them go would just allow the slavers to return to their scummy opportunism, but they needed to press on and rescue the other party.
Camilla answered, “We all know what we need to do.”
Everyone nodded. It wasn’t ideal, but they would do as the other groups who encountered bandits before them did and strip them. While, naturally, protecting the captives’ lives over bringing the bandits in for justice. A single member of the party would escort the survivors to the camp while the rest of them continued on their mission of saving the larger group.
To his surprise, along with everyone else’s, her bladed whip lashed out, and wrapped around the neck of the man who took the payment. Before the shouts of protest were out of their mouths, the man’s throat was shredded in a spray of blood.
The rest of the man’s party reacted violently. The fight was short and brutal, with Camilla getting the drop on the leader. She tackled the nearest woman and choked the life out of her with her bare hands.
Matt had to cut down another woman, whose hands had started glowing with mana. He felt sick doing it.
“What the f**k was that?”
Matt’s voice was drowned out by the others’ shouts of similar expletives. None of the slavers were left alive, except the woman Camilla was still strangling.
Looking up, hands still wrapped around the woman’s neck, she glared at all of them.
“Why would we leave such monsters alive? They would just return to their ways if we left them! If…”
Fen shouted the loudest, “We could have stripped them! And let her up!”
Camilla squeezed the woman’s neck harder. Her kicking and struggling faded as the lack of oxygen took its toll.
She calmly stated, “No. They were monsters who betrayed everyone, as well as our efforts to protect people. They would have gotten more gear and started doing this all over again.”
The shouts drowned her out, but she stood her ground and finished strangling the woman. Her brown eyes were as cold as ice and shone out of her helmet with angry defiance.
“They would have stolen more gear and continued their crimes. You’re naïve if you think otherwise. The only way to stop them was to either abandon our mission or kill them. I won’t leave any survivors for dead, and I won’t let trash like this remain. Ascenders know what the golems need people for.”
Matt hadn’t wanted to think of that particular aspect of the situation, but the best-case scenario was that they were being used as mana farms. The other options were much darker, and he didn’t have any interest in mulling them over.
Matt wanted to argue that they could have done something besides murdering them, but he held his frustration in check.
“We need to move. Let’s cut these people free and get them moving.”
The prisoners were Tier 4s and would just get in the way of their rescue. They needed to get them moving toward the camp and pick them up on the trip back with the other survivors.
Putting his words into action, he reached down and cut the bindings tying them up. After removing their gags, he was inundated with thanks and tears.
It didn’t escape Matt’s notice that Camilla moved directly to the lone woman, who when freed, cried in her arms with violent sobs. The small tufts of fur and blood told his AI everything he needed to be able to guess the situation. The woman had visible bruising and other marks on her body that the others in her party didn’t have.
They clearly were beating the poor girl, whether for sport or because of defiance, he wasn’t sure. From the claw marks on the dead leader’s face, it appeared that her bond died defending her, which made Matt shudder in sympathetic rage.
Matt couldn’t bear to think that they would stoop so low but, if they had, the entire party deserved to be killed. They were criminals, even if they just stood by and let it happen. But they should have been judged by the courts, not them.
- Writer
