There were several things that the Guildmaster had warned Sev and the others about before allowing them to leave for Elyra. The first was, of course, the possibility of bandits — the routes they normally took didn't often have bandits on them given they were rarely traveled to begin with, but the path to a Kingdom was almost always ripe for the picking. They knew how to pick their targets, of course; they wouldn't pick anyone that seemed too powerful, or anyone with too large of a delegation, or anyone who seemed like they didn't have anything worth stealing.

The other warnings were for dealing with Elyran politics in general. Vex had some idea of what they were like, and he nodded vigorously to every one of the Guildmaster's points. Don't make jokes at the expense of any noble. Don't call them out in public. Don't interfere with their businesses.

She had sighed and cut herself off midway through the explanation, because absolutely none of them (except for Vex, and even he was starting to look a touch rebellious, after a quick glance at Derivan) looked like they were planning on taking her up on her advice at all.

"If you do run afoul of Elyra's politics," she had said, and then she'd hesitated, eyeing all of them carefully as if to figure out how much trouble they were going to get the Guild in. Then she just sighed. "We'll back you up. The Guild's been trying to make some changes in Elyra for a while, but it's hard to participate in a system without being influenced by it in some way. We rotate the people that work in the Elyran branch every so often, and that's only mostly successful. Some things still slip through the cracks.

"And on that note. If any of the problems you see are with the Guild... Report them to me. But you're also authorized to deal with them. You're a Silver ranked team, now, and I'm giving you Gold authority. Make use of it."

So that had been nice.

Back to the problem of the bandits, though.

They'd decided almost immediately after the meeting that they would make themselves targets intentionally. They'd make their caravan look weaker and less well-staffed than it was. They'd leave a symbol of the Guild on the side of the caravan, to show that it might have something worth stealing.

If there were bandits en route to Elyra, then they wanted to do their part in making sure the route was safer.

To that end, they'd spoken to Max about their plan.

"It might work," she had said thoughtfully. "As long as you don't get in over your heads. If you keep an eye out and make sure you spot them before they spot you... then sure. They'll expect a diplomatic envoy to be guarded, but the standard guard team is one Silver rank and three Bronze ranks. Just make sure they don't hit the food, and remember that they might decide not to attack you anyway."

Which was fine. They weren't looking to intentionally pick a fight, and they didn't have the time nor the skills to chase down bandits that they didn't know for sure were there — but if they were targeted, they would be prepared, and they would have a plan to lead the bandits into their own trap.

Even with all of that preparation, though, Sev hadn't expected it to all work out quite so... well.

Vex had been the one to notice the bandits first — the lizardkin wizard spent most of his time observing the movement of mana anyway, when he wasn't working on one of his sketches or on a runic formula. It hadn't taken him long to notice that the ambient mana was avoiding a patch of trees further into the Sunlit Forest, and although he couldn't see any actual people, the mana had been a rather obvious tell.

From there, they'd quickly worked out a plan. [Endless Echoes] could work out, roughly, what sorts of skills the bandits had, to make sure they wouldn't be caught completely by surprise — all Misa had to do was find a few versions of herself that had hopped out of the caravan to challenge the bandits to a fight. There had been... a surprisingly large number of them.

And they'd learned from there that those bandits weren't really a threat to them at all.

So they decided to wait it out. They'd get attacked by the bandits sooner or later, but the bandits were clearly waiting for an opportunity, for them to drop their guard; they'd planned out a number of possible scenarios in the safety of the caravan, messaging each other over the system.

If they were attacked before they made camp, they could deal with the bandits in short order — Misa had more or less confirmed that.

If they were attacked while they were making camp, they would try to lure the bandits out. [Endless Echoes] came in useful here, too; they tested making camp a number of times in simulated alternate timelines, and while Misa's information-sharing capabilities were somewhat limited, the fact that the fights rarely lasted more than five minutes... helped.

As a result, all four of them knew pretty much exactly when they would be attacked, how they would be attacked, and how long the fight would take. Misa cautioned them not to be careless, though; this was exactly the sort of thing that might lure them into being overconfident, and they'd quickly assured Misa that they would take the ambush seriously, when it happened.

It was just...

"I can't believe that just took us two minutes," Sev said plainly, looking at the others, then at the carefully restrained bandits. Max had provided them with a set of particularly durable, enchanted ropes for exactly this purpose. "What are we going to do with you," Sev muttered with a sigh, and then raised a hand when the lizardkin bandit opened his mouth. "No, I wasn't asking you, don't you start talking."

Xothok snapped his mouth shut again, looking disgruntled. Further in the back, an infuriated bandit — Byrrhon, Sev vaguely remembered — tried to yell at him, and mostly failed through the [Silenced] effect Vex had placed on him.

Just him. He was the only one that would not stop talking, and kept insisting that his being defeated was a fluke. He'd basically turned purple when Vex [Silenced] him, and was in the process of doing so again now.

"I was not aware humans could turn that color," Derivan said mildly, watching him.

"We usually don't," Sev said.

"Max said she'd pick up any bandits we caught if we found them, right?" Misa asked, staring with interest at Byrrhon.

"She didn't really tell us when she'd be picking them up, though," Sev grumbled. "For all we know we have to drag them all the way to Elyra."

"We could just send her a message," Vex pointed out.

"Right, right, I'll ask," Sev said, sending out a quick message—

"And do we get any say in this?" Xothok growled out now that there was a lull in the conversation. Sev was honestly surprised that he'd bothered to wait to speak at all, but...

Perhaps he shouldn't have been. More than anything, the lizardkin man seemed tired. A lot of the rest of the bandits were quiet and sullen, save for Byrrhon; Sev didn't miss the way a lot of them were looking to Xothok like they were expecting him to get them out of this somehow.

"You're bandits," Misa said. "And we're probably not your first targets. So no, not really."

"And what's this Max going to do with us?" Xothok asked. There was a thick sort of bitterness in his voice, and he spat his words out like they were curses. "Slaughter us? Sell us into slavery?"

"What the fuck?" Sev stared at him. "No. Obviously not. I can't say I know the exact procedures, but I'm sure Max will. You'll probably be hired into the Guild and compensated fairly."

"What?" Xothok stared at Sev. "Are you an idiot? We're bandits—"

"Uh, boss," one of his men said. "I think that's a good thing. Dunno if we should argue the point."

Xothok just glared. "We tried to join your damn Guild," he said. His voice was thick with anger and the smallest hint of something else; Derivan stepped forward, seeming concerned, but he didn't say anything yet. "They kicked us out. Wouldn't listen to a damn thing I tried to tell them."

Sev frowned. There had been some mention of problems with the Elyran branch, but from what the Guildmaster had told them, it shouldn't have reached the point where the Guild would turn away people that wanted to work for them.

"Doesn't excuse your banditry," Misa said, her eyes hard. "You didn't react when I mentioned other targets earlier. You have hit others. I'm guessing they didn't survive."

"None of us have restraining skills, believe it or not," Xothok snarled. "What do you want us to do? We have barely any food to eat. There's almost nothing to hunt here. The monster corpses all disappear if we kill them. It's us or them—"

"Tell you what," Sev said. He glanced at Derivan, who gave him a nod, and then he looked over his system messages. "Max says it'll be a couple hours before she can make it here. Why don't we talk over dinner?"

"Are you fucking trying to mock us?" Xothok glared. "I just said we have barely any food to eat. I'm not going to sit here and watch while you gorge yourselves in front of us."

Sev sighed, and decided the time for words was over.

Actions were better, when it came to convincing people that you were acting in good faith.

Cooking for something like 25 people would have been more of a chore if the caravan's food supply hadn't included an absolutely absurd amount of bread — something about bread was, apparently, far more amenable to spatial compression magic than most other foodstuffs.

So dinner was bread, and a massive pot of stew, the pot itself being conjured out of the earth and sterilized with fire. That part was easy. The more complicated part was figuring out how to feed 20 people that were being restrained with ropes.

But Misa checked with [Endless Echoes], and it seemed that none of the bandits were particularly inclined to run away from the offered food, or even take off running with the food. Not when they could smell a massive pot of it nearby and were told they could ask for seconds. Nor were they particularly inclined to fight, after the rather onesided way they had been taken down to begin with. The only real problem was Byrrhon, who refused to eat, or indeed admit that they'd lost the fight.

"Leave him be," Xothok had said when approached with the topic. "Just... put some bread near him or something. He'll eat it when no one's looking."

"Has he always been like that?" Sev asked curiously.

"No," Xothok said, but he fell silent, and didn't seem to want to elaborate further.

There was a long silence. Xothok had been angry and snappy with them, right up until the part where they'd actually started feeding his men — he hadn't believed a word they said until then. Then they'd untied his men — well, mostly — and given them food, and his face had gone carefully blank.

Then they'd untied his arms, and Sev had quietly handed him his own bowl of stew, along with a hearty helping of bread.

Xothok sighed.

"What the fuck is all this?" he asked bluntly. He didn't sound angry anymore, at least; maybe just a certain kind of tired. Sev looked up from his own stew, from where he was seated in the grass, to stare at Xothok. The lizardkin was just staring at his stew, not eating.

"Food," Sev said, trying for a joke, and when Xothok glared at him he backpedaled quickly. "I'm not making fun of you. But you're hungry and we have food. I don't think it needs to be more complicated than that."

Xothok looked down at his plate for a moment. He grabbed his bread, dipped it into the stew, and took a bite; all in lieu of responding, and when he finally did, he did it without looking at anyone.

"Fine," he said, his voice a little softer. "But don't think this changes anything."