Andric flew through the forest until he saw light coming from ahead of him. He quickly stopped and landed on the ground, then cast an invisibility spell on himself. He watched the area around the light for a few minutes, and he constantly noticed more things about the area in front of him.

The light came from many tiny fires placed throughout a wide area. Some were on the forest floor, but some were in the trees. Eventually, Andric also noticed the humans standing in the trees, and the complex array of branches they used to move around on. From what Andric could see without making any movements himself, there were roughly fifty bandits patrolling the outer rim of their fortress.

Past the scouts who were in the trees, there were several buildings and tents. The tents were large and draped over long branches, while the buildings were thin and tall. Lights inside the tents cast shadows on the cloth, but Andric couldn’t make out how many people were inside the tents. He guessed that anywhere from an equal amount to four times the amount of the people who were in the trees were inside the fortress.

Actually, fortress wasn’t a good name for it. A campsite would be more accurate. There were no sturdy walls. There were no mounted weapons. Due to the density of the trees around the area, there wasn’t enough space for a wagon to make it all the way into the campsite area. If someone attacked the campsite, they would have a difficult time arriving on a horse, negating the benefits of a cavalry charge.

The bandits had an array of branches giving them increased mobility in the trees, making them far more maneuverable than anyone who didn’t know the area. Andric frowned while thinking of how to attack the campsite. He could try bombarding them with powerful magic, but he couldn’t be sure that there were no powerful martialists who would be immune to his spells. In that was the case, he would need to kill them before they noticed his presence and brought up their defenses.

The more Andric thought about his plan of attack, the less certain of it he became. If it was the past, when there were no martialists, he could simply throw out a few spell and pick off the survivors. However, in the new age, a single powerful martialist could kill him with only a few moves. If he didn’t kill the power martialist with the first strike, he would only have a few seconds to escape.

The problem with using excessively powerful spells was that Andric didn’t want to damage the loot that the bandits might be carrying or have stored away. In the campsite he was at previously, all the loot that wasn’t made of metal was disintegrated. Even before that, most of the non-metal loot was torn apart and deformed. The swords of the bandits who were trapped in the Gravity Bomb were all twisted into unusable shapes by the attraction force.

Andric thought for a while longer, then settled on one idea: poison. Through time immemorial, poison had taken the lives of thousands of ‘untouchable’ opponents. Whether it was placed in food or water, coated on a blade, or applied to a surface, poison was the method that weak people used to kill strong people. Andric’s only question was how to affect everyone in the campsite with the poison.

The first and most obvious thought would be to poison the air. Indeed, Andric knew dozens of colorless and odorless airborne poisons that could incapacitate a man in three seconds flat. However, Andric didn’t know how those poisons would fare against a martialists. Also, if the martialists was inside a closed building, the poison wouldn’t be able to reach him.

The next though was to poison the water. Andric only knew that Novice realm martialsts still needed to eat and drink, but he didn’t know about Apprentice realm martialists or higher. If they didn’t drink water, they wouldn’t encounter Andric’s poison. Although Andric knew a few waterborne poisons that were much stronger than the airborne poisons he knew, they weren’t anything if they weren’t ingested by their targets.

Andric resisted pacing while he continued to think. Even if he couldn’t poison their bodies, he could still poison their minds. He decided upon his plan, then slowly backed away from the campsite and disappeared into the forest.

A few hours later, a heavy rainstorm rolled in above the campsite. Rain poured down relentlessly, putting out many of the fires that illuminated the campsite. The bandits patrolling from the trees were the most effected, but the bandits inside the tents and buildings were only minorly inconvenienced.

Time passed, and morning came. The storm showed no signs of relenting. Eventually, a few bandits asked, “What’s going on with this rain?” but nobody had an answer.

At noon, the rain was still as heavy as it was during the night. The dark clouds went on for miles, but none of the bandits scouted far enough to know that the rain suddenly stopped only about five hundred feet from their campsite.

That evening, before the sun had fully set, a group of ten bandits left the campsite. They wore thick cloaks to protect themselves from the rain, and they carried crossbows along with their swords. Andric watched the group leaving and grinned.

At last, less than a day after he began his assault on the bandit campsite, his first group of prey were leaving the safety of the nest.

Andric followed the small group of bandits for a short while, then cast ten spells from behind them. The ten spells morphed into giant icicles, which then accelerated to ludicrous speeds. The icicles pierced the back of each bandits’ head, killing them instantly. In the blink of an eye, ten bandits were killed.

After killing the bandits, Andric jumped to their position and checked their clothes. None of their weapons or armor interested him, but they did have a few coins and pieces of jewelry. He didn’t understand why the bandits were carrying jewelry with them when they were supposedly going to rob someone of their jewelry, but he didn’t look into it.

The loot from this group of bandits was the same as the loot from the previous group of bandits. They increased Andric’s coin total to nearly one hundred silver coins, and the amount of copper coins he had was enough to make it the rest of the way. One hundred copper coins were worth one silver coin, and one hundred silver coins were worth one gold coin. With all of Andric’s funds added together, he had one gold coin.

Andric reinforced the rain spell that hovered above the bandit campsite, then returned to his position of vigilance, waiting for more bandits to leave the campsite. He watched continuously, for over ten hours, just to catch ten bandits coming from the campsite. But, he knew that the frequency of bandits leaving the campsite would only increase. Eventually, more and more would want to resume their banditry, or their leader might want to mount an expedition. If Andric was lucky, the leader of the bandits would come out commanding his subordinates, making him easily identifiable.

Over the course of the next few hours, several groups of bandits left the campsite. Some of the groups only had two members, and the largest ones had ten. At midnight, the last group had gone out, and nearly eighty bandits had been killed by Andric. Like the groups before them, they were instantly killed by Andric’s icicles, and their bodies were disposed of a short distance away.

By the time morning broke and none of the groups of bandits who left the campsite had come back, some of the bandits inside the campside were growing nervous. This didn’t both Andric, because there was a large gap between bandits mysteriously going missing and a powerful magician killing them. At the moment, none of the bandits in the campsite knew that their opponent was merely a single magician.

At dusk of that day, almost the entire campsite was in uproar. The missing bandit groups were essentially confirmed deceased at that point, since it would be ridiculous for not even a single one to return after a full day. The groups that had left, which were supposed to be hunting for food, should’ve come back before morning.

As more uneasiness spread through the bandit troupe, an apparent figurehead needed to calm the outfit. The old man walked out of a stone building and jumped cleaning onto the roof, showing off his high-stage Novice realm martialist abilities. The moment he stepped out of the building, the noise around the campsite lessened, and the campsite went entirely silent when he jumped onto the roof.

“Men of Erfdag, what is this notion of missing patrols? Do any of you need to be told what has happened to the fellows who’ve left and not returned?”

The old man’s aged voice spread clearly across the campsite, even through the loud rain. Andric could hear him from a distance away, and he began to wonder if the old man was the leader of the bandits. If he was, his age was outside Andric’s expectations.

The old man continued, “We don’t choose this life because it’s an easy one. We all know what could happen when we leave the fortress. There’s always a chance of never returning. But, more importantly, there’s a chance to show those alboche who the real men are!”

The old man’s words were met with cheers. Among the bandits who called the campsite - the fortress - their home, none of them were upstanding citizens. They were the downtrodden, the abandoned, the oppressed. Few of them were born into their way of life.

“They didn’t want us their cities! They didn’t want us in their sects! They didn’t want us, then, so now they’ve got us, now! Are we going to let him getting away with this, or are we going to go out and slaughter them?” the old man asked, questioning all the men around him. Again, his words were met with thunderous praise.

Then, after the old man finished speaking, a younger man appeared at the entrance to the building. The younger man had a chiseled face and thick arms, and each of his eyes showed a disinterested gaze. His looked over the crowd of bandits that had assembled in front of his building, but his expression didn’t change in the least.

“Veremund…”

“Veremund.”

“Veremund!”

A chant echoed throughout the campsite, combining the voices of nearly two hundred bandits into one. They repeated the name of their leader. Andric trained his eyes on the man who most recently walked out of the building, but he couldn’t see very much from where he stood. In order to make sure nobody patrolling the campsite saw him, he was quite a distance away.

Andric memorized a few features of the man supposedly named Veremund, then cast a spell on the ground. The spell traveled through the dirt, making its way toward the campsite. When it reached its destination, it exploded while still underground. The explosion of mana had no effect on the campsite or the people inside it, but it did affect a spell that Andric had setup a while ago.

The secondary spell activated, and a massive crater opened up beneath the campsite. All of the buildings and tents were sucked side, and only a few capable martialists were able to escape. Hundreds of martialists fell into the muddy hole and were unable to pull themselves out of the sludge.