The Siege of Arconia: Chapters 42-44

Everyone in the city was waiting for the raiding party to come back successfully, and the next week, they did return successfully indeed; thankfully with minimal casualties. The raiding party had wide smiles on their faces as they walked back into the city triumphant.

They recounted how the two armies had trapped the dryads between two hills, finding the perfect position to sourround them while the Liberomancers rained down fire upon them until nothing but ashes remained.

If we had been more prepared for the dryad threat, we could have done this from the beginning and avoided most of the large-scale destruction that had occurred. But again, something along these lines had never happened before, though whether or not Chipker would need to consider this in the future was something that remained to be discussed.

The cost of preparing for a potential dryad invasion in the future would be high - Hitutsa could attest to that, though the cost of ignoring that kind of problem would be even higher. That, however, was an issue for people far above me in the administrative ladder to consider.

The important thing was that the threat of the dryads was over. Or at least the major threat was taken care of for now. There would be pockets of them in Chipker for a while that monster hunters like Zhen Liu would take care of, but that could take months if not years to do.

Time…

That was what the city really needed to recover from what had happened.

The issue that the humans had been pressing the lizardmen on - a death penalty for that particular lizardman who had killed a human in a drunken fit - was dropped entirely. Many of them couldn’t even remember what it was that had caused the initial friction in the first place.

“People are like that,” Granny Qi told me as I mentioned such. “But just you watch - give them another six months, and this unity will be forgotten and they’ll be back at each other’s throats for something else.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I could tell that her family wanted to go back to their village - or whatever would’ve remained of it. Many people had already left the city the moment the army had come back as much of the threat had been eliminated - but it wasn’t like the outside world was completely safe now.

“Master Liberomancer,” Suki Tang asked me. “I hate to burden you any further, but we would like to return to our village - though we do not know what lies for us out there. If we had someone like you to help us initially…”

They didn’t have to say any more, because both Granny Qi and I set out in a few days to help them rebuild.

I had told Zeke I was resigning from my position, and after some mumbling he agreed that it wasn’t really needed anymore.

My reservations had been about being caught between the two sides because of that job turned out to be needless worrying on my end. My newfound reputation made me a hero to both sides, something the bat hadn’t been able to do.

We set out, a huge line of about twenty wagons, back towards her village with the Elephant Frog at the head of the column.

The outside world had changed quite a bit due to the dryad invasion even if the full extent of it was not completely evident from just atop the walls.

A lot of the roads had been damaged to the point that they were nearly untraversable to the wagons. Perhaps this was not intentionally, but by the sheer volume of traffic that had passed over them. The ones which were paved were mostly alright, but a good portion of the roads were made of dirt and mud, and those had transformed into what could generously be described as piles of wet mud.

Any crops that had been planted were uprooted and had withered away long ago.

Any farm animals that had been left behind; of which there were many since only a limited amount could be brought into Arconia, had been slain and drained of their blood by the dryads. Their carcasses littered the ground around us, and we would occasionally find one blocking the road.

Many of the animals brought into the city unfortunately also had to be culled as they couldn’t be fed properly and also to feed their owners. All of this was going to be a problem now as there was going to be a huge shortage of them in the future.

Occasionally, we would run into other people who had also just left the city, or had somehow managed to hide somewhere in the wilderness away from the dryads. Many of the survivors were extremely haggard, barely clutching on to life, and could only be discerned from some of the corpses that littered the ground by the fact that they might occasionally twitch or gasp for air. You could see many of their rib cages very prominently along with their other bones - it reminded me of some of the photographs you’d see back on Earth of people who had survived severe famines.

The villagers carefully inspected such people to see if they were alive or not, though the stench of a rotting corpse was rather apparent once one got close enough. The survivors had delirious expressions even as they were offered a few drops of water, most of them being too sickly to speak more than a few words.

We accepted those people onto the carts, and carried them with us towards the village after I worked a bit of healing magic. I didn’t need to use [Fish Haul] - we had stocked up well before heading out, though how things would be once we got to the village would be a different story.

As it was, even now, I had to preserve a good portion of my mana in case we were attacked.

We weren’t - though we did also find the occasional animal who had escaped the wrath of the dryads as well. We found two pigs and a cow wandering off the trail who looked lost, which the villagers eagerly caught.

Given they had no marks to prove who owned them before, they were taken as the village’s property - which I found kind of suspect, but then again I had no idea how the law would’ve handled something like this so I did not object.

As for the various human bodies we found, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. The city guard or some other government body would have to round them up, and see if anyone recognized who they were. Those that couldn’t be identified would be buried by the city. There were just too many of them for us to deal with.

While we didn’t run into any dryads, a bear did pass by dangerously close before it lost interest and wandered somewhere else.

If it hadn’t, I’d have been forced to kill it. The Tyrant Arachnea would have been more than a match for it - it had uses other than being lit on fire and with its deadly venom alone the bear wouldn’t have stood much of a chance.

Because we were traveling while being burdened with a long train of carts and the like, we were not able to reach the village by nightfall and had to make camp.

We found a somewhat elevated hill in the afternoon, and decided to set up our camp there. We arranged the wagons in a protective circle and started a fire in the middle.

Dinner was fish again, and though I got some looks asking me to show off my [Poissonnier] skill, the thing was that I had to decline for now. I wanted to conserve my energy, because someone needed to keep watch at night - and I knew that it was likely that I would be woken up even after my watch was over because I was the only person who could deal with a large threat.

I turned out to be right, as once I fell asleep after my initial watch, someone shook me after what felt like only five minutes, saying that they thought they saw a dryad in the distance.

I got up, my [Unobstructed Sight] coming in handy here.

“That’s not a dryad, that’s just a normal tree,” I told them.

“Wait - are you sure?” the villager asked, concerned.

“Yes, I am, I would see movement with these eyes of mine if it was a dryad,” I told him. It was likely that in the darkness, and with how on edge most people were, that his eyes were just playing tricks on him. He did not have my night vision ability, after all. I yawned. “I’ll be heading back to sleep for now.”

Nothing else happened overnight, thankfully, and we started on our journey again.

Now that the roads were in a lot worse shape than they were in the city, the wagons began having extreme problems, oftentimes becoming stuck and requiring a group of people to pull them out. It wasn’t that the dryads had caused more damage here, but rather that the roads there were more ill-maintained in the first place.

With all of that said, we did end up reaching the village - or where the village was supposed to be late in the evening on the second day.

The village was almost unrecognizable - Suki Tang’s house was mostly intact thanks to the fact that it was mostly constructed from bricks, but the houses that had been less well-built, which included the vast majority of them, had been completely destroyed by the dryads likely while they were scrounging for food.

Many of the villagers burst into tears at the sight of their ruined homes. Some of them had nothing more than an empty plot of land to remind them of what had once been the place where they had lived in relative peace for what was likely their entire lives.

The fields fared no better - I doubted that the dryads had destroyed them intentionally, but with the mere passing of so many of them through these areas, the crops were all ruined, and the fields would need a large amount of work to get them ready for the next harvest.

The walls, which had been rather suspect even when I had come here before with Ganny Qi during the Spirit Festival, were just a few isolated stacks of bricks two or three bricks high now.

Assessing the situation, their first priority needed to be repairing the wall if they wanted to survive out here.

The dryads by now would be quite weak from having been starved, and a single rogue one could be defeated by even a group of farmhands with ease. However, they would still need some layer of protection, not just from the dryads but wild animals as well.

Even Suki Tang’s house, on closer inspection, was not as intact as I’d thought. One wing of it had all but collapsed, and another area was almost uninhabitable. Small vermin like rats and mice were everywhere, having successfully infiltrated and seized Granny Qi’s family home.

‘This is less a village than two or three broken-down houses in the middle of the woods,’ I thought to myself. We had repulsed the enemy, but scars like these would blemish the countryside as a reminder of the terror that had struck this land. The contrast between when I had last visited with Granny Qi and now couldn’t have been more evident - whether you spoke of the village itself or the villager’s morale.

The villagers began working trying to make something of a makeshift wall, which was probably going to take at least a week to finish.

“How is our food supply?” I asked Granny Qi. Once the place was secure, that was the next most pressing concern.

“We can go and restock in the city,” she told me. “But what we have should last us for at least three weeks - don’t worry too much about food, there are also some streams nearby.”

I wasn’t sure about the streams and how many fish they would have right now - I was sure the dryads would’ve over-fished from them. But hopefully with time the fish would repopulate. Also, humans had ways of fishing the dryads likely couldn’t replicate, so maybe there was a group of fish living deep within the rivers that the villagers could grab.

I ended up staying there in the village along with Granny Qi for a total of two weeks. I didn’t really mind the time spent out here, because while I wanted to head out away from Arconia, there were other things that I had to settle first in the city before I embarked on that kind of journey.

I worked on a new Rank Three grimoire I was writing whenever I had free time and wasn’t helping the villagers out with something or the other.

Two incidents of note occurred during my stay.

One was that a dryad was spotted far away - that was it, a singular dryad, who moved rather sluggishly. While it had been fortunate enough to escape from the main army sent after the dryads, it had barely managed to cling onto life.

Although its appearance caused a large amount of panic, it was weakened to the point where I thought the villagers could easily take care of it without me. A single [Fireball] ended its pitiful existence- I honestly felt bad looking at its state even as it tried to crawl away pathetically when I approached it, but knew that there was no negotiating with it or use in keeping it prisoner.

If I let it go, or fed it, it would end up attacking humans sometime later on.

In a way, this was a kindness given that I was saving it from a slow and what was probably a painful death while its body parts withered away from lack of blood.

That had been easy enough to handle, and by the end of the first week the wall was back up and fixed to a state that it would keep any large threats out. The remaining gaps were mended hastily by a wooden fence, but again, the purpose of it was mainly to stop any threat from just waltzing into the village. The villagers still kept a tight watch, of course, but it served as a passable deterrent.

The second major incident occurred four nights after encountering the dryad.

I was deep asleep when I felt someone shaking me. “Just a while longer…” I mumbled, though the person in question didn’t give up.

“Master Liberomancer! Please wake up! Bandits!”

The last words stuck out to me even in my slumber, and I leapt out of bed, trying to get rid of the dreamy haze from my mind as quickly as possible. In a further attempt to snap me out of my sleepy stupor, I used [Create Water] and splashed some of it on my face.

Feeling fully awake now, I glanced out the window.

I had been given a room on the second floor this time, simply because it made it easier to scout things from here, and also because my range with Rank Three magic was at the point where I could snipe most things, if need be, from this place without even having to leave the house.

I saw a group of fifteen men standing outside the village walls. I could make out that some of them were carrying weapons and that some of them were wearing plate armor - though none of them had a full set on. Their loose organization and uneven distribution of weapons and gear meant that they hadn’t been sent by the city.

“Bandits…” I hissed under my breath.

I flew downstairs and ran out the front door, stopping by the hastily-replaced front gate to the village.

The bandits were standing in a group a bit of a distance away, and had sent an ‘emissary’ it seemed. The other villagers had panicked looks, but calmed down considerably once they saw me.

“What’s going on?” I asked one of them.

“They approached us ten minutes ago, demanding we open the gate and let them take whatever they wanted,” one of them told me.

Some of the bandits were carrying swords, or axes, but most of them were carrying the spears that had been distributed to the conscripts.

In short, these were probably conscripts who had been dismissed from duty and had turned to banditry for various reasons. They were supposed to return the weapons they were holding back to the city once they had been dismissed from service, but that was hardly the biggest crime they were committing so why would they be bothered with that. If you were going to turn to thievery as a means of supporting yourself, of course you’d be an idiot to give up your weapon.

“What’s the holdup?” the one standing at the gate yelled out.

I decided to take things into my own hands. “I am the leader of this village. Why are you here?”

“Are you people daft or just deaf? Didn’t we just tell ‘ya what we wanted? Open up the gate, and let us have some food, money, and we’ll be on our merry way and no one needs to get hurt,” he said.

I heard voices from behind him.

“Ugh, let’s just tear down the gate, boss.”

“If it wasn’t for that damned wall we could’ve already been inside…”

“It isn’t all too sturdy - hey, a couple of us could climb through that part over there…”

“I wouldn’t mind taking the company of a lady or two while we’re in there - whaddya say lads?”

“Shut up-!”

“They were smart enough to set up a watch and might be armed.”

“What’re you afraid of? These are backwater peasants, little more than cattle carrying pitchforks at most, don’t tell me that-”

I sighed. I should’ve just cast [Grand Fireball] on them from my window and been done with it. I hadn’t, deciding to give them the benefit of the doubt that they might have a legitimate reason for being there. I also hadn’t killed a human since coming to this world - the dryads were somewhat excusable in my mind, and I didn’t want to start now.

“Listen- you idiots do realize that you’re threatening a Liberomancer here, aren’t you?” I yelled out back. “Drop your weapons, surrender yourselves as prisoners, and you can keep your lives!”

There was silence after my shout.

“Liberomancer-”

“-magic-”

I couldn’t catch much more than a few hushed words after that.

It was doubtful that these people had a Liberomancer on their side, else they wouldn’t have had to resort to thievery in the first place. And if they did have one; certainly not one above Rank Two.

Could there be a demonic Liberomancer among them? There was the slightest possibility of that. I didn’t have any skills that could detect demonic grimoires, so I couldn’t tell for certain.

“Heck - do you think we were born yesterday?” the reply finally came from the other side. “Why’d there be a Liberomancer in a place like this? Next you’ll tell me the king and his family are here too! I’m losing my patience now, open up or- ARGGGH!”

The scream came as the Tyrant Arachnea leapt over the walls and onto the man. It was best to avoid [Fireball] given how close they were to the gate as it would be caught up in the blast radius as well. That was just one of the drawbacks to fire elemental magic.

[Summon Tyrant Arachnea] was also the best skill I had if I wanted to try to take people alive. It was able to produce multiple kinds of venom, including one that paralyzed but did not kill its prey so long as it was injected in small amounts.

On top of that, its silk was nearly as strong as steel, and it often wrapped up its prey to save them for later consumption.

Perfect for taking prisoners!

Screams echoed from outside, and I could feel the Tyrant Arachnea taking damage. It was not much, but still annoying.

“Oi! You idiots - if you kill my summon, I am going to kill all of you, you know that right? Drop your weapons and surrender!” I yelled out.

I still wanted to avoid killing them if possible.

I felt a tug on my mind from the Tyrant Arachnea - it had neutralized most of the threats outside, but four of them had run away.

It wanted to know whether or not it should chase after them.

I told it to do so, but that it should wrap up the others very securely before it did so. Once it scampered off after those who had run away, I said, “Open up the gate, and bring the prisoners inside.”

It had wrapped them all up but left them free just enough so that they could breathe - only their faces were visible through the thick coat of silk that surrounded them. They could not so much as wiggle their fingers however, and I knew that many of them had had small doses paralytic venom injected into them.

With the Tyrant Arachnea’s speed, it would no doubt catch the other four who had run away. It could see well enough at night and had other senses to rely upon, so darkness was not an issue. I did not even need to command it as it could complete this mission all on its own agency.

Meanwhile, several of the villagers moved to comply with what I had just said.

The bandits were either begging for mercy or weeping.

By now, Suki Tang and Granny Qi had come outside, as well as the rest of the village.

“What’s going on?” Suki Tang asked.

“Robbers and thieves,” I said, kicking one of them. “Who are all of you?” When he didn’t reply, I leaned closer to the man. “Speak, or I’ll have my spider devour each of you one by one. Do you know how it is that spiders eat their prey? It’s quite a fascinating process really, though I don’t think people like you would know the details. They don’t swallow or eat their prey like normal animals - they first inject them with digestive fluids until their meal is slowly broken down before they pick it apart slowly and then ingest it. Do you want that to happen to you?”

At least three of them had apparently pissed themselves at my description from the smell of things. I wrinkled my nose but continued to speak in a threatening, dark, tone. “If you want to avoid that - then talk!”

“We’ll talk! We’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything! Just don’t do that!”

They were quite eager to spill the beans once I had finished my threat.

“Okay,” I said, and walked over to one of them who looked like he could still speak. Some of them had been injected with so much paralytic venom that they couldn’t get their words our right without slurring half of them. “What’s your name- and why are you running with these folk?”

“M’name’s Guo Fu - please let us go, sir, we meant nothin’ by all this- we just-” a light kick stopped his mumbling.

“Answer the question. Why did you decide to rob this village?”

“Sir, we were let go from the army, and came back to find ruined fields,” he said. “We had no choice, sir, and decided to take our chances…”

I sighed. That was about what I had expected - and sadly this was an easily foreseeable but hard to solve problem. People, after the siege was over, would realize that they didn’t exactly have a rosy future ahead - but some of them still had the weapons they had been lent.

And many would decide that banditry was better than potentially starving or toiling fruitlessly.

These people had evidently thought the same, and assumed that a village like this would be an easy target.

My Tyrant Arachnea came back, carrying four more prisoners with it. Those who were already tied up shuddered - while most of them couldn’t turn their heads to see it, there was no way they would mistake the way the earth shook as the giant spider approached.

“What should we do with them?” I asked Suki Tang. Back on Earth you would’ve just called the police - but I didn’t know how it worked here. Was there a local sheriff or magistrate that we could send these people to?

“I say we slit their throats,” one of the villagers said. “They wouldn’t have hesitated if it was us on the other end, now then would they?”

“No sirs we would never hurt nobody we only wanted some food and-”

“Then you would have us starve to death instead!” the villager answered.

There were murmurs of agreement from the other villagers.

I couldn’t blame them for feeling that way - they had also come back home to ruined fields, but they hadn’t gone around trying to rob other people like these people. And they were right, if I hadn’t been here, these bandits likely would have had no problem either outright killing these villagers or stealing so much from them that they would have no further future.

I don’t think anyone would’ve even questioned it if we did decide to take the law into our own hands like that - as it was, it was easy enough to claim self-defense and with so many witnesses agreeing on what happened, what could the courts do?

But, I couldn’t exactly condone that kind of thinking. “Is there a local magistrate in the area we can hand them over to?”

Suki Tang shook her head. “When conflicts arise within the village, usually the elders pass down their decision together. For such things like outside thieves, we handle them ourselves - but such a thing on such a scale…”

“…hasn’t happened before,” Granny Qi said. “At least in living memory.”

I sighed.

So there was no precedent.

“Alright then, I say that we don’t stain our own hands here,” I said. “Let’s keep them tied up, we’ll drive them towards the city tomorrow morning, and dump them for the city guard to deal with them.”

It was here that my reputation was more of a hindrance than a help. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t really know much of what I was doing - it was the right thing to do by my own reckoning and with the way laws worked back on Earth, but this was a different world with different rules.

My thinking might have been very wrong - the issue was that when they saw me, a ‘Master Liberomancer’ say something, they assumed I was right.

Even if they had some doubts or wanted to dissent, a lot of them would not speak up and bury those thoughts within their hearts. And they might’ve even been correct if they chose to oppose me - but I would never know unless they spoke up, would I?

I turned to Granny Qi - as I was sure that at the very least, she would give me an honest opinion on my plan. “It seems well enough,” was what she told me. “And he has a point: let us not stain our own hands by stooping to their level.”

That settled it, though afterwards no one seemed to fall asleep. I saw many of them pacing around the perimeter of the village, or looking outside the gate to see if there was anyone else who was coming.

I knew why they were so agitated - it was one thing to be attacked by a dryad, but another to see a group of humans try to attack you, people who were supposed to be working with you, was far more disturbing. Especially given that the dryads were gone, but the people within would continue to live. And these bandits were unlikely to be the last.

My summon went to hide in the nearby wilderness, almost blending in completely under the cover of darkness. I could make it out even among the trees - but that was because I always knew where it was through our mental link together. Otherwise, even with [Unobstructed Sight] I think I might have had some problems finding it.

But I was actually glad that it was out of sight, and not just because it could easily ambush anyone stupid enough to attack us.

I didn’t feel as attached to the Tyrant Arachnea as I did to the Elephant Frog - and that was for a rather superficial reason - because it was terrifying to look at even when it wasn’t on fire. It, unlike the frog, did not appear cute whatsoever. I knew people back home who kept pet spiders like tarantulas and the like, but I had never really understood that kind of craze. I could also tell that its presence made the other villagers uncomfortable as well, in a way that the Elephant Frog just didn’t.

Daybreak came, and we loaded up the prisoners onto a wagon like they were sacks of potatoes before setting off.

The city guard did end up taking them, and from what I had heard, they were likely going to be hung till death.

Which, given what they had attempted to do, I really couldn’t argue against. Perhaps we indeed would have saved everyone some trouble if we had just done such ourselves - but at least now we were sure we had done the right thing.

However, I now had another thing to worry about while rebuilding the village. I didn’t want something like this to happen again, so I ended up hiring ten guards in the city - people who, much like the bandits, were out of work and could not return to their farms.

For now, their pay was in arrears until I got the reward that Zeke had promised me for my contributions in the war, or whenever I sold the Rank Three grimoire I had, but many of them were fine so long as their bellies were full for now.

The people we had rescued, numbering half a dozen in total, were beginning to recover and could start to walk around. They should’ve been able to be mostly functional within a few weeks. My magic could only do so much, I did not have the extra funds to hire a healer at the time.

With that, our time in the village drew to a close without further incident and Granny Qi and I returned back home.

We didn’t encounter any dryads on the final trip back either, but we remained ever vigilant, as Granny Qi reminded me - you could never let your guard down.

Back in the city, there were a lot of celebrations now that the place was less congested and people were getting back to business.

Being one of the most famous figures during the war, I had been invited to so many celebrations, from both lizardmen and humans, that there would have to have been a dozen copies of me if I wanted to attend all of the ones that I was invited to.

I did attend a few of them - like one that was held by Master Jiah Pei.

He had set up a large celebration in the bookstore that his family owned - it was similar to the other one I’d been to, but the people were far more appreciative of my presence. “Ah, come meet my family,” Master Jiah Pei said, and introduced me not only to his entire family, whose names I almost immediately forgot after he told me, but also some other important human Liberomancers.

Everyone wanted to talk to me - the hero who had distinguished himself during the fight, and I had ended up shaking so many hands that my own felt numb.

“So, I heard you’re leaving Arconia,” Master Jiah Pei told me as things were winding up.

I don’t know where he’d heard it from, but I guess my preparations to leave by this time had been obvious enough for word to get out. “Yes.”

He sighed. “I would’ve liked for you to stay - but, I guess you’re leaving for your own reasons. Whatever they are.” He did not make any further attempt to dissuade me from leaving. Had Lance told him about Earth and where I came from? That seemed highly unlikely. “There is a final bit of advice I’d like to give you - if you’re open to hearing it. I want you to remember that magic is everywhere. We Liberomancers - we like to pretend that we’re masters of the universe because we can write a few lines on paper and cast a few spells. But magic existed long before even the spoken word did, and it will exist long after we’re gone. Be it the magic that magical beasts can use, the wild magic out in the natural world, or the spirits - we are but big fish in a small pond. The Ruler of the Astral Winds considered himself to be a world-conquering emperor, but was undone by the machinations of the Spirit of Darkness. Be careful when you go out there.”

I nodded - not entirely sure what he was getting at, but feeling that parts of it did sound profound.

I did make a note to meet with the other Master Liberomancers in the city afterwards, though these were less memorable and almost seemed to blur together in a sea of faces and greetings.