Chapter 18
We were going to be hunting bandits. It was a bit sudden for me, but it seemed that Viro had planned from the beginning to raid the dwellings of bandits or brigand wannabes, or otherwise goblins, and “use” them for my training. That’s quite a harsh training.
Bandits and thieves were slightly different. Although the places they worked on were different, the main difference was that the bandits weren’t managed by an organisation like the Thieves’ Guild.
Thieves were people who, like the orphans of the slums, had no other way to make a living and had lost their aversion to committing evil deeds. Apparently, that was why scouts from the Adventurers’ Guild like Viro would hire orphans from the slums, to keep the Thieves’ Guild from gaining more members.
However, bandits were often villagers who were in need of food.
In the case of farming villages…especially poor farming villages, they tended to have many children to use them as labour force. However, because of their poverty, the second and subsequent sons had no fields to inherit, and while it would be nice if they could find work in the village or a nearby town, those villagers who were out of work were more likely to become thief wannabes in the town and get caught, or bandits outside of the town.
However, the Claydale Kingdom was a relatively easy country to live in if all you wanted to do was survive. While the tax rate may not be the lowest in the world, the climate was mild and the forests were bountiful, so there was no threat of starvation unless there was a serious problem.
In essence, the majority of people who became brigands were those who gave in to their greed, robbing others to make their lives easier.
Moreover, the thieves of the Thieves’ Guild tended to avoid killing civilians in order to avoid escalating the incident.
But bandits did not hesitate to kill travellers. They never attacked people with guards like the nobles. They only targeted weak people and killed them to keep their mouths shut so that the feudal lord and the like wouldn’t discover them.
None among them had the guts to hold merchants hostage and demand a ransom. Perhaps because they were originally villagers, they were too cowardly to risk their evil deeds becoming known, so they killed the merchants too.
“…So, when you find bandits, the priority is to eliminate them rather than catch them. Even if you were to capture them, it would be difficult to bring them to a town with guards, and even if you did manage to hand them over, the reward would be minimal unless they had a bounty on their heads. They’ll be forced to work in the mines until they die anyway, so there’s no point in showing them mercy. You understand?”
“…Mhm.”