"I'm telling you, I heard someone snoring," hissed a voice.

  Seriously? Again? Was I really that much of a snorer? My parents had never mentioned it. I needed to figure out how to keep [Expert Stealth] active in my sleep...

  At least it wasn't Leo's voice this time. The fight at the bandit camp had proven he was vastly more powerful than any of his subordinates, so as long as he didn't turn up in person, I had a decent chance. I just needed to avoid any fair fights.

  "You're not the only one. Sounded like it came from over here," said a second voice.

  "Really? I thought it was from over there," said a third.

  "Shh! The snoring stopped. He must be awake. What if he hears us? What if it's that guy who fought the boss to a stalemate?" said a fourth.

  "Then we're fucked, but really, can you imagine someone like that sleeping rough in the middle of a forest?" said a fifth.

  When I said I wanted to avoid fair fights, I was thinking more of things being biased in my favour. Five against one was rather too biased in the other direction for my taste. On the other hand, they'd referred to their 'boss', so they were almost certainly from the bandit camp. I'd fallen asleep feeling guilty to the point of being sick, but after a surprisingly good night's rest, I was mostly just angry.

  Those child-murdering scum all needed to die.

  "Hey! Who's there?" called the first voice, loudly.

  "What the hell are you doing?!" hissed the fourth.

  "Oh, come on. It's probably just a runaway from a local village who decided they didn't feel like starving to death. If this was yesterday, we'd have found them, fed them and pointed them back to our village."

  Starving to death?

  I was getting the impression that... what was his name? Count Harvent, was not as good at territory management as Baron Cargellen. And yet, wasn't count a higher rank than baron? Sometimes I wished I'd had a better education, but often I doubted things would make sense even if I had.

  "I swear it was over here," said the third voice, from right under my tree.

  The fools had split up.

  I lightly pushed myself from my branch, dropping behind him and clamping hand over mouth as I slit his throat. Blood spurted, but the guy reacted by grabbing my wrist, hard, easily overpowering me and ripping it away from his face.

  "...!" he said, trying to scream through a slit throat, but only succeeding in bubbling uselessly. I plunged my dagger into the back of his neck just as he gave up on making noise and bit into my hand. It took all of my self control not to scream myself. And then he finally slumped in my arms.

  "Well? Did you find anyone?" called the second.

  I lowered the corpse quietly and bolted in the opposite direction before climbing up another tree.

  "Well?" repeated the bandit.

  How the heck did he fight back with a slit throat?! That was the highest level human I'd killed. He must have had far higher physical Stats than me. Thankfully, aside from their boss, none of the bandits seemed to have combat Skills. In fact, I'd seen very little evidence of Skills at all. Perhaps they didn't have a supply of skill crystals, and the boss had become the boss because he already had suitable Skills?

  Whatever the reason, it was becoming obvious that I'd been lucky. They'd said they took runaways into their village. I hadn't been killing professionals; I'd been killing people like my mum—at a decent level, but without an appropriate Skill build for fighting. Had I tried to fight a level thirty-nine adventurer or professional soldier—or a bandit that had taken up banditry young and had obtained skill crystals that supported their occupation—I'd doubtless be dead half a dozen times over.

  Now my hand was bleeding, with several punctures where teeth had pierced. That was going to make it really hard to take out the other four.

  "Hey! Over here!" yelled the fifth bandit. "Bob's dead! He's been stabbed, and his throat's slit!"

  "Shit," said one of the others, then the four survivors went silent.

  And that was going to make it harder again. They wouldn't split up again, wouldn't give their position away, and now they were looking for an enemy.

  Thankfully, they didn't immediately find me. [Expert Stealth] was sending a constant stream of warnings, but the sensation of being utterly overwhelmed, like when Leo had smashed it, wasn't there.

  "Come on out. We know you're here," shouted the first voice.

  "Who even are you? Why are you attacking us?" shouted the second.

  Obviously, I didn't answer.

  "It's not a local. It's not going to be one of the count's men. It's not either of the people who attacked us back at the camp, either. The first one wouldn't bother being sneaky, and the boss killed the second."

  "Did he? I never saw no corpse."

  "Oh, come on! You saw the damage. No-one could have survived that. Anyway, if it was someone who did survive, again, they wouldn't bother being sneaky. They wouldn't need to."

  "Didn't the boss say something about the new kid he brought in having [Expert Stealth]?" asked one of them.

  "You think a kid killed Bob? Wasn't he almost at the second milestone?"

  "Stats don't mean shit if someone gets the drop on you. You know that."

  "Then where's the kid now, if it's him?"

  "Could be anywhere. Could be right here, listening to us. It's not like any of us have detection Skills. We should get out of here, and stick together. Don't expose our backs."

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  "Getting out of here is all well and good, but where do you propose we go? An invisible assassin is nothing but the icing on the cake. We have nowhere to go. There's a reason the boss waited so long before giving the instruction to abandon our base. It was a suicide order."

  "To Cargellen canton? We could turn ourselves in?"

  "Hah! Baron Cargellen would just hand us straight back over to the bastard count, and you know it."

  "Bah. If we were all going to die anyway, we should have staged that uprising we were all talking about."

  If they were so desperate to survive at any cost, why didn't they volunteer for the slave mines? They were perfectly happy to sell others.

  It didn't seem like I'd get the chance to assassinate the rest; they were being too careful. But not only did I really want to kill them, but they'd correctly guessed the 'new kid' was their assassin. I'd rather that knowledge didn't leak, as far as that was possible.

  Even if I couldn't touch them now, that wouldn't be true forever. They were all awake for the moment, but they had to stop to sleep at some point. So did I, admittedly, and they likely all had higher Constitution than me. On the other hand, I was freshly rested, and still had water left, while they weren't and didn't; they'd fled the bandit camp without supplies. I could see their weapons still on them, but not one of them had a backpack. I could easily find food in the forest, and unless they had [Foraging], they couldn't.

  What I couldn't do was track them, so I'd need to wait for them to stop before I ranged out of sight of them.

  "We should head back to the base," suggested one of them. "No way would those people who attacked us stick around if they were there to rescue one of the kids, and unless they had storage items, it's not like they'd be able to loot everything. The boss would have been careful not to destroy the food stocks. Unless the attackers burnt it all out of spite, the supplies will still be there."

  "We won't be getting any more, though, not when we've lost all our best fighters. We won't be supplying Greyforge any longer. It's not a bad idea, though... What would feed Greyforge for a week will feed us four for years."

  "If we're going to do that, we should hurry. Others might have the same idea."

  "But don't hurry too much, or we might turn up before those murderers have left."

  Murderers... Seemed a bit rich, coming from them.

  Actually, that reminded me. I brought up my Status, checking for a Mark I'd ignored in the heat of the moment.

  Yup, there it was. [Murderer I].

  That was... terrifyingly accurate, actually. I closed the prompt again. I didn't want to think about it. Besides, I had a damn good reason.

  Right?

  Yes, I had a good reason, and I still had a good reason. It wasn't just me lying to myself, and, given the experience bonus I'd had for beating my pursuit, it seemed I no longer needed to worry about the baron's men chasing me down. Combined, they were pretty good reasons for why I silently pursued the four as they travelled back the way I'd come. This time, I tried to pay attention to the direction, but although there were faint hints of dawn—the eastern sky, when I got glimpses of it, was a dark navy rather than a speckled black—there was still no sun. Still, the vague direction of 'east' was enough to approximately orientate myself.

  My only concern was the possibility that Leo was still around, but I was oddly reassured by the bandits' description of a suicide order. Given their comradeship, I imagined Leo fighting to the death, buying time for his subordinates to escape, because it was the only chance they had. Which raised questions about who the heck the baron had sent after me, but now that he was gone, I didn't want to know.

  The bandits very much seemed to be an 'us' versus 'them' group. If you were a member of this canton, you were part of the 'us', and the bandits were your best friends. Come from outside, and you were no better than monsters in their eyes.

  By the time we got back, the sun had risen, displaying the damage in the stark light of day. The palisade was still standing, apart from the section near the gate, but the interior of the camp was in shambles. Half the huts were in ruins, the other half damaged where they'd been struck by debris. The prison hut was gone completely, only a crater serving as a reminder of where it once stood. No bandits stood watch on the battlements. No guards stood at the gates. Nevertheless, the group I was pursuing weren't the first ones back. Another trio were already rooting around in the ruins.

  Thankfully, Leo wasn't amongst the trio. Even so, I'd rather they weren't there. The more people around, the greater the chance they'd set a significant watch when the time came to sleep. My aim was to kill them all and loot the place, and I didn't fancy seven against one, especially given that these were some of the higher level bandits, combat Skills or not. Worse, if I waited until night, there was a decent chance that even more of them would gather. That would not only make things harder for me, but there was a very real risk that if enough of them got back together, they'd decide they were once again a viable bandit gang and resume their child-kidnapping activities.

  Hmm... On my first visit here, I'd remarked upon how flammable the place was. The first three to get here had set up a campfire, and while all seven were being vigilant—who could blame them, given that someone had come out of nowhere and wiped the base, and then I'd assassinated one of the escapees—there was no carefully organised guard, and [Expert Stealth] was gleefully whispering to me of an abundance of blind spots and safe paths.

  A good fire would make an excellent distraction.