I was dragged out of the room onto the plaza in the middle of the camp, naturally while I flailed around wildly. The anger of the bandit boss was detrimental to me but worked in the favour of the plan I came up with. I was soon knelt down on a podium, a dagger just a few centimetres away from my neck.
Soon afterwards, a horn was blown and the broad majority of bandits gathered in front of me. Not only that happened though. The horn was also a sign for my unit to shoot a few fire arrows towards the trees we painstakingly rolled down the hill. It wasn’t as noticeable as I hoped it would be, but at least I could see an orange hue in the distance.
“The message. Now.” The bandit boss threatened me once again, to which I just smirked. I didn’t want to have the dagger inside my throat though, so I still hurried up and said what I needed to.
“Uhm … hi? We do hope that the music we played wasn’t too loud or that we ruined your business. That was never my intention, but we are still here because we were tasked with eradicating you. There are five hundred of us in the woods and another fifty thousand waiting when we don’t succeed. As you see, you are already dead. You just haven’t realized it yet.” The bandits growled for the most part, but the person that stood behind me earlier didn’t react the same. He grabbed his chin, as if he was deep in thought. “But we aren’t cruel and certainly want to end this fight between us in a more civilized way.”
“You lot want to disarm us and to execute us afterwards, so why would anyone of us ever listen to you? We will fight!” The bandit boss shouted towards the bandits and a few bandits held up their weapons and roared. What a barbaric display …
“You can do that if you want, nobody is stopping you to go out and die. If you would please listen to me … we want to play a game with you. It is a game of survival or however you may call it. The rules are fairly simple. You will challenge me to a one versus one in whatever you want. Swordfight, archery, a fistfight, whatever. There is nothing but a few simple rules. You can choose if you want to make the fight lethal or not. If you win and I die, everyone who hasn’t challenged me so far is considered a winner as well. If you still chose to challenge me in a non-lethal way and lose, you still die. The challenge has to be at night and there is no other way to escape this place alive except to win against me. Has everyone understood the rules?”
Laughter. Nearly everyone was laughing as my words seemed so comical that nobody believed them. I probably could have given them their death verdict and they would still laugh because of how childish and innocent I acted. Well, in a sense, I just sentenced most, if not all to death. The bandit boss threw me to the side violently. I rolled a few times on the floor until I came to a complete stop. With shaking legs, I stood up and faced the bandit king.
“I suppose you want to fight me first?” I was still a bit shaky but acted a lot more confident now.
“I only have to kill you and your superiors let us go? In that case, I challenge you to a duel with daggers.” He whistled once and soon and a dagger was thrown in front of me. It pierced the stage beautifully and I picked it up rather swiftly. I held it completely wrong and my grip on the weapon was pretty loose. The bandit boss didn’t wait for me to fix my stance, but rather rushed directly towards me.
By telling everyone that they just needed to kill me and everyone else would be free, I painted a target onto me the bandit boss couldn’t ignore. I mean, everyone could question his bravery if he wasn’t the first one to fight against me. The effect of their leader´s death should be immediate and exactly what I was aiming for. Astonishment, rage, and in the end fear should disorganize the bandits enough to start havoc even when they came all at me at once. For that though, I first had to defeat him.
The bandit boss was never taught how to fight properly. He just rushed towards me like a bull which saw a red cloth. His footwork made me sick just by looking and the scream he gave from him didn’t serve any purpose either. He probably won his fights through sheer strength alone, but that just wouldn’t do it against me.
I positioned myself sideways, lifted up my left leg and shifted my centre of gravity to the front as my arm catapulted the dagger forwards. At least, that’s what I wanted to do until every alarm bell in my head went off. Way too late did I notice how the bandit accelerated to inhumane speeds, forcing me to let me fall down to the left as I wanted to avoid the slash that was aiming directly for my face. The dagger beautifully reflected the moonlight as it cut through the tip of my nose, barely short of doing any real damage. Still, as I let myself fall on the ground and rolled to the side, just to use the momentum to stand up swiftly again, I already lost a bit of blood. The bandit king waited in astonishment. The little girl just evaded this inhumane strike which probably none of his subordinates could even see.
Meanwhile, I was astonished as well as I held my already healing nose. That I was the one to get hurt first was unexpected.
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