Of course, all of these things meant more in a village that lacked a magician with healing magic. That said, Vandal didn’t feel comfortable with being paid for his services. This place looked worse off than both the Seventh and Fifth villages.
“In that case, please erect a shrine to the Goddess Vida. Whenever you have the time, no rush. You need only carve the holy seal into a stone and put a simple roof over it.” With that, he flew off to the next pioneer village.
Skill level increased for Surgery!
The Fourth Pioneer Village was a place of poor but hardworking people, giving their all to everything they did.
“Bugaaaaah!”
“Ooooooink!”
“Bughhhhhh!”
Until, of course, three orcs smashed through their shoddy wooden walls.
“Run for it! Orcs!”
Screams rose as the villagers fled, each of them trying to be first to get away. Adventurers would rarely have a problem handling orcs like these, but for poor refugees they were a major threat. With just one orc, the hunters and younger men could probably surround it and kill or drive it off, but there wasn’t anything they could do about three at once.
If all the men fought together, they might have stood a chance of driving them away, but the village—especially with all its farms—was quite spread out. The orc attack was sudden, so there was no way to coordinate everyone grabbing weapons and getting there in time. The orcs watched the people flee, perhaps choosing targets, and started forward on light and confident steps.
“Nooo!” The first thing they had spotted was a young girl who had fallen over in front of them. She was maybe still a year or two below adulthood, but the orcs and their dark desires didn’t care about that.
“Buh-huh!” The three orcs closed in, each one trying to beat away the other two.
“Beth! I’m coming!” That was when a young beastman appeared, sporting wolf ears and a tail. He looked around the same age as the girl and was carrying a hoe in his hands.
“Moris! You can’t save her! Run!” shouted another wolf beastman, who looked like the boy’s father.
“No! I’m not letting orcs take Beth!” The boy shook off his father’s hands and dashed toward his friend—or perhaps more than that.
“Moris! Stay back!” Beth yelled. She knew he wouldn’t be able to fight the orcs. Even Moris had to know that. If a kid with farming tools could kill orcs, no one would need adventurers. He might manage to give Beth a few more seconds; a few seconds while they beat him to death with their clubs. Even with that knowledge, Moris was unable to stop himself.
“You pigs! Fight me!” the youth shouted bravely, lifting his weapon.
The orcs grinned at this development. First they found this female, and now a juicy-looking young male was bringing himself to them.
“Buh-hoh!” One of the orcs swung his club at once, looking to make mincemeat of the boy.
“Raaaagh!” Meanwhile, Moris’s swing with the hoe bounced right off the orc’s blubber. His face paled with despair.
Blood splashed out.
Beth thought it was Moris’s blood and closed her eyes tight. Even Moris thought he had just been killed.
“That’s one down. Next. Gravifist!”
The other villagers, however, saw what was really happening. A white child had zipped down from the air at high speed, blowing up the head of the first orc.
“Blaaaaagh!” The head of the second orc was hit by a powerful Brawling Proficiency battle tech that quickly beat him to death. The technique had a big windup, making it pretty easy to dodge, but it landed with a heck of a punch.
“Buhgoh?!” The third orc snapped to his senses and swung his stick, but Vandal had trained with the likes of Braga. To Vandal, the stick was moving in slow motion. Vandal slipped in his claws, providing a more-than-lethal shot of neurotoxins. The orc convulsed, dropped to his knees, and then collapsed completely.
“Huh? Hold on?” Moris stood in front of the scene, his mouth hanging open.
Vandal turned to him and spoke. “That was reckless, sure, but humans tend to let their emotions overtake them. I’ve experienced it myself. What I’m trying to say is—I’m glad I was able to save you.”
“Ah, yeah, thank you!” Moris replied purely on reflex, although he was still stunned at the sight of this boy. The child was half covered in blood and had an arm pointed at an odd angle as he floated in the air.
“Er . . . you have nothing to fear from me,” Vandal said. As always, he lacked confidence when meeting new people. Just because he had saved this boy from being attacked, it didn’t mean the kid wasn’t going to cry “another monster!” and charge.
“Hey, your arm . . . ”
Vandal had broken it, his limb failing to withstand the speed of his descent and the impact of killing the orc. He promptly used his other arm to straighten it out, then used Spirit Bodification on the insides. He corrected the positioning of the bones and arteries; he’d be all healed up soon.
“I’m healed,” Vandal said.
“Already?”
Beth’s eyes were open wide as well, but Vandal’s next comment snapped them all back to reality.
“Forget me. Do you want to carve up these orcs? Three of them should provide quite a feast for the village.”
Vandal had held back from using magic, not only because the kids were so nearby, but also to allow the villagers to collect the meat afterward. It would be a waste not to eat it.
When Vandal asked the spirits of the orcs about why they attacked the village, they told him that their “boss” had given them orders to have some fun in this village.
“Tell me about your boss,” Vandal said.
“He unleashed us and went away.”
“Is he an orc?”
“No. Human.”
“Do you know his face and name?”
“Called himself Boss. Has a human-shaped nose.”
“No pointy ears. Darker than you.”
“No horns or wings.”
The orcs hadn’t got any smarter by becoming spirits. That was about all they knew. Vandal estimated that a human Tamer had, for some reason, unleashed orcs on this village. He had some Lemures search the vicinity for suspicious individuals, but they turned up nothing.
He sighed, wondering if there was someone selling a starter pack of local knowledge that he might use. A silly thought he had, while using his claws to slice up the orcs. Most solo adventurers possessed the skill Dismantle, but not Vandal. He did have the skills Cookery and Surgery, and by applying them in liberal doses, he could do the same thing as Dismantle. He stripped down and sliced up the orcs faster than anyone in the village could hope to, and even started to cook the internal organs, knowing that they wouldn’t keep.
The villagers told him that they were facing a water shortage, so they didn’t have much water for cooking. Vandal could solve this with his death attribute magic, but he didn’t want the villagers to see him using it.
Vandal therefore found a moment to sneak away. He slipped behind an empty house and quickly used Golem Creation to dig a well. He used Astral Projection to go underground, locating an underground cavern with water that would be hard to reach digging by hand. Then he used the earth located between the surface and the water source as material to make Earth Golems and Rock Golems, pushing water to the surface. Finally, he used the Rock Golems to harden the walls of the hole, and the well was complete.
Of course, he had also been sure to confirm that the water for fit for drinking.
“Whoaaa, no way! There’s a well here!” He called the villagers over, doing his best Conan impression.
“Impossible! There can’t be a—there is! A well!”
“What? That’s not possible!”
“Water? Is there water?!”
The villagers came crowding around. Vandal took the water he had already drawn from his new well and returned to his cooking. Then he carefully cooked the offal.
“Death to Bacteria and Detox don’t physically remove anything from these organs,” Vandal muttered. That was why he needed water to wash everything out. Even if it wasn’t going to cause any harm, no one wanted to eat the contents of an orc stomach. The same went for Vandal.
“Thank you, great envoy! You not only saved the children but have given us this wonderful well! How can we hope to thank you?”
“The future of our village is assured for years! No, decades to come! Thank you, thank you!”
The villagers easily put two and two together about the whole well situation. Vandal hadn’t expected to be able to deceive them completely—he just didn’t want them to know that he was using unknown magic and skills. Now they simply believed he had used earth or water magic to make the well.
“Sorry, I really am in the middle of cooking,” Vandal said. “If you want to show your gratitude, please, just make a shrine to Vida.”
“Very well! Once our village flourishes, we shall build a mighty temple!”
“No, just a small one will do,” Vandal replied.