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TinyBard t1_j451q73 wrote

The leader of this bandit group had the most unfortunate face I had ever seen, it looked like he had made a habit of running headlong into every wall he came across since childhood. His face was strangely flattened, and he had more scars than teeth, and I could only see two scars.

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He laughed heartily as the pair of 'guards' hired by the caravan master dropped their weapons and raised their hands. They both looked to have no more battle experience than the merchant who had let me ride on the back of his cart.

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I sighed and carefully marked my place in the book I had been reading and prepared to be shaken down... again.

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Luckily, my most valuable possessions weren't valuable to anyone aside from myself. The group of bandits were unlikely to want my few books, and my staff didn't look like much more than a stick. I had spent the last of my money paying for my spot on this caravan. I was hoping to make it to the university in the rather pompously named Imperial City, where my healing magic would be valued rather more than it was out among the unwashed masses.

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By all rights, the caravan master should have been paying me twice what he was paying his guards to accompany his wagons, and even then he would be getting a fantastic bargain. But anything aside from martial strength or flashy offensive magic was looked down on in the Carvallian Empire. Which was unfortunate as the Carvallian Imperial University was widely regarded as one of the greatest centers of magical knowledge in the world, rivaling even the fabled libraries of the long dead Aaragean people.

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A scream of pain pulled me from my contemplation. I looked up just in time to see the fat caravan master fall to the ground. The bandit leader pulled his sword free and grinned evilly at the rest of us. He made a gesture to his men and they started forward, death in their eyes.

I frowned deeply, robbing caravans this close to the Imperial City was brazen enough, but murdering the entire group? Either these men had a death wish or...

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I sighed, pulling my staff from the back of my belt. In its current form it appeared to be a simple foot long stick, one that might have been taken from the branch of any of the hundreds of trees that lined the road. The only difference was that this particular stick had been polished and oiled to a rich brown.

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I ran a trickle of magic through the stick and it instantly expanded in my hand to a six foot long pole, richly engraved with arcane symbols inlaid with silver. These symbols began to glow faintly as I pointed the staff at the nearest bandit, a scrawny man whom I could smell from six feet away. The man jerked slightly, as though he had been stung by an insect, and fell forward onto his face. Dead.

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I don't think any of the next six bandits even registered me as a threat. They had all fallen to the ground, unmarked but also unmoving, when the leader finally noticed the small woman, apparently barely out of her teens, waving a staff at his men, and those men falling inexplicably dead to the ground.

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This bandit leader was apparently ready for magical resistance, he shouted at a black robed figure who had been standing back from the road. This figure also produced a staff and started towards me.

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The mage was undoubtedly warded against all sorts of magical effects, fire, ice, and lightning would be unlikely to do more than ruffle his clothes, and he would be prepared with active wards if any large objects were thrown at him. Mage duels tended to be flashy showy things with the winner decided by the mage with a larger magic reserve.

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The bandit mage fell dead as easily as the rest of his crew. Seeing their trump card fall with apparently no effort put the fear of God, or rather, the fear of Me into them. The three survivors turned and fled, while the leader stumbled and tried to run, but found his legs wouldn't work properly, jerking and twitching, sending him sprawling to the ground.

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I stalked forward, pausing to place a hand over the wound in the caravan master's chest, which immediately stopped bleeding. A quick fix to be sure, but it would keep the poor fool from dying while I dealt with the bandit.

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The bandit, who I was pretty sure was actually an assassin of some sort, was blubbering and nearly crying as I stepped carefully over his dropped sword and crouched down next to him.

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TinyBard t1_j451qrk wrote

"How- What-?" he stammered."Magic, and magic." I replied reaching out and placing the index finger of my left hand over his heart.

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As I touched him, he stopped trying vainly to crawl away and the color drained from his face. I could practically smell the terror coming from him now. Unfortunately, the fear in him would probably not be enough to get me the answers I wanted, so I began to speak.

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"Did you know that with less effort than it takes to move a finger, a single blood vessel in the brain can be pinched off? Death is nearly instantaneous, and the magic is so subtle that blocking it requires full body warding."

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The bandit swallowed hard, and I could feel his body tensing as he prepared to run, I could almost see the electrical impulses travel along his nerves to his muscles. The look of confused fear on his face when he didn't take a swing at me and run would have been comical if I was the type of person who enjoyed killing.

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"I'm sure that you were never taught this in whatever school of hard knocks you attended." I said softly. "But the human body runs off electricity, which is the same stuff that lightning bolts are made of, only much much weaker. A very simple spell can disrupt the signals coming from your brain to your muscles, you can tell yourself to punch me in the face all you want, but your fist will never hear the message while you are in my power."

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The faint smell of urine touched my nostrils. Great, well, that was probably the cue to start asking questions.

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"Who are you after?" I asked quietly enough that no one could overhear, not that anyone from the caravan was likely to willingly come near me now.

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The bandit swallowed again, looking queasy. "We was supposed to git this fancy bird-" I held back a grimace at the butchery the man was making of the language. "'is some sort'a lordling, what is supposed to inherit or summtin'."

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Parsing that sentence took me a second, their target was likely a noble heir, probably female, though that was less certain. I was pretty sure that Carvallian inheritance laws allowed for daughters to inherit, though there was some stipulations that I couldn't bring to mind at the moment. In my defense, I had intended NOT to get involved with the nobility during my stay here.

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Oh well, in for a Pent... or however that saying went. I was certain that I would not get an answer to my next question, but I had to ask it anyway. "Who hired you?" I asked, again, keeping my voice low.

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The man's jaw slammed shut with such force that I'm sure he would have cracked teeth if he had any remaining. With the magic circulating through my eyes, I could make out the Geas swirling around his neck, breaking that spell was well outside of my expertise.

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I sighed and tapped him lightly on the chest, his eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped backwards, unconscious.

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As I turned to tend to the caravan master, I gestured at the bandit while addressing the two guards, who had recovered their weapons from the ground.

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"Bind him securely and load him on one of the wagons." I said curtly, "I'm sure that someone in the capital would like to question him."

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As the two men jumped to obey, my eyes found two of the merchants who had joined this caravan, a man and a woman, the man was covertly stowing something distinctly sword-shaped under his robe, and the woman was looking at me with the kind of hard eyed look I associated with nobility.

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Well, that wasn't hard to figure out.

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I ignored the noblewoman and her guard as I knelt next to the caravan master, whose name I still couldn't remember. Luckily the sword hadn't hit the heart, or the man would have been dead before I could do anything.

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Instead the blade had only pierced a lung, the wound was clean enough, in the sense that it was a single cut that wasn't particularly ragged. I doubted the bandit's sword was particularly sanitary.

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Stitching the wound was a matter of a few minutes concentration, and cleansing any potential infection took another couple of seconds.

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In that time the patrol of guards I had been half expecting rode up and demanded to know what had happened. The guards were no doubt there to "discover" the dead noblewoman so that whoever wanted her dead could capitalize on it right away. But finding a distinctly not dead caravan threw a wrench into the plan.

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I'm not the best at reading people, but I was pretty sure that the leader of the patrol was the only one who expected to find us, the rest of the group seemed to react normally.

As we set off under the protection of the patrol, I could practically feel the eyes of the noblewoman fixed on me the entire way into the capitol.

So much for staying out of politics I guess.

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Tequima t1_j48fjog wrote

If this were the start of a book, I would definitely read it!

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TinyBard t1_j48g74g wrote

I enjoyed the world this prompt inspired. I'll probably write more when I have time.

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