Author's Note:
I felt like writing a new chapter for this story. The chapter is a little short, but I think it works for the post-action phase.
XXX
Story Arc: The cavalry has arrived
Episode 1: The Errant Knight (III)
Chapter 3: A Good Samaritan
Plot: The bandits have fled, but the problems remain, and so does Arthur Nearl. Leaving while a village suffers is not in his nature.
XXX
POV Narrator
Mistral was the largest kingdom by territorial extension in all of Remnant, a geographical vastness that stretched along the entire eastern continent of Anima. It was a land born and raised on extreme contrasts. On one hand, the surface exhibited a refined and Renaissance-like culture, celebrated worldwide for its deep love of art, monumental architecture, and the sacredness of untouched nature; on the other hand, a ruthless criminal underworld hid within its depths, ruled by a social division as rigid as it was invisible to a superficial eye. But far from the sumptuous and elevated capital, distant from the pulsing and glamorous heart of the kingdom, reality scaled down into a decidedly rougher, more rural, and genuine daily life. Among towering mountain ranges with snow-capped peaks, dense rainforests lashed by humidity, foggy marshes, and fertile valleys, lay dozens of small settlements forgotten by the central government, forced to rely only on their own strength.
Lotus Village was one of these.
Being geographically isolated from any power center or military garrison, the settlement was mostly self-managed and defended by its own inhabitants. The total population counted barely a few hundred souls, a mixed and close-knit community of Humans and Faunus who coexisted in a tranquility that was almost surprising by Remnant's violent historical standards. Of course, it was not an idyllic or perfect place; racial tension could occasionally be felt smoldering beneath the ashes, and the occasional bar fight involving alcohol and broken chairs was a daily occurrence, but overall, the spirit of rural cooperation always prevailed over ideological differences.
Lotus Village owed its miraculous survival to a fortunate geographical coincidence: it sat right on a well-trodden path. It was not one of the major trade routes patrolled by the continent's armies, but it was a frequently enough used detour to guarantee a constant flow of merchant caravans and solitary travelers. They would choose to stop within its reinforced wooden palisades to rest, repair their wagons, and refresh themselves before resuming their journey toward the wild frontiers.
Founded about eighty years prior, Lotus boasted no grand written history or legends of illustrious founders belonging to the nobility. Its chronicle was one of ordinary resilience. Thanks to a good dose of blind luck and, above all, the timely intervention of passing Huntsmen and Huntresses over the decades, the small village had managed to keep the constant threat of the Grimm at bay, continuing to prosper and maintain its peasant peace.
Unfortunately, today Lotus Village had been struck by a terrible, bloody misfortune, followed, however, by a miracle so incredible it seemed to have come straight from the illustrated pages of an ancient fairy tale.
Among the few people left alive and well, capable of witnessing the destructive madness and the wonder of those events, were Caterina and Dolly, two girls born, raised, and weaned within the palisades of that rural settlement.
Caterina was a twelve-year-old cat Faunus, petite and lithe at one hundred and forty centimeters tall, with long black hair framing her delicate face and two red eyes—bright, vibrant, and curious; that day, she wore a single-piece dress of light black cotton, paired with little red shoes worn out by the dust.
By her side, literally shielding her with her own stature, was Dolly, a fifteen-year-old dog Faunus girl. Taller and sturdier, standing strong at one hundred and sixty centimeters, Dolly wore her brown hair short in a tomboyish cut, had warm yellow eyes with a protective expression, and wore a practical white short-sleeved t-shirt, long brown work pants, and heavy black boots of stiff leather.
The two friends, united by an emotional bond so deep and visceral that it made them seem like a pair of blood sisters, were spending a quiet and ordinary day, lulled by the usual, monotonous melody of Lotus's peace.
Then, out of nowhere, the hell of the frontier descended upon the village. A group of ruthless bandits, armed to the teeth and devoid of morals, raided the settlement, breaching the palisades. The local militia—which usually only handled maintaining public order, breaking up fights, and keeping troublesome travelers from doing foolish things—was caught completely by surprise in the middle of the day. Despite their desperate courage, the defenders were brutally and systematically overwhelmed by the raiders' firearms; within minutes, many of them fell to the ground in the mud, gravely wounded or killed without any mercy.
Dolly, being the older girl and driven by a fierce protective instinct toward the younger one, wasted no time on tears or panic. She grabbed Caterina by her left hand, squeezing it so hard it almost hurt, and together they ran breathlessly, their hearts in their throats, toward the old local stone church. Once inside the sacred building, carefully avoiding the main alleys patrolled by the criminals, they climbed up the creaking wooden stairs until they reached the highest and narrowest point of the bell tower, where they hid in the dusty darkness among the gears of the bronze bell. The older girl was convinced that the bandits would show no interest in a building so old, bare, and lacking in safes; and even if they did, they would struggle quite a bit to find the entrance to the staircase, which was carefully concealed behind a heavy, worn, and dusty velvet tapestry.
Up there, in the suffocating silence of the tower, Caterina clung to Dolly as she never had in her entire life, burying her face in tears against her friend's chest so as not to hear the gunfire and the screams of terror constantly echoing from below. Dolly, despite her heart beating wildly against her ribs and her canine ears straining with fear, tried to give strength to them both, stroking the younger girl's black hair with her trembling hand and whispering words of comfort under her breath, swearing on her very life that they would get out of this situation completely unharmed.
The situation, however, escalated further, taking on apocalyptic proportions. Through the narrow vertical slits of the bell tower, designed to let the sound of the bell ring out, the girls began to see the first orange flames rising from the roofs: the bandits were systematically setting fire to several civilian buildings after plundering them. While on one hand the bell tower was in some ways the most isolated and safest place in Lotus, on the other hand, it was also the highest point in the entire valley—a visual trap from which they could watch the entire disaster of their world without being able to do absolutely anything to stop it.
At that destructive sight, the spirits of the two young Faunus plummeted, crushed by the pure despair of witnessing their childhood and their home burn in a bonfire of hatred. What Caterina and Dolly did not yet know, however, was a fundamental and physical rule of these wild lands: fire always generates smoke. And smoke, rising dense, acrid, and black into the clear, blue sky of Mistral, is a sign visible from miles and miles away beyond the mountains.
A sign that, sometimes, draws heroes.
The smoke had just sent out an involuntary distress signal.
When the situation seemed to be inevitably unfolding toward the worst, toward the total massacre of the settlers, sudden and blinding flashes of crackling golden light began to appear right at the edge of the village, piercing through the curtain of black smoke.
Caterina, moved by a feline twitch, wanted to peek out past the stone to see what was happening down there. Dolly, having always had a soft spot for watching the mountain birds nesting on the peaks, always carried a small brass pocket binocular in her pocket—a precision instrument that over time had come in handy on more occasions than one would think. Just like now. Quickly adjusting the focus with her trembling fingers, Dolly looked out through a large hole in the masonry of the old bell tower; she focused the image and saw a figure that would remain etched in her memory for the rest of her life.
A magnificent and imposing horse, clad in heavy, polished silver armor, carried a mysterious armored man in its saddle, armed with a technological bow and with his face completely hidden by the unnatural darkness of a midnight-blue hooded cloak.
"The cavalry has arrived," Dolly murmured, her breath catching in her throat in an expression of total, bewildered surprise.
"Let me see, Dolly," Caterina said, gently nudging her friend's hip to make room for herself to see what was happening on the dirt ground, firmly believing that those lights were good news.
The cat Faunus grabbed the brass of the binocular and saw clearly how the hooded hero, moving at unhuman speed on the steed's back, shot arrows of pure concentrated light at the bandits, literally making them explode and killing them on the spot.
"That's what you deserve for causing trouble in Lotus Village!" Caterina exclaimed with a suddenly shrill and vengeful voice, while her feline ears snapped forward.
The two girls, with the eagerness and adrenaline of youth, began to feverishly share the binocular, passing it back and forth from hand to hand in rapid turns so as not to miss a single moment of the unfolding combat in the central square. It was practically a one-sided slaughter, a purging of pure justice, until the hero in pristine armor directly confronted the supreme leader of the bandits—an imposing woman with long black hair, armed with a bizarre and gigantic red and black sword.
The fight, according to the ecstatic eyes of the two girls, was something absolutely epic, a dance of flames and compressed wind that made the building walls tremble. In the end, the bandit leader miraculously escaped death by stepping through a spatial rift, a dark portal, while her remaining live subordinates fled in total panic toward the nearby rainforest, abandoning their loot in the mud.
"We have to go talk to him!" Caterina exclaimed with a voice full of primal excitement, spinning around and racing down the wooden steps of the bell tower at breakneck speed.
"Don't run!" Dolly yelled, leaping forward to chase after her and following her cat-eared friend down the staircase, which smelled of old incense, in an attempt not to leave her alone in the middle of the still-smoking village.
XXX
A short time later, Caterina and Dolly were guiding Arthur Nearl through the debris-littered streets toward Fabio's clinic. The building stood as a solid two-story structure, made of solid wood and local stone, with large windows designed to capture as much natural light as possible.
The interior architecture was rational and well-organized: the ground floor served as the first-contact area, which included a welcoming waiting room with wooden benches, the reception desk protected by a counter, and the main room used for emergency medical examinations. Upstairs, on the other hand, were the inpatient rooms—small, quiet, and acoustically isolated spaces for when the doctor needed to keep the most seriously ill or convalescing patients under close observation.
The clinic had sustained no structural damage during the bandits' brutal attack; its exterior walls were miraculously free of scratches or smoke marks. This had surely happened because the Knight of Light had appeared on the battlefield before the criminals could proceed with their systematic plundering and target that specific peripheral area of the village as well.
"We're lucky, this place is intact. If anything had happened, the nearest doctor would be a three-day journey away," Dolly said, letting out a sigh of deep relief and showing a sincere smile upon seeing the clinic perfectly upright.
"I am a healer, among other things," Arthur said in a calm and reassuring tone, his deep voice echoing from beneath the fabric of his cloak, revealing the nature of a man of many and extraordinary talents.
"I'm sure any form of help would be appreciated, but maybe you should lower your hood before going inside," Dolly said, her canine ears folding slightly to the side in a timid gesture; she did not want the dark and mysterious appearance of their savior to be perceived in a negative or alarming way by the already terrified patients inside.
"Don't be shy, we inhabitants of Lotus Village are good at welcoming solitary travelers," Caterina said, playing the friendly cat and moving the tip of her black tail with a cheerful rhythm to instill confidence in him.
'The girls have biological traits completely similar to the inhabitants of Terran. If there is no social stigma or political persecution in this world against people with animal appendages similar to the Kuranta, I should easily be mistaken for a native of these lands,' Arthur thought, drawing a quick mental parallel with his homeland. He unhooked the upper laces with a fluid movement of his gloved fingers and slowly lowered the hood of the Cloak of the Wayfarer, revealing to the daylight the magnetic intensity of his green eyes, the symmetrical cascade of his golden hair, and the large, majestic horse ears that immediately straightened on the top of his head.
Dolly's cheeks instantly turned as red as ripe strawberries at the sight of Arthur's delicate and elegant features without the coverage of the shadow. The dog girl averted her gaze out of embarrassment, fidgeting with her fingers.
Caterina remained completely silent, still as a plaster statue, but her pupils dilated heavily; she kept a dreamy, fixed gaze on the paladin's face, while metaphorical, invisible little hearts seemed to float lightly around her warm head.
"You're a horse Faunus, cool," Dolly said, regaining a modicum of vocal stability and finding it immensely reassuring to have a powerful Faunus Huntsman by her side in such a dark moment for her community.
'He's a prince straight out of a fairy tale,' Caterina murmured in an ecstatic whisper, her hands clasped under her chin, completely focused on purely aesthetic matters rather than logic.
"Not that human Huntsmen are bad, but it's better to have one of our own kind, less chance of incidents happening. Even though most Huntsmen and Huntresses tend to look past racial issues," Dolly added quickly, waving her hands in front of her in a flutter of anxiety, absolutely not wanting her words to be mistaken for racist prejudice or an offense toward the humans of the village.
"Understandable," Arthur said, nodding with martial gravity; after all, the young knight possessed vast firsthand experience with the dynamics of racism and social discrimination, even if in his world of origin such atrocities were mainly linked to and directed toward the unfortunate infected suffering from Oripathy.
'If I'm dreaming, please don't wake me up,' Caterina murmured with a theatrical sigh, her feline ears pinned back, clearly lost in a daze due to the dazzling beauty of the knight of Kazimierz.
Dolly, seeing her friend totally incapable of handling the situation, spun around and gave her a quick, sharp pinch on her outstretched arm to snap her abruptly back to material reality; she wanted to stop her at all costs from making a fool of herself publicly in front of such an important guest, and above all, she wanted to avoid making a fool of herself by direct association.
"Let's go inside," Dolly said aloud, regaining a formal composure. She grabbed Caterina by her left arm with an iron grip, pulled her sharply close to shorten the distance, and whispered into her ear in a choked, imperious tone: 'He's attractive, alright, I agree with you, but get a hold of yourself!'
Arthur, pretending with impeccable heraldic gallantry not to have noticed the whispering and embarrassment of the two young Faunus, followed the two girls' steps past the wooden threshold, stepping into the medical clinic of Lotus Village with a measured and proud stride.
XXX
Once past the solid wooden threshold, the first thought of the Elder Pegasus, as his green eyes methodically scanned the environment illuminated by the Dust-lamps, was devoid of panic: 'The situation is not that bad.'
The waiting room was packed to capacity. There were dozens of women resting on the benches, teenagers leaning against the stone walls, children huddled in the corners, and a small number of militia men; however, a quick clinical assessment revealed that most of them presented only superficial wounds, friction abrasions, and light cuts from shrapnel. A couple of village women, who wore white aprons stained with soot and were clearly acting as impromptu nurses or care assistants, moved quickly through the rows, clutching linen bandages and disinfecting newly arrived injuries. The more serious cases, those requiring surgical intervention or hemodynamic stabilization, were surely located upstairs with the doctor. Fortunately, a real medical assistant in a blue uniform was among them, helping them out.
"Caterina, Dolly, I'm happy to see you unharmed," one of the nurses suddenly exclaimed, lifting her head from a bandage. The woman looked like a forty-year-old version of Dolly: the same sturdy build, the short brown hair, and two large dog ears that snapped straight up in relief.
"I'm happy to see you too, Mom," Dolly said, letting go of her grip on Caterina's sleeve and taking three quick steps to wrap herself in a warm, solid hug against her mother's chest.
'So that's why she insisted so much on coming here first,' Arthur thought, as an invisible smile brushed his lips and he shifted his analytical gaze to the other wounded in the room to establish triage priorities.
The knight immediately noticed a human woman sitting on an isolated stool, her head poorly bandaged with a cloth soaked in blood; the mother held a small child close to her, barely four or five years old, who gritted his teeth with a sad and pained expression, his right leg visibly deformed and bent in a nasty bone fracture.
'Time to play the part of the benevolent paladin,' Arthur thought, moving with a silent, regal stride toward the woman. Seeing an imposing, armored stranger approach like that, the woman should logically have entered a state of agitation or fear; instead, nothing happened. There was something in Arthur's slender figure, a sort of calming, soothing, and inherently sacred aura that prevented anyone in his vicinity from losing their mind or giving in to panic.
"I am here to help," Arthur exclaimed in a melodious voice, extending his gloved right hand toward the injured woman. In a millisecond, a pulsing, visible white-green energy ignited around the knight's arm: it was a powerful combination of pure White Mana, tied to the paladin's sacred structure, and Green Mana, imbued with the regenerative forces of deep nature. An excellent magical combination for healing.
"May I heal you?" Arthur asked, keeping the energy flow suspended a few centimeters from his fingers, having already mentally formulated the structure of the healing spell.
The woman, hypnotized by the warmth radiating from that light, simply nodded her head. Arthur immediately released his magic: the white-green light detached from his hand like a liquid mist and passed from him to her, enveloping the bodies of the mother and her son in a beneficial shroud, initiating the process of accelerated cellular regeneration.
Within seconds, the woman regained a healthy, rosy complexion in her face and her labored breathing vanished, making her feel suddenly completely vitalized; she touched her temple with her fingers and felt no more throbbing pain. Cautiously, she removed the linen bandage: beneath the fabric, there was no longer any trace of the laceration, her skin having returned smooth and perfect. The child seemed as good as new too: his bones realigned beneath the muscles with an imperceptible magical click, and the little boy instantly went back to walking and jumping on his healthy legs, before leaping forward and enthusiastically hugging Arthur's armored leg to thank him.
"Dolly, who is he?" the nurse with the dog ears asked, dropping a roll of gauze onto the wooden table and widening her yellow eyes, urgently wanting to know who this mysterious miracle worker was.
"He's the Huntsman who sent the bandits running," Dolly answered with seriousness, straightening her back and pointing at the paladin with a proud nod of her chin.
"No, he's a magical knight from a fairy world," Caterina said with shrill enthusiasm, jumping in place and gesturing with her hands, clearly captivated and taken by everything she had seen him do on the battlefield.
Dolly's mother wiped her hands on her apron and approached Arthur, studying his golden hair and Pegasus physiology. "Mr. Huntsman, I am Mara, Dolly's mother, and I am a nurse in this clinic. First of all, I want to thank you for the help you provided; if you hadn't been here, the situation would have worsened drastically," she said, bending her knees slightly to offer a formal and sincere thank you on behalf of the entire Lotus settlement.
"I am a knight, not a Huntsman; I was simply in the right place at the right time," Arthur said with total heraldic humility, giving a slight nod of his head and not considering that he had done much from his own personal perspective as a hero of justice.
Mara, having met some eccentric Huntsmen and Huntresses over the course of her working life in frontier clinics, knew perfectly well how eccentric these warriors could be and how attached they were to bizarre titles or personal codes, so she decided not to say anything about it so as not to upset him.
"I saw that you have a healing Semblance; how good are you at using it?" Mara asked in a suddenly serious and professional voice, narrowing her eyes to understand how much Arthur's abilities could be utilized immediately to manage the village emergency.
"I cannot resurrect the dead, regrow lost limbs, cure mental trauma, or heal diseases. But if a patient is alive, breathing, and their brain is intact, I can work miracles," Arthur offered a general but extremely precise overview of his extraordinary healing capabilities.
"Come with me, we have patients who need your help," Mara said without hesitating a single second longer; she reached out, firmly grabbed Arthur's gloved left hand with her firm grip, and pulled him behind her, leading him with quick steps toward the flight of wooden stairs that led to the clinic's second floor, where the wounded in imminent danger of losing their lives were crowded.
XXX
The subsequent hours were frantic, chaotic, and exhausting for the entire Lotus Village.
The sudden attack by the Branwen Tribe had been a horrible, bloody surprise, and many of the terrified inhabitants took a long time even to emerge from the underground shelters and realize that the criminals had finally fled, leaving behind nothing but smoke and empty shell casings. The settlement's mayor, Paolo—a human in his fifties, one hundred and eighty centimeters tall, characterized by a robust physique weighed down by years of administration, tired black eyes, and ruffled brown hair peppered with obvious streaks of gray—had the most fatiguing, stressful, and grueling hours of his entire political career.
However, walking among the rubble of the square with his hands clasped behind his back, Paolo could consider himself deeply relieved for two very specific reasons.
Number one, his private residence was happily among those structures that had remained completely intact and preserved from the bandits' attack. Therefore, at least tonight, the elderly administrator would not be forced to seek makeshift shelter with surviving neighbors or sleep uncomfortably on a cot in the town hall's public meeting room.
Number two, a mysterious and formidable Huntsman had saved the day before the raiders' fury could worsen any further. In the harsh logic of the Mistral frontiers, it was decidedly better to mourn a partially damaged village and a few dead rather than witness a total massacre with a village razed completely to the ground and the entirety of the population exterminated.
Blind luck had truly been on their side on that dramatic day, because the self-proclaimed Huntsman possessed a prodigious healing Semblance and a shapeshifting weapon imbued with a highly powerful blend of Wind-Dust.
The presumed medical Semblance had saved countless human and Faunus lives on the second floor of the clinic, restoring to full health everyone who had been severely wounded in the chest or limbs; this proved to be an absolute miracle, especially from an economic and social standpoint for the community. In a small rural village of these dimensions, in fact, if a considerable fraction of its active inhabitants had been bedridden for long weeks, or potentially for months due to their injuries, the local economy and agricultural harvests would have remained completely frozen, condemning Lotus to famine.
Furthermore, the devastating wave of air unleashed by the weapon imbued with Wind-Dust had proven incredibly useful in extinguishing the building fires in their infancy, choking the flames before they could spread to the granaries and drastically limiting the overall structural damage.
All in all, looking at the final balance, Lotus Village had emerged almost unscathed from a crisis that should have wiped it off the map: there were only about thirty dead, mainly young militiamen who had done their duty, and only a handful of buildings weathered by fire were currently considered at imminent risk of collapse.
Now, however, sitting at his solid wooden desk, Mayor Paolo urgently had to deal with another thorny bureaucratic problem: figuring out how to adequately pay that lavish Faunus Huntsman for his services, which had proven entirely indispensable for the very survival of the village.
XXX
The noon hour had finally arrived over Anima, and the surviving population of Lotus Village was painstakingly taking a breath of fresh air and a break to eat lunch; an act of pure and absolute necessity after the acute terror of the warlike events and the recent, exhausting hours of manual labor to put out the fires and minimize structural damage.
The only ones not touching food, remaining motionless like ghosts among the rubble, were the grief-stricken people who had lost a relative, or those who had seen a large part of their belongings and their lives catch fire or be brutally stolen by scavengers.
Among this group of empty stomachs were also Arthur Nearl and Mayor Paolo, who had appropriately isolated themselves and gathered in the silence of the town hall office to speak behind closed doors, away from indiscreet eyes and ears.
'If my past experience helps me predict the course of events, I will now receive a formal thank you, a modest monetary reward, and an immediate, subsequent request for help with some other local problem,' Arthur thought to myself. The Planeswalker sat composed on a simple wooden chair in front of the desk, yet his body language, the impeccable posture of his spine, and the subtle aura of authority he emanated made him look like an absolute king sitting upon a golden throne.
'Is this boy by any chance a secret member of some noble, high-society ancient family from Menagerie, or what?' Mayor Paolo thought intently. Observing Arthur's physiology from the other side of the table, the elderly administrator could not help but suddenly feel small, inadequate, and clumsy, as if he were in the presence of a figure of immense historical importance.
"Are you well, Mayor? You seem not to be present," Arthur observed in a calm tone. He shifted his emerald gaze to his interlocutor's face, understanding instantly that the man before him was not focused on the material reality of the meeting at all.
"It has been a decidedly fatiguing morning," Mayor Paolo said, sighing deeply and being brutally honest about it as he massaged his aching temples.
"Perhaps you have already heard it repeated countless times today from the mouths of the settlers, but I want to tell you in person: thank you, you saved Lotus Village from extinction, and I seriously doubt any of us will forget it anytime soon," Mayor Paolo said, leaning his elbows on the desk.
In the settlement's past, minor problems and raids had certainly occurred that required the fee scale and professional intervention of a passing Huntsman or Huntress, but Lotus Village had never been as close to the abyss and in danger of losing its life as on this cursed day.
"I only did my duty as a knight in its simplest and purest form: to protect and help the innocent, while punishing the wicked," Arthur said in a quiet and solemn tone of voice, devoid of any trace of arrogance.
'Well, it's nice to see that nobody in this world is born perfect. We have before us an incredibly skilled, attractive Huntsman, endowed with a highly useful medical Semblance, but with a bizarre, childishly obsessive passion for fairy-tale knights. Honestly, as long as he does his job as effectively as all the other professional Huntsmen, as far as I'm concerned he can call himself a superhero,' Mayor Paolo thought with a touch of frontier cynicism, well aware that psychologically normal people almost never tended to undertake the dangerous career of a hunter.
"As for the financial compensation due, if you wait a few days to give us time to organize ourselves, we could certainly scrape together a suitable sum from the warehouses for the monumental service you have offered us," Mayor Paolo said, twitching his lips slightly in the hope that he would not have to squeeze and completely drain the community's already meager funds.
"Keep the money to finance the repairs of the damaged buildings. All I really need to travel is an updated geographical map, essential provisions, a dry place to sleep tonight, and something warm to eat," Arthur said with detachment. In the course of his travels, the paladin had long since learned to do without many superfluous materialistic objects and local currency.
"Is that all?" Mayor Paolo asked, widening his black eyes with an expression of total, bewildered surprise, almost not believing his own ears.
"If you have a town library, I would very much like to visit it, and furthermore, it would be particularly appreciated to receive a single raw bar of iron or steel," Arthur added, defining his priorities.
The first request was purely strategic: to gather as much written information as possible on the inner workings of this new planet without having to ask strange questions to people or resort to covertly listening to others' conversations in taverns. The second request was decidedly more personal and tied to his passions: metallurgy and laboratory work were among the crafts and artisanal professions that the young Kuranta had mastered over his lifetime, much like alchemy and runic inscription. All three disciplines had come in handy for him in various emergency situations.
'An eccentric, altruistic, and even inexpensive Huntsman; we have been blessed with shameless luck,' Mayor Paolo thought, feeling an immense weight lift from his chest at the thought that he would not have to touch the village's emergency funds to pay off their savior.
"I am absolutely sure we can satisfy these more than reasonable requests of yours. We can find a clean, vacant room in the main inn within minutes; the town hall library is rather small and modest, but it houses all the essential books on the history, geography, and art of the kingdom. Furthermore, the local blacksmith will have no problem giving you the best tempered steel bar he has in his workshop as soon as he opens his doors early tomorrow morning," Paolo replied, recovering quickly from his initial surprise. A smile of genuine and deep gratitude finally illuminated his tired, wrinkle-lined face.
Paolo passed a rough hand through his ruffled brown hair, feeling the crushing weight of the last few hours partially slide off his shoulders. The magnificent prospect of not having to drain the emergency monetary funds meant he could immediately buy the lumber and nails to rebuild the homes of the families left roofless.
"If our formal conversation is finished, I would gladly go to eat something and rest, and then perhaps do some patrol rounds around the perimeter of the village," Arthur said, feeling a real and unpleasant emptiness in his stomach. Despite his immense magical talents and transcendent capabilities as a Planeswalker, he still remained a creature of flesh and blood; and healing so many wounded people in a single afternoon had consumed an exorbitant amount of energy.
"You more than anyone deserve a moment of absolute rest, but we have one last, crucial matter to discuss before you go. The bandits fled in fear, yes, but the Branwen tribe is vindictive: they could reorganize and return to finish the plunder," Mayor Paolo said, assuming an extremely serious, anxious, and tense expression.
"They are already dead, but they simply do not know it yet. I intend to go finish exactly what I started in the square," Arthur said with a voice that suddenly grew cold, hard, and sharp as steel; he had already firmly decided to pursue the bandits' tracks into the forest and destroy them all, from the first to the last, to eradicate the threat at its root.
Mayor Paolo let out a small, liberating sigh of relief. Frankly, according to the written law of the Kingdoms, he should have played the part of the just and institutional man, reminding the Huntsman that the civil code dictated capturing criminals alive to send them to trial in a Mistral prison. But when one found oneself so painfully far from the Kingdom's capital, blood matters were inevitably handled the old-fashioned frontier way; besides, Paolo strongly doubted those bandits would have been merciful to them if the roles had been reversed.
"Do as you see fit, you are the hero in shining armor here; you certainly know better than I do how to handle bandit scum and monsters. I am just a humble mayor of a small rural village," Paolo said, lifting his hands in a theatrical gesture, formally washing his hands of any legal or moral responsibility for whatever would happen in the forest.
"Once the bandit problem is definitively resolved, you could even stay at Lotus Village for a couple of days to enjoy our best complimentary hospitality; for the surviving inhabitants, it would be immensely reassuring to have a... permanent knight around, as it would drastically reduce the chances of a future Grimm attack drawn by the negativity," Mayor Paolo said, attempting to push his luck one last time to secure an elite temporary bodyguard.
"Until the moment of my departure, neither man nor beast shall touch a single innocent of this place; if they try, they will have to go over my lifeless body first," Arthur declared solemnly, pivoting on his legs and rising to his full height from the chair, while his blue cloak settled with a rustle.
"Thanks to those words, I will finally be able to sleep peacefully tonight," Mayor Paolo said, relaxing his shoulder muscles and now wishing only for a warm plate of food.
'What exactly is a Grimm? I will find out somehow tonight by reading those history texts,' Arthur thought to himself, giving a formal nod and exiting the mayor's office with measured steps. He had several matters to attend to and much information to absorb before beginning his ruthless night foray.
To be continued ...
XXX
Author's Note:
In the next chapter, Arthur Nearl will face what remains of Raven's bandits and encounter the Grimm.