I hopped down from the tree and headed towards the battle. By the time I got there, it was all over. Some of the bandits may have tried to surrender, but the punishment for banditry was death, as was the punishment for defying Lord Ota's troops and resisting capture. I wasn't here to quibble over the details. My inept attempt at archery had ended up helping Hideyoshi, but it didn't make much difference to the outcome.

I was pleased to see that my students were rounding into real sword saints, at least as far as their ability to take on relatively untrained rabble in greater numbers. I still wouldn't be confident throwing them into a pitched battle against enemy elites, though. Fortunately, that wasn't likely to come up out here in the middle of nowhere. Now that I had finished up with the bandits, I had a few weeks more for lessons and then I would hand over my students back to Lord Ota.

With any luck, that would be the end of my military adventures. I hoped I had done enough to establish my organizational bona fides. A permanent post as an administrator might be a bit too much to hope for, but if I could start out as a full time teacher and then work my way up through the ranks, that would work as well.

While I was pondering over my future, my students had taken charge of cataloguing the battlefield. All told, we had killed twenty-seven bandits. Not enough to make up an army, but still a sizable group of criminals.

Back in their cave, we found great piles of rice, no doubt stolen from the tables of the surrounding villages. We also found a surprising amount of precious metals. Silver statues, silver jewelry, even a few bits and pieces of gold were all scattered around a pile of silver and gold coins. That stash couldn't have from the nearby towns. Well, even bandits had to come from somewhere. They must have harvested that wealth from some other set of victims before they headed here, for the middle of nowhere.

We also had taken ownership of five horses. They'd been tied up off to the side. A few of the bandits had headed that way and tried to make an escape while their comrades held us off, but naturally ordinary soldiers up against sword saints couldn't manage that kind of organized retreat.

"It's a good haul," I told Hideyoshi. "Prepare everything to be brought back to the village."

"We won't be able to get a cart up here or back there," Hideyoshi said.

"Is that a problem?" I asked.

"There's too much here for the horses to carry," he said. "The bandits must have brought it in bit by bit."

"Well, it's a good thing we've been building up your strength," I said. "This looks like an excellent training exercise to me."

Rather than try to deal with arranging some people to guard the stash while others transported it out bit by bit, I thought it would be much more straightforward just to load my students up and move everything in one go. It might be a bit heavy, but that just meant it would be better exercise, in my book.

I ended up taking up some of the slack in the transportation department, supporting a bundle that stretched two or three times my height overhead. It was a little shocking how much those little grains of rice weighed once you gathered enough of them together.

Even if I was doing more than my share, that left plenty to go around for everybody else. We'd loaded up the horses with just about as much as they could carry, then put together improvised backpacks for all of the people. We looked like some kind of moving company as we staggered back through the woods.

Still, even if we were under a heavier load going back than we had been going up, we were buoyed by the thrill of victory and the satisfaction of completing our mission. My students even had enough breath to spare that I could hear them swapping battle stories behind me. I smiled at their high spirits, though I was careful not to let them see that I was pleased. I had an image to maintain, after all.

Also, it wouldn't do to let them get sloppy with overconfidence. Today's ambush was easy enough for me to intercept, but if we were up against an opposing force that posted more than one or two archers I would be hard pressed to defend myself, let alone anybody else.

The long term solution to that problem was to get myself an assignment as far from the battlefield as possible. Or, in the short run, to make sure I was positioned far enough back in the army that I wouldn't be ambushed. Just in case I wasn't able to arrange such an ideal situation, it wouldn't hurt to be prepared.

"Harumasa," I called out. "If you received an arrow attack, how confident are you that you can intercept it?"

He laughed. I turned around and continued walking backwards, relying on my mana to guide my feet. Under direct scrutiny, he quieted down as he had to take the question seriously.

"Ah," he said, before settling on an answer. "Maybe one time in ten?"

That was a start. Ideally it shouldn't be a matter of chance, but I had to start with the students who I had, not the students I wished I might have. For now, we'd work on bringing the percentage up.

"All right," I said, "now that we've cleaned out the bandits you guys won't have to farm all day, so we'll have more time for creative training exercises."

It would kill two birds with one stone, hopefully figuratively. I could work on my archery while my students learned how to intercept projectiles.

The villagers saw us coming a good half hour or so before we arrived. We reached the streets of town to be greeted by a cheering crowd. The ensuing impromptu parade didn't have nearly the pomp and circumstance that I associated with modern victory celebrations, but the heartfelt gratitude of the people was more than enough to make up for it.

This was a matter of doing well by doing good. I was, of course, simply following Lord Ota's orders to clear out bandits. By doing so in the full view of the villagers, though, I was building up a reserve of good will among the people. I might never need to use it, but it would act as a sort of emergency savings account if I ever fell on hard times. Considering the state of banking in this primitive era, having a good reputation in a small town like this might even be more secure than a savings account.

It didn't take long to finish our tour of the small village, basking in the applause of the locals all the way. Afterwards, I led the men to our temporary lodgings to unload our burdens. The trophies of war made for an impressive display for the locals, but it was a great relief for us to put our prizes away so that we could walk unimpeded once more.

We didn't have time to do much more than catch our breaths before the mayor showed up to congratulate us. I could see from his expression that he was acting out of gratitude rather than political calculation. The bandits had to have been putting a lot of stress on their community. Waking up every day uncertain if you were about to be raided and lose the vital supplies you relied on to get through the winter would take a toll on anybody.

Besides congratulating us, he also invited us to a victory feast. I was happy enough to accept. I didn't want my students to get overconfident, but they still needed to be rewarded for a job well done. You couldn't teach people just through negative feedback alone. It was important to provide them with positive incentives so that they would strive to do well instead of simply seeking to evade punishment.

The feast itself was a simple affair. The village could hardly take a wide variety of food out of storage, after all. The meat that was served on the table was largely what my students and I had delivered over the previous week. Still, even simple food tasted good when it was enjoyed in good company. Especially when everybody was in such a good mood.

The general aura of celebration that had accompanied our victory march through the town also blessed the feast. Destroying the bandits may have been a minor matter for Lord Ota, hardly worth noting, but for this village it was something that would be celebrated for weeks or months. I ate without reservation and was feeling pleasantly stuffed by the time the mayor stood up and proposed a toast.

"To Lord Ota!" he said. The response was general applause. The mayor smiled and waited for the crowd to quiet down. "And Lady Hana! Thanks to their hard work, we won't be troubled by bandits until at least after the end of harvest season!"

My initial reaction was to protest that he had misunderstood my position in the medieval hierarchy. As an enlightened person from modern times, I didn't consider my status as a peasant to be an important measure of my capabilities or my value as a human being. Nevertheless, I knew that claiming honors that were above my station was the kind of thing that would end in tragedy.

But that matter, while serious, was shoved to the back of my mind by the rest of what he’d said. We had thoroughly annihilated the bandits that had been troubling the village. That particular bandit group would not be troubling anybody ever again. I was shocked to hear that the mayor expected a new group of bandits to show up by the end of the year.