With a spider summoning spell in your arsenal, you walk through the purple portal. You emerge on the other side in a thick oak forest as the portal closes behind you. You are just a couple of rows of trees away from the edge of said forest. Further ahead there’s an uneven field of rock and moss filled with tree stumps. The emptied field stretches for over fifty yards and leads to a fifteen feet high wooden stockade with six roofed watchtowers forming a half-circle against a steep mountain-side. The emptied field provides a great view for the people inside the towers and ensures that sneaking up to the stockade is nearly impossible.

The half-circle of the stockade appears to be simply the first line of defense as it is formed around several tower-like, square, rock structures built into the mountainside. Or rather, it looked like the structures were carved out of the very mountain they were pressing against. All of the rock towers have narrow windows on three of its sides in rows of two or three, depending on how far the tower protrudes from the mountainside. The windows themselves are nothing more than pitch-black, square holes in the rock. The tallest of the four towers is around five stories high.

Even from the edge of the forest, you can hear noise coming from inside the stockade—laughing and shouting. It’s buzzing with life.

You almost criticize your sister for failing to inform you of what awaited here but reconsider. Inform me of what? That the outpost of bandits is an outpost and has bandits inside?

Still this might be slightly more than you were prepared for. And even if your sister is both confident and capable of storming the whole thing alone—and that’s assuming she knows what she’s doing—your previous encounter with bandits has taught you that it would not take more than a couple of well-aimed arrows to put you down.

You consider if perhaps returning to the corpse-filled front yard of your humble establishment might be a better idea.

“Ariadne, are you able to summon that teleportation portal mid-combat?” You ask just in case.

“Yes, My Lord!” She nods and you almost sigh in relief, that you have a back-up plan. “Though it will take three hours before I can use it again.”

“...” You say nothing. That’s information you could have used earlier! You consider the benefits of walking through a forest for three hours. Such activities are considered healthy.

“Nihihi, what do we have here?” You hear a female voice from above. No, it is not a Goddess, speaking with you from the heavens.

About twenty feet above your head, on one of the thicker branches, sits a girl in her late teens. One of her legs hangs freely from the branch. She has shoulder-length white hair—the same color as her bunny ears that are as long as her forearm. She wears some kind of a form-fitting black waistcoat with a high neckline and a weathered white coat with wide sleaves on top. The bottom part of her outfit consists of little more than black shorts and ankle-high boots. You don’t fail to notice the two sheathed katanas strapped to her side. She already has her thumb on the guard of one of the swords, ready to unsheath it.

“Looks to me like a couple of intruders!” She says with a smile, revealing a single cute little fang.