[Yonten]

Supplied with all the information and resources the villagers could provide, they built up the plan for the Cautious Raid, and the results came in two steps.

The first step, the one that made up the entirety of the ‘cautious’ in Cautious Raid, depended on the Coroner’s dangerous stock of concoctions and Yonten’s efforts.

The bandits’ stronghold was a farm, just at the northeastern end of Dokka. From the top of a hill overlooking it, two points of interest could be observed: the main house, where the leader of the bandits took residence, and the stables, where the villagers’ children were held captive.

According to the villagers, the stables were guarded by five men: three outside, and two inside. Of the bandits’ forces, they were of the best. The hopes of many rescuing attempts met their end at those five’s hands.

The Coroner brought out the chemical marvel of the day, a dark powder wrapped in a small cloth. Upon heating, it would emit odorless fumes that had a sleep-inducing effect.

Placing the cloth on the ground, she backed a step away, leaving the stage for him.

Yonten knocked the end of his staff on the ground, and a small mound appeared under the cloth. Another knock, and it started moving, bypassing the farm’s fences and sliding slowly towards the stables.

“Must be rather convenient to be an Elemental Smith,” the Coroner mused.

“Not really.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw the Butcher frown. “What do you mean?”

Yonten wondered whether he let something show, or if it was the Butcher’s overly compassionate nature at work again.

At any rate, he ignored the inquiry, focusing his attention on the mound that was finally within range of the stables. A few minutes later, he knocked his staff on the ground, and the mound ceased moving, flattening as if it never existed.

Then Yonten spun his staff. The flame he lit was too small to be seen by the three bandits guarding the front of the stables’ gates, and the same applied for them four, too. But Yonten felt his success, and he guessed the cloth must’ve caught fire by now. It was only a matter of time before the fire reached the powder it held and released its full effect.

“The cloth is aflame now, but there is no smoke,” the Beauty noted.

Yonten squinted at where she looked, at loss as to what flaming cloth she meant. It couldn’t be that she could actually see the flame Yonten lit up, right?

“What?” the Beauty said, immediately tensing up for a fight by his stares.

“I’m starting to suspect that you do have some good eyes,” Yonten replied, for once earnest.

A shame that the Beauty couldn’t tell. “I’ll—“

“It’s an attribute of the extract I’ve used,” came the Coroner’s voice, addressing the Beauty’s note, interrupting whatever threat of bodily harm she wanted to inflict on Yonten. “No odor, no smoke, and no trace once it’s been totally burnt. It’s the reason why it’s still used in warfare to this day.”

Yonten didn’t think merely putting those bandits to sleep would be enough. “Don’t you have something that could take them out for good?”

The Coroner raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m leaving their judgment to the villagers.”

“I see…” he murmured, then regarded his companions flatly. “In this quest of ours, we will have to bloody our hands at some point. I do hope you’re prepared for it.”

“I am,” the Butcher replied, severity in his gaze and tone. “But we also should stay our hands as much as we can.”

That gaze held something interesting, one that had Yonten glimpsing at depths beneath the mellow surface of the Butcher’s.

He smiled.

Perhaps his companions were more intriguing than he originally thought.

It took a long while for the Coroner’s extract to start taking effect. They started early in the afternoon, and now it was close to sundown. At some point, Yonten questioned if the Coroner somehow made a mistake in her preparations, only for her to say, “I don’t make mistakes like these.”

Then the Beauty’s voice rose up to alert them, “One of the bandits started to falter in his stance.”

Yonten had to take her word for it, because from his end, he saw nothing of the sor—

Wait…

Due to the villagers’ numerous attempts to take back their children, the bandits guarding the stables did it with notable diligence. After all, the children were their winning card—not only for extortion purposes, but also to limit Dokka’s communications with the surrounding settlements. They would certainly not want Vice-Captain Greco on their tails.

At the moment, that diligence was nowhere to be found as the three bandits began walking circles in a daze a few moments before they fell, one by one.

This marked the start of the second phase of step one.

Descending from the hill, they bypassed the farm’s fences, making sure not to inhale too much of the extract’s fumes. While its effects were slow to manifest, they couldn’t afford to fall unconscious in the middle of their scheme.

Standing before the stables’ closed gates, the question was how to initiate phase two or, more accurately, how to lure out the two bandits standing guard inside?

“So?” Yonten asked.

The Butcher began, “Like I said before, we can imitate th—“

Yonten asked just for courtesy’s sake. “How about this?”

Manifesting a ball of fire, he set the stables’ gates aflame.

“What are you doing?!” the Coroner screeched at him, while the Butcher appeared to be looking for the nearest source of water.

As for the Beauty, well… by now, Yonten was alarmingly accustomed to her tight hold on his scarf.

In response to all these reactions, Yonten merely smiled, tilting his head to the side. “Look.”

They looked, and Yonten guessed they must’ve realized his intention; the Coroner’s glares subsided, the Butcher stopped his search, and the Beauty’s hold on him loosened.

A keen eye would note how the flames Yonten set were limited to the stables’ gates, never spreading a hair’s breadth beyond them.

Of course, fear induced by sudden onslaught of inferno would blind such an eye.

With a crash, two figures jumped from the single and high-placed window of the stables, just to the side of the gates, only to fall into the shallow ditch Yonten prepared with Earth energy. With a single knock of his staff, he sealed the two’s feet into the ground. Every attempt at getting up resulted in hilarity.

“The fire?” the Butcher reminded.

Ah, in his amusement at the show the two bandits’ unknowingly provided, Yonten forgot about that.

Thrusting his staff forwards, the Water stone shone its brilliant blue, and a brief shower of water in the shape of the stables’ gates extinguished the flames, leaving a dark and fragile remnants of wood.

The Beauty kicked the pitiful remnants down to allow them entry, and the moment they did, they heard the unmistakable sound of crying.

At the center of the stables, a group of grime-faced children huddled into a trembling pile, their teary, wide-eyed stares fixated on them with abject terror. It was probably due to the bandits, definitely not his brilliant plan.

The accusatory gazes of his companions argued otherwise.

The Butcher knelt down to the children’s level, his voice warm, “Your families told us to rescue you. Would you be kind to follow this lady beside me?”

“I’ll lead you home,” the Coroner assured, the softest she ever had.

Appeased by the kind gazes of his two companions, the children’s crying ebbed to unrestrained hiccups.

A boy, the seemingly oldest of the bunch, voiced the lingering doubt in the children’s hearts, “What about the bandits?”

“We’ll protect you from them.” The Beauty’s tone was neither warm nor kind, but it was awkwardly sincere.

Perhaps that was the push that got the children to get up and wipe their tears, approaching the Coroner with hope.

“I’m depending on you to hold those bas—bad people back,” the Coroner said before departing, her little followers in tow.

Out of the stables, Yonten, along with his two companions, turned their sights to the main house.

He could already hear the alarmed cries of the bandits heading the stables’ way.

It was the mark of the second step of their Cautious Raid:

Wreaking havoc.

When the first batch of the bandits arrived to the scene, Yonten knew how it would appear to them: the missing gates of the stables viewing a space devoid of their captives, the pathetic state five of their strongest had been reduced into, with three unconscious, and two wrestling uselessly against earth—and, to damn this scene further, three strangers with unknown affiliations standing in the middle of it all, as if waiting for their arrival.

“Nice of you to join us,” Yonten greeted.

A pause, and then one of the bandits roared, “Get them!”

In the span of a few moments, they were surrounded, three against more than a dozen.

At the heart of it, Yonten separated from his two companions, taking with him a section of the force sent to quell their raid. The stones dangling from his staff alternated in colors, Earth’s green to Shadow’s purple, Shadow’s purple to Fire’s red—in their wake, the bandits circling him stumbled upon shallow ditches, their sights hindered by small shadows sticking to their faces, and then ending up delivering themselves to the flames hovering below them.

But Yonten couldn’t keep that sort of rhythm for long. At one point, his control faltered, chilling him to the core, and he had to take a moment to breathe. In his daze, Yonten didn’t take note of the surviving bandits before him, not even the Butcher joining his side—not until the Butcher drew that humble-looking scimitar he stored in his sack throughout their journey.

It made for a peculiar image, the Butcher standing with his back towards Yonten. “You alright?”

Yonten found the strength to give a smile he didn’t feel. “I am.”

The Butcher didn’t seem to believe him. “Rest and leave them to me. You’ve worked hard.” Not even leaving Yonten the chance to ask how he would be able to do so, the Butcher proved his words right.

Out of sheer habit, Yonten pushed his predicament to the side to observe the scene unfolding before him.

It would be an overstatement to say that the Butcher wielded his blade against his foes, and Yonten meant it in the flattering sense. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Butcher didn’t deign using his scimitar on the bandits surrounding him.

A bandit rushed towards the Butcher with a spear, while another charged from the side with a dagger—just where it would be difficult for the Butcher to keep an eye on.

With the latter, the Butcher instantly blocked the strike with the body of his scimitar, and the bandit’s dagger fell, the bandit himself following into one of the ditches Yonten dug.

And in the following moment, with the former bandit, the Butcher reached to grab the spear from the middle, directing it to stab the ground and leaving the bandit weaponless and off-balanced, reduced to a heap at the Butcher’s feet with a swing of fist.

Incensed by the fall of their comrades, the remaining bandits joined the fray, only to meet the same fate.

It was almost arrogant, brazen, the way the Butcher kept his blade drawn but barely used it, as if taunting his opponents, mocking their lack of skill. It was a display, an act, everything opposite of what Yonten would expect of the Butcher.

As the last of the bandits fell, another batch appeared on the horizon, their silhouettes greater in number than the previous. In no time, they had Yonten and the Butcher sieged.

Curious, Yonten questioned his companion, “Think you can fend them off, too?”

“I’ll manage,” the Butcher replied.

However, just before the Butcher could demonstrate how well he could ‘manage’, a loud, distressed call came to break the tense air:

“Halt!”

The call belonged to a man that approached them with a conducted pace, and judging by how the bandits immediately did as told, he was most probably their leader.

Behind the leader, raising a blunderbuss to his head, was the Beauty who had been missing from the scene up to this moment.

“Do as I say,” she said, and left the rest up to interpret the act of her pressing the mouth of the firearm to the bandit leader’s temple.

The Beauty’s hold must’ve been awfully tight; the bandit leader appeared close to tears as he echoed, “Do it!”

The Beauty told it briefly: she ran, entered the main house, found the blunderbuss on the way, found the leader, had him begging for his life, and then finally dragged him outside to stop his subordinates.

With the bandits tied with earth-born confines, Yonten had to ask the most important and stressing question, eyes never leaving the gleaming blunderbuss taking residence upon the Beauty’s waist, “When are you planning to drop this thing?”

The mere thought of the Beauty with her spectacular aim holding such a weapon terrified Yonten in ways he didn’t want to admit.

Perhaps Yonten should’ve let the Butcher ask the question, because the Beauty smiled in that spiteful way, and said, “It might be a little crude, but it could be of use.”

“For you?” the Butcher blurted out, and immediately appeared guilty afterwards.

The Beauty’s heart was magnanimous, it seemed, because she easily answered, “Yes.”

Yonten and the Butcher exchanged an alarmed look.