As he circled the village to find a road, Degritone occasionally started to make the structure to fly until he heard a faint, Don't hurt yourself like that, in his head, then he stopped himself before he could show any signs of Stavch corruption, which he confirmed with his permanent Stavch sight. Luckily, that hadn't also started corrupting him, probably because it was not an active construction after having been applied. Degritone remembered Melena and messaged her about Stavch corruption.

It had taken Degritone years of Stavch use for it to show itself, but he wasn't sure of the exact cause. It could be because his Potent Vitality-enhanced Endurance was keeping him stable and it finally overcame that, or it could have had something to do with now being inside a multiverse again. Regardless of the cause, he'd eventually need to confirm if the levels he was now exposed to upon making any construction were permanent or if they decayed over time.

He also did not want Melena to have to deal with it, considering she might not have been able to regrow a limb as fast as he could, though he wasn't sure, since he had no concrete knowledge on her exact capabilities. After getting an acknowledgment from Melena, he he finally found a road. He followed it away from the town and, with his system-enhanced speed, he was able to get to the next town in about two hours.

He assumed the towns were spread one day's non-system-enhanced travel apart, like they historically were on Earth. As the first buildings entered his sight, he realized a slight problem with his plan: He had none, now that Stavch manipulation was banned. He knew he could materialize a large box and put a few of the halflings inside, but he didn't know exactly how much he could lift at the moment. Additionally, he wasn't confident in pulling off that heist without being noticed.

Instead, he started working on using the image system to replicate the Stavch flows of a zombie removal structure. After a few minutes, he realized it wasn't going to work, as he could visualize the flows of Stavch in half the time required to get images to materialize, but the flow refused to come into existence. He knew that if he tried to use the image system to materialize the structure, he would simply mentally build the structure, which would lead to Stavch corruption, against a loli order.

So, not knowing exactly what to do, he shut down. A loli order was preventing him from performing the one action he needed to do: Help lolis. However, he knew he could help lolis in a much less efficient and more dangerous way. Given this was only a single town over from the previous one, he had until daylight to get these halflings back to the others. More, if he accounted for travel time, but he still felt he shouldn't risk it.

Conflicted, Degritone decided to go with the cart method, even if it wasn't the safest. It took him almost all the remaining night to convince every halfling to get into a metal box with wheels, and he wasn't sure if he'd have been able to get back to the halfling village before sunrise and without getting seen, but he had to try. He slowly accelerated the box as to not give anyone whiplash or bang their heads on the walls.

When he reached the point to turn into the woods, he told everyone to get off. Once they had, he picked up two of the halfling girls and told the others to continue in the direction he's about to run, and he'd be back to take them to safety two at a time. He walked a few tens of feet to make sure they were following, then accelerated off to the zombie removal chamber. By the time he'd gotten half the group to the chamber, the rest had arrived and were slowly making their way through.

He sighed and looked at the trail that had been left. It took him until noon to fully restore the woods to a natural-looking state using image materializations, starting from the road, and he realized that this was going to be a much larger project than he'd initially hoped. Two towns in, his head was killing him and he couldn't use Stavch structures because it'd cause corruption.

He needed an organization, but he knew he would have been incapable of actually entering a town without doing something about the lolis he would have seen. With him also just knowing about their plight in general, he was uncertain he would be able to do anything, anywhere that didn't involve freeing them. He sat in the budding halfling village, thinking, watching the now-free halflings be confused about what to do with their lives now.

He sat so unmoving that near the end of the day, a pair of lolis came up to "admire the well-made statue of our savior" while wondering how it got built so fast, since all of them were so low leveled and they hadn't seen anyone making it. He startled them by moving when Melena sent him a message, sending a link to a YouTube video. He wasn't sure how it worked, considering the internet should be completely new to the system, but the video was embedded like it would have been if they were talking through Discord.

It was a very basic video with pretty bad framing and a bad microphone, but he loved it, regardless. It was a video about the math behind stats, with her writing on a white board. The only things he learned that he didn't already know were the exact calculations behind movement speed, muscle strength, and bodily regrowth speed.

He told her he loved the video and it was informative, then asked if she wanted constructive criticism about it.

When she did, he told her all the problems he could see as someone who only watched thousands of similar videos, without ever making any. He also recommended 3Blue1Brown, Numberphile, BlackPenRedPen, Mathologer, and PBS Space Time to see the the general range of quality she should aim for, if not exactly any of their styles. She thanked him and told him she'd work on it, then they went back to doing their own stuff.

There were only a few halflings were out and about when he finally decided he'd temporarily set aside his need to free the lolis in order to do the job properly, with a whole organization he could use to raid a town and escape with every halfling inside without harming anyone or getting seen. He had no idea if he would find anyone that shared the goal of freeing the lolis, and by association, the male halflings, as well, but he was certain he'd be able to find at least one group of insurgents.

All governments, eventually even himself, would have to deal with them at some point. He didn't know where to start, exactly, but he figured he'd head to some much further away town and listen for anything weird. He taught the halflings how to use Condensing, then spent a week following roads at his speed, hopefully getting far away enough that he'd not get implicated by being a stranger popping up out of nowhere immediately after some crimes.

32 days passed before he finally heard tale of his own deeds, which were attributed to a what he found to be a group derogatorily called the Halfers. Their real name was the Swift Liberators, but they simply got lumped into the halfling equality movement in order to give the common man a reason to do dislike the movement. They, themselves, were harming people with families, so he decided that he'd take over and implement some aggressive reforms.

During this time, he killed a couple loli abusers who would not be missed, followed a potential lead that simply lead to a slave market that kidnapped others' slaves for profit, rather than anything he could find useful, and watched a few more of Melena's videos. Luckily, none of the enemies were even mid-Leveled due to the government highly guarding all Village Dungeons, so he was able to deal with them on his own. Overall, those excursions got him 2 extra Levels.

It took him 3 days to figure out the general location in which the Swift Liberators were based, somewhere within a normal person's week's travel of a town that translated to Hugebridge. It took him a few hours to reach that town and 9 days to scour the surroundings thoroughly enough to actually find the hideout.

An arrow hit Degritone's unarmored shoulder, tearing his shirt and drawing a small amount of blood before the wound sealed back up. "Ow, why," he said, probably too quiet for his assailant to hear. He looked in the direction the arrow came from, activated his perception Skill at just high enough power to be able to keep up with his body's full speed, and ran through some low greenery.

Another arrow hit him and a spear hit his neck from behind while the foliage obscured his vision. He grabbed the spear and yanked it forward while whoever was still holding it had a grip on it, sending them to the ground. He put his foot on the man laying face down on the ground as yet another arrow hit him. He returned his time to normal as he said, "Stop that. You can't even damage me and replacing these clothes is annoying. I also now have one of your friends as a hostage, I guess."

"Oh yeah?" The man on the ground asked before attempting to push up off the ground. Degritone didn't move at all.

"Yeah." Another arrow hit him. "I said stop that, you little cuck. I'm looking for something and considering you're in the area and attacking me, I assume you're part of what I'm looking for. I'm looking to either join or take over the... uhhhhh, I think it was Swift Liberators? Apparently, you're supposed to be in the area. Judging from what I've heard, it'll almost definitely be take over instead of join, but we'll see."

Another arrow hit him. "Ok, another one of those and you'll be the one on the ground. Seriously, these clothes are annoying to replace."

"Come and make me stop," he heard a small voice back in the bushes. He activated Swordsman's Territory, Exotic Nervous System at full power, and Haste to stop another arrow from tearing his clothes. With Swordsman's Territory, he could pinpoint the archer's position, and went straight at them, grabbing the halfling man's neck and slamming it into the ground before putting his foot on his chest.

"There, I made you stop. Take me..." He smirked, not having intended to do this, "to your leader. At least, I assume you're SL guys. Why else would you attack a random person in the middle of the woods near the area that they are supposed to be? I figure regular bandits would at least realize the..." long pause, "danger of death of being associated with them should they get caught in the same area."

The halfling on the ground sighed and said, "Fine. Barthas, lead him to the hideout. If they ask, just say he threatened you or something. Now kill me and get this over with."

Degritone lowered his eyebrows slightly while turning his head for a second in confusion. "Why would I do that? Well, there's a couple reasons I might in the future, but literally all you did was attack me and I highly doubt anyone not part of the government could damage me meaningfully, even without my armor." He reached down and picked up the halfling's bow before helping him to his feet.

The other man also stood and nodded to the halfling. As they began walking, Degritone said, "I'm keeping this at least until we get to the hideout. If I get ambushed again, I should just put on my armor, but I'd prefer to look non-threatening. I... well, I might be here for a fight, but maybe not. We'll see how you guys are. Tell me more about you guys from an insider's perspective, rather than propaganda."

The halfling responded, "Do I have to?"

"No, but I would like to go into this knowing a bit more than the public. It probably wouldn't actually affect anything, but it would, it would allow me to have a... uhhhhh... Man, my brain is slow today and I don't know why. It would allow me to have a better idea of what's actually going on in the minds of the people apparently performing acts of terror effectively just for the sake of terror, at least according to the propaganda."

"I do it mostly for the women," the one in front said, "though I think Yevelt there does it just because he hates humans. He just puts up with us because we're fighting the same fight."

"Women?"

"Yeah, get tons of little halfling women to have fun with every time we raid somewhere, plus any human women we happen to capture."

"How many people engage in this 'fun?'"

"Around 70 out of our roughly 120."

Sad, I'd hoped to have way more than 50 people on my side when this was over, Degritone thought. It angers me that I've seen so much that I'm not just immediately murdering this man for admitting to raping lolis. "You ever partake... whatever your name was? Sorry, I heard it like 20 seconds ago but I've already forgotten. I am horrible with names."

"Of course not," the halfling said, "and I wish they'd stop. It's completely needless, but this is the only group doing anything about the slavery situation."

"You'll live, then," Degritone said as the human opened a hidden hatch in the ground and went in.

"What?"

Degritone didn't answer him. After a few tens of feet of ladder, they reached a large, man made cave. Visible from the ladder were 58 men, mostly human, and some doors leading off to who knows where. A couple of them looked over at the descending stranger flanked by two of their own members, then got the attention of others. Soon, everyone was watching.

"So who wants to partake in some WOMEN!" Degritone said, exaggeratedly excited with a big smile. All but Yevelt and another man in the crowd cheered, and Degritone's face fell. Mustering his anger, both that he felt toward these men and he'd built up over his too long stay on this world, he created a simple image and spread it among the crowd, forcing it into their bodies.

The image was of every single tendon in their bodies being played like a fiddle as their bones were shattered and used to pierce and rend their flesh. Given he didn't know if they had a loli that cared for them, he refused to actually make it produce the effect fully, but when most of the crowd screamed in pain and fell unconscious, he knew he'd succeeded in creating an image of pure physical pain.

Yevelt and the one other remaining conscious man looked horrified at Degritone as a few men came out from various doors. They all froze and Degritone said, "I don't know about you newcomers, but you two don't need to worry about suffering the same fate as those idiots," he said to the man standing in a sea of unconscious men while handing Yevelt his bow back.

"You killed them... without even moving," Yevelt said in shock.

"They're alive. I don't know if they have a loli that cares about them or not, so I couldn't kill them. Are any of these new people rapists, too?"

No one answered for a few seconds before the only unopened door slammed open and a burly halfling man in leather armor stepped out. "And what is going on here?"

"I came to take over the Swift Liberators. I think that was what you guys were called. Apparently like 65% rapists or something instead of actually caring about the s-" Degritone got cut off as a dagger went hilt-deep into his heart. He donned his armor and sword while activating his buffs. The halfling was already inches from his body and moving at a noticeable speed at full Exotic Nervous System time.

Degritone swatted him out of the air and he impacted the wall with considerable speed. Infecting his opponent with his painful image, he moved over to stomp him into the ground. This didn't last long, as his opponent's Strength was significantly higher than his, knocking Degritone off balance and spinning to face him while sending a back-handed stab at his stomach.

For the next four real-time seconds of Degritone just watching his Health, he was stabbed 36 times, presumably image and Skill enhanced, but his opponent obviously did not have a perception Skill, as their movements were very imprecise. Surprisingly to Degritone, his opponent did not fall down in agony during this time. It also seemed his opponent did not have any good DR-piercing Skills, as his Health was effectively full thanks to his regeneration.

Going back to real time, Degritone said, "Can we please talk? I'd like this transition to be as bloodless as possible. I have yet to kill anyone associated with your organization, and it's going to stay that way for at least another few minutes."