“You know, for you to vehemently insist that bandits are people too and deserve the right to live, did you ever consider about all the people whose lives were lost due to their actions? Did they not deserve to live as well? Did all their families not deserve to have their loved ones with them? Huh?

This is why I always fucking said that too much peace isn’t necessarily a good thing. It promotes stupid ideas like these in the minds of those who had nothing to do.” - Memnon de Javrila, Philosophy lecturer at the Levain Institute of Higher Learning, circa 524 FP.

With an outraged cry, most of the remaining bandits brandished their weapons - from axes that were clearly designed for chopping wood rather than flesh to one who literally tied a knife to the end of a long stick - and charged at Aideen in a haphazard, unorganized manner. There was little if any teamwork or cooperation to be seen in their advance.

She kept a careful note on the few that stayed back instead. The few bandits that looked like they had military experience - four in total including the scarred man she noticed first - had stayed back, and so had ugly and filthy, who probably were the bosses of this gang of pitiful outlaws. They had not seemed the slightest bit concerned about the rest of their members who charged her way.

If she guessed right, they probably thought that if any of them died under her hands, that just meant one less mouth to be fed and one less share to be distributed. Such disregard for their own men’s lives was probably one reason they treated others, innocents who had the misfortune to cross their path, the same way.

Unfortunately for them, Aideen was nowhere near as helpless as she might have looked at first.

As the first three of the bandits entered her range, Aideen thrust her staff out sharply, three times in succession. The first bandit had a fast enough reaction and tried to block her strike with his rusty cleaver, but the weight behind her blow was far beyond what he expected and his cleaver was the one that chipped instead.

Her staff struck him directly in the gut and dug deep, as the man crumpled to his knees and vomited out the contents of his stomach mixed with some blood. She had probably ruptured his organs with the strike, which meant a painful death so far out in the wilderness with no healer present. Aideen herself definitely did not care to heal her victim back to health.

The second strike struck against the center of another bandit’s chest, and shattered his breastbone into pieces. With his hands clutched hard against his chest, the second bandit seemed to convulse in pain, then fell on his back and moved no more.

Before the third one even realized what happened to the other two, Aideen’s staff struck him directly in the hollow of his throat, and collapsed his windpipe with ease. The man too fell on his back, hands clutched on his throat as he gasped and tried to desperately draw a breath while he slowly suffocated.

The remaining ten or so bandits that rushed were alerted by the swift, relaxed way she had dispatched three of their compatriots, and slowed their charge as they spread out and tried to encircle her instead. Aideen just allowed them to do so with a look of contempt in her eyes, and she even beckoned for them to come already, which clearly incensed some of the bandits into making the mistake of doing just that.

Aideen parried away the makeshift spear of the first bandit foolish enough to step forward and landed a bone-crushing strike against the man’s shoulder with the other end of her staff. She continued the same movement and used the other end of her staff to nudge away another bandit’s pitchfork as he tried to strike at her from behind.

Then Aideen spun her staff the whole way around and the other end struck the surprised bandit from below, directly against his chin. Jawbone shattered and teeth flew out as a result, while the already unconscious bandit ended up carrying through his charge another step before his body slumped forward.

By coincidence, that charge resulted in his pitchfork stabbing into the bandit with the broken shoulder, as its tines pierced the unfortunate man’s eye, mouth, and throat at the same time. The dying bandit looked at his compatriot who had just killed him with disbelief in his eye, before he too slumped forward with an unresigned look on his face.

Another bandit bellowed loudly as he came at Aideen from her side, and swung the axe he held in both hands down at her. She returned a strike that aimed for the shaft of the axe, and when the wood met adamant, it splintered and broke apart on the spot.

As she continued her movement, Aideen spun on the spot, as her left leg swooped past and struck the jaw of the surprised axe-wielder with a roundhouse kick that dislocated his entire lower jaw. At the same time, she thrust out her staff to the back where it caught a second bandit right on his crotch and incapacitated the man on the spot.

The remaining six bandits dithered when they saw the fates of their other compatriots, and halted for a brief moment that Aideen had not failed to capitalize.

Her hands swiftly twisted her staff apart into its three-sectioned form and she held it on one end as she whipped it around as hard as she could. The heavy adamant staff segment at the other end struck and broke the necks or heads of three bandits before it lost momentum and she gathered it back to her briefly.

Then she lashed out once more and two more skulls burst apart, while the last bandit had turned tail and ran away. He did not get far, however, as Aideen picked up a cleaver one of the dead bandits near her had used and hurled it at the back of the escapee. The cleaver struck him right on the base of his skull, where it connected to his neck, and the bandit also slumped down after he took one last step.