The leader was shaking.
Yuki looked at him. The flat calm in his chest didn't feel good. It just felt necessary.
"How many women have you tormented?" he asked. "How many families have you killed?"
The leader's face crumpled. "We — we were just going to steal the cargo. We never hurt anyone, I swear—"
The lie was so transparent it was almost insulting.
Yuki turned to Lira. "What should I do with him?"
Her expression was hard. Battle-hard. The teasing, warm, playful Lira was somewhere else right now. This was the merchant's daughter who'd grown up on dangerous roads, having faced bandits before.
"We only need his head. There'll likely be a large bounty — a bandit group this size operating this close to the capital means the Confederation's been hunting them. Turn the head in to the city guard and we'll collect."
The leader shrieked. "Please — mercy—"
"You'll die either way," Lira said evenly. "If we bring you in alive, the guards will execute you. At least this way it's quick."
Yuki looked at the man. He didn't want to do this.
"Their hideout," he said. "Where is it?"
The camp was two kilometres off the road, hidden in a thicket near the river. Another dozen bandits. And prisoners — six of them, caged in a wooden pen. Beaten, starved, broken.
Rafael had joined them, leaving his men to collect the heads of the fallen from the road. The veteran took one look at the prisoners and his jaw set.
Yuki sent the daggers. Twelve bandits — quick, clean, done before they could touch the prisoners or raise an alarm.
He healed the captives. Every wound, every infection, every broken bone. Lira helped clean them up, gave them water, spoke to them in low, calming tones. The state they were in — the hollow eyes, the flinch responses, the way they cowered from sudden movements — told Yuki everything about what this bandit group had been doing to travellers.
He stored every valuable and stolen good in dimensional storage for sorting later.
Rafael executed the bandit leader at the camp's edge. Yuki heard it but didn't watch. He was grateful not to carry that extra weight.
The absorption was different from monsters.
It had started the moment the first bandit died and hadn't stopped. A tidal wave of life and magical energy — dense, complex, human — pouring into him with every kill. Unlike the shallow trickle of wolves or the ancient depth of the dragon, this was something else entirely. Rich. Layered. Potent.
Over sixty humans. All at once.
The energy hit him like a wall. His reservoir — already absurdly vast — expanded. His mana density increased noticeably. His parallel mind capacity jumped — he could feel it, the infrastructure in his head widening, new threads becoming available. Fifteen parallel minds. Maybe twenty. The ceiling had risen sharply.
He felt guilty.
These had been people. Terrible people — rapists, murderers, slavers. But people. With life force and mana that was fundamentally different from anything in the animal kingdom. More complex. More potent. And his body had consumed all of it without asking.
In my old world, killing sixty men would make me either a war hero or a serial killer. Here...
Here, the caravan cheered. They clapped him on the back. They called him a hero. Rafael's men saluted. The merchants counted their blessings and thanked the gods.
Different world. Different rules.
He said a short, silent prayer. Not to any god of this world — just a private moment of acknowledgement for the men he'd killed. They'd chosen their path. He'd given them a clear warning but he wondered if he could have handled it better. But sixty dead was sixty dead, and he wasn't going to pretend the weight wasn't there.
I need to get used to this. I don't like it. But I need to get used to it.
He moved on. The caravan moved on. The horses were collected — forty-plus, tied in strings behind the wagons. Weapons, armour, valuables — all stored. The bounty heads — stored in the magic bag, preserved. Rafael confirmed the dispersal: all gold from the guild bounty and the sold equipment would be split among the fighters. Anything the caravan riders stripped from bodies was theirs to keep.
Yuki was asked to burn the corpses. Nearly a hundred bodies — road and camp combined. He cast a controlled incineration spell, reducing everything to clean ash.
Rafael had handled the execution. Rafael's men had handled the collection. The caravan had handled the logistics. Yuki had handled the killing.
This world is gruesome.
He asked Lira later how a bandit group that size could exist this close to the capital. She explained — the land was vast, the military was stretched thin, and patrols couldn't cover every road. Soldier detachments cleared known bandit camps regularly, but new ones formed as fast as old ones fell. It was a constant, grinding problem with no clean solution, all made worse by the war.
That evening, he hugged Kana and Hana tight. They were sitting by the fire, warm and fed, unaware of most of what had happened. Kana had heard the fighting but Yuki had shielded the wagon from view. Hana had slept through the entire thing.
He looked at Lira over the fire. "Do you think I'm a monster?"
She frowned. Genuinely confused. "Why would I think that?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Searched for words that would make sense in a world where killing bandits was heroism, not horror.
Right. Different world.
They were bandits. They would have killed, raped, and tortured every person in this caravan. The women. The children. Kana. Hana. Lira.
He'd warned them. They'd laughed. They'd talked about what they'd do to Lira.
He protected his family. That was the truth. The only truth that mattered here.
"Never mind," he said.
Lira studied him for a moment. Then she reached across the fire and took his hand. Squeezed once.
You're not a monster. You're the reason we're alive.
She didn't say it. She didn't need to.
That night, the caravan made a bonfire.
It was tradition, Varlen explained. The last night on the road — a feast to thank the gods for safe passage and celebrate the end of the voyage. The caravan had been through the Darkwoods, a monster horde's aftermath, and a sixty-man bandit ambush. If any group had earned a feast, it was this one.
Alcohol appeared from somewhere — wine, ale, a clear spirit that burned on the way down. Meat was roasted over the bonfire. Bread was broken. Someone produced a stringed instrument and started playing, and within minutes there was music — rough, enthusiastic, joyful.
The caravan treated Yuki like a hero, and Kana and Hana were the caravan's mascots. Everyone came to his spot by the fire. Merchants brought plates piled high. Guards raised cups in his direction. Several of the younger women in the caravan found excuses to sit near him, pour his wine, and make conversation with bright smiles and lingering eye contact.
Wow this is really nice. Hehehe I feel giddy from all of this attention. I need to be careful and not let it get ot my head.
Lira's cheeks puffed out. She positioned herself firmly at Yuki's side and radiated territorial energy that could have melted steel.
Yuki laughed. He couldn't help it.
Kana and Hana were dancing.
He could see their cute little tails swishing in the air as they made up dance moves by the bonfire, in the warm orange light, with three other children from the caravan. The music was loud and fast and none of them knew any formal steps — they just moved, spinning and jumping and chasing each other around the flames. Kana's silver hair caught the firelight. Hana's black tail swished in time with the melody.
They were laughing. Both of them. Kana's bright, fearless laugh and — barely audible beneath it — Hana's quieter, rarer, infinitely more precious laugh.
Yuki watched them. The wine was warm in his stomach. The music was warm in his ears. Lira leaned against his shoulder. The caravan — fifty-odd people he'd spent weeks with, fought beside, built things for — sang and drank and celebrated around him.
He liked this life. The road, the group, the sense of collective survival. These people had become something close to family — loud, messy, imperfect family.
Not bad for a kid who fell out of the sky.
The next day.
Late morning. The caravan crested the final hill and stopped.
Yuki stood up on the wagon bench and looked down.
Veldara.
The capital of the Renvale Confederation spread across the landscape like a living thing. A massive riverside city, built where the Verant River widened and emptied into an enormous lake — so large the far shore was barely visible, a hazy line against the sky that looked more like ocean than freshwater.
High walls of pale stone encircled the city, punctuated by watchtowers and gate complexes. Inside, buildings rose in tiers — stone and wood and tile, densely packed, climbing toward the centre where a castle complex dominated the skyline. Spires, buttresses, banners catching the wind. The seat of the Confederation's parliament and the heart of its government.
Outside the walls, farmland stretched in every direction — irrigated fields following the river and lakeshore, rich and green, feeding eighty thousand people. And on the water — ships. Hundreds of them. Fishing boats crowding the shallows. Cargo barges moving along the river. Merchant vessels with full sails crossing the lake. A navy patrol with the Confederation's banner flying from the mast.
Kana grabbed his arm. "It's HUGE."
Hana's dark eyes were the widest he'd ever seen them.
Lira stood beside him, a small smile on her face. "Welcome to Veldara."
Yuki stared at the city. The walls. The castle. The lake that looked like a sea. The ships and the farms and the thousands of lives packed inside those walls.
Another world. For real this time. Not a forest. Not a frontier town. A capital city in a nation at war, on a continent he'd barely begun to explore.
He'd fallen out of the sky with nothing. Now he was standing on a wagon with a sword at his hip and a fortune in his pocket and two fox-eared children grabbing his arms and a girl he was falling in love with beside him.
I really am in another world.
He stepped down from the wagon, took Hana in one arm and Kana's hand in the other, and walked toward the gates of Veldara.