"Boss, the caravan dropped off two adventurers at the lunch stop." Karson, the scout of the bandit group operating between Safeharbor and Sapphirestone, began as soon as he burst into the small campsite the group had set up the night before. The group didn't have a name, and the boss only ever went by boss, because names could help search spells find them. The rest of the bandits couldn't avoid using their names, partly because some of them were too stupid to avoid calling out their allies' names in the middle of a raid when referring to them, but also because too many of them came and went. The current boss had only been in the position for around a month but had taken to it like a fish in water.

"What'd they look like?" Boss demanded. He had been in the middle of joking around, with a few of the others who had been around for a while, but the mention of adventurers being left behind had turned his mirthful grin into a ghost white look of worry. They all knew that if the adventurers were left behind then that meant that they were not on the 'caravan escort' bounty, but the 'remove bandits operating in local area' bounty.

"Black cloaks, one had black armor underneath and the other had purple, I think. I only caught a glimpse when they got outta the wagon." Karson explained.

"Run." Boss declared and took off in a run towards his tent.

"What?" One of the new guys, Rich, asked in pure confusion. "It's just two adventurers, there's over a dozen of us."

"I thought they went north?!" Tarel yelled as he too started stuffing a backpack with everything he could.

"Apparently fucking not!" Boss yelled back.

Karson didn't wait, he hurriedly followed his boss and Tarel's leads and started packing all of his stuff into a bottomless box. He had fashioned a harness for it so he could carry it like a backpack and it had served him well as a makeshift Bottomless Bag. "What're the odds it's not them?!" Karson called out to Boss who was in his tent on the other side of their camp.

"What're the odds a snake bite in the middle of the night won't kill ya?!" Boss called back.

"Shit." Karson swore under his breath.

"Who are you all so freaking afraid of?!" Rich demanded.

"You heard of the demigod that moved into Safeharbor?" Karson asked him in return.

"That's just a rumor. Demigods don't just pick up and move like that, and even if they did, they wouldn't choose some hellhole like Safeharbor to move into." Rich waved him off.

"It's not a rumor, you unripe cabbage, and it's the demigod of darkness so no shit he chose Safeharbor." Tarel swore at him before Karson could even reply.

Karson was so blindsided by Tarel's chosen insult that he just had to stop for a moment to look at him. "Unripe cabbage?" He couldn't help but question.

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"Tarel's horrible insults aside, when did the camp get so quiet?" Aiden, whose tent was right next to Karson's, said as he walked out with a backpack loaded with food and gold.

"What?" Karson questioned and looked around. They could see the boss, through his tied open tent flaps, and he too stopped to listen to the deadly silent campsite. There had been ten people there, all making a racket as nine of them started packing up while Rich jabbered on. Now there were five. The smell of rot drifted through the camp on a soft breeze.

"He's already here." Tarel whispered. He was one of the few who had survived the encounter with Darkness and Hellfire and been able to escape the duo due to the arrival of a certain red dragon.

"If you can hear me, oh great demigod of Darkness, I surrender." Karson said and unbuckled his sword belt. He let the stolen sword thud to the ground and put his hands behind his head.

Boss walked out of his tent with his longsword in one hand and shield in the other. They were both decently high quality but lacked any enchantments which meant that they were little more than decorations and clubs against a high level adventurer, let alone who they knew to be there. "Lord of Darkness. If I may be so bold, I would like to test my mettle, man to man." Boss's voice boomed across the small clearing. He was a big man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds without any fat on his body, but he was no goliath. He was a platinum level adventurer before a few too many bad decisions found him where he was.

"Man to man? With weapons?" A man in a black cloak questioned. He had come out of nowhere but had clearly heard enough.

"I'll agree to whatever your terms as long as I have a chance at surviving this." Boss told the man in black.

The man reached up and unclasped his cloak. He pulled his cloak off of himself with a flourish and dropped it into his shadow where it vanished. "If you can survive one punch, I'll think about hiring you instead of killing you." The Lord of all that is Dark offered the boss of a small bandit group. "I won't even cast a spell."

Boss brought his shield up in a ready stance. "Thank you for this opportunity to either survive or die with honor." He dropped his sword onto the ground and braced the shield with both hands. "Maybe my god will still take my soul after all."

Darkness grinned and Hellfire appeared behind Rich, Karson, and Aiden. Tarel was off to the side and frozen in shock and horror as he could only bear witness to whatever was about to go down. "Don't try to interfere, and you just might survive this encounter." Hellfire's smooth voice purred from behind them. They could feel a shadow of her aura seeping into the air around them and they all knew that she would split them in half before they could even take a step.

"For a bandit, you are shining quite brightly." Darkness told Boss. "That dictates that I answer you in kind." He finished and ran his entire regeneration rate into and through his body in the form of pure death flames. Isaac grabbed his belt and twisted the dial until he doubled his own gravity and then raised his fists. As more power went through his muscles than ever before, a wicked grin spread across his face. "This is going to be fun."

—

Isaac had sent his animated shadows after each of the scouts that they had noticed. Shamesh had burned the entirety of his mana reserves flying around while encased in Shroud as soon as they realized that there were scouts following and watching them. It only took time, and a bit of vision sharing between Isaac and his animated shadows, for them to figure out which scout was heading back to base, which one was staying on them, and which ones were going after the caravan. After that, every scout except for the one who went back to base was systematically turned into black ash on the wind. After that, Isaac and Lenna went after the only surviving scout and Shamesh returned to Isaac's shadow.

The bandits' base was total chaos. Nearly every bandit was scrambling to get their things together so they could scatter to the four winds. Isaac wasn't going to have that. He quickly spotted which ones were isolated from view of each other and poked a finger of death flames through the back of each of their necks. His shadows made sure that every takedown was completely silent and since he used as little death flames as possible, no one had noticed the feeling of his power over the rest of the chaos and terror washing through the camp. Once those were out of the way, there was only half of the camp left. Four normal bandits and the leader. The leader was strong, for a bandit, but not overly so. Lenna, who wasn't yet back up to one hundred percent, could have handled him easily. Isaac was just about to kill all four of the normal bandits at once, with Lenna's assistance, when they both just cracked up laughing at the one bandit calling the other an 'unripe cabbage'.

After that moment, Isaac decided to have an open mind about maybe not killing all of the bandits. It now came down to two things. First was their list of crimes. If any of their crimes were utterly unforgivable, they would still die, just later, when Isaac and Lenna found out. The second was their personality. The funny one already got a pass but the rest of them were still up in the air. If they passed those two criteria, and the duo felt good about them on an instinctual level, then Isaac would find a use for them. Friends in both the lowest and highest places is what separated nobles, gang leaders, and mob bosses.

As Isaac got ready to test the limit of a level eleven warrior's durability, he actually thought about going easy on the man. He chose not to in the end however, because he had already told the warrior that he would respond to the challenge with just as much conviction. That, and it would look bad if the Lord of all that is Dark couldn't send a mortal through a tree.

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