Repelling the bandits had gone fairly well, even if we hadn't pnned anything with the other adventurers beforehand. They had actually pulled their own weight.

  Taking a closer look at the elves, I saw that their warrior had actually gotten hurt in the fight. Unsurprisingly, he was now getting healed by the cleric while the mage was looting their kills.

  I was rexing a bit after the fight when I noticed that Hander was walking over to us.

  "Good job, adventurers. That was quick. We will get moving again once we are done with burning the bodies. It wouldn't be good if we left them to rot on the road." (Hander)

  "Alright!" (Nix)

  Seeing that some of the merchants were struggling to drag the corpses off the road, I decided to help them a bit. It wasn't a pleasant task, but the sooner we could get moving, the sooner we'd be done with this trip. Besides, this situation could get very annoying very fast if the smell of blood attracted monsters.

  The three elven adventurers began to help out once the warrior was fully healed, which sped up the process even more. As for Nix, she helped by using her ice magic to make the ground under the dead bandits less slippery. Once everything was off the road, I sent a couple fireballs at the remains and called it a day.

  Since that was dealt with, the merchants began to get the caravan moving again while I headed back to the usual wagon with Nix. Unfortunately, I was interrupted by an annoying voice.

  "Hey, can we speak with you for a moment?" (Cleric)

  Turning around to face those three fools, I was quite annoyed. What did they want this time? Were they after our loot? I certainly wasn't going to give them any of it.

  "We would like to apologise for not having taken the both of you seriously previously. It's clear that you know what you are doing despite your age." (Warrior)

  Wait, what? They were actually apologizing for their behavior? I did not know the proper response to this sort of stuff.

  No, seriously, I thought they were just a bunch of jerks, so I really hadn't expected to get an apology. Were they just doing this because they were scared of us after seeing our skills? Yeah, that must have been it.

  "It's fine, that was like three days ago, I barely remembered that that happened anyways." (Nix)

  "Alright, if you say it's fine, we won't insist. We'll see you ter." (Warrior)

  With that, they left us alone again, tho it didn't feel like they were running away this time.

  "Let's go." (Dragonfly)

  "Alright! Oh, did I tell you about that time mom baked magical cookies?" (Nix)

  "No, but it sounds interesting." (Dragonfly)

  I ended up spending the rest of the day chatting with Nix about random things. She had plenty of stories to tell involving Camity, to absolutely no one's surprise.

  When it was time to camp for the night, I was surprised to see that the mage of the elven trio come over to our campfire.

  "What do you want?" (Dragonfly)

  "I just wanted to talk a bit, we don't see adventurers your age with your level of skill often. Actually, I just never saw something like that. I was just wondering if you two would like to share how you got this strong." (Mage)

  ""No."" (Nix and Dragonfly)

  "Alright, fair enough, I suppose. Everyone has their own secrets. I just hope that you'll be ready to use your strength again, the amount of bandits near the capital has gone way up tely." (Mage)

  Ah, I knew that they were after something! They wanted to get information about how to grow stronger from us. Well, he might also just have been trying to make conversation, but that was hard to tell.

  "That sounds bad. Why are there more bandits tho? Is there a famine making people turn to crime to survive? Oh, is there some sort of bandit lord with a huge bounty in the area causing trouble?" (Nix)

  "That's the thing, no one knows. These bandits have just been popping up out of nowhere." (Mage)

  That was pretty weird. Last time I'd checked, bandits weren't monsters, so they couldn't just appear out of nowhere. It's not like I could do anything about it, however. For now, the only thing I could do was to try to get as much information as possible.

  "Is there anything else interesting going on at the capital? You seem well-informed." (Dragonfly)

  That's when I learned about a small, tiny and mildly annoying problem.

  "Not really. I heard that there's some delegation from another continent that's going to visit the capital soon, but that's about it. Apparently it's from the Gcius Empire or something? I dunno, noble affairs don't really interest me." (Mage)

  Upon hearing this, I shared a long look with Nix. Was our luck seriously this bad? What did those atrocious people have to do with this kingdom? Didn't they hate all races apart from humans? Why were they sending a delegation to a non-human kingdom located on a different continent?

  "Hello? What's with that reaction? Did I say something wrong? If I did, sorry, I didn't mean to." (Mage)