He Bought Slaves (The Bandit Did)

Two days after the bandits lost five newcomers, the bandit boss brought in new recruits.

A whopping eighteen people. Since there were originally eight, plus the seven new ones minus the five who died, that made ten. So now it jumped to twenty-eight—a 2.8x increase all at once. Where did he get them from… I wondered, but then I noticed that two of them were adventurers he'd attacked along the way, tied up like sacrifices. Well, even without them, that's still twenty-six people. Isn't that enough to form a small village?

"Oh, except for the sacrifices, they're all slaves."

"You can tell just by looking? … Ah, the collars. Well, two sacrifices worth… alright, I'll make two more rooms in the back. They won't generate DP if they can't fit inside, so expansion takes priority…"

Looking from above, I shaped the rooms like a square with the upper right corner missing.

By the way, is it okay for slaves to be sold to bandits in this world?

"I've heard that humans who commit crimes can be turned into criminal slaves, but…"

"So bandits are buying criminals back? What a sieve of a system…"

Well, among them were obviously non-combatants… women, or rather, young girls.

In this world, there's no reason to be too dirty-looking thanks to life magic.

… Yeah, but being nearly naked with just scraps of cloth is hard on the eyes. Also, isn't the slave the boss is carrying clearly single-digits age-wise? Why would you buy a child with eyes like a dead fish? Is he going to raise her as his daughter? Hey, she even has dog ears… wait, hey.

S h e ' s a s e x s l a v e .

He's a lolicon?! We're going with an R-18 development here?! Well, it has been all men up until now.

Stripping off clothes that looked like nothing more than rags, running his hands over her body in a suspiciously slimy way that made me doubt he was actually using purification magic, making wet sounds as he pressed his face against hers, pushing her down onto the bed… yeah, okay. Cut.

Well, of course she'd have eyes like a dead fish. She's completely a doll at this point.

"Woooow… wooow, amazing… Humans can have reproductive behavior even when their bodies are still that small, I didn't know that… W-wait, is Kehma after me too?!"

"No, forcing people isn't my thing, and someone as small as her or you isn't even in my strike zone! I'm not a lolicon!"

"B-but you do evaluate feet, right? Mine, and that human slave's too."

"Her feet are all torn up from going barefoot even though they're tan with a nice shape, what a waste. Damn, I'd at least like to put some socks on her."

… Knee-high socks would be ideal. White knee-highs, black knee-highs. Or maybe not knee-highs, but socks with a little dog design to match the dog ears? … Hey, there's a filthy bandit on the screen, can we get rid of just the bandit?

"I feel like that's pretty bad too…"

"Don't worry about it. Well, let's get some sleep… The DP from the sacrifices this time, we used up quite a bit."

 

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What's so good about becoming a bandit…

You can't enter towns normally, and shopping requires going through middlemen who take a hefty margin.

I've had some guys whose faces aren't known try their hand at peddling, but the merchants seem to be taking advantage of us with high prices.

Can't use a blacksmith either, so we do amateur maintenance on our weapons ourselves and use them until they break. Using a weapon that might fall apart at any moment really sends shivers down your spine.

Acquiring money and goods puts your life on the line. You could even say there's more danger to your life than when I was a mercenary.

But if you have strength, you can take anything.

Income isn't stable, but when the returns are big, they're huge.

Besides, I was able to join something called the Hidden Guild that I'd only heard rumors about during my mercenary days.

There are rules like not attacking wagons bearing the Hidden Guild's mark, but there are plenty of benefits too.

As long as you have money, you can get anything… Well, it's expensive though.

One of those things is women, in a brothel… or rather, a tent in the slums that barely qualifies as one.

Bandits obviously can't enter towns, so we can't go to normal brothels. But sexual desire builds up. Adventurers are mostly men, and women adventurers draw attention just by being women, making them harder to attack. So we have no choice but to rely on the Hidden Guild's prostitutes.

The bandit boss had come to the Hidden Guild's brothel for that very reason.

Despite having lousy women, the prices were on par with high-class brothels in town, staring right at our vulnerabilities.

And yet, without enough money, you can't even buy the bad ones.

… Better to just buy, the bandit boss thought, and purchased the cheapest woman available.

What came out was a demi-human child not even in the double digits. Not even human. The Hidden Guild's cheapest prostitute had no such luxury as clothes, only a slave collar around her neck.

Not even trained, she wouldn't do anything on her own.

At this level, cutting off her ears and tail would at least make her look closer to human, but even that hadn't been done. Of course, paying a healer to cast recovery magic on a demi-human slave would be something only an eccentric would do. Without recovery magic, losing body parts meant risking death… Still better than having a corpse come out, I suppose.

But she was too small to begin with. It was laughable that she was even being called a prostitute.

Though the fruit was far too young, a woman was still a woman. Grabbing her delicate arm—one that seemed like it might break at the slightest touch—he pulled her close.

The feeling wasn't bad. Rather, her young, fine-textured skin reminded him of the high-class brothel prostitute a senior had taken him to during his mercenary days, and it aroused him.

After the act, the bandit boss decided to start buying criminal slaves.

The slaves handled by the Hidden Guild ranged from worthless to premium. Half-dead slaves were cheap, healthy slaves were expensive.

Newcomers can take down reasonably strong adventurers if you throw enough at them, but ideally I'd want criminal slaves with experience in killing. That's what the bandit boss was thinking.

Eventually, I'll need sex slaves for my underlings too… The fact that sex slaves cost more than criminal slaves, well, they're luxury goods, so it can't be helped. I'll buy some when the funds are a bit more comfortable.

The bandit boss had them line up the slaves he could afford. Among them was the demi-human child from the brothel. He felt like buying her would make the money he'd spent at the brothel go to waste, but they said they'd discount her for that, so he decided to buy her. She'd been practically at throwaway prices to begin with. Or rather, she was almost free, a bonus thrown in with the other slaves. Perhaps she'd been about to be disposed of, her price was no more than about ten hard black breads.

Remembering the feel of that nearly-free child slave… the skin texture reminiscent of a high-class prostitute, the bandit boss thought he'd gotten a good deal.

If she became his property, he wouldn't have to worry about penalty fees or forced buyouts for tearing or breaking her, and cutting off ears and tails or using a knife to widen unusable holes would be his own responsibility.

"… Maybe I'll hold off on cutting the ears and tail until she grows a bit more. Be a waste if she died right after I went through the trouble of buying her. I want to at least get my money's worth."

Carrying the demi-human child slave who walked too slowly for his patience, the bandit boss headed toward the [Ordinary Cave] that served as their base.

Along the way, he spotted a pair of adventurers and ambushed them from behind, taking them alive.

Perfect timing. This might get us another room to put the slaves in.

"I'm so lucky."

Kukku, the bandit boss laughed.