When the elven mage had told us that there was a bandit problem near the capital, he wasn't kidding. It had only been a day since the first attack, but we had already gotten attacked three more times. Sure, it was nothing particurly deadly, but it did raise the question of how this many bandits could keep showing up. I was certain that other adventurers were sying them too, so their numbers should have dropped massively by now.

  To make matters worse, all bandits apart from the first group that we met didn't even have a single coin on them. Were the bandits stealing from each other? Was that why most of them were broke?

  "Hey, Nix, am I the only one feeling like there's something off about these attacks? I mean, what's the point of being a criminal if you can't even get anything out of it?" (Dragonfly)

  We were currently walking next to the caravan to stretch our legs a bit. The merchants had chosen to take a detour to avoid areas where the terrain would facilitate an ambush, so we were traveling through a nice meadow.

  There were lots of colorful pnts that the others called flowers. They were unlike anything that I had seen before. I would've loved to take some to keep them in my storage, but I knew that doing so would kill them. Not wanting to damage something so pretty, I held off from grabbing any.

  Anyways, what was I talking about again? Right. I was wondering what was up with those bandits' behavior.

  "Oh, I know! This must be caused by the evil empire people!" (Nix)

  "Well, it could be and this does sound like something that the Gcius Empire would do, but we have no proof. Besides, we can't just bme every issue we encounter on them." (Dragonfly)

  "We can just bme everything on them, tho. It gives us more excuses to fight them!" (Nix)

  I did make sure that we were far enough away not to be heard by anyone on the caravan before continuing the conversation. I wasn't exactly ready to inform the whole world that we wanted to destroy a country, for obvious reasons.

  "I guess, but we don't really need anymore reasons to get rid of the Empire, do we?" (Dragonfly)

  "True, but making a huge list of all of the bad stuff they did and reading it out loud while we beat up all of the bad people could be fun!" (Nix)

  I had to concede that that did sound like a pretty good idea. I was about to answer when I was interrupted by the sound of yet another fight breaking out near the front of the caravan.

  "Again? Seriously? Nix, keep an eye on the back of the caravan, please. Wouldn't want to get sneaked up on from behind." (Dragonfly)

  Flying up in the sky to check the situation, I saw that a group of two bandits had attacked us this time. I would've went to help the elven trio to deal with them, but they were already done.

  Why would a group of two men unch a frontal attack on a protected caravan? Did they have no fear of death? I nded near the mage, who I had learned was named Sultus, to make sure that everything was fine.

  "Is everything alright?" (Dragonfly)

  "Yes, we handled the situation quickly. These bandits were weak." (Stultus)

  "That's good, I guess. Let's just burn these bodies properly and move on." (Dragonfly)

  Sending a fireball towards the corpses, I watched as they burned for a while. For some reason, however, they stopped burning before turning to ashes properly. Seeing this, I decided to use my draconic breath on them, for good measure.

  [User has levelled up to level 10]

  Wait, what? People were not supposed to give levels. The world's will wasn't trying to encourage infighting, after all. Also, weren't they already dead? Destroying the corpse of a dead monster shouldn't give exp. Something was very wrong here.

  I would need to investigate the next time we encountered bandits. There was a mystery here, and I wasn't going to just ignore it. I mean, who could resist something like this?

  "What's going on?" (Nix)

  "Nix? Didn't I just ask you to guard the back of the caravan?" (Dragonfly)

  "Yeah, but I got bored." (Nix)

  "It's been less than five minutes." (Dragonfly)

  Her answer to that was to simply pout. Well, leaving our backs unprotected didn't matter too much since those bandits seemed incapable of doing anything other than striking head-on, for some reason.

  According to the merchants, we would soon reach the area next to the capital that was usually patrolled by guards and adventurers soon. Once we reached it, the amount of attacks would drop, making the st day of travel far easier.