After dinner and some more talking, I’d returned to my room where I spent a peaceful night dreaming of delicious goodness. It may have also included some scenes about butchering the ingredients, but blood and gore had stopped being a problem for me years ago.

I awoke refreshed and ready to go, though I didn’t immediately leave. Isabella and her party were leaving this morning on a passenger carriage bound for the capital, but we’d be having breakfast together before they left.

I’m not sure why they were continuing to go incognito, not with her status, but guessed that politics were involved. Which is why I was staying out of it. Still, they were fun to be around, so I’d enjoyed the time I’d spent with them. It had been a very different type of interaction as Ella, as I’d introduced myself, then it had been as Lary.

On the ship I’d had to be a teacher, kind yet firm. I didn’t make idle conversation, instead focusing on teaching her to the exclusion of all other unnecessary activities. When I did have down time, as she occasionally needed breaks to recover her mana, I’d read.

Here, I’d been able to be a friend. My appearance was closer in age to her, being around eighteen, but short. I made cute plushies and had given her one, even showed some of the others, getting to watch her cute reaction to them. For an aristocrat, she was very down to earth and easy to talk to, able to talk about topics I hadn’t expected.

But she had to go home, and so we said our farewells. It wasn’t quite as emotional as our last parting, but I’d, reluctantly, made a promise to see her in the capital if I went there.

No, they hadn’t revealed to me who she was, but one of the guards had a father who owned a merchant business who could forward letters to them to let us get in contact.

Was I breaking my rule of not getting involved with politics? Yes. But she was just so darn cute, I couldn’t resist this time. I’d barely been able to stop myself last time.

After we parted, I headed for the gate, and then the woods.

I decided to do it the easy way this time and flew while invisible. It was faster, and I was going deeper in order to find the orcs, since the outskirts of the forest were mostly inhabited by goblins. Sure, there were some of them deeper in, but those were usually servants or slaves of the more powerful orc tribes.

Orcs were somewhat different on this world then on Valla. First off, they tasted far better. This was likely due to the second difference, being closer to the boars they resembled. Third, they were dumber. Or that could have been the result of having an orc demon lord over there.

The remnants had revived a bunch of the things, of various species, which we’d had to kill since they increased the strength of their same species minions.

Here they didn’t have that. Here, Demon kings and lords were societal positions, just like human ones, since they were just another intelligent species, so they didn’t use the species name in the title.

Monsters like orcs tended to group together to form communities, and they learned to get stronger, but having a lord didn’t strengthen them as a passive buff. They had to put effort into getting stronger, though they were seldom given the chance since they attacked most other species intending to kill or capture. The latter was usually only in the case of females, though there were a times feminine looking men got captured thinking they were women. Sometimes they even survived once found with a twig and berries, though it still usually led to intense mental and physical trauma for those who were rescued.

Anyways, I flew over the forest today, using my skills to try to find my targets, rather than just wandering mostly aimlessly like the day before.

As luck would have it, I stumbled on an orc village.

I had gone quite far into the forest, almost to the mountains on the other side. The distance would have taken a week or more of hiking to cover on foot.

The place was built in a clearing, though it barely qualified as a village considering the hovels could only be called buildings with great generosity. There was one large hut, and a dozen or so smaller ones, even a horribly built wall around the place, but no towers for lookouts. I had a feeling if they’d tried building any, they were likely to collapse before they were finished.

Checking the place with my detection skill, I found that there were thirty-two humanoid life signs, though I was sure there were more orcs out of the village hunting and foraging. Of those signs, I couldn’t tell what species they were, so there was a possibility that there were captives, so I had to be careful. I couldn’t just send magic flying to terminate all of them.

I decided to head hunt them, taking their heads off their shoulders. It was a great chance to brush some of the rust off my skills. Magic was more fun for me, so I tended to use it over weapons more often than not. Less running around that way.

Drawing the rapier from my hip, I readied myself. The thing wasn’t one of those fencing rapiers, but was a bit stouter, allowing it to cut easily, not just poke holes in other being’s juice boxes.

I dropped to the ground, then cast a silencing field over the village. Unlike a silencing ward, this completely cut all sound within the area of effect, in this case the whole village. I’d gotten used to fighting in one, though it could be a bit eerie having one of your senses that was relied on cut off.

There were two guards at the gate, and then there weren’t. As soon as their heads popped off, the bodies were stored in my item box. The heads got knocked over the walls and into the village. I’d pick them up later, after they finished dying.

Living beings couldn’t be stored in item boxes, so one had to make sure they were dead in order to store them. Happy coincidence, most beings ‘life’ was considered to be where their consciousness was, the brain, so separating the head from the body made it possible to store the ‘dead’ part of the body once the two were separated.

This did not apply in all instances. Vallan vampires, similar to many legends on Earth, had two points that needed to be dealt with. Head and heart. Golems had a core somewhere in them. Many worm-type monsters had little to no brains, but a distributed neural network throughout their bodies, letting them heal from being chopped in half in some cases.

Orcs, they were among the majority vulnerable to beheading. And so I did.

I’d kicked the heads so as not to leave any traces at the opening in the ‘wall’ around the village. Didn’t want to scare off any returning prey. Once the gate was cleared, I started running around the village. I was unable to hear, same as any under the silencing field, so I had to rely on sight and my sensing skills to find the beasts.

It wasn’t hard. Orcs were low level monsters. Dangerous in larger numbers, but weak alone or small groups. Or if you are overpowered. I was definitely not the only one who could do this, since there was a reason orcs were available as a rank two target. Those a few ranks higher would also be able to do this, with it getting easier the higher one went.

After I ‘off with the head’ed the last orc, I went around and started cleanup, starting with the three beings that were not orcs. The orcs, like goblins, used females of other species as seedbeds to increase their number. Not always humanoids, just females of species with large enough bodies.

None of the victims could move, having had their limbs removed, but there was only one I was actually interested in. The others were a deer and a cow. How had a cow gotten so deep in the woods?

I’d put the animals out of their misery when I visited earlier, but couldn’t store them due to them having buns in their ovens. Since I now had time, I removed the corpses from the hut and gave ‘em a quick dissection, cutting open the stomach to spill the contents, including the womb, to the earth. I didn’t know if orc baby tasted good, so after killing them and collecting the ears I stored them with the others.

Then I returned to the hut where a limbless elf lay. Like most of the race, she was quite pretty, if she wasn’t covered in ick. I’d purified her body, inside and out, leaving her true appearance to be seen, not that she responded to either my presence or my actions so far. The purification did nothing to the being in her stomach, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

After making sure she was healthy and unconscious, I gave her an abortion. Should I have talked to her first? Maybe, but she’d been awake, yet completely unresponsive. There was a good chance I’d have to kill her since she wouldn’t be able to survive if her mind was completely broken.

Also, the children of orcs are always more orcs, regardless of what species the other parent is.

I healed her back up, repairing the damage the operation had done to her body, then left her for the moment. She was in good health, and there were other matters to attend to.

According to my senses, a group of beings were approaching the wall, and I needed to attend to them. It was a trio of orcs, hunters, considering they were carrying dead animals with them. As soon as they entered the village, without even seeming to notice that the entrance had been unguarded, they lost their lives.

I tossed the heads to the center of the village. After collecting the ears, I’d be burning them along with the village. It was a bad idea to leave inhabitable locations like villages or caves behind after clearing them out. It was best to destroy them so the chances of being used again were lower.

I quickly went through the huts, searching for any goodies, coming up mostly empty. I did find a few things, but most of it was so foul I didn’t care enough to clean it, even with magic. Once a hut was checked, I collapsed it and moved on. When they were all done except the one where the elf still lay, I dealt with the heads, taking their ears and tossing them on the wooden scraps that used to provide negligible protection from the elements.

Then it was time to see if the elf could be saved.

I spent the next two hours trying a variety of spells to see if I could heal her mind, but to no avail. There were occasional interruptions from returning orcs, but they were minor things.

I ended up putting her to rest, hoping that her soul would find peace in her next life.

With no more reason to stay, I demolished the last hut, leaving the woman’s body within what would become her funeral pyre. It’d have been nice if there’d been some form of identification for the woman so her family would know she’d passed, but I couldn’t find any, so I’d drawn up a picture of her face, putting the information I gained by dealing with the hassle that was appraisal on the paper as well.

Then I started an inferno.

It was rare that I used fire magic in wooded areas, since there was always a risk of forest fires, but there was nothing to distract me like during a battle. Even if a fire started, I could extinguish it easily. As I was controlling the fire, it quickly reduced the village to ashes, then went out.

I’m sure there were other orcs who knew of this place, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a new village was rebuilt in the future, but it was gone for now, and I had a few tons of orcs to dismantle, including a few higher ranking ones.

Returning to the city would have been quick and easy via flight, but it wasn’t even noon yet, so I did what I’d done yesterday, wandered the woods and appraised various plants to see if they had any value.

Since this was deeper into the forest than people tended to come, there were some rarer plants around, so I collected them. Some of them would be useful in making various potions and medicines, and I was interested to see what I could do with them.

I wasn’t hiding my presence, so I got attacked a few times and added a few more corpses to my item box for dissection later on. There were a few orcs, but I also got a four-armed bear, a pack of larger than average wolves, even a plant that spit out seeds like bullets. The seeds were edible, and looked like beans from earth.

The plant had enough beans inside it’s stalk to fill a large pot, and so a future meal was set. I’d boil the beans, then eat them with the orc meat from earlier. Have a nice old fashioned pork and beans dinner.