"Thank you, and good luck." She got up, bowing. Yet, just as Rui was about to leave, she stopped him.
"Wait. I have something to give you."
Rui tilted his head as she reached for her neck, taking off a string necklace with what looked like a claw attached to it.
"This is the claw of a skyfringe eagle." She told him. "It protects the crops by hunting the pests and critters that destroy the crops. In our village we wear it around our necks for good fortune."
Rui wordlessly accepted it as she put it around his neck.
"Good luck." She wished him.
"Thank you, goodbye" Rui nodded as he left her humble abode.
The Hefermaine village was located a little south of the Kingdom of Grahal. Rui thought about how he was going to do this.
The first thing he needed was information. Information on the exact number of gang members in the village. The tendencies and habits; things like where they spent most of their time, what they did with most of their time and how alert they were.
He would also have liked to get as much information about Vranil Fra as he could, although he didn't expect to get much as much as he would have liked. After all, he would need to see Vranil fight in order to gain any meaningful information.
"Maybe I can get him to fight." Rui murmured as a few ideas popped into his head.
A few hours later, he reached the edge of the Kingdom of Grahal on the western side, quickly jumping past the border as he sprinted away at top speed. He never lost track of the path that would take him most of the way to the Hefermaine village, but he never stayed close either.
It was possible that the Ruyloken gang had kept lookouts on the path to the Hefermaine village that would inform them of the arrival of a new Martial Artist, thus Rui chose to travel parallelly to it deep in the forest, he kept track of the path from afar with Seismic Mapping, which allowed him to map the environment and anything that had seismic radiation.
This way, there was absolutely no way the Ruyloken Gang could possibly know that there was a Martial Artist out for them. Rui had not given his identity entering or exiting the Kingdom of Grahal and now was keeping himself remote as he travelled to the Hefermaine village.
Thankfully, it wasn't more than three hours away by carriage, he managed to reach it in an hour.
He was quite paranoid about being found; thus, he took his precautions. When he was ten kilometers from the village, he stopped using Apprentice-level techniques. If Vranil had sensory techniques, he might have been able to sense Rui's approach, after all.
When he was one kilometer away, he stopped. He jumped to the top of a tall tree, pulled out a portable monocular as he used it to get a good look at the Hefermaine village.
Unfortunately, he didn't see much.
The Hefermaine village was large, because there were a lot of wide and large crop fields across the entire village. Meaning the village was as large as a small town, or multiple districts because of the size of the crop fields, despite the population of the village being low.
This made things harder for Rui.
However, he didn't want to take a risk and try infiltrating the village, if Vranil was a good sensor and detected him, then there would be problems.
The reason Rui was averse to just walking in wreaking havoc was because it was possible that the Ruyloken Gang would use the villagers as hostages, which inevitably would mean that they would die if he didn't surrender himself or something of the sort.
And there was no way he was surrendering himself, that was as good as signing his death warrant.
Although he didn't think the probability of Vranil being a powerful strong sensor was high, because otherwise, Fria would not have been able to escape the Ruyloken Gang, he still wanted to be careful. It was possible that Vranil simply didn't care that a single girl managed to escape.
If that was the case, that would make Vranil a bit careless and stupid, because that very well could lead to a bounty being placed on his head.
Like it basically did, with Rui aiming to take him down.
Rui began circling around the village from a kilometer away, occasionally jumping a tree and taking a good look with his monocular. He soon saw his first gang member.
('They're armed quite heavily.') Rui noted. They had muskets, knives and other blades as well.
It had taken him quite some time to circle around the village, gathering as much information as he could piece-by-piece, until he got a general gist of what was going on.
The villagers outnumbered the gang immensely. However, the gang members being armed as well as the presence of a powerful Martial Apprentice was more than enough to crush any hope of resistance.
The conditions of the villagers was not great, they looked a little malnourished, but were still healthy enough to keep working, which they had been doing non-stop.
('They're feeding them just enough so that they can keep working and tending to the yield and so that the money keeps rolling in.') Rui sighed.
Furthermore, he sensed groups of villagers holed in buildings with guards on the outside, preventing anyone from leaving. Rui's seismic sense was too far away to get him a clear picture of the people inside, but he already had had his suspicions.
('They're holding the elderly and young children hostage so that the working adults don't even dream about trying something. I bet they've killed a few of them as an example.')
This was the reason Rui didn't see too many patrollers from the gang, they already had a pretty good way of guaranteeing cooperation from the villagers. If the villagers were even half of what Fria was, they wouldn't do anything that put their families at jeopardy.
