Chapter 439: The Tribe

Yuusha looked at him. "Yes."

Anderson thought about it. He stayed completely silent for a moment, and Yuusha could tell that he was deeply considering his options.

Then, completely contrary to Yuusha’s expectations, Anderson looked up at him.

"Is there another tribe nearby that I can go to instead?"

Yuusha narrowed his eyes.

"You wish to go to another tribe, even though I just offered to take you into mine? Isn’t that a little disrespectful?"

He took a single step forward. Just that one single step was enough to put every single elite knight in Anderson’s party into a state of alertness.

"And based on the way you asked about another tribe, and your pointed questions about wars and aggressive attacks..." Yuusha continued slowly. "Is it fair for me to assume that you purposefully want to join a tribe that is aggressive?"

Anderson didn’t bother offering an excuse. Instead, he smoothly pulled his sword from its scabbard.

"Yes. And what about it?"

Seeing such a reckless, arrogant display right in front of him, Yuusha just shook his head.

"You are a completely lost foreigner, and you want to make a direct enemy out of a native who actually knows the land?"

"Well, yes," Anderson smirked. "But not really. I am just not really interested in a weak, peaceful tribe. There are grand things that I need to do to achieve my goals here. But of course, a young kid like you wouldn’t understand the ambitions of a great empire, would you?"

Yuusha chuckled darkly.

"Ah. That annoying blessing of yours."

Anderson’s body immediately stiffened up and he gripped his sword tighter.

"What do you mean blessing?" Anderson asked coldly, keeping his eyes locked on Yuusha.

"Just by looking at someone, you can accurately tell exactly how old they are," Yuusha said, unbothered. "So the fact that you are genuinely considering me a young kid is actually good news for me. This was all just a test, and I wanted to see exactly how omnipotent your so called blessing can be, but it looks like there are limits... According to your blessing, I must be around eighteen years old, right?"

Anderson just stayed silent.

"Well, sure, you can go to the other tribe," Yuusha shrugged. "I am not going to fight you. After all, I am just one single guy and there is no way I can win against ten high ranking knights all at once right?" he asked and chuckled.

He pointed a finger lazily toward the east.

"Head over in that direction. I mean, head east and you will find one of the most aggressive tribes on this entire island. They are also one of the strongest tribes here."

Anderson and the rest of the Crestwall knights just stared at him instead of walking away.

Yuusha raised an eyebrow. "What? You said you wanted to get into a tribe that is aggressive, and I told you exactly where they are. So why are you still staring at me?"

Anderson narrowed his eyes. "Who are you?"

Yuusha smirked. "Well, that is none of your business now, is it? But of course, a lot of things do make a lot of sense now. A lot of things do make a lot of sense."

He paused, looking Anderson up and down.

"An incomplete technique, huh?" Yuusha muttered.

That cryptic comment only served to confuse Anderson even more. But before he or any of the elite knights from Crestwall could say or do anything else, Yuusha casually grabbed the wooden bucket of fish that was sitting on the ground and simply began walking away into the foliage.

All of the knights looked directly at Anderson, waiting for his orders.

But Anderson did not say anything. He just stood there in silence, watching as Yuusha’s bald head disappeared into the thick jungle.

Only when they couldn’t see or hear Yuusha anymore did Anderson finally turn to look at his knights.

"Let’s go. Let’s just trust him for now and go in that direction."

One of the knights nodded hesitantly. "Yeah, it doesn’t really... it is not exactly a bad thing, I guess. Though there is a high chance that it might be an ambush or a trap, we should be ready for it just in case."

Anderson nodded firmly. "Yeah. Let’s go."

As they started walking, they looked up through the thick canopy of leaves at the sky. The sun was almost setting, casting long, dark shadows through the trees.

One of the knights looked over at Anderson.

"It’s a good thing that we forced that guide to send us here first, right?"

"Yeah, that is a good thing," Anderson agreed. "Though the others should be here in a few minutes or an hour."

They started walking toward the east, following the exact direction which Yuusha had told them to go in.

They walked cautiously for around one hour before they finally started to see actual signs of human-made things in the jungle.

Traps, to be specific.

They didn’t exactly ’see’ the traps. One of them actually got trapped. Or at least, almost got trapped.

A camouflaged pit had opened up right under Anderson’s feet. Luckily for him, as a high-ranking knight, he possessed the physical capability and the reaction speed to react in time. The exact moment he felt the weight under his legs shift and the ground give way, he grabbed the solid edge of the hole and hoisted himself right back out.

The hole was incredibly deep, almost dropping down ten feet into darkness, and it was also a full six feet wide.

Anderson looked down at it, and then he looked back at the others with a dark expression.

"We need to be much more careful from now on. This thing was almost unspottable but we should be able to spot them if we actually keep our attention on our immediate surroundings."

And just like that, they continued to walk.

This time, they did not trip any other hidden traps. Since they were keeping an eye out for things, and they were actively using the tips of their weapons to probe the ground ahead of them, it slowed their progress through the dense forest.

While it did slow their progress, it was still a much safer method.

In the end, it took them a total of thirty more minutes to finally see another actual human being.

A man was standing by a thick tree and he had gruesome burns all over his body, but it looked almost like they were made intentionally in specific patterns.

Seeing that, one of the knights whispered to the group. "Hot metal branding. That is way too intense and painful... I cannot believe someone would actually voluntarily go through something like that."

Anderson did not respond. Instead, he confidently walked over toward the branded man.

The man just stood there and offered a wide, unsettling, toothy grin.

"What you want, stranger?"

Anderson who was almost a foot taller than him, spoke. "We want to join your tribe."

The guy just laughed out loud like a maniac. "Guehuehuehue!! You want to join the tribe?"

Anderson nodded in response and the guy’s grin widened even further. "To join tribe, you prove yourself."

"We will all prove ourselves," Anderson said. "You can throw us into any test you want."

"Okay. Follow," the man grunted.

Anderson and everyone else followed closely behind him.

Soon, they pushed through the bushes and entered a massive clearing that was situated right beside a wide riverbank.

Anderson looked at the extremely wide clearing and took in the area.

There were cut-up tree trunks still rooted to the ground acting as random, scattered seats for people to sit on. There were also multiple tents which were basically made from massive overlapping leaves and sturdy sticks.

Anderson looked at the people walking around the camp.

Almost every single person barely wore anything, even the females. Both the males and the females wore just a tiny piece of animal hide, a large leaf, or softened tree bark just to cover their pubic area between their legs. Even their backsides were completely bare.

Seeing this, Anderson looked at the knights he came with. He had one single question burning in his mind.

’Why wasn’t this guy surprised when he saw our outfits?’ Anderson thought as he looked at the tribal people. ’We clearly look entirely different from them. Not just with the way we look, but especially our armor and clothes.’

He observed the people closely. Most of them were incredibly thin, but they were also muscular in their own way. Their muscle density was unnaturally high. Meanwhile, the elite knights with Anderson had much more overall muscle volume and bulk.

The tribal people’s faces were also a mess with wonky proportions, teeth growing at random angles and one of them even had three eyes but he seemed to be blind considering the way he walked on all four while feeling around the ground. Anderson did not really know what would have caused it. They looked ugly to him, even compared to the lowest commoners back in Crestwall.

As Anderson and the knights continued to follow behind the branded tribesman, Anderson finally saw one thing that genuinely shook him to his core.

The other bizarre things he had observed until now were things he could bear with. He had prepared himself and he knew that he would be able to tolerate watching other foreign people live their own life or have their own weird customs.

But this specific thing he was looking at... it shook him so much that he couldn’t help but stop walking entirely.

And it wasn’t just him. Every single elite knight that had come along with him froze in place and looked in utter shock and horror.

There was a man tied firmly to a large wooden cross.

He wasn’t exactly alive anymore. But what shook them the most was the horrifying fact that the cross was placed horizontally to the ground... and right below it was a massive, glowing bed of red-hot coals.

[A/N: Just 1 for today. The next few Chapters are gonna be hard to write but I gotta cook.]