Yashima Chronicles 21. Planning for the Future (Patreon)

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I waited for the general merriment of the toast to die down. Once everybody was happily engaged in eating their fill once more, I made my way over to the mayor. He was seated with other distinguished town elders, while I had been enjoying the meal together with my students. He looked up at my approach and beamed. Clearly, while he expected the bandits to return, he considered the current bandit-free state of the mountain to be a wonderful thing even if it was temporary.

"I must admit that I am worried," I said, "to hear that you expect bandits to stay away only until after the harvest."

"Naturally, they won't dare to bother us so long as you are here," he said.

He spent a while after that buttering us up before he finally got to the root of the problem. I liked to be praised as much as the next person, but it was hard to take it to heart when the praise was coming from somebody so obviously intimidated. The bandits who had given the town so much trouble had easily been slaughtered by my students, so obviously the village wouldn't be able to put up much resistance if I should lash out in a fit of pique. He had no way to know that I was too even tempered to do such a thing.

Once he finally got around to explaining what he meant, well, it was a headache, but not something I could blame him for. It seemed the root of the bandit problem came from the civil unrest across the border in the neighboring province. The bandits weren't simply depraved criminals. Many of them had turned to a life of crime after having been driven away from their honest lifestyles and forced to wander around with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

It would take a while for the trickle of refugees to accumulate into a formidable force of bandits, and our presence in town would prevent anybody from making a nuisance of themselves, but we couldn't stay forever. Lord Ota expected me to deal with the bandit problem, but he also expected me to return his sword saints to him in better condition than they'd been given to me.

I was tempted just to wash my hands of the matter. I'd killed all of the bandits in front of me, which ought to merit at least a little bit of praise from Lord Ota. Remembering the man's ambitions and bloodthirsty disposition, though, I couldn't expect him to be happy if I were to return to him with reports of renewed banditry following on my heels.

Even in the modern world, the way to make your boss happy is to solve his problems. If bandits popped back up as soon as I left, had I really solved the banditry problem? Not at all.

If I couldn't stay to continue suppressing bandits, and I couldn't leave a bandit-infested area behind me, the solution was obvious: in addition to training my students up into half decent sword saints, I would have to train up the locals into a somewhat competent militia so that they could keep a lid on banditry themselves.

Actually, it was possible that we could kill two birds with one stone. The village still had room to expand, especially if they could draw on the help of my students to help clear the wilderness and terrace the nearby hills. If we could create more fields to be worked, then we would be able to give refugees from the neighboring province productive labor to do. Instead of stealing from others, they could satisfy their basic needs through voluntary transactions, leaving everybody better off.

Ultimately, the refugees could become upstanding citizens and perhaps even a part of Lord Ota's war machine. Or at least part of the economy that kept the war machine fed and paid. In order to unify Yashima, he would need to have as many people as possible pulling together in the same direction.

There would be some expenses incurred in the transition. The refugees would be nothing more than mouths to feed until their labor had a chance to bear fruit. Fortunately, the bandits had handed us a solution to that problem. Their enormous store of rice would ease the hunger of the whole village by a great deal. The store of silver and gold could be turned into rice easily enough, to feed even more people.

Honestly, once I thought matters through I was almost grateful for the opportunity. Training up newbie sword saints into some facsimile of competence was all well and good, but what I really wanted was an administrative position where I could use my knowledge of modern economics to help bring order and prosperity to the people of Yashima.

A certain amount of military accomplishment was necessary to qualify me for any position of authority, but in order to secure the post that I truly wanted I would have to show a history of accomplishment in a relevant field. Organizing the refugees to act as a benefit instead of a menace to peace in the region, and organizing the village to be independently capable of stamping out any remaining bandits, would both show skills that went beyond the mere technical ability to use mana to kill people.

I let my students enjoy the rest of the banquet, doing my best to fade into the background so that I could plan out my next steps.

The next day, we resumed our usual efforts. That is, my students helped out in the rice fields while I applied magical pressure for them to resist. I intended to polish my abilities with the bow up to a minimum level of competence before I introduced my new anti-projectile training.

I called for them to leave before the usual hour. While some of them were just grateful to knock off early, a few of them looked suspicious. That was good. Training up capable underlings didn't just require that they grasped how to use magic, but also that they could think for themselves.

In this case, though, they were overthinking things. All that I was doing was announcing the new division of labor. While helping out in the fields was helpful to the villagers and did allow for relatively efficient magical training, now that I was focusing on stamping out banditry in the long term I had to make more efficient use of the resources assigned to me.

First of all, four students were to take on the duty of performing a roving patrol. Their job would be to spot any refugees migrating away from the troubles in our neighboring province. They would tell those refugees of the new home waiting for them in our mountain village. If the refugees already had a specific destination in mind, then of course they would be free to go on their way. If they seemed intent on aimlessly wandering through Lord Ota's land, well, it was reasonable to assume that they were aspiring bandits.

Another four students had the task of taking the captured valuables back to Kiyosu. The stolen goods retrieved from bandits naturally belonged to Lord Ota. As his representative, it was my duty to see that they were turned into ready cash and then converted into a form that was suitable for pursuing Lord Ota's aims. Namely, to purchase rice that would support our anti-banditry efforts.

The last four students would continue to help out in the fields during the day. It wouldn't do to stop our magical training entirely. In the evening, though, they had a new job: to lead the training of the new village militia. I certainly wasn't going to do it.

We got more of a turnout than I'd been expecting. The people of the village had to work hard all day just to secure our livelihood. I hadn't thought that many of them would volunteer for martial training on top of that. As it happened, almost a hundred people showed up, all relatively young and hearty. They looked to be in high spirits, too. It seemed our subjugation of the bandits had acted as effective advertising.

Hideyoshi surveyed the crowd for a moment before he turned to face me. He hesitated for a moment, then spoke. "Are you sure you want me to lead the training?"

"Of course," I said, smiling.

"It feels strange to be teaching while you stand by," he replied.

"Teaching new people will help you learn," I said.

More to the point, I didn't know the first thing about ordinary soldiering in this day and age. When it came to coaching non-magical troops, the only thing I could tell them to do was to stick their enemies with the pointy end. Anything beyond that, and I could only describe how I would use magic to solve the problem.

Thus, I had delegated the task to Hideyoshi, who seemed the most reliable of my students. I would keep an eye on proceedings in the name of supervision, even though in truth I would be learning almost as much as the villagers. I figured the leadership experience would do Hideyoshi some good as well. He had a few of his fellow students to help act as teacher's assistants as well, so it wasn't like he was completely alone.

The first night's lesson was more of a physical education class than real military training. Hideyoshi had the villagers running up and down the street, carrying buckets of water, and so on. They did better than I'd expected for the first day. On reflection, I shouldn't have been surprised. These were all men who worked hard every day just to survive, so it was only natural that their first day of boot camp was more impressive than what I would have seen if a bunch of my old college classmates had shown up.

The second day, we didn't get quite as many villagers. It seemed that some of them had shown up full of dreams of military glory and were disappointed at the relatively mundane reality. Still, with over seventy-five people in attendance, it was more than enough to comprise a formidable bandit-fighting corps.

Hideyoshi gradually introduced the use of the spear over the course of the first week. When arming a bunch of villagers, there was no question of providing them with swords. Even with the windfall we'd received from capturing the bandit's stash, we would have been hard pressed to buy that many high quality weapons. Being as a spear was basically a sharpened stick with, at most, a metal point on the end, it was a much more economical purchase. Practical, too. Once they learned a bit of coordination and could fight together with spears in hand, it wasn't a formation that even I would be willing to attack lightly.

As they moved into the second week of training, a strange phenomenon started to occur. More people were showing up. Not villagers who had been sitting on the sidelines, but rather people from the surrounding villages. This mountain village was rather isolated, but there were other villages scattered around the area, all a day or two of travel apart from each other. The news of our victory over the bandits had spread, along with the news that we were training men to be able to fight off any future waves of bandits.

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