“Wh-what happened?” The man asked, his eyes slowly opening.
“Do you remember dying?” I asked, not trying to be crass, but also not wanting to waste my time beating around the bush.
“Dying? R-right… the bandits… wait… my wife!” He tried to stand up, but with my hand on his chest, it was more than enough force to keep him on the ground.
“We will be resurrecting everyone. Just be patient. Actually, I resurrected you first for a reason.”
“If there is anyone not here, we need to know. We will continue to resurrect people, but we don’t want to miss anyone whose body we couldn’t find or something like that.”
“I see…” He sat up a bit slower this time, needing some of my help.
As he glanced around the town, his eyes lowered. “They… they burned everything.”
“No, the fact that you’ve already chosen to help us resurrect, we owe you our lives literally. We’ve seen Bandits before, but never . They usually still fear death. They have an ounce of humanity still in them. These guys… they just killed everyone, even the children.”
“Murdering a child is a taboo.” Carmine explained. “Even if you’re resurrected, trauma is harder to fix.”
“That’s assuming there isn’t any developmental issues.” I added.
Who knew if a body reassembled from magic could just jump back into adolescent development as smoothly as the original? Copying a grown body is one thing, but copying a body that hasn’t finished growing, and then expecting it to continue was another. Well, child murder was rare enough in this world that this was a question no one had previously had to answer.
“I have kind of been skimping on the subject, but what about rape?”
“It happens.” She shrugged. “Most women would kill themselves to keep it from happening, but if they are restrained, it can happen.”
The man on the ground lowered his head. “My wife… I gave her a knife before I went out. I told her that if anyone but me enters the door, to plunge it into her throat immediately.”
“Isn’t there a poison for that?” Ruby asked and then looked over at me. “It’s a common threat for all female warriors, so there are fast acting, supposedly painless poisons that women can buy to avoid such things.”
“It was too expensive.” The guy let out a half-cry, half-sob. “Bandits around here don’t usually attack villages. I told her I didn’t think it was necessary since we never left town.”
It was clear by the tone of his voice he no longer saw things the same way. It really was strange, the ways that being able to resurrect yourself changed your way of thinking. The best thing for a commoner to have wasn’t safety and security, but a quick way out and a reliable person to resurrect you.
Furthermore, the Bandits around here had become bolder and more aggressive. They could resurrect seemingly instantly too. It definitely left me worried about what was to come.