After we finished, Salicia appeared to be healed. I was a White Mage, after all, so as soon as the curse was flushed from her system, my spells were more than enough to bring her back even from the cusp of death. Her wound healed up, and she looked as good as new. She looked even better than that. After becoming so close to her, I suddenly found it a bit difficult to see her the same way as before. She looked just a touch more radiant. As she looked at me, her cheeks flushed, and there was a slight bit of shyness that caused her to become more radiant and beautiful to my eyes.
She put her eyepatch back on, covering the dark brown eye, the only thing that indicated her as different from the original Salicia who had once died. After getting spare clothing from the girls present, she was starting to return to her old self. Furthermore, when our souls touched, I had also flushed out the contamination from Calypso’s miasmic attack. Although she had resisted Calypso once, there was no saying Calypso might not use her again. However, that mark had now been destroyed, freeing Salicia completely.
I looked out over the group of Bandits standing at the ready down in the arena. The rest of the girls walked up with me. Only a bit before, they had been battling these Bandit hordes to the death. Now, we all stood above them, and they looked up at me with reverence.
They were all controlled by me, and once I had ordered them to stand down, they had stopped fighting and had seemingly been loitering around. Given the angle of the arena to the stadium box, they weren’t able to see me with Salicia, but that didn’t stop them from being able to hear. Many of the men gave knowing grins and thumbs up as they saw me, having been well aware of what we were doing up here.
To them, I was nothing more than their Bandit King, although if they were asked why I became the leader, they’d just give a vague answer about how I defeated Calypso and am thus the strongest. In that respect, having a harem of beautiful women was perfectly suitable for a Bandit King, and perhaps even a sense of pride for the Bandits that followed me.
Many of them even recognized Salicia, so seeing her conquered by their new leader left them feeling quite happy. Some might have known her as Calypso’s right-hand woman, but many others had actually been Bandits under her back when she was the Bandit King herself. Of course, all of them had died, and these were only the remnant souls of those people.
Although their souls had been captured completely by this dungeon, they hadn’t been formed into miasmic bodies, but ground into food for the dungeon. Furthermore, these guys experienced endless amounts of death as they were sent out and encouraged to attack the countryside, creating more fuel for Calypso’s growing ambition. At this point, they were shells of what they once were, and even Salicia would struggle to pick out any one of them and recognize them as a bandit she once knew. It wasn’t like they could hold long conversations about the past, or act on any deep level.
“So, what should we do now?” Shao asked.
I thought about it for a bit, and then I made my decision.