Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 51
These three worthless soldiers made the young Witcher understand the face of this world more deeply than before.
What sort of soldiers had he encountered in the past?
The law-enforcement squads, the elite teams sent to hunt him down.
Phillip’s mounted unit, every man on horseback, the baron’s castle guard and direct military arm.
Those men might be coarse. They might be savage. They might carry all the ignorant prejudices of their age.
But without question, they were capable men, far above the common folk and ordinary soldiers of this era.
They knew how to kill, how to track, how to ride, how to work military gear...
Those skills gave them status, and at the same time imposed rules on them.
A man serving as the baron’s guard did not have the time or freedom to swagger through villages and prey on peasants at whim.
A man who had become an elite soldier did not have the spare energy or opportunity to moonlight as a roadside brigand.
But for ordinary soldiers, perhaps the three Lannor had just beaten to death with his bare fists were the real norm of the age.
Slack, undisciplined, convinced that holding a sword meant they held power in some remote backwater.
And so they robbed travelers, bullied without restraint, killed when it pleased them, and only did anything resembling real work when tax season came and they had to follow behind the tax collector.
In most people’s eyes, they were nothing more than bandits wearing the state’s badge.
Lannor felt not the slightest thing amiss about the rage that had driven his hand.
At first, the young man had meant to beat those three pieces of human refuse to death and leave it at that, then continue on with what really mattered.
But in the midst of the fight, an overturned storage chest beneath the tarpaulin caught his eye.
Lannor crouched by the chest and picked up a strip of blackened, hardened cured meat.
His cat eyes shifted. There was still nearly half a chest of the stuff left inside. By Velen’s average standard of living, that was no small amount.
Judging by the traces, the meat had been put there less than two days ago.
The Witcher’s fingers rubbed over the surface of the strip, and soon the tips of his gloves gleamed with grease.
“So this is the ‘salted meat they’re sick of eating’?”
Lannor narrowed his eyes slightly.
“There have to be hundreds of waystations like this across Velen. If every one of them is stocked at this level ... can Vserad even afford it?”
In the blink of an eye, Mentos picked up the thread of Lannor’s reasoning, calculated the total volume of supplies, and, based on that single visit to Crow’s Perch, estimated the rough scale of Vserad’s wealth.
“Sir, according to my calculations, Sir Vserad cannot support his forces at this level. In practical terms, supporting seven to eight hundred men is already near his limit.”
“So this isn’t standard issue for an outpost.”
Lannor rose from his crouch and surveyed the surroundings.
Corpses and the signs of the fight had left the place in disarray.
But the combination of his now respectable grasp of trace detection, supernatural senses, and Mentos’ visual recording ability was enough to let him reconstruct the scene.
“No one besides me has left signs of a bloody conflict here within the last week. A merchant passed through three days ago, but that was a flower buyer...”
Lannor walked to a faint wagon rut that had nearly disappeared, pinched up a bit of mud, and brought it to his nose.
“The merchant’s cart carried nothing but the scent of flowers. Even if the soldiers squeezed him, the most he could have paid was coin.”
The answer was obvious.
The cured meat had not come from official rations. It had not been extorted from passersby. It was even less likely to have come from some forced “donation” by villagers...
In this stretch of hills, was there any other possibility?
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