He's dropped the crossbow, drawn his own blade, and succeeds at a parry, briefly knocking Ame off balance.

The grass starts twisting around his legs, making him fall to the ground instead of dodging backwards from Ame's next blow. The others are still readying their non-ranged weapons, a bit stunned by the speed of her reaction.

Well that's helpful.

Then the pain hits, and Ame's mind goes cold.

Ame knows which vertebrae to sever to turn him into a quadriplegic without killing him. Her blade plunges down, missing his heart (but nicking a lung, she's never actually done this before), and slices through his spine.

She leaves the sword there, using it to brace herself as she kicks out behind her with both feet, catching one lackey with his weapon half-drawn. The force of the kick propels her forward, she tucks into a roll and comes up at lackey number two, aiming for a gut blow.

Lackey number one takes a small fireball to the chest!

Number two falls over from the gut blow, and three runs for his life.

Ame is slightly startled by the fireball, but it doesn't stop her from stomping on and breaking lackey-two's knees.

Lacky-three trips over a gallon of healing slime that is suddenly clinging to his feet. Lacky-three was the one who was the most... distracted... by Ame's counter-offer. He gets to not be horribly maimed.

There's a lot of screaming. Lackey One manages a "Please don't kill me!"

Elizabeth seems to have been preparing another fire spell, but suddenly catches herself and lets it fizzle, breathing hard, wide-eyed.

Oh, he's not on fire. Good?

"Okay," Ame says, and steps on his neck. Gently. "What would you like me to do instead?"

"L-Let us go? This was all Murko's idea - just get a little silver and we can get out of Baron Traver's land for good and, and get jobs chopping wood or something without bein' picked off by wild animals or freezing to death in the woods!"

Ame assumes Murko is the one who had the crossbow, and is currently nailed to the ground with a severed spine.

"You do understand that trying to kill us was the worst possible way to get anything you wanted? That literally any other approach would've served you better? Are you going to be smarter and pick a boss who won't lead you to ruin or decide that just because he isn't interested that's a good reason to get his men crippled instead of laid?"

"I was - I don't - Murko said that the only way to get what we need is banditry! He said he'd plan it all out for us... But he just got himself killed instead!"

(Looking closer, all of these people have been living rough and possibly starving, just a bit. The leader a fair bit less than the other three.)

"Hey, Ame, you want this guy to die?" Elizabeth says, poking Murko with the end of the wyldfire staff. "Better tell me to mercy-kill him now, or one or both of us heals him up. He's in bad shape." Elizabeth is totally untroubled by the idea of killing someone, it seems.

Ame takes her boot off lackey-one's neck.

"...kill him. I would be very unsurprised if I healed him and he did something to make me regret it."

Ame, still with a crossbow bolt through her shoulder, crouches down and... doesn't touch the lackey. Instead she has her first healing slime roll over and squish itself around his burns. The other slime shifts itself, not releasing lackey-three but allowing him to sit up in a more comfortable position.

"I'll heal the rest of them. I think they've learned their lesson. And I want to test out my healing slimes."

The three lackeys are compliant and kind of miserable. Healing slimes apparently up their mana usage a good bit when they're actively healing!

Elizabeth's chosen method of execution is some kind of spell that feels cold and inevitable in the limited magical sense Ame has. The bandit leader relaxes and stops breathing, apparently painlessly. She shivers.

"Any of you know if he'd rather be burned, buried, or what?"

"Dunno. He said he was from across the sea. Right stupid of us to follow a foreigner into crime, but he sounded like he knew what he was doing and we were all really hungry and he shared a deer he'd shot and everything..."

Ame is disappointed in her healing slime. And she doesn't have the mana to spare anyway. She expected the healing slime to not be as good as Axiom of Physicality, but the additional mana cost on top of that is an unpleasant surprise.

Ame sighs and casts the dismissal, freeing lackey-three. Then she moves the remaining slime out of the way and proceeds to heal all three of them properly.

"...Wow, it was really fucking stupid to try and rob you two."

"YUP."

In fact, Ame is going to even further demonstrate that by asking Elizabeth to hold her pack and her clothes, as she strips naked right in front of the mooks.

Then, with her stuff out of danger, she grabs the crossbow bolt and rips it out of her shoulder with a choked snarl. She visibly bleeds a lot, but doesn't lose a dangerous amount of blood before she manages to close the wound. She continues to glare at her shoulder until there's no mark left.

Annnnd, as predicted, she is now drenched in blood. Maybe her slime can absorb it or at least wipe it off? She will try that first.

Healing slime will absorb and digest blood just fine! It feels vaguely soothing.

Ooh. That is nice. Good little healing slime, proving your worth.

Ame collects her things from Elizabeth and gets dressed again. Thankfully, the bolt didn't hit her shirt.

"Hold hands, you three. I wanna try something."

"...Try what, exactly?"

"Oh, I can give you a little perk-up with the Lore of Life, maybe last you long enough to find gainful employment! Why are you out here in the first place?"

They look at each other, downcast. 

"...Neighbors decided they didn't like us on account of not wanting to suck up to the Waltmann clan. Didn't take too long after that for 'bad luck' to catch up. Broken windows, lost animals, holes cut in flour sacks."

"Waltmann clan?"

"Yeah, the Waltmanns. They almost act like nobles, put everyone else down. The Baron put them in charge of the town for some darkness-damned reasion. Carinna, the grandmother of the lot, is the worst of them - interfering with people's business and telling them what to do just because she can."

"Making us go to some stupid church service. Complaining about house colors. Saying the farm animals is too smelly."

"Domineering idiot only getting away with it because the Baron likes them. I think he's fucking one of their daughters probably."

(Elizabeth pokes them into holding hands in a circle with her, which they accept after a bit of trepidation, glancing nervously at Ame. She starts chanting and doing - something Ame can feel with magic. It's more of a mnemonic or a theme than strict instructions, and there's no gestures. Stuff about life, power, energy, and growth.)

...she pulls out her Quest Journal and writes down a note about the Waltmanns on a blank page.

Ame watches the magic with interest.

"Hm. Are they talking about the town we were going to stop in?" Ame asks Elizabeth after she's done casting.

Poke. "Well, are you? The one down that way."

"Y-Yeah."

"We'll keep an eye out."

Ame goes over and yanks her gladius out of Murko's corpse, has her slime clean the blood off, and puts it back in its sheath.

"Good to go?" she asks Elizabeth.

Elizabeth sings three high notes and something - thrums - then she lets go over the mooks' hands.

"Good, I didn't botch it! You should be nice and healthy for, uh, maybe three or four days. I dunno, we'd better do something about the leader's body? Maybe there's a reward, if he's been organizing bandits. Don't know if you want to do anything else for-or-with the other three."

Ame shrugs.

"I'd leave them to sort it out. It's their mess."

And if there is a reward, and they manage to collect it, well, that would be deliciously ironic.

She starts walking. "Let's go then. What were you saying about 'nexus' again...?"