Adventurers chased danger, and were danger itself.
Using short-term goals like "quests" and "bounties" as the purpose of their actions, they did not care whether you were a good person or a bad one, did not care whether this field caught in the aftermath of battle determined if a family could make it through the winter, and did not care that a water source polluted by poison might affect hundreds of lives downstream.
Compared with money, fame, and power, that pitiful shred of justice and conscience was like a gambler's promise—shamelessly kept on their lips only when they needed to use it to squeeze out profit.
To a certain extent, for the ordinary people of the area, a travel-worn band of foreign Adventurers was even more unsettling than the thieves and bandits who ought to be sent to the gallows.
At least the latter's patterns of behavior were relatively fixed. With enough luck, one might even reach some fragile, passive balance with them—lose some property, but not one's life.
The former... no one knew what these powerful beings with inhuman abilities actually wanted to do.
Human nature was universal.
When an individual's mighty power broke past a critical point sufficient to bring about a qualitative change, desire would also swell by geometric multiples.
In large towns where all sorts mixed together and many factions were entangled, things were still all right. The power of order could manifest through law and fear. People and people, Adventurers and Adventurers, divided ranks by strength and jointly maintained the unspoken rules that allowed daily life to continue.
But in those remote, impoverished villages, when one's own martial force became the source of power, driven by inner desire, the ugliness of human nature would also expand with it.
When wringing a person's neck was as