"I feel that your offer has a lot of 'strings attached', demon," She said, "You clearly want my father dead, if not my entire family, so what life would I enjoy even if you do hold your end of the bargain? I know better than to work together with someone who wishes me harm, and did in fact harm me."
"You're smart," He nodded, "But I hope you're smart enough to understand that your father, and the King's Guard have crossed lines that they weren't supposed to cross. They killed my family, and unlike today, they had no reason to wipe my family out, because I hadn't harmed anyone."
Furthermore, he continued, "They either knew too much about Fleshmancy, my abilities, and wanted to get rid of me before I became a real problem, or they didn't know anything about it, and mistook me as a Necromancer. Either way, innocent people died, and me, the only person who they were supposed to kill, survived. So now my assumption is that either your father is an absolute idiot, or that he really knew what he was doing, but he stepped on my toes nonetheless, and he must suffer for it. He's the demon who killed the innocent, while I only killed you in self defense."
Clayton was hoping to coax Esmeralda's sensibile side, but he could feel that this conversation wasn't going anywhere. He lost the plot, in a sense, and filled her head with a bunch of information that only made her 'final' decision a lot more complicated than it was supposed to be.
Confused, she asked, "Are you trying to rationalize your deeds? I won't kill my father, if that's what you're trying to get at. Your family was killed, and I can't say if that was fair or not, because I wasn't there, but you must understand that even a life in Royalty isn't worth it if you don't have your family there with you. I can't help you, just kill me."
"Alright then," He stood up.
"You'll kill me?" She mimicked his movements, and appeared to be as happy as ever.
"No," He smiled, "You'll die on your own three months from now, but until then, you'll be fighting for me. Too bad, because I was planning to attack a farming village a few days from now. You'll be killing farmers soon."
"Fuck you!" She raised her voice.
Esmeralda had the urge to charge at them again. At that moment, she was in enough control of her actions to start swinging, but she had recently learned that her attacks weren't as effective as she wanted them to be. She had to fester within her boiling anger, and keep it to herself.
Clayton ignored her all together. He didn't intend to be cruel to her as much as he was right now, because the Princess, although a killer, appeared to be less than twenty years old. She didn't deserve to be treated this badly, because she was too young to understand what she stood for.
In his perspective, it was best to ignore her for now, and hope to eventually wear her down, to the point where she'd accept his deal.
Ideally, he wanted to reap any information he could out of her today, so he could adjust his plans accordingly, but that didn't work out for him, so he had to go with the alternative. He had to play with the cards he was given, and craft a decent plan along the way.
For now, they had to get moving, because he wanted to use the cover of the night to move undetected. If he wasn't wrong, the closest village was at least seven days away, and he wanted to get there, and perhaps sell some of the great armor, and weaponry that the hundreds of dead men and women had left behind, but he was aware that the road to the village was dangerous.
Common guards, and even the King's Guard might be patrolling the way there at random. Although he didn't fear any man, the math was otherwise simple, as he didn't want to lose the fifty or so slaves he had, just to take down a couple of overpowered guards. It wouldn't be productive, and it would certainly cost him a lot of points to fix such an encounter, just for the sake of keeping his plans of selling the loot going.
Within two hours, he, his friends and the slaves looted all the bags of gold and gems from the dead.
It took a while to teach the undead slaves how to loot, but they eventually mimicked what their master did, and stuffed a bunch of leather bags in their armor.
Then they had to learn how to keep the bags from falling off of their armor, but they eventually did learn that the bags were important to the master, so they acted accordingly.
"We're rich!" Rufus exclaimed after the looting, and had stuffed many bags down his shirt himself. "Screw the King, we can buy hundreds of miles of farmland if we sneak into another Kingdom!"
"Who will you present yourself as? Rufus Grave-robber the Third?" Lara was quick to ask him, "No King will appreciate a random rich guy popping up in their lands."
"She's right," Clayton added, "You can keep the gold you have on you, but as for the rest, let's hold on to it, because it might just help us cause damage that my slaves can't buy. I need it."
It took a while to convince Rufus to not disappear with the gold, but he was eventually reminded what their goal was. That and Clayton promised him that he could walk away with as much gold as he could carry once his plans, and revenge was exacted.
This promise was effective, so they could get back to looting. His slaves did most of the work after this point, as they were taught to grab the most expensive looking armor across the grounds of the dead, lift them, and carry them.
With fifty slaves to his disposal, Clayton had a whole one-hundred pieces of armor, chest plates mostly, which he intended to sell.
He could walk away with the gold and gems, yes, but he had a feeling that the pieces of armor, collectively, were a lot more expensive than whatever riches he had looted from the hundreds of corpses. It was possible, and he sure as hell wanted to have the advantage of great riches, because his enemy, the King himself, was hundreds of times richer!
Anyway, as his slaves held on to all the loot they could carry, Clayton was finally ready to move. It was dusk now, and so they used the dark cover of the night to finally leave the destroyed, secluded chapel, and head towards the closest village they could find.
His plans, although still with a lot of holes in them, were finally in motion!