I am so overworked. We had everything we needed, either through sheer luck or through hard work.

Our mole dug a tunnel to the merchants guild, stopping right outside of its magical protection that would sound an alarm if he came too close. He also worked at night so the probability of other mages noticing his magic was incredibly low. In the end, we even had our assassin to watch above ground alarm Jack, our mole, if any mage came too close. Luckily, that never happened and so we had a nearly finished tunnel.

The problem was though that we couldn’t get closer. There were quite a few magical protections inside. Luckily Jack was a capable earth magician and immediately realized the trap though, sparing us the hassle of evading the guards.

We also came to know the exact location of the vault, this time not through luck though. The manager I scouted out in the beginning, was way too helpful as soon as Pauline seduced him. He probably didn’t even know what he was doing as he talked about all the riches inside the vault because of how drunk he was. She thus became the sixth unofficial member of the group, after Felix demanded his cockroach to become the fifth one.

But still, we didn’t jump into action as we were learning more and more about the vault. It was protected by magic, that was obvious. There was only one weak part of the chain we could exploit though: Every magical trap, every circle or barrier was linked up to a single mana source. This mana source was obviously inside the vault and inaccessible for anyone except those few higher-ups that could. There were exactly five of them and sadly, our helpful guy wasn’t amongst them. But at least he gave us their names as Pauline started a torture play with him. I immediately asked Luke to find out as much as possible and then proceeded to use the network I built up to do the same. One was the director of the headquarters and the other ones had seemingly random posts.

As soon as Felix calculated how often the mana source would need to be recharged, we were sure that we could disable it. We only had to keep these five humans out of the vault and all the magical traps were null and void. There was a catch though: a loud siren was supposed to activate when the mana was depleted, drawing the attention of every guard in the area.

Thus, we could scrap our plan nearly completely. There was just no way to disable this magical alarm that ran on another mana source. It would take years for this source to deplete and I doubted we could hold everyone off for this long. A covert operation was completely out of question, but Lucinda already prepared for this eventuality. Why else would I need to hire someone who was well versed with all kinds of explosives?

Thus, we were conducting a few experiments with the guards and Felix dug more tunnels we could use while I finally found the right poison we needed. It was during this time of our final preparations as Lucinda arrived in the city. Surprisingly, she had no problems leaving me in charge and fled the brothel the first moment she could. What a bummer, I really wanted to see the disgust on her face as I showed her around.

In any case, she didn’t mess up my preparations at all which was great for me. A few days later though, a letter from her arrived, stating I should work on a meeting between her and a random elf. I was already working on using my network to find someone that fits her wishes as news spread that her dad died. I immediately knew what to do.

Around this time, we finished all of the preparations we needed. We had a list of all the items we were going to steal and those that we absolutely couldn’t take with us like magical stuff any mage could track.