Straightening out the confusion caused by the Guildmaster’s lack of knowledge took hours. It wasn’t helped by Zany’s insistence on learning more about Serenity’s reason for coming to Asihanya. The Guildmaster spent more than an hour asking Raz questions about what he saw on the day his clan died until Raz grew sick of it and stormed out of the tent.

Fortunately, there wasn’t an airplane overhead at the time.

Serenity didn’t learn much from Zanzital other than his proper name. He’d been holed up in one cave or another inside the base for months as he tried to work his way closer to the base’s commander. Serenity already knew that the occupants were Imperial in origin; he wasn’t certain if he could believe Zanzital’s assumption that they were rebels or not. The lack of proper insignia meant it was possible, but Serenity was entirely willing to consider the option that they might be a black operation of some sort. The idea didn’t seem to have even occurred to the Guildmaster.

Zanzital’s invisibility cloak was a well-made piece of gear and was easy for Serenity to fix since he had all the monster cores he needed, but it wasn’t going to be anywhere enough to hide anything other than a one-man infiltration. Serenity was fairly confident he could sneak in on his own as well, in Sovereign form if nothing else, but that still didn’t help the others.

Before they attacked, they needed a better idea of the daily practices of the base. It was boring, but with Legion helping to repair the Library, there was no hurry. Things in Takinat weren’t changing; they had time to gather all the information they wanted that they hadn’t looked for when they were planning the smaller mission to retrieve Zanzital.

Serenity was glad he didn’t have to have a campsite as porous as the base he watched; he had wards that covered not only the immediate area but a good ways beyond it and would let him know if any hostile or anyone intelligent crossed over them. Even something as simple as a detection spell might set them off if it wasn’t created just right. He’d set them up in a series of rings and carefully hidden them so that they would be hard to notice yet would still give plenty of warning.

He knew why the base didn’t have a similar setup. It took too much mana to run over such a large area. Serenity had tied his wards, like his detection rituals, into the ley line that ran over the base, but that was relatively rare knowledge. There clearly wasn’t anyone on the base as skilled at wards as Serenity was, and he knew of people who were better with wards than he was. Well, people who would be better with wards than he was; it was possible they weren’t that good yet.

Each day, six of the eight biplanes in the hangar were wheeled out onto the takeoff strip; on two of the days they watched, it was five planes instead of six and the sixth plane was swarmed by mechanics. Each biplane carried three people. The remaining two biplanes never moved; when Serenity inspected them in more detail, he found that they were each partially disassembled. It looked like they were being used to supply parts for the six flyable planes.

When the pilots were gone, there were two hundred and sixty-three people in the base. Most were Tier Three and seemed to be support rather than actual combat forces, though Serenity couldn’t discount the possibility that they were trained; anyone could learn how to fight. Seventy-six of the people in the base routinely wore armor while they walked around the base; of those, about half were clearly guards while the others (along with another thirty-two who didn’t usually wear armor) seemed to spend their time in practice, maintaining their gear, and getting into avoidable fights.

Serenity tentatively identified the commander based on his armor and Tier; he never wore the armor, but it was usually nearby. He was able to draw it well enough that both Blaze and Zanzital agreed that he was probably an Imperial noble of some sort, but the flash that should have shown his affiliation was missing. The armor didn’t make it impossible that this was an official Imperial mission of some sort, since there was no requirement that nobles had to wear standard armor; instead, it added the possibility that this was the rogue action of a group of Imperial nobles to the list of possible causes Serenity was trying to track.

Ten days of watching wasn’t enough to have a completely solid idea of where everyone would be at any given time, but it was long enough to see the overall trends. The Imperials seemed to use a five-day week, where a tenth of their people were given six hours off from their usual shift each five days; they seemed to work on roughly a twelve-hour shift the rest of the time. They were quite willing to add extra hours when something like the planes not flying came up, but they did give extra rest time afterwards.

The five-day week was common but not standardized; apparently, how the work schedules were set up in the Imperial military was determined by each commander. Serenity had never realized that; he’d thought of the Imperials as one homogeneous mass both when he was hired by them as an auxiliary mercenary and when he fought against them. It was something to keep in mind; after all, someone from the Empire sent the giant telepathic ooze to the Rocky Mountains and it seemed likely there were some Imperial agents already on Earth.

The only areas of the base that Serenity couldn’t see were seven warded rooms. One was near the aircraft hangar; for the entire time Serenity watched, no one entered or left. Two seemed to be working rooms of some sort; they were located near the middle of the base and had a regular flow of people entering and leaving, people who had to be working there because it was the only thing that made sense with the schedule. The base commander came and went from those rooms several times a day but never stayed for more than about an hour.

Two of the warded rooms were small squares, each barely ten feet on each side. They were rooms that a handful of people entered and left, but few stayed for long. One room was attached to the base commander’s bedroom; it was about half the size of the bedroom, but the base commander spent at least half an hour there every day, usually more than an hour. The timing was odd, since it didn’t seem to be during his normal work hours, but Serenity suspected that was because he was reporting to someone in another part of the planet. The last warded room was the one the base commander spent most of his day in; two other people often found their way to the room, as well.

With as much information as Serenity thought he would gather in a limited period of time, the next question was what to do with it. With the assistance of the guilds from Takinat, they had more people than were in the base, but if they removed them all from Takinat, the dungeons would overflow. A fast assault might work to get them back to Takinat quickly, but digging through a base like this tended to create large numbers of casualties and they couldn’t really afford that.

Serenity was certain that was part of the reason Zanzital went in alone. The downside of alerting his target was definitely the reason Zanzital let people of a far lower Tier bottle him up; Serenity doubted h’d have made the same decision.

These days, he had ways to potentially hide. As Vengeance, he’d have charged forward and simply killed anyone in his way, relying on speed to prevent the Tier Threes from warning the person he was after. The Final Reaper would have made different plans; he wouldn’t have gone into the base at all. He’d have found another way to achieve his objective.

What exactly was his objective, anyway?

Serenity paused and thought about it from that angle. He wanted to get to the base’s commander because he wanted to stop the attacks on Takinat and he wanted to know some things about the attacking force. Specifically, he wanted to know why they were attacking and he wanted to stop the attacks all over Asihanya, which meant he either needed to know who could call them off or he needed to know where the other attacks came from.

That meant that capturing the base commander was a method, not a goal. It seemed like a completely viable method but he needed to consider his options.

Serenity looked up at the others as they argued about how to penetrate the base. “Do we even need to go in?”

“How else can we get at the base commander?”

“We have to stop them!”

“The base had to be destroyed.”

“The people who killed my Clan must pay.”

Serenity managed to make out four of the objections to his proposal before they all realized they’d talked over each other and stopped. He took advantage of the sudden silence to explain further. “I’m wondering if we can draw them out. I don’t want to just blockade them, but I’m also not sure it’s necessary. We should be able to take out the flyers while they’re on the ground; that’ll stop the attacks on Takinat and wherever else they’re headed for now. Once we do that, maybe we can look strong enough to need the commander’s strength to handle us but weak enough that he thinks he can.”

Serenity glanced around the tent. Raz didn’t look happy, but Serenity didn’t expect him to look happy. The others seemed to consider the idea. “The weakness is that we have to capture enough people to get information without letting them warn any other bases about this, at least without too much warning. They’ll probably know the base is gone but if we can keep it to that it would be best. There’s no node in the base, so they’d have to have an enchanted device of some sort; probably something owned by the leader. I haven’t seen him use anything like that, so either he isn’t reporting in very often or he’s doing it while he’s in a warded space. I think it’s in the warded space attached to his bedroom.”

“Can you break the ward?” Rissa was the first to propose a new plan. “Or infiltrate it? I know you’re good at wards, and if you can take out their communications, we can do whatever we want.”

Serenity thought about that option. “Probably, but I think I’d have to be there in person.”

Rissa nodded. “So you sneak in alone, probably at night when they dim some of the lights, get to the ward, deal with it, kill their communication and let me know it’s done. While you’re on your way out, we head into the tunnel and take out the flyers while they’re still in the hangar, then escape to the surface. We can leave a false trail that shows that we left the way we came in if we want to. We can watch them after that and come up with a plan to lure out the base commander.”

There was a lot of arguing after that, and even more details, but Rissa’s outline covered the essentials of the final plan.

Lillene

The assault is next chapter. With all this  recon and planning, it’ll surely go according to plan … right?