It didn’t take us long to pack up our meager camp. It’s not like we really had anything lying around besides our sleeping rolls and the dome that could be magic’d away with a wave of our hands.
The entire time the other two members of the group were quiet. Jazz, because I had quite literally threatened to torture him… I needed to stop doing that, honestly. I couldn’t let every little thing he said get a rise out of me.
Lea was quiet because I believe she was embarrassed to make such a drastic social misstep regarding the trauma I experienced under Lurks. It had probably been a while since she had made such a major social faux pas and wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with it.
I was quiet because I was lost in thought. I didn’t like being reminded of Lurks. It was… complicated thinking about her. She had manipulated my mind so thoroughly that I still wondered if any of my thoughts were even my own. How did I know that I wasn’t still in that cell just imagining all of this?
The scary part? There was no real way to tell. What made it worse was that I still couldn’t bring myself to fully hate who she was now that my tension had boiled down. And that terrified me. Was that a leftover of what she had done to me? Or was that just a natural result of my thought processes?
I couldn’t tell, and I wasn’t ready to dive deeper into those thought processes just yet.
After fully packing everything away, we stood kind of awkwardly in a circle for a moment before Lea cleared her throat and said, “Well, I guess we should start heading south. We’ve got a lot of area to try and cover, the sooner we figure out where they are the sooner we can work on getting rid of them.”
This time, she didn’t wait for a response and instead just turned around and started making her way due south. I quickly stepped in behind her, Jazz taking a moment longer to step in behind me.
After a moment, she slowly started increasing our pace until we were sitting at the sweet spot that was the optimal travel speed for Jazz.
At the pace we were traveling, it was going to take us about thirty minutes to cross the distance. Which wasn’t all that long considering the pace normal humans could travel at, at least back on Earth.
I was never gonna get tired of the traveling speed I was capable of.
***
After around twenty-five minutes of traveling, Lea started slowing us down.
“We’re in the general vicinity of where it’s located. Supposedly there’s a dugout in the ground nearby which they use to enter and exit. The problem is that there are no defining landmarks nearby it, you just have to know where it’s at in order to find it. This also makes it hard to tell people where it is and have them then infiltrate your base.
“Much like what we want to do,” She said the last bit with a tinge of annoyance.
The northeastern region of Seltas was a multitude of grassy knolls, occasionally trees dotted the hills here and there, providing a modicum of flair to the otherwise rather plain landscape.
I guess calling it plain was a bit unfair, it didn’t have any fantastical elements, but it was still a wealth of natural beauty that you can only see in the un-industrialized areas of Earth, which are way outside of convenience and comfort if you’re a city-slicker.
“We should stay close together. Alex, keep watch for anyone trying to catch us unawares. Also…” she paused for a moment, her tone becoming slightly sheepish, “You’ll also have to be the one that probably finds the dugout in the first place. You have the best observation skills out of the rest of us, even if it’s only in the amount of surface area you can cover.”
I just snorted, “I’ll see what I can do, but my abilities aren’t infallible. If they’ve got it well disguised then I’m probably not going to find it easily, if at all.”
“Just do what you can, that’s all I ask.”
“Aye aye, ma’am.”
Supposedly what I was looking for was a bit of metal, disguised as grass, that could be pulled up and let us down into an underground base. All in all, it seemed terribly sophisticated for the low-end grunts of an international group.
So how did they end up with such a well-designed base? Well, I guess I couldn’t say it was well-designed yet, I hadn’t actually seen it yet. So it was very possible it was a very crappy base that just happened to be easily defensible.
And cleverly hidden, underground, and disguised.
Hmmm…
I redoubled my efforts in searching the surrounding area, and as we looked we slowly walked through the areas. I was also filtering through my various forms of sight. [Mana Sense] and [Electric Sense] both came back blank for me as I tried to see if I could see or feel anything on the ground in the area or perhaps through it into the base if it was nearby.
During my stay at the NSA, I had managed to figure out different vision types without bursting an eyeball. Surprisingly, this had been something that people had already figured out, mainly because they were kind of obvious things people would want to do.
Things like wanting to see through walls to better find opponents, or perhaps see further or more clearly with telescopic or microscopic vision. Or maybe you were trying to find your opponents by the campfire they were likely using so you developed thermal sight.
All of which could be manipulated with electricity, truly a versatile tool fit for any situation.
And thankfully, with my many minds and areas of vision, I could have all of them active at once without issue. It was a little disorienting and definitely pushed my brain capabilities to their limit, but the fact that I could do it was impressive enough.
At least it was to me.
The only problem I was having currently is that we’d been searching for two hours and we hadn’t found a single thing.
Was it possible we missed it? Have we just not walked close enough to see it yet? Did the guy happen to pull a fast one on us?
That was probably the most likely scenario honestly, I didn’t push him much farther on the torture path to see if he was perhaps lying to us. Although none of the others caught that either.
Which just kind of reaffirmed the idea that he might have lied to us about this.
Just as I was about to open my mouth to say something, right next to our feet a square clump of ground, indistinguishable from the rest plopped open and a guy started crawling out.
Only to stop as he saw us and we stopped as we saw him.
Jazz recovered the fastest and a spike immediately impaled him in the back of his skull and went out the other end, killing him instantly.
The body tumbled back down the ladder with hollow thuds and after a moment reached the bottom, eliciting cries of shock from whoever was down there.
I looked up at my two companions and then shrugged before I started forming my armor and activating all of my buffs.
“I’ll go first,” I said calmly as I summoned my two signature swords.
I took a quick peek over the edge and then spawned a flower at the bottom. Awareness bloomed into my mind as I got a good look at the bottom of the ladder. Three guys were present at the bottom, one was kneeling over checking the corpse of the guy that had fallen back down.
The other two were waiting for whoever was at the top to come down so they could kill them.
None of them noticed the flower. I quickly started spawning more of them in the area, managing to get one of them to partially grow under the only door in the room on the north side. I let one of my minds take over mapping the facility from where we were at.
“Three guys at the bottom of the ladder, two of them are prepared to ambush us the moment we try to go down. I’m going to teleport in there. Wait, two seconds then come down.”
They both nodded, and I returned it before using [Bind] on the guy kneeling next to the corpse. It came from behind him so he was completely unprepared to dodge it, and it caught him easily.
I created a few tendrils in the floor and fired a [Web of Lightning] at them, I then jumped through one of the forks. My body turned into electricity and instantly passed through the ground blocking my path.
One of the tendrils easily hit the guy that I had already restrained, instead, I teleported next to one of the other two. Specifically, the one that had managed to dodge my attack. From there I began swinging both of my swords. My opponent in front of me just had a single sword. It looked somewhat like a scimitar, but it was slightly off, so I wasn’t sure if that’s actually what it was or not.
He deftly managed to block a few blows but wasn’t prepared for the root to trip him up. I kept an eye on the guy behind me, but he was only just not starting to come to the realization that he should probably help his buddy.
And at that point, it was too late.
My sword cut through the guy’s sword arm at the elbow, I then tossed my wooden sword so it would stick in the ceiling ten feet overhead and grabbed the guy by his shoulder, slipping my foot behind one of his and tossing him to the ground while driving my sword through his chest to have leverage.
I let one of my minds dislodge my sword from the ceiling and left the guy impaled on the floor before grabbing my sword as it fell out of the air just in time to block an overhead swing from the guy coming in behind me.
I then took two steps back and let Lea fall right on top of him, breaking his neck in the process.
She just looked at the guy as she stepped off of him shaking her feet, “Did you have to do that? His brains are stuck to the bottom of my feet now,” She said with a hint of disgust.
“No, but it was kind of funny honestly.”
She just huffed and moved out of the way as Jazz came down after her, flying. I walked over to the guy I had impaled on the floor, he was still alive so I put him out of his misery by decapitating him.
I then removed my sword from his chest cavity and walked over to the other two.
“So what’s the plan?” I said looking between the two of them, “Despite all the action, we managed to dispatch them fairly quietly, and I’ve got a decent bit of the facility already under observation. From what I can see there’s no alert and there are a few patrols nearby that don’t seem like they heard anything.”
I did go ahead and take time to look over the rest of the facility I had uncovered so far. I hadn’t found any of the women that they had taken, but they would probably be further into the facility itself, everything was made out of solid stone and was unnaturally smooth.
They probably had some sort of stone or earth mage around that made this place, that’s both why it was so big and so well-hidden. They didn’t have to pay anyone to make it, they just had to let the mage walk around and just magic up a new room whenever they needed one.
I wasn’t sure it was going to be easy to deal with him in an area so enriched in his element.
“We’re here, and we’re already inside, which is further than I thought we’d be able to get. We should do our best to eliminate as many of The Sons as we can while evading detection. We should also try and make sure that we have nothing in between us and the exit so that way we can make a quick escape if we need to,” Lea dictated.
I nodded, “I agree, I’m able to see the patrols right now, by stealthing the flowers. It’s easier to hide something if it doesn’t move and since there’s no windflow down here I don’t have to account for anything other than its static location. I’ve hidden them mostly along the ceilings now, but I have to make some underneath doors and- I’m rambling, I’ve got eyes around the area, I’ll make sure we don’t get trapped,” I finished succinctly.
Lea nodded, “Good. Jazz, feel free to go invisible. You’ll be the first line of defense by being on primary offense. These tunnels are going to limit their room to dodge, so that should make it easy for you to hit them, and given how powerful your attacks are, it should just kill them outright.”
Jazz just nodded before going invisible.
Lea then turned to me, “Alright, how much of the facility do you have so far?”
“Mmm, I’m already at the limit of my observation currently and I still don’t have the entire facility under my eyes. I’m seeing 3… 7… 13 patrols currently in the area that I can see, and about 12 different paths that go beyond my current range of sight and control.”
“How many people are in each patrol?”
“It varies,” I replied quickly, “But anywhere from three to five people. All of them are third tier as well.”
That bit of information caused Lea to frown slightly, “They’re all third tier, yet these two guys were second, and most of the ones that ambushed us yesterday were second tier. That’s odd.”
I nodded in agreement, this was starting to get very strange. I wasn’t sure I liked the implications.
“They’re deliberately hiding how powerful they are. There are, at minimum, a hundred people in this underground base, if not more depending on how far it actually stretches. It’s completely insulated against outside observation considering I couldn’t see through the ground and the entrance was perfectly hidden from sight in a way we never would have noticed on our own. This is a lot more than the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs we were led to believe from the guy we interrogated.”
“I agree,” Lea said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “We proceed. Carefully. We will uncover their secrets further inside, I’m sure. If you see anyone in the fourth tier, let me know, and I’ll advise under the circumstances. If you see anyone of the fifth tier or higher, we retreat immediately, understood?”
I nodded, and I assumed Jazz did as well although we couldn’t see him.
“Good. Let’s go then.”
