It was a lot more difficult than I had initially thought it would be, trying to keep track of all the different pathways through this maze of a base along with all the different patrols. Especially since they kept passing in and out of my sight.
It was difficult to remember if I had seen a particular group before or not, so I started naming the groups and then associating levels with the names and how many people were in the group to be able to determine which groups were which.
I created a long wooden sheet that stuck comfortably to my back and just notated on it every time I discovered a new group.
I had groups A through P at this current point in time for a total of 63 people so far. The average level of the groups was [Level 24³]. So well within our fighting range. The problem was potentially taking on more than one group at a time. Even just taking on one of the five-man groups, while also keeping the scuffle quiet and short enough to not bring attention to us, would be fairly difficult to do at this point in time.
The only saving grace was the fact that I was a healer. Those were a rare commodity and thus made a huge difference in combat capability. The idea that you didn’t have to worry about any potential damage you might take opened up a lot of options for combatants in dispatching their opponents.
For us, it might be the difference between being able to take this base and facing defeat.
“We’re coming up on one of the three-man groups right now,” I said quietly as we walked up to an intersection.
We had made it roughly 500 hundred feet from the entrance to the base. We still weren’t sure if there was more than one way in here. A base this large? There were definitely going to be other hidden entrances and exits, at least in my opinion.
“What direction, potential team composition, levels?” Lea asked succinctly.
“From the left in about 45 seconds. It looks like three fighters. Perhaps one is a ranger. Highest level combatant is thirty-two.”
Lea nodded, “We’ll wait here for them to approach the corner, when they get close I’ll engage initially, Alex, stick with me. Try to use mainly physical attacks, no magic. Both to conserve your mana in case we need healing and to cut down on noise. Jazz you do your usual, try to avoid hitting the walls as the sound will carry.”
“Understood,” Jazz’s disembodied voice came from the air next to me.
Lea didn’t respond, instead just falling silent as she crouched next to the wall as we waited for our targets to approach.
This group was Group J. In roughly a minute and thirty seconds from the designated time we would engage, Group C would be coming through this area, so we really couldn’t dally on this. I probably should have mentioned that to Lea, but I hadn’t considered it at the time.
We’d have to dispatch them quickly and then remove the bodies. If we created any damage or bloodstains in the hallway we wouldn’t be able to hide the evidence, so hopefully we could keep it clean.
Lea held up a hand, fingers splayed out. Then she put one down.
3…
2…
1…
Lea exploded around the corner. The speed and intensity of the action ill at odds with the lack of a yell or a roar as she charged to the nearest opponent. I followed close behind her as she ran, the first person didn’t even have a chance to react as she took their head off.
I was in right next to her attacking the person directly behind them, given that I had been behind Lea and they were behind a still falling corpse, that had given them enough time to at least ready a weapon, which they used to parry my first attack, only for them and the remaining person to get sniped by Jazz and fall in a heap to the floor.
Lea opened her mouth to say something but I quickly interrupted, “We need to move these bodies now. Another group will be coming from the opposite end of the hallway in… twenty-five seconds.”
I reached down and grabbed one of the bodies, Lea put her weapon away and grabbed the other two, following behind me as I took the lead. I led us down a couple of turns. Left, left, right, left, and then I opened a door on the right side of the hallway.
“In here,” I said quietly. The door I had opened was a storage closet of some kind, but it was empty. Cobwebs indicate its lack of use. A lily flower was hidden in the corner and I had one of my minds dedicated to bending light around it so people looking outside-in weren’t able to see it, but it could see looking out with certain types of vision and by using other skills.
Lea arched an eyebrow, “How did you know this was here?”
I just gave her a look, “Lea. I see everything. How would I not know this was here?”
She nodded, “Fair point.”
I slowly closed the closet door behind us as we stepped back out into the hallway.
As we had moved, I slowly expanded my sight by spawning new flowers and disappearing the old ones so they wouldn’t pop into view when they left the range of my control.
“Where to now?” Lea asked me as I slowly panned my view around the new sections of the base that I could see.
I took the time to label all the new groups on the wooden sheet I had on my back, my nature control allowing me to see what the board said without having to physically see it. I also mapped out the newer sections of the base.
Still more hallways and uninteresting closets. Where were the important rooms? Where did they sleep? Where did they have their meetings? Where did they eat or store their foods? Why couldn’t we find any of it?
I shook my head, “I’ve still got nothing in a specific direction, we’re still just walking blind. I see more hallways and a couple more patrol groups. But otherwise, there’s nothing specific to even guide us or give us direction. How they manage to navigate this base is crazy, there’s nothing to tell them where things are or anything. Or if there is, I have no idea how to tell.”
Lea nodded again, “Then I’ll continue leading. Follow behind me, and let me know of any patrols we start getting close to. We’ll continue taking it slow and looking for any potential traps or signs you might have missed.”
I nodded and we set off once again at our slow pace. Every minute we spent down here felt like an hour. I had initially thought that our invasion of their base would end up with us rampaging through it and killing everything in our path, instead, it was a lot more anticlimactic.
I guess this was the only reasonable way to attack this problem, but it was still just kinda boring.
Minutes did eventually become an hour and at that point, I finally did notice something.
“Found something,” I said quietly.
Lea immediately came to a stop and gestured for me to continue.
“No patrols nearby, the closest one is two minutes away, but three patrols block us off from what I’m seeing. It’s a large open room, looks something like a recreational area maybe? Lots of people standing around talking, drinking, playing cards. It’s just on the edge of my range so I can’t really see anything else outside of that. But the closer we get to it the more patrols there are, there’s about half as many patrols as I’ve seen so far just in the space from where we are now to any of the three doors I’ve noticed leading into this new room.”
Lea tapped a finger against her chin, “How close could we get to it before we started to run into trouble?”
“Maybe about 1500 feet?” I said with a shrug, “There aren’t any rooms nearby for us to hide in, unfortunately, and time between patrol groups is extremely short so I don’t think we could get through without being noticed or making too much noise.”
“Alright then, how many people do you see there currently?”
“Way more than a hundred. The guy was clearly lying about how many people there were, I’m curious about why he would downplay that?”
“Probably to intentionally get us killed,” Jazz said matter-of-factly.
That was a good point. If we had just gone through here guns blazing, we more than likely would’ve just ended up dying and that would be the end of that.
No, this was definitely a major operation. But why would an international bandit group have such a large member count here in the boonies of a kingdom almost completely separated from the rest of the wide world?
Seltas was… strong for its size, but on the continental scale, they were not even close to a superpower. They would’ve basically been something like modern-day Italy or France. A first world by all means, but not a leading power on the global scale.
This combined with the fact that they were a peninsula meant that there wasn’t a lot of inherent value in trying to get into Seltas’ markets. There were oceans surrounding the east, south, and west sides of the country. To the north was Alixia, and then to the north of Alixia was Lake Omnikiah, to the east of Omnikiah was Melistinia with Bratvers being on the west.
Lots of the wealth of the country ended up being exports from what I understood, so things were leaving the country, but they didn't have a lot of imports. Instead, they found ways to supplement their lifestyles and supply everything they might need from internal sources.
This allowed them to gain a financial and economic foothold in the existing, but relatively small, global market. Believe it or not, it’s hard to transfer resources cheaply across long distances in this world. It wasn’t necessarily cheap in the old world as well, instead, they just took the shipping hits by creating the item in sweatshops in a third-world country using cheap labor.
So all this to say, there wasn’t a lot to gain by being bandits in Seltas. There were only a few large cities that potentially had resources worth stealing. Vinwood, which was now gone, Lustirne, Elendar, Filith to the east of Elendar, and Ornit to the west. Seltas was left with four major cities after the destruction of Vinwood that had any sort of major cash flow running through them.
The rest were just towns and villages. Towns were at least large enough to have a local inn or bar to congregate at, but villages? Hardly ever more than just a collection of a few houses, there might be a couple of gold coins collectively amongst the people there. If you’re lucky.
So what were they going to gain by being all the way out here, well out of the way of any major cities?
“They’re trying to avoid being detected,” I said suddenly.
Both Jazz and Lea looked at me as I spoke.
“Think about it,” I said, “They’re out in the middle of nowhere in a country that has maybe a quarter of the GDP of their northern counterpart. They have hundreds of members hidden away inside an underground facility that’s well designed and well maintained, and they aren’t hitting any major cities despite the fact that they have the manpower to. What other reason could they be hiding here for, other than they have something to hide?”
Lea tapped thoughtfully, “That might be, that they have something to hide or a plan that they’re currently enacting that requires them to create a small amount of noise. Neither are good, it means that they’re intelligent and have a plan of action that they’re following. Which means…”
“That they’ll have contingencies for when they do get someone’s attention…” I finished.
The thought clicked immediately to both of us.
“They know we’re here,” We said at the same time.
“It’s time to go. Alex, path our way back and out. We’re going loud and fast. Keep Jazz apprised of any enemy movements. Jazz, anywhere he directs you, you place a metal tide of spikes down the hallway. Don’t even give them the chance to attack us.”
I immediately snapped around and reallocated the minds that had been handling the invisibility on my plants. If we were going loud there was no need to hide them any longer. Instead, I used those minds to start tracking our opponents.
And all at once, in unison, they turned. It was completely unnatural the way they turned to look exactly where we were standing. Some skill? But that wouldn’t explain why everyone that I could see did it.
And we didn’t plan to stick around and find out. I activated all of my buffs and started bounding forward, taking the lead from Lea as I dashed around corners. I stayed slow enough that Jazz could keep up with us but went fast enough that I probably would have left him behind if I didn’t have to slow down on the corners.
“Three groups, coming from the front! ETA ten seconds!” I yelled back at them.
In the meantime, I was doing everything I could to trip them up and distract them. Both Lea and I came barreling around the corner and sprung forward into action in the distracted opponents. Jazz had been too far behind to join in and was only just now turning the corner to see the action.
I activated [Lightning Blade’s Guidance] along with [Lightning Stream]. Purple afterimages of lightning trailed behind my swords as they carved through the opponents. I deflected attacks from the side and the front, and put enemies behind me, fully trusting Jazz in the heat of the moment to defend me from behind.
And that he did, two guys slipped behind me and I placed up barriers to block their attacks, only for the barrier to instead be used to block the spikes that pierced their skulls and kept going straight through.
I dispatched three on my own using my swords and healthy doses of lightning. Lea dispatched the other five singlehandedly while wielding her favored greatsword. The area was just large enough for her to use it and I stayed well out of range.
I’d only gotten to see her use it once before in one of our spars. She had handily defeated me. Her technique was beautiful, she danced between the five opponents, attacks only landed glancing blows that slid off her silvery armor, and attacks that wouldn’t were then parried away with deft movements that seemed far too graceful for such an unwieldy weapon.
She took off the head of one opponent, sliding into the space between two more, and tripped a third before slamming her pommel against the skull of another, caving his head in with the blow. A single step to the side carried her out of the path of an overhead swing letting her retaliate with a smooth upward slice that decapitated the man that she carried into a 180-degree downward cut that cleaved her fourth opponent. The fifth tried to turn tail and run, but she snapped a throwing knife out of her wrist, and with a smooth windup and release, it flashed down the hallway in an instant and embedded itself at the base of his skull.
We didn’t stop to do any looting. Even now we had lost precious time in our race to try and get back to the surface. That was two groups in total of the many we had seen so far. I eliminated them from the board I had been using to keep track of them. Teams C and J, were now disposed of. Running a bit of mental calculation and time tracking I determined that our next opponents were likely to be teams D, F, and P for a total of nine opponents.
We dashed down the hallway nearest. I formed a barrier in front of me and my feet lifted off the ground as I took to flight instead. I could accelerate and stop more quickly in flight, so I’d need to be careful about not leaving Jazz behind. But it would end up safer for me if they had left any traps on our likely path back out through the underground base.
A few short moments later and sure enough I was seeing the groups I had designated in my mind show up, nine opponents sprinting and coming from three different directions all to meet up at the same four-way intersection.
I quickly relayed that information to my two teammates.
“Jazz, you’ll handle the group that shows directly in front of us at that time, I’ll take right, Alex you take left.”
None of us responded, Lea not doubting for a moment that we understood her directions. This is why she had drilled us, why she had spent so much effort in ensuring our commitment and loyalty to her orders. In a moment where a single questioned order could be our downfall, she ensured that we thrived and excelled in the face of our adversity.
We reached the intersection,
And we executed her plan like a well-oiled machine.
