"So, this is where they were seen heading east?"
"Yes, did you find anything?"
"I just got here! Can't you try to pretend to have a little patience? Give me a few minutes."
"Too sensitive."
What a troublesome woman, she obviously knows how a tracker works and yet she's teasing me for fun. I better focus on my current task, I hope after all this time some traces have been left behind, even knowing the direction they went doesn't help that much.
If I don't find some kind of trail to the east I won't know if I can find the moment, they changed direction after they headed east. Only by finding a trail will I have a good chance of finding them.
There's nothing special here. A very clean terrain full of grass and two trees in my camp, more common terrain in the north does not exist, but I have to be thankful for my luck if it had snowed or rained a lot the chances of me finding any trace of elemental energy would be basically non-existent.
Leaving my team behind along with my mount I walked through the region. I focused as much aura into my eyes as possible and started looking for anything out of the ordinary as usual. I already feel the headache coming on.
Obviously, there's nothing in the air so I turned my attention to the ground, the mana and elemental energy would seem normal, but I focused well on the elemental energy because if the smuggler group used a magic tool or had someone covering their tracks, he should use the earth elemental energy for this.
Pure mana to cover tracks in the open field like this should only be done by an abnormally talented or very high-level mage, both scenarios are ridiculous and basically impossible, but if it's not this red core mage it would kill my entire team.
How fun.
This is hard, elemental anergy seems normal, but after spending thirty minutes walking around in a circle around the area I noticed something was wrong here. When I got far enough away, I could see that the elemental energy on the surface of the ground is slightly different.
It was not a circle formed in the area around where the smugglers had passed, but a straight line that was several meters from where the smugglers must have passed, on one side of the line the color of the earth element on the surface was slightly stronger than the other. other. It was a really small difference in brightness, an artist would notice that in a painting when normal people weren't able to record this color difference.
I can only see why on the line that separates the colors the energy on either side does not mix creating a visual effect much easier to see than simply seeing the color of elemental energy. This is the first time I've seen this happening; such unnatural behavior of elemental energy can only be a product generated by the actions of an elemental energy user.
The energy of this pressure not only caused the ground to be unmarked but also caused its energy to cover the ground in an even manner that mimicked natural elemental energy. Does the elemental energy left by Ana behave the same way, is this a defect I can find in professionals of her level? If so, I just found a very useful flaw that I can exploit to track people who are difficult to track.
"What are you doing so far away, Wolf? If a trail exists, shouldn't it be there?"
I turned around to find Abel asking hard questions to answer, it's not like he understands what I'm doing or it's a good idea for him to understand what I'm doing, so the best answer is something simple.
"What kind of stupid question is that? Are you a tracker to keep guessing or commenting on what I'm doing? Go do something useful like get the horses, I've already found their trail and we're on our way out."
Was I too rude to him? Sure, but it was necessary he was the victim that Serbian made it clear to the rest of the group that they shouldn't ask me questions like that.
This could be problematic in the future, but it's still a safe choice to keep them away from my secrets. When Abel was heading towards the horses to join the group, the leader Ana approached.
"Is the trail good? It's been several days and from what I could tell there was a skilled earth mage in the smugglers group."
"The trail is fine; their mage might be good but his level shouldn't be too high. He made a mistake and I found him, but it was not easy to find his mistake and I think we will have a consistent trail until the end."
A smile dominated Ana's face, even though it was hidden behind his helmet I could hear her smile when she spoke to me.
"Well, let's go find the smugglers and kill them. If we're lucky, we'll kill half of them now and ambush the rest in their hideout."
Bloodthirsty, but it's a good plan.
Our trip was resumed and this time our trajectory was very straight and when I say very straight it is literally a straight line that took two whole days to travel, then it was replaced by another two days going north in a new straight line.
The smugglers must have been in a hurry or very confident that they would be able to avoid being followed. They didn't even care about making a more complex path to thwart their pursuers.
But that turned out to be good for us, I just had to follow the line that was the limit of the earth element mage's elemental energy, it was an easy task to do on horseback, but I was impressed when we're heading to a small mountain covered in trees.
That little mountain is on the edge of the northern range and beyond that must be the kingdom of Divos, a bunch of slave-owning shits who love money. I was already expecting the smugglers to be making a route to that realm by the time we came in that direction.
We wait until nightfall for me to go scout closer to where their base should be, I doubt they made a tunnel here the rock under the earth layer is very hard this makes digging through it very time consuming so they must have chosen to take a surface route since they didn't have that much time to do that route.
This type of route has its next disadvantages, caravans are magnets for monsters and they have to go through the border barrier. This last problem is really tricky, the barrier cannot be damaged and as it is a massive set of several rune matrices opening a hole in it is a monumental task, if it where easy most smugglers wouldn't dig such complicated tunnels to get around them.
I approached the mountain looking for their base, it was not difficult to find them. Their base was at the edges of the forest they used the trees as cover for their base which looked like a large hunting cabin.
Even though I'm far away from the hut I can see the mana and elemental energy that the rune arrangement that is inside the hut's structure, it's like seeing the outline of a bluish building under the ground. Two floors up under that hut, they must be keeping a lot of contraband inside.
When approaching dodging the runic arrangements that serve as alarms, I got close enough to the hut to have a better field of vision, I didn't worry too much about being seen because there was no one inside the hut all the cores I could see were in the first one. and second underground floors.
Now I understand why they built such a big floor underneath; it's not holding many items. They are imprisoning people, dozens of black cores piled up in small places.
They must contain over one hundred and fifty prisoners in those boxes. Half of the deepest floor is used to hold these prisoners or victims.
Leaving them aside I focused on the rest of the cores that are inside the base, the whole of three mages and thirteen warriors inside that base and to my surprise not even a green core inside the base.
Looks like the leader of the smugglers isn't here which is very good news, if that's the weak half of the smugglers group I don't think we'll be able to kill if the whole criminal troupe was in there.
We could kill most of them by blowing up the base with all of them inside, but considering the slaves I don't think Ana would approve of doing that. But with our current reality that isn't so bad, we can storm the base and kill that half of the smugglers and ambush the rest of the group that must be heading this way.
The only downside is that we don't know how long we'll have to stay here waiting for the rest of the smugglers. I made my way back to my team with the new news.