After cleaning the excess blood that I had on my hands and legs I sat at the table in one of the corners of the cabin that had a slightly ordinary look, taking away the smell of blood that is on my body the environment looks like an ordinary cabin in the mountains.
You wouldn't even suspect that downstairs to a blood-stained room and another full of slaves and some contraband or outside to a large shallow grave full of mutilated body parts.
I get rid of these irrelevant thoughts and focus my attention on the diary in my hands, unlike me it is clean which is good news. It is not damaged at all even after its owner was torn into several pieces, the two idiots were very lucky not to have hit the diary.
If one of their blows had hit the diary it would have exploded killing its owner, at least two tier two cores of fire element magic beasts. This explosive rune set is under four layers of rune arrangements, which I have to dismantle in a very subtle way so as not to detonate a bomb in my face.
Lucky for me these rune arrangements in this book are quite simple to dismantle, the person who created this journal started with a simple defensive rune set that creates a thick layer of mana that flows in a chaotic way over the journal cover.
This set tries to hide the alarm set which is the first trap I have to undo, it is on top of a confusion rune set which protects the fourth rune set which is meant to activate the explosive rune set, the apparent last layer of protection before the explosive rune set is a very clever trap that has a high chance of protecting the contents of the diary, but against my eyes it's pretty easy to spot their weaknesses.
It will take me a while to undo them without any danger, but under the explosive rune set is a rune set linked to the diary lock, this is the real final defense of the diary, it is really small and it takes very little mana to activate several small one's blasts of heat that should burn off much of the ink used in the diary.
After so many traps and protections it is normal that a trap that is so different from the others has a good chance of succeeding. I must admit that the creator of this diary is very intelligent and paranoid, I have great respect for him, but I would probably 'kill' him if I found him since he works with criminals.
Of course, that would only happen if he wasn't Keni who owned this diary, but I think it's highly unlikely that a rune craftsman would be working on logistics for smugglers in a place like this. The most plausible scenario is that Keni bought this journal from a rune craftsman.
Over the next two hours with the assistance of the parchment filled with rune matrices I used earlier I undid all the runic arrangements in the diary. Finally, the contents of the diary are unprotected and ready to be read.
Wiping the sweat that had built up on my face during this grueling task I looked around to find Ana's eyes staring back at me.
"Have I kept you waiting too long, Shield?"
"Sincerely? No! I may not know much about runes, but I know the basics of the basics, which is enough to note that this journal is protected by a number of different runic arrangements. Are you sure you found and disarmed them all?"
"Only one way to find out."
I flip open the diary as I toss it towards Ana who is quite startled to the point that she jumps backwards knocking over the chair she was sitting on. It was a very funny situation for me, but for Ana she looked at me with a lot of anger I think she didn't like the joke very much.
"Jerk! That's not funny."
"I disagree."
I take the diary from the open cabin floor and hand it to Ana.
"You better prepare yourself because I'll get revenge later."
"Try it, I think I took a long time to unlock the diary. Where is the rest of the group?"
"They're all down there tidying up, I've given the order that the prisoners are kept locked up and gagged at all times. Only you and I can have direct contact with them, I don't want the information to get out."
"I hope you understand the reason for this, Wolf. I don't think they can have any more useful floors for us to provide, but they still have value as bargaining chips so don't let anything bad happen to them, Wolf."
"The leader of the smugglers Mitus will arrive here in a few days probably four or five, the mage wasn't entirely sure as Mitus is on a very long trip, but in the end, we were very lucky this time."
"If we were slower to get here, we would have found the group of smugglers in their strongest formation, which would be pretty boring to face. But now we've already killed the weakest of the group that could get in our way later, and we also can't forget that we have a few days to set a trap for the main group of smugglers."
"I see, should I put someone on guard outside and focus on repairing the runes inside the base or should I focus on reactivating the outer surveillance perimeter?"
"Focus on the entire base and take the opportunity to thoroughly scour it, Luz brought me earlier the valuable items that came from the corpses and that weren't destroyed during combat, but I doubt that there will no longer be valuable items hidden in the rest of the base."
"I mean, I'm going to ask the rest of the group to do double patrols around the cabin. Without the runic arrangements, it is possible for animals and magical beasts to visit us here, especially if they are attracted by the smell of the bodies that have been buried outside."
"Keep the mages in here, I don't want to take any risk of them getting hurt. We can have a healer now, but I'd rather not have to use one."
I made my way downstairs while Ana sat in the chair, I was using earlier to start reading the diary, it's not very big so he shouldn't spend too much time reading it.
Upon arriving at the first underground floor, I notice that he is really different, except for some marks on the walls and the damaged wood does not indicate that there is a fight here. They did a good job of cleaning and fixing this room and the fact that I can't hear much noise coming from the next floor so I believe the slaves are still sleeping.
I doubt they'll be able to calm the slaves so short a time to the point where they don't even dare to make a noise from the deeper floor of the base. In front of me are most of the team members, the only faces I don't see are Tania and Fim who must be looking after the slaves.
"You guys did a good cleaning down here, I wish next time, you guys would focus your efforts more so as not to damage the underground base in the first place."
I get a hostile glare from everyone present for different reasons.
"While Shield is reading the journal which should have a lot of information about the smugglers, I will focus on fixing the base's runic arrangements. I need you to pair up to guard the perimeter and kill any beasts or magical beasts that try to get close to the base, try not to attract attention."
"Smugglers can take a long time to arrive, but it's always good not to draw too much attention."
Their unhappiness is palpable in the air, they are not trying to hide their feelings or they are very bad actors. Not one of these 'geniuses' likes to take orders from me, even if they make a lot of sense or even come from Ana.
The first to break her stance was Carmilla, she really likes being in the lead of a team and not in her current position as a soldier who can't know all the information being retrieved during the mission.
"What have we discovered about the smugglers? Do you know why they are gathering such a large number of slaves here?"
"You'll know about it when you need to know about it, because you don't focus your thoughts on what you made mistakes during the operation and how to avoid making the same mistakes again. Don't try to keep investigating what is clearly not for you to know, Shield has given the hush order and it will be long no one should talk about anything they see on this base until the hush order is lifted."
"Start separating the pairs soon. The time wasted of each patrol must be decided by you who will do it, in case something happens or you find some interesting things outside or inside the base, come talk to me. You must not interrupt your reading, Shield."
I didn't even wait for an answer from them and went to do my job, I was lucky I didn't spend a lot of physical energy before. This will allow me to stay up for a long time fixing these rune arrangements, I hope I don't have a problem fixing the runes.