During the days after our team took over the smugglers' base, I found myself in a rather pleasant routine, especially when you compare it to the rest of our group minus Ana.
Our fearless leader was quite disturbed by our new discoveries and to deal with this she focused her mind on the next phase of the mission. The reception that we have to prepare for the group of smugglers led by Mitus, I obviously came up with the idea of having a pretty explosive reception that means more work for me, but I'm fine with that.
While the rest of the team took care of the menial part of the mission, like taking care of the slaves who are very 'excited' when they find out that the smugglers were killed or captured by us, their reaction was pure joy mainly because Quinn was the person who explained the situation for them is presenting himself as a soldier of the realm and no harm would be inflicted on them anymore.
The problem is that they want to be freed now and that's impossible, we can't let the slaves roam free around the base and even less in the area around the hut, with Quinn's help I was setting up the explosive trap against the smugglers and the rest. of the team also set up barriers inside the first underground floor.
If the ambush on the surface goes wrong, we have an escape plan to hide inside the base, this would normally be a bad choice, but in our current situation it is quite feasible.
The smugglers must not intend to bury the base as there is a lot of contraband inside the base and the slaves they promised to the necromancers, if anything happened to the slaves, they would have great difficulty securing a new batch of slaves like these.
One of the information we got from the diary was that the necromancer identified as Purple Crow insisted that a part of the slaves was from the fawn tribe, snakes, bulls and some dwarves. Fortunately, this information also helped us to discover that the slaves that must be being transported here by Mitus' group are from the snake tribe and some bulls.
In the base cages most of the beast people and the fawn tribe and some types of felines like panther, wolf and foxes that must have been kidnapped to make bulk or because they were in the same place as the fawn tribesmen when the smugglers attacked them.
Because of this it is extremely unlikely that they will try to harm the base, so they will be forced to enter the base for guerrilla combat and we will also have the advantage of having cover and they will not.
Tania will do some damage with her wind and fire element against the cornered smugglers, but I'd still prefer they all be killed and captured on the surface.
It took me two full days to repair the base runes enough that most of the rune sets are working now. The alarm or transmission type rune sets are completely disabled, which will make the group of smugglers that are coming to realize that something is wrong with the base.
That's why I planted the explosive rune sets far away from the base where their group will pass, it's a pity that I can only use level one and two rune sets. We cannot risk killing the slaves being transported or Mitus.
A green core warrior wouldn't die even if he stepped directly into a blast from a tier two rune set, at most he would lose his footing, which would be a pretty funny situation.
The explosions should be capable of killing or seriously injuring the gray core warriors who should be leading the caravan and a few on the sides if I've got a good estimate of the size of their convoy.
It's a shame that killing the mages isn't possible, they must be at the center of their formation and Ana's plan doesn't include blowing them up. She doesn't want anything we can profit from being damaged.
I also managed to complete a full base search as Ana asked me to, not that it was possible to have many safes hidden in the base as I should normally be able to see all of them, no matter what kind of cover used to hide them.
But unfortunately, there was nothing hidden on the walls, ceilings or floor of the entire base, but I found some contraband that was hidden by some false bottoms in some boxes. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of smugglers, greed.
There're one or more smugglers stealing their leader Mitus, maybe it was Keni who takes care of the logistics of the base it shouldn't be too difficult for someone like him to steal from his boss since he keeps a diary with enough information to blackmail his boss if he has to leave this operation.
The only reason for the death of Keni and the other smugglers was the greed that his boss Mitus had, without that greed he wouldn't have risked this operation turning this base into a point for a smuggling route, making the kingdom able to get the clue incomplete that there might be a new countermanding route in the north.
Aside from the preparations and other tasks I did with my skills, I also had the opportunity to read Keni's diary. I admit I was a little surprised when I received the diary, I thought Ana would keep the information to herself, but then I realized she did it as an insurance policy and a ploy to show that I had gained her trust.
The face of the rest of the group when they saw me studying the diary was very nice, Carmilla and Abel were completely devastated and a little annoyed. The two of them probably hoped that I would fail to earn Ana's trust and lose my position as second-in-command, even though the position had been handed over to the highest-ranking officers in the army.
A negative assessment from the unit leader, saying that I am not competent or skilled to be second in command, would probably be enough to demote me.
Because the second-in-command position should only be held by someone competent and trusted by the leader, at the end of the day this position not only means that I have to lead the team in an emergency, it also has several different responsibilities that I have to shoulder because of my position.
A simple example is something like, something bad happened to Ana so it will be my duty to report all our findings to the kingdom's intelligence center, I doubt that on most other teams the second-in-command of the unique has received their trust leader as quickly as me.
Because of the friendship she has with the female members who lead the Memphis family, Anna has placed her trust in me without too many problems or reservations, even though I am not a real member of the Memphis family. I doubt I gave her any form of negative impression for the short period I had in contact with her for the trip and stay in the capital, in fact I think I gained some positive points with her.
In Keni's diary there were some useful entries to discover the plans the smugglers had, but there was other information even more impressive and useful for us. This diary really is a gold mine the most valuable item in this entire base, the only thing missing from it was a sentence saying that they were working with worshipers of evil gods.
Obviously, Keni wasn't stupid enough to write those words, but he wasn't vigilant enough to avoid there being any references to the necromancer who hired them, he even had some information that showed us some possibilities of what the necromancer wanted to do in the northern region.
The buyer of the slaves was only referred to in the diary by a clearly false name, the green crow being what the necromancer was being called in the diary.
Of course, calling someone a green crow doesn't mean anything special, but Ana explained to me that there was a small group of traveling necromancers, they called themselves the avian society, each member of the group was identified by a name that was a combination of a bird and a Collor.
So the moment Keni identified the slave buyer as Green Crow, she knew the odds of him being one of the avian society necromancers was pretty high. Ridiculously big to be precise, especially when she found out that all this foundation was made for him.
The trade between the Green Crow and Mitus' band of bandits is basically a purchase of a large number of slaves who must meet certain characteristics, the food needed to keep the slaves 'alive and well' for an extended period of time and to finishing the entire base would be the necromancer's new home.
With a few more details that Keni ended up recording in her diary, Ana formed a good idea of what a necromancer's plan is a very expensive deterrent, and one that will result in the deaths of countless innocent people.
I know a few things about necromancers, but I have to admit that I don't really know anything beyond the basics of how they create their armies. I know they need bodies to summon zombies and skeletons, and the higher the quality and level of the bodies the better the summoned dead.
But when Ana explained to me that this necromancer probably wants to take all the slaves, I was shocked, I didn't expect him to plan on doing something so vile.
I had hoped that the slaves would turn low-level undead to be used to kill the northern villages for the Green Crow to be able to make a large army of the dead, but I was dead wrong.
According to Ana the Green Crow intends to use the slaves to make a different type of undead, if we were to compare this type of undead with skeletons and zombies, they would clearly be more alive than them. This kind of trait basically means that they are stronger and have a different path to getting stronger, but making them also requires a lot more work and investment.
Ana even suspects that there is more than one necromancer working with this Green Crow. Basically, he'd turned the slaves into two types of undead, two variations of ghouls.
Dwarves would become a type of terrestrial ghouls; they have great defense and ability to dig. They are often used by necromancers to dig up corpses at great speed without making too much of a mess, any mid-level necromancer has at least one of these to keep gathering materials for them.
Already the slaves of the tribes will become wild ghouls, this is a type of ghouls that is a form of imitation of ghouls created from magical beasts. This type of ghouls and famous for their adaptive combat skills, they both have the ability to fight with weapons and claws.
Famous for their speed and combat power, their only real weakness is that their body's defenses aren't very good and tend to need to be fed more often than other types of ghouls. It's not that hard to damage their bodies, but of course you have to hit them in order to destroy them and that tends to be tricky, especially when they're moving in large numbers.
But at the end of the day, the fact that he wanted to turn the first underground floor into a big chamber to refine the slaves into ghouls isn't the most shocking part Ana shared with me.
She believes that Green Crow wants to create high level ghouls, he will use a large number of victims to feed the best ghouls so that they evolve. This type of process takes time and is a safe place like this base.
We thought the necromancer wanted to create a large army of low-level undead, but now it looks like he wants to use the war in the south and east of the realm as a distraction for the forces of the realm and temples. To be able to refine high-level ghouls calmly without attracting the attention of anyone in the northern region.