Fire, the magical flames that devour the city already have the shape of a sea monster, several tentacles of fire fighting against various warriors and mages. The flames stopped expanding and were concentrated on top of the wall fighting a battle of attrition against the soldiers.
It's pretty obvious now that the mage responsible for this is targeting the soldiers and not the city, he's luring them to fight while killing as many of them as possible without creating a wildfire. I don't know why he's doing this but I know he can keep it up for a long time, the power of the flames doesn't seem to be affected by intense combat, at this distance I can't see the combated in detail but I can assuming the group of cultists is still hidden by the flames waits for the moment to act.
Whether your objective is to protect the mage during the escape or to attack a target among the soldiers I don't know and I don't intend to find out, now I'm close to the south gate and away from the light emitted by the red flames that illuminate the sky. Not far away I can already see Raven leading the rest of the team, it seems like no one is missing.
"Let's leave soon, the confrontation is reaching its climax and after that the city will be cordoned off in search of the mercenaries."
"Mercenaries?"
"Yes, the person responsible for the flames is not a cultist but a mercenary, he may be trying to hide his identity more his style and well-marked for those who have seen him working before."
"So, this attack has nothing to do with the cultists?"
"We have no way of knowing; Magnus the Fire Beast is a perfect mercenary. He doesn't care who hires him and does the job to the letter, without even an emotional involvement. I respect his professional ethics, but because of that it's impossible to know who hired him, but if I had to bet, I'd say the person who hired him is either a cultist or the swordsman who attacked earlier."
"The way you said it, it sounds like the swordsman and the cultists are different groups. Why do you think that?"
It seems Little Flame didn't like the idea that the swordsman is out of our reach.
"I don't know, but I have some suspicions about this swordsman's identity, if I'm sure he's not a cultist."
Okay, now everyone is shocked at how Raven can know the swordsman's identity. To think he's not a cultist and a wild guess, but has some basis, proclaiming that she knows his identity is a very different level of information.
"Who he is?"
"No need to be in such a hurry, Little Flame, talking now won't make a difference other than I risk being wrong. When we find him, I can be sure of my hunch until then, keep your expectations low."
Too mysterious for my taste.
"Let's get out of this damn town before the flames start to fade, we have a lot of documents to read before dawn."
"You've no longer got the location of the cultists' hideout."
"I got the location of one of their hideouts, it wouldn't be too strange for them to have more than one and these papers will help us find them. You guys will hate reading the papers at night in my dark forest on a moonless night and without the help of even a light, at the end of the day we don't want to get anyone's attention."
This is going to suck for those who don't fear the shadow element, which is everyone but Raven. Leaving town, we were really far away before she started reading all the papers that were stolen, but she let Mia and I use magic tools to light the papers when the rest of the team stood guard.
Normally I wouldn't be used to a task like this as Raven and Mia are the people who have secret information about the cultists, they are the ones who can have all the pieces to link the cultists with any piece of information, but according to Raven they need to go through all these papers very quickly to get to the base that Raven discovered.
My job to be specific is to note discrepancies and rule out reports that cannot be related to slave smuggling, which is basically the vouchers of slaves being put into training the only information there is the number of slaves who started training in the camps, furthermore, nothing useful will be reported after the first day of training in better ways to steal dead slaves' bodies.
During my reading I realized how much I hate paperwork, I have to do reports as I am a member of the army and voluntarily participate in any inquiry, but this is not bureaucracy when compared to the constant and almost equal requests that are processed in an operation of logistics.
I feel like I reread the same piece of paper over thirty times before I found something new, I would hate to work in a place like this. But during the next few hours as the three of us read through piles and piles of papers I found few clues.
Obviously, it was easy to find the discrepancy in some numbers, it was quite normal to miss one or two slaves when comparing the number of slaves sent to Canos with the report made on the arrival of a convoy, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were stolen.
It is quite common for slaves to die during travel or to be killed at the hands of those transporting them, in one of the reports a captain made it very clear that he used three slaves as bait to lure a bunch of magical tools into a trap. His justification was that sacrificing three slaves helped them send the convoy to be attacked directly.
The result would obviously be the destruction of the band of magical beasts, but the number of deaths and equipment damaged would be much higher if the convoy was simply attacked by the magical beasts. According to the report, the captain received a promotion for his job well done, but this is just one case that was well documented by those in charge of the slaves.
If slaves were used or sacrificed for less logical reasons, it is quite natural for those responsible for transport to lie saying that the slave tried to escape or died of illness and old wounds to justify a missing slave. But this can be a common problem that army logistics have to face; our problem is identifying which of these disappearances can be connected with the cultists.
Raven separated some names that could be cultists or someone hired and blackmailed by them, after that it was my job to count all the slaves that disappeared during the transport of these people. If the number is high enough, there's a good chance he was responsible for the kidnapped slaves, knowing who the biggest suspects are and it's easy to follow their tracks and get a lead on the direction or who else would be involved with transporting the slaves to a base. cultists.
After reading so many reports, the information that surprised me the most was the exorbitant number of slaves that disappeared, I already expected a large number, but this operation has not been working for so long for the number of missing slaves to be so close to four digits, the number I came up with was seven hundred and sixty-nine, but considering that number was higher I wouldn't be surprised if the thousandth slave who disappears is already very close to happening.
I know that slaves are not very important to the army or slavers who only have a few slaves missing at a time, but this number of disappearances is very high.
After realizing this I realized how lucrative this slave stealing business is for cultists, the war has just started but as time goes by the soldiers will care even less about the missing slaves as their focus will be on win the war. At this point the number of stolen slaves can easily exceed a thousand, this is really a great resource for the cultists.
It would not be surprising that in the kingdom of Kavenus there is also a start-up or an operation already set up to divert slaves during transport. The amount of art users who use human bodies will not so much increase during this war, most slaves end up being used by mages or older warriors who must be mounting their small armies to attack the innocent.
I doubt most of them attack some of the three realms directly, stealing the realms and attacking them are two very different things. The cultists will not come out into the light as the temples would end the war by making a holy crusade against them, the cultists would never be allowed to openly conquer territory in that region of the continent.
After stowing the papers on one of the mounts we made our way south to where the cultists' base is. According to Raven, Jack followed one of the cultists to this base in hopes that his sister was being kept there, but unfortunately, there were only slaves there besides the cultists.