Preparing for the trip took more than a week. There were all sorts of people to notify and coordinate, even among just the Silver Blades. Once the Mercenaries’ Guild found out about it, Serenity found himself having to deal with inquiries from other groups that wanted to be part of the eventual assault. He was able to refer those people over to Kerr, but he couldn’t delegate the task of combing the city’s markets for the various materials he might need for the trip or for the rituals he was considering once they got to the base.
Of the Silver Blades, only Daryl and Gabriel would come; Naomi had a party that she often grouped with when she wasn’t with the two Tier Nines that she wanted to stay with. Honoria needed to stay at the library to defend it; she wanted Raz to stay with her, but he was adamant that he wasn’t going to be left behind. Kerr volunteered to stay instead; she was needed to organize the various groups of Silver Blades and other mercenaries.
Ita chose to stay behind as well. Her plan was to be able to create an emergency portal away from the base if needed; she was better at portals than Serenity was yet, and while she couldn’t go through a portal she created, she wouldn’t need to if she was already at the destination. She couldn’t hold a portal even remotely as long as Serenity could when he was in a ley line, but she wouldn’t need to for the small group of scouts. All she had to do was send a broken token with Serenity; he could tell her when to create a portal if it was needed.
The final group was seven people. Serenity had to go; Daryl and Gabriel were there to “help” rescue their Guildmaster. Rissa was coming because Serenity was; she also noted that her oracular ability might come in handy. Raz wanted to kill the people who killed his clan, while Blaze wanted to heal anyone who was hurt. The last member was one of Legion’s bodies; she was going to have one accompany each group for coordination, and clearly that included Serenity’s group.
The relatively small group reached the spot where the base was hidden without any difficulty. The terrain was rough to begin with and turned into something that could be called “forest” about twenty miles into the trip. For the entire group, it took six days of walking. While they could have done it in less time, none of them wanted to be exhausted when they arrived.
Several times a day, they also had to hide from the biplanes as they flashed by. Fortunately, Serenity was able to feel them coming by the pull the runescript on the plane exerted on the ley line, which gave them time to huddle under a concealing enchanted cloth; it wouldn’t have held up under close examination but was good enough to hide them from a plane whipping by at the speed granted by the ley line.
Serenity brought out his tent each night for the group to have a safe place to rest. It was relatively simple to conceal with the enchanted cloth covering it. They also didn’t actually expect any planes to fly overhead, since they didn’t seem to fly at night, but it was better to be safe than surprised.
Gabriel and Daryl were shocked that the tiny tent they’d seen Serenity use in the dungeon was large enough on the inside to comfortably sleep eight people. At their Tier, the magic necessary to create a pocket space like that wasn’t impossible, simply unusual; the cost in monster cores to operate a tent went up geometrically with the size of the space unless the outside also went up in size, so most people settled for turning a tiny one-person tent into a comfortable space for one or two people. That cost didn’t matter to Serenity, since he’d found that he could supply the tent with his own essence and mana instead of monster cores.
The area outside the enemy base was covered in trees. They were tall pine trees; Serenity wasn’t good enough at trees to tell the exact species, but anyone could identify a pine tree when they saw the pinecones. There was quite a bit of space between the trees, with only sparse grasses and bushes making up incomplete ground cover.
Wildlife was common but weak; most of it resembled the wildlife Serenity would expect to find on Earth. The few signs of anything stronger were the traces they left behind, claw marks that were simply too deep or razor-sharp metal spines embedded deep in a tree. It was obvious that the two Silver Blades scared off anything that wasn’t essentially mundane; they were the only people flashing their auras at the surroundings.
That should work fine here, since the monsters were probably all low Tier. Serenity still didn’t normally choose to advertise his Tier. There was too much of a chance to attract something that wanted to defend its territory.
It took a while to locate the cleared area where the biplanes were landing, because it was a bit farther from the ravine than anyone expected. The only obvious signs that it was used for anything were the marks left by the biplanes’ wheels. There were no planes visible; given the late hour, it seemed likely that they were all put away for the night.
Once the landing field was located, it was simple enough to follow the marks to a pair of concealed entrances; they were well hidden, but the fact that the wheel marks stopped suddenly made the large one easy to find and it gave them the clues they needed to find the smaller personnel entrance.
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Once they found the second entrance, Serenity headed back into the trees. He had the immediate information he needed; it was time to move on to the next step of the plan. He hadn’t found any wards so far, but that was the first thing he wanted to look for, followed by a layout of the area and then where people might be.
“Hey, where are you going? Aren’t we going to head to the cliffside to find Guildmaster Zany?” Daryl sounded puzzled.
Serenity paused before continuing towards the forest. He wanted to be under cover before anyone came up from below or a plane arrived. Exploring the area was a necessary risk and he didn’t feel a draw on the ley line now, but there was no reason to take more of a risk of being seen than they had to. “There’s no need to head to the cliff yet; I can use the entrances we’ve found to gather information on the base. If these tunnels don’t connect, we’ll head that way and start there, since rescuing your Guildmaster seems like a good place to start.”
The mention of the Guildmaster seemed to mollify Daryl. He followed Serenity back into the woods.
They spent a while looking for a good place to make a longer-term camp; realistically, all they needed to hide was Serenity’s tent and whatever magic he set up to examine the base. They passed up a number of clearings as too large for their needs before they found a spot that was perfect. It was a shaded area just large enough to hold the tent next to a larger than usual tree; while there were openings from the spot where they stationed the tent to the sky, they were no larger than about a foot in width. There was also an area nearby without surface tree roots that was covered by the tree’s higher branches that Serenity could use for a ritual circle.
The next morning, Serenity set up his basic ritual circle. It was not difficult to decide what to do; this was a sequence of rituals he’d used many times in the past, first as Vengeance and then as the Final Reaper. It had been perfected by the Final Reaper to a group that could be used under almost any circumstances he found himself in; his current circumstances were excellent. Most importantly, he had the time and supplies to do the setup correctly. While he didn’t have the Final Reaper’s power, he was also trying to cover a far smaller area than a planet or solar system and he had a ley line to help.
Everyone gathered to watch; they hid when the planes went over, but other than that there wasn’t much else to do. Gabriel peppered Serenity with questions and asked him to explain each step. Serenity did, but he didn’t think Gabriel understood the entire explanation. Even without full understanding, Gabriel was excited to see a spell that could use the power of a ley line to search for wards without triggering them over a large area.
At noon, Serenity triggered the ritual. Technically, he could use it under the light of the Sun, the light of the Moon, or under starlight, depending on how he set up the ritual, but he only explained the Sun variant. The power of Light to reveal secrets was well understood and easy to comprehend, after all, and Gabriel wasn’t well enough trained in ritual magic to even attempt to modify a ritual, never mind design one the way Serenity often did.
The answer the ritual provided was not really surprising, but it was helpful: there were no wards at all on the entrance they knew about. There were some small wards inside the cave system, but none of them covered more than a hundred square feet and most were smaller; they had to be individual room wards. The locations might be important, but Serenity couldn’t find that out until he had a map of the place.
Naturally, the map ritual was next. It would take quite a bit longer to run than the ward-detection ritual. Since he was able to set it up and initiate it before sunset, Serenity fully expected it to run all night. What he didn’t expect was for the ritual to send the entire detailed map to Serenity’s mind as it explored the area.
The mapping ritual’s primary output was a physical map drawn on paper Serenity provided, but it had a secondary output that gave the ritualist performing the ritual a crude idea of what the ritual saw; it was there so that the ritual could be steered; there were other ways to bound a mapping ritual, but they were best if you knew more than Serenity did about the base. He didn’t want to map any natural tunnels, after all; he’d seen natural tunnels and tunnel systems that could run for tens, possibly even hundreds, of miles. If the base connected into some of them and the mapping ritual took off that way, Serenity had to keep it on track.
Surprisingly, the version of the map sent to the ritualist wasn’t actually less detailed than the one put on paper; in fact, if anything, it was more detailed because of scale. Everything went to Serenity, while some things were too small to put on the paper. It seemed that a human or undead who had once been human had some sort of natural filter that kept the details limited; perhaps it was simply that they couldn’t pay attention to too much at once and learned to only watch the things that mattered. Whatever it was, Serenity could now accept all of the data and do something with it. He also didn’t forget.
Serenity sent the others off to sleep while he monitored the ritual. He didn’t mention the mental map he was building, but he did try to observe everything the spell could tell him, whether it ended up on the map or not.
He was well into the mapping project when he felt something strange. Whatever it was … no, whoever it was felt strange yet familiar. When he compared the feeling to the map, he realized that Daryl’s directions from Guildmaster Zany would lead to where the feeling seemed to come from.
Well, he knew Zany had bound the Layered Dungeon. That was probably why he felt familiar. It didn’t completely explain why Serenity could detect him when he didn’t feel anyone else, but Serenity could only assume it had something to do with his connection to dungeons.