The Viper was the person they needed to draw out of the base. The information from Amily only made it more important; while Serenity could lay Hollow Ones to rest even if they were as nasty as they could be from a Tier Ten ritual, he could only manage it one at a time. There were far too many people in the base for that to be viable; they’d be overrun if they were found.
The best option was to prevent the Hollow Ones from being created. That meant dealing with the Viper before he saw the need to activate his ritual. If that didn’t work, they needed to have already thinned out the base’s population enough to make the number of Hollow Ones created small enough to be dealt with.
They’d have to cut out or destroy the hearts; while most rituals to raise Hollow Ones would only raise people the ritual killed, that wasn’t always true. Fire was best; given the choice, Serenity would burn the bodies to ash. Bone chips could be used by a necromancer but were of relatively little use to most Life mages. The very Life mages who might make Hollow Ones were the same ones who might be able to use bone chips, but at least they’d be less useful than a whole body.
Serenity wished he’d been able to see the entire ritual. Sure, Amily had seen it, but she hadn’t understood it. That meant it wasn’t clear in her memory; he’d seen bits and pieces but not enough to even be certain that he was right about it being to make Hollow Ones. However little he liked trusting the Viper to tell the truth about his protections, even to his assassin, Serenity didn’t have a choice.
The group watched and waited as the Imperials stood around the tree. After about half an hour, Serenity headed outside to energize the ritual and see what was going on in the base. It took time to get a complete picture, partly because when Serenity first checked the Viper was in the warded “planning room”. Serenity wasn’t certain he hadn’t fled until he came out. Unfortunately, even after a couple of hours of watching, Serenity wasn’t certain what the Viper’s plans were. He simply spent too much time in warded rooms and never explained himself to anyone as far as Serenity could tell.
Eventually, the Imperials sent someone up the tree to look for “Amily”. Serenity wasn’t in the tent at the time, but quickly shut down the ritual and hurried in to watch what little could be seen when Rissa silently called for him.
There wasn’t that much to see until the slight unarmored man returned about half an hour later. Without sound, Serenity couldn’t hear what was said, but the gesturing was emphatic. The scout had searched the entire tree while he was up there. Serenity suspected he mentioned signs of his climbing the tree; he hadn’t even tried to hide them. The important thing was that there was no obvious way out; from the frustration he saw, he’d succeeded there.
It turned into a search of the entire area, starting with the area near the tree. Serenity wished them poor luck and expected that was exactly what they’d have. They didn’t have any dogs; even if they had had something that could scent him you, Serenity was fairly confident his scent changed when he shifted form.
The only way to track him was to have a magical way to follow his presence, and most Paths didn’t have such a thing. They’d have to have someone with either a spell like the one Serenity knew or a Path Skill. A hunter of some sort might have the Skill, but it wasn’t common in soldiers. Soldiers tended to gain Skills to tell them where an enemy was, not where he had been.
“We need to do something to draw their attention.” Serenity spoke his thoughts out loud and hoped someone else would be able to fill in the missing details. “Keep them off balance, worried about where the next attack is coming from, even if we’re not planning one. I don’t think it should be inside the base; we have to draw the Viper out.”
“The Viper?” Daryl noticed Serenity’s slip.
“The base commander,” Serenity corrected himself. “I came across his Name while I was in the base.” It was nowhere near the entire truth and was a misleading way to say it, but it was still the truth. He just happened to have found the name by overhearing it and in Amily’s memories.
Raz didn’t seem to pay attention to that byplay; instead, he was lost in thought before he snapped out his suggestion. “A trap. I’m pretty sure we can drop a tree on the search team tomorrow morning. If we do it right, we can even lead them in the wrong direction…”
The more Raz explained his idea, the more Serenity liked it. It required some specific Path Skills that Raz had and a couple of spells that Serenity and Ita could build to detach the tree, hide the damage, make it collapse at exactly the right time, and prevent the people in the way from escaping, but it was doable.
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At Tier Three, the people affected would at least be hurt. The trees in this forest were no larger than a normal temperate forest on Earth, but that didn’t make much difference; the trees were still massive. It was possible for a collapsing tree to kill people below Tier Five or Six on a direct hit even without the extreme luck of hitting the right spot. A true giant of a tree could kill higher Tier people; the odds of it happening were simply miniscule without a direct cause.
The soldiers didn’t retreat into the base that night; instead, they left four people on the surface to watch the clearing that held the entrances. A check with the ritual setup told Serenity that the hallways leading away from the hangar entrance were also guarded.
There were some other additional guards added in places; while many of them were at other locations Serenity suspected were exits, they were also scattered throughout the base. Some were for obvious reasons, like the ones stationed outside the planning room and the Viper’s bedroom, but Serenity had no idea on some of the others. He marked the rooms they guarded on the map as possible places of interest; if they were worth guarding, they might hold something that was valuable to disrupt.
There was no way the base could keep this level of readiness in the long run; they simply didn’t have the personnel for it. It would wear them out. In many ways, that was perfect; worn out people simply weren’t as good at anything. In other ways, it might be disastrous; the last thing Serenity wanted was for the Viper to get desperate enough to trigger the ritual he’d told Amily about.
When Serenity walked back into the tent, he found a good reason to be glad he’d let the others in on the information he’d gotten from Amily, even if he’d had to pass it off as some papers he’d found but not been able to bring out with himself. He hated lying like that, but the three Silver Blades didn’t seem to suspect anything and the information itself was good.
“...can’t.” Zanzital’s voice was clearly audible the moment Serenity stepped past the tent flap. “I told you not to come for a reason; it’s bad enough to have the two of you out of the city! Who’s managing the guild while you’re gone, Minak?”
Serenity froze and let the tent close behind him. He wasn’t sure what the argument was about, but everyone in the tent would easily be able to hear it at the volume Zanzital used. Serenity was simply glad that the properties of the tent meant his voice didn’t carry outside as well.
Gabriel huffed. “Minak left, Guildmaster. Ran away. The Guild was half-destroyed when you vanished after the attacks. We’re the only Tier Eights, there are no Tier Sevens.” He sounded just as upset as his Guildmaster. “That’s why we came, and it’s why the others want to come. It’s not just the Silver Blades, either. Half the mercenaries left in Takinat want to come. Serenity says he can get us a portal to get people through, we won’t be gone from Takinat for that long. Let us bring them in and clear out the base.”
Serenity frowned. He knew that information wasn’t new to the Guildmaster; both Daryl and Gabriel had told him about what happened to the Silver Blades. Did Zanzital not believe it or did he just keep forgetting?
Zanzital’s lips narrowed into a line before he shook his head and forced himself to relax. “That’s even more of a reason for them not to come. Some will die if they go in there. Especially if Serenity’s right and there’s a ritual to make Hollow Ones set up in there. You’ve never fought Hollow Ones; fighting Hollow Ones who used to be your friends and allies is …” Zanzital stared at nothing for a moment. “I wish we knew more about the ritual. If we knew how far it can go or how it identifies targets, it would help.”
That seemed like an excellent time to interrupt. “You can’t want that more than I do. I doubt it can reach this far, but anywhere inside the base seems all too likely.”
Both Gabriel and Zanzital turned towards Serenity. They tried to cover it, but the jump when he spoke told him they hadn’t realized he was there.
Serenity grinned as if he hadn’t just interrupted an argument. “It’s late enough now; why don’t we check in with Ita, make sure everyone’s where we think they are, then go set up that trap? Oh, and do you have any idea of something we could leave behind to make it obvious it was a trap without leading them to us? I want to make sure they can’t decide it was an accident.”
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Finding exactly the right spot and exactly the right tree was more difficult than Serenity expected. The forest wasn’t dense, but they still needed a path that was open enough that the tree could fall where they wanted it to without bouncing off another tree and unpredictably changing its direction - or worse, stopping.
Raz was the best at knowing what to look for. As it turned out, he was also capable of seeing when they missed a step or needed to be a bit more careful with how they set the trap so that it would be unseen, go off when they wanted it to, and go where they wanted it to. That made sense; he was trained to find traps, which meant he also had knowledge on how to set them, and he’d helped Aki design her dungeon. It didn’t use many traps, at least not above ground, but Serenity was confident Aki had taught Raz a lot on the way by.
They weren’t that far from the area the soldiers had explored during the day, so they could have allowed them to wander into the trap as they searched. That wasn’t the plan; instead, Serenity set up a spell that was little more than a blinking light. It would attract attention; when they set off the trap, it would also burst in a flare of bright light that would hopefully shock and blind the targets for long enough to let the trap fall. It was intended mostly as a lure, but the secondary effect ought to make the soldiers think that was an unintentional side effect instead of the main purpose.