"Is it weird that I feel bad about what we did here?" Drassisa asked her new friends while looking at the mass of bodies from where friends cut apart their own friends instead of trying to escape the noose creeping slowly around their necks.
"No, this is just a horrible way to die. Suffocation by smoke while having your minds warped and twisted against you. Lets never get killed like that, figure out some way to avoid it at all cost." Teamasa told her friends while surveying the bodies for magical items or other valuables before raising them into her service.
'Lets get to that treasure trove and see how much they have! Though it still troubles me. How could they have that much treasure and look at this gear? It is not something that I would expect your typical bandit to have. There is something that we are missing here that is for sure.' Sasha thought out loud.
"What troubles you about it if you do not mind me asking?" Smithy said while looking around, anything that would trouble his half-elven friend was not something that he wanted taking him by suprise.
"You remember how Tea described them fighting amongst themselves. How small groups would form to fight everone around them before they started hacking each other apart?" Sasha asked while picking up a severed arm to demonstrate her point.
"That shows ingraned responses for group tatics! Not knowing who has you back but trusting them to have it. That does not seem like your average bandit to me, what about you?" She added with an after thought.
"Those groups didn't start killing themselves until all the others were dead and gone. They didn't even look at each other until that point. It was like they were fighting off of instinct alone." Teamasa added with dawning dread.
"That is not the kind of trust bandits have for each other that is for sure. 'Don't look away from your opponet, just trust that the man next to you will do the same and you wont leave any opening.' Fight like ever second will be your last and you will never falter." Sasha recited a battlefield mantra the order had drilled into her at a young age.
"On top of that none of the gear is mixed and matched. It all looks like bandt grear but to anyone with the know-how to know what to look for will see through it immediately. This is a set up for something and I would rather know before it comes to bite us on the ass." She stated to the group while they made their way into a bloody room in the mine.
It was filled with seven corpuses. Each of them wearing a ring under the gloves on their hands. In one of the coats on the dead men there was an encoded journal filled with notes.
"I found something here but I can't read it. It is probably important so lets take it with us." Teamasa told the group while waving a blood stained book in the air.
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Having delivered that bit of grim news the group walks on in silence. They were each wondering what this would mean in the long run.
Were they sent here by political rivals of the Dragonlord? To make him seem weak and incompetent in his old age. Could it have other purposes besides just money or was this the start of a trade war between wealthy merchant companies? More importantly, who was going to come after them now that this operation was delt with. Would they recieve assassins in the dark of night? Or something much worse, having a noble of some kind breathing down their necks and wanting them dead for the high crime of daring defiance.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
It would make as much sense as anything else. Or maybe just a old group of soldiers that decided to become bandits after being fired. Could they have been unleashed on the area in such a manner that nothing could be traced back to the soruce if they got caught?
This was going to be headach inducing that was for sure.
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"That is a lot of chest and even more gold!" Embrda said to everyone while checking for traps on the chest after Teamasa had disabled all the magical ones she could find.
"You are telling me, it could not all have come from just rich merchants or there would be far more of a big stink about them being here." Tess said while reinforcing the ceiling to make sure it would not collapse on them as intended.
"They really did not want anyone getting away with all this loot did they?" Drassisa asked when she had to heal her brother of a minor poison he had touched.
"Another reason that they were not mear bandits is that they would never trap their loot like this just in case they had to grab what they could and run." Smithy told the group while pondering about the sicurity, "We should have taken at least one of them alive."
"It would have given us away and they knew each others faces so they would not have been fooled by a disguise in the least." Embrda told everyone.
"That should be everthing so Tea hit it with magic again to give us a better view of it. Destroyed quite a few things that would have blocked our search the first time round." Embrda added while wondering who in their right minds used that many traps for something like this.
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After finally getting through all the magic and traps on the chest they used the undead and loaded all the gold onto the enchanted wagon that they had found. It took quite some time but everyone agreed, they were leaving nothing behind for someone else to stumble onto. They would hide it all in the main cavern and set up their ambush near the mine.
With the magic they could snipe at the hydra for this distance easly enough while being at the sight to kill the damn thing.
They found a nice clearing and set up some illusions to hide the undead digging the pit and preparing the area according to Teamasa the Necromantic Wizard as she had taken to being called after a joke was said in the mine shaft. She had made the freshly risen bodies dance for a bit out of boredom. Say what you want about her, she knew not to take herself to seriously.
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Back at the cavern that they had taken great pains to get the wagon into, Smithy and Sasha were working together to make several poisons for slowing regeneration. It would speed up the fight with tthe hydra immensly if they could just add constant bleeding damage to the monster.
The problem in doing so it that the damn thing would regenerate away the poison in time and it would run out with the bloodloss making it all effectively useless. Then the monster would start regenerating all its blood back and they would be back at square one. That was why they were putting so much of it together, to make sure that after it was almost drained of blood they could put more on the back wounds and keep it down. To many forgot that and ended up paying the price for it later.
So much work would go into bring down the damn thing that it was frankly ridiculousthat anyone ever killed the damn things. Of course their solution was usally to throw more bodies at it untill it died. Considering how much they would be worth to the right buyers most idiots would throw away all their friends lives and even their own to take one down.
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"Hay guys I was just counting the gold and we are going to make out better then expected from this trip. I say that when we get back to the cabin we do not take this out until we are ready to spend it and even then not all at once." Teamasa said to the group. She was levitating an entire chest of gold to make counting easier.
"This day just got a lot more profitable if I do say so myself." Drassisa said before sugesting while looking at all the gold. "We are going by finders-keepers for the gold right?"
"YES!" Everyone else said at the same time.
"Just checking on whether or not I needed to smack some sense in to you lot." She clarified for everyone that was looking at her like she just grew three heads.
"We spend tomorrow setting up the ambush and spring it the day after, is everyone agreed." Smithy asked around getting nods from all corners. It was time to get this over with.