"Thank you. Oh, is there a place to buy new clothes? These need to be burned!"

Clerk says "You can either get a set of basic clothes from the fort provisioner or there is a general store down the way."

"I think I'll go with the general store. Thanks!"

With a wave to the clerk I leave and head for the general store, which is past the inns. As soon as I walk in, the shopkeeper covers his nose and asks what I want. When I tell him I want clothes he finds me a set and throws them to me, he doesn't even charge me.

I get a similar reaction from the innkeeper when I walk into the Silver Griffon inn. The innkeeper chases me out the front door and takes me around back. Luckily, there is no one else in the bathhouse, which in reality is just a shack with a wooden barrel.

However, the wooden barrel is large and filled with water, cold water. Then to my surprise the innkeep casts a fire spell to heat the water for me. He casts another to burn my clothes as I climb into the tub and sink into the water.

After being filthy for days it feels amazing to be able to get clean again. Once I am clean and in the new clothes the innkeeper is finally willing to let me into the inn. He even brings me a big meal and waits until I am finished eating to talk about money.

Innkeeper says "It's two silvers for the bath and five for the meal."

"How much is a room?"

Innkeeper says "Ten silvers a night. Which includes two meals and the use of the bathhouse."

Hearing that I take forty silvers out and put them on the table, which the innkeeper snatches up. Once he verifies the coins are real his attitude improves quite a bit. He quickly fetches me the key for my room and tells me where it is.

While I am not tired I decide to head up to my room to rest since that is what a human would do. Once I am in the room I lay down and take a nap for a few hours until the sun goes down. Once it is nice and dark out I get up and take a look out the window, the fort isn't dark.

There are torches all over the place and the taverns are doing a brisk business. It would seem that the humans of the fort have no fear of the night and are out in force. This makes my plan of sneaking around to take a look at things very unlikely to succeed.

For now at least, things may quiet down later once the drinkers have had enough. It just means I need to sit here and twiddle my thumbs for a few hours before I prowl around. It is just a habit of humans that I didn't think to account for, so I take another nap.

When I wake up the second time, the night has gotten a lot quieter outside. After taking a look around to make sure no one is watching, I go out the window and up to the roof. The inside of the fort is nice and quiet now, only the soldiers on the walls are still moving.

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However, they are carrying torches so they won't have any night vision at all. Seeing that it is all clear I drop down from the inn's roof into an alley that runs alongside it. Using the alleys I move to the harbor and take a look at where the elves are being held.

They are locked in a pretty basic shed, the only thing keeping them in is a simple padlock. Of course, even if they got out they wouldn't get far, they are all chained up. They have shackles at their neck, wrists, and ankles, no way can they run away.

Luckily, from what I can see they are just normal restraints, no magic symbols and I can't sense any mana in them. That will make it much easier when it comes time to get them out of here. From the shack the nearest ship is only about a hundred feet away, which is fine for my plan.

Now I just need to get everything ready for the orc's next attack, which could be any time. So I move down to the end of the harbor and find a narrow stretch of rocks between the water and the fort wall. It is barely wide enough for a person to slip through, but the humans must be aware of it.

Even though it looks unguarded, I take my time and check it out thoroughly. It is a good thing I do, I find several magical traps set along the length of the path. A couple of them are simple alarm traps, the rest are explosive traps.

While it would be difficult for a human to cross it, for me I can simply jump over the entire thing. Once I am on the far side I am outside the fort, between the fort and the defensive wall. The soldiers on the wall are only paying attention to the north, looks like they have gotten complacent.

The orcs are straight forward, they only ever attack openly, so the humans aren't worried about sneak attacks. This means that the siege engines behind the wall are not being guarded. As I sneak away from the fort all I have to worry about is the soldier on top of the fort's walls.

Thanks to them all carrying torches I am not too worried about them being able to spot me. Since the soldiers on the defense wall aren't paying attention I make it to the siege weapons easily. The first one I reach is a ballista, but I have no idea how to sabotage it.

Sure, I can destroy it easy enough, but I want to make it so it fails when they try to use it. That way they don't know ahead of time that anything is wrong, otherwise they can fix it. The crank mechanism is probably the best thing to sabotage, but I am not sure how to.

Instead I decide to mess with the string, since the ballista isn't loaded right now. I figure if I cut halfway through it, it shouldn't be noticeable until they try to load it. Once that is done I search the area around the ballista, I find a box with extra strings in it.

Once I cut all the strings halfway through I carefully make my way over to the next engine. Which is a catapult, it seems the humans alternated the siege engines. A catapult is much simpler than a ballista, especially these that are just wooden arms that they bend with ropes.

All I need to do is weaken the base of the arm where most of the pressure is placed when it is loaded. That way everything will look fine right up until the humans try to load the catapult. To weaken the arm I simply drill a couple of small holes near the edges of the arm.

They are at the base of the arm and small enough that unless someone looks closely they will be missed. Of course, I am no engineer so I can't be sure if this will work, but it's the best I can come up with. It may not break the first time it is used, but it will sooner or later, so I head for the next engine.

*DING*

Congratulations! Skill Stealth has progressed to level 7!

Stealth

Level 7

DP Cost 15 Agi +7

You are very hard to locate when hidden.

'Oh, yeah! I forgot I had that skill!'

As I think about it I realize that it really has been a long time since I last tried to be sneaky. These days I tend to just walk out and cut down everything in my path. I could probably even do that to the humans, but doing it this way is also kind of fun.