After clearing all the obstacles, I lead the way down beneath the arena. This is where the elven slaves are being kept, along with other slaves. Aside from the elves, there are humans, beastmen, and beasts being kept for the arena.
As I am still in my normal form, practically everyone is staring at me with looks of fear. Even the beasts in their cages are cowering as far away from me as they can. The elves at first are also looking scared, until they notice the elven warriors behind me.
After they notice the warriors, the elven slaves put aside their fear and become excited. From the looks of the slaves, they are elven warriors as well and a few recognize the ones with me. We quickly release them from their cages and I have the four elves with me lead them out.
Once all the elves are safely away I turn and start ripping the other cages open. Once I have broken open all the cages I notice that not a single slave has moved. They are all still cowering in their cages, even the beasts haven't moved.
So, I turn and head upstairs and only then do I start hearing sounds of movement. However, if they choose to accept freedom or not really doesn't matter to me. I leave the warehouse and head for the library, on the way I contact Silverstream.
"Mission complete on my side. How are you doing?"
Silverstream says "We ran into some problems, but are now escorting the girls out of the city."
"Alright. It is your call if you want to do some looting or cause some chaos once they are safe."
Silverstream says "Of course we are going to! If we didn't, then Brightfire would certainly do so!"
"Yeah, you are probably right. I am going to do a little looting, then I will meet up with you."
Silverstream says "Okay!"
Breaking into the library is extremely simple, it doesn't even have magical locks. Probably over half the books inside will be useless to me, but I can't take the time to sort them here. So instead I take two backpacks of holding out of my pouch and just shove the books in.
Of course, grabbing this many books by hand would take forever, so I use mana. Two streams of books are flowing through the air and then into the backpacks. Watching this, I have the sudden urge to play music and make the books dance around.
However, I resist the urge and continue sending all of the books into the backpacks. Once I have emptied all the books out of the library I turn to leave, but then I pause. Just out of paranoia I use my mana to scan the library and it turns out to be a good thing.
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There is a small room that I completely missed, so I head over to look for the door. It is tucked behind a bookcase in the back corner and is very hard to spot. The door is a small wooden door and it looks like it hasn't been opened in a long time.
Surprisingly, the door actually has a high grade magical lock on it, the first I have seen. The locks on the rest of the doors in the library have all been simple mechanical locks. So, of course, my curiosity is instantly triggered and I start trying to open the lock.
In the end, I am unable to pick the lock and end up just destroying it instead. When I destroy the lock the entire door crumbles into dust, it must have been really old. The door was small, even an average sized human would have to duck to get through it.
For me to get through it I end up shapeshifting into an elf so that I am small enough. Inside the room there is only one bookcase with twenty or so books on it. I randomly grab one and flip it open to see why these books were so well protected.
It turns out that all of these books record the true history of the kingdom. Normal history books don't always tell the truth, rulers tend to want certain things to be forgotten. Well, that at least explains why these books were hidden away behind such a strong lock.
All these books go straight into my pouch and are put at the top of my reading list. I would much rather read the hidden history than what is commonly available. Now that I have them I turn, leave the cramped room, drop shapeshift, and then leave the library.
To prevent anyone from knowing I got my hands on the hidden histories I set the library on fire as I leave. By now the slaves should be safely out of the city, so causing a little commotion shouldn't matter. It turns out someone else must have had the same idea, I can see part of the city burning.
From the map in my head I can tell that it is the area of the mansions that Silverstream raided. She did say she ran into some issues, I will have to ask her about it later. For now, I take off and fly towards the gate that Brightfire was supposed to attack.
Before I even get close to the gate I start seeing the corpses of human guardsmen. It looks like Brightfire has been having fun, she probably got bored of waiting. As long as she kept the gate secure I don't really care what she did while waiting.
When I reach the gate, I once again find only Brightfire is still there waiting for me. The rest of the elves have already retreated to the ship with the freed slaves. All around the gate tower is a field of corpses, and Brightfire is covered in blood.
"Is any of that blood yours?"
Brightfire says "Nope! I didn't get injured!"
"That's good, but you are not riding my like that!"
Brightfire says "What am I supposed to do then?"
With a sigh I use mana to clean the blood off of her and then I let her climb onto my back. On the flight back to the ship she gives me a full report of everything that happened. The last thing she tells me is why the mansion area was on fire, Silverstream snapped.
"What caused her to snap?"
Brightfire says "The slaves in the mansion were all female, so you can imagine how they were treated."
"Yeah, I've seen it before."
Brightfire says "So has Silverstream, she even lived through it. The problem is that one of the elves she found there was her little sister! If she didn't have a mission to complete she would have burned the entire city down!"
"That's completely understandable! I never even knew she had a sister!"
Brightfire says "For a lot of people it is easier if they don't talk about who they have lost."
"I guess that makes sense. I wonder how Silverstream is going to act now."