Froggy and I walked along the poorly lit streets stopping from time to time when a group of Piligers were walking towards us.

But after an hour of walking as carefully as possible even when we were invisible, we arrived at the castle.

The building was huge and intimidating, with sharp towers popping out of unusual places making it much more intimidating in the light of the night.

"Why is it so scary, do they plan on making everyone here have nightmares?"

"I don't know, but if they wanted to make me tense, they did it."

As usual, the castle was separated from the other districts by a huge wall.

Not as tall as the one surrounding this whole place, but big enough to make it clear were not welcome.

Fortunately, the wall wasn't made with obsidian blocks like some places I've been to, which made me realize that I have to upgrade the wall at my base, even if it's a decoy.

So with my trusty pickaxe, I broke the wall making some noise, but we were gone by the time someone got there to check it out. We walked through the garden looking for an entrance, and as I expected we found a huge archway that led inside, with no door or guard.

Rich people tended to leave out security for comfort, and we were going to take advantage of that.

Unfortunately, that was the easier part of the mission, as when we got in, almost constantly some guards were patrolling the hallways.

I take back whatever I said about them choosing comfort over security. They took security very seriously around here, they took it so seriously, that It made me wonder what made them act in such a way, there has to be a reason for this otherwise a lot of resources were wasted here.

Because of the unexpected activity, we had to be much more careful on what we did, otherwise, they would see our particles if we moved around too much.

We planned to search for the basement as that's the place where usually the prisoners are being kept, and unfortunately, it wasn't that easy to do.

We walked mostly close to the walls of the hallway, sometimes seeing other rooms that didn't have a door, such as the kitchen or the main entrance with its big room and many others.

We passed by the staircase but it was only leading up so we didn't bother going there yet, but we did find something that could help us find the place were looking for.

On our time sneaking there there was a shift change, so we followed the ones that were leaving, which brought us to another dormitory at the back of the castle outside.

There, we saw some training dummies and other training equipment. But we didn't stay to admire that as we went inside the building before the doors were closed.

"Another job well done, how long do you think we would work like this?"

"I don't know, last time something happened it was double the guards, and it held on for a whole year."

"A whole year?! We barely passed a few weeks, I don't want to do this kind of boring job when the big invasion is coming, my skills will get rusty!"

"Don't worry, I don't think we would continue like this for much longer. From what I heard the reason we're even doing this is because the Mad Scientist doesn't trust our new ally, he expects a betrayal from him."

"You mean Brutus? I can guess why suspicion would be on him, especially when he betrayed his people twice."

"Yeah, the first time was the whole clan, and the second time was when he killed his allies to get this position. Only his right mam seems to survive his slaughter, and I don't know if that's a good position to be in. Who knows, maybe the Mad Scientist doesn't want him to kill the other prisoners as well."

"Oh yeah, the dungeon has never been more full than now, I don't envy their position as guards anymore. Have fun taking care of the prisoners while we get our former glory back losers!"

Then they both started to laugh while going to their rooms to get some rest.

"Did you hear all of that Trader?"

Froggy spoke in a hushed voice.

"Yeah, looks like the tensions are pretty high right now, but at least we know for sure that the others are alive."

I replied in a similar tone.

Unfortunately, while we heard some good news, we still didn't know where the entrance of the basement was, and from what I heard, it would be harder to get there than we expected.

We silently walked passed closed doors until we arrived at the end of the hallway which was a small room where a soldier stood at a wooden table drinking something from a potion bottle.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I knew it wasn't a potion, because no matter how much he drank from it, no particles appeared around him, and the liquid was a dark brown which I didn't recognize.

We decided to stay here since it looked like hang out room for soldiers. If we stayed enough here maybe we could find out who had a shift underground that we could follow.

An hour later new people came to the break room, making it more cramped than before.

"Hello Vine, drinking hot chocolate so early in the morning?"

"Hello to you as well Sunny, did you manage to sleep this time at least or are the nightmares still keeping you up?"

The man gave a deep and tired sigh which was enough of an answer.

"Can I have a sip of your drink?"

Vine gave the bottle without saying anything, but his expression showed concern for his friend.

"Pfff* It's so sweet, how much sugar did you put in?"

"Oh yeah, I forgot to warn you about that, not that much, just one pile."

"A whole pile?! I don't know how you can drink something like this."

They continued to argue while the others ignored them concentrating on waking themselves up.

Half an hour later the two friends stood up.

"We're going on our underground shift guys, good luck with yours!"

Some of them returned the greetings while others completely ignored them.

But when I heard him say that, I quickly tapped Froggy who was beside me to follow them. There was a high chance they were the ones to lead us where we wanted.

To my surprise we didn't walk for long, actually, we just passed the corner of the castle and saw something similar to a prison outdoor area, all with iron bars and recreational items.

They entered through the iron door with a press of a button, and we had to wait our turn to not attract unwanted attention with our noise.

"I can't believe we didn't see this before, this place is so obvious."

Froggy whispered with frustration.

"In our defense, we didn't know the entrance was outside."

I replied, also frustrated.

Froggy pressed the stone button and both of us went through the iron door, and now we were in the prison.

Or at least the outside part of it

We continued to walk toward the entrance that we saw the two guards walk through and stop once we reached the bottom of the staircase.

What we saw in front of us was a long and tight hallway with an iron door at the end.

But that wasn't the problem, what made things more complicated was the two guards that were stationed beside the iron door.

They were fully equipped with enchanted iron armor and were looking very serious. That wasn't the only problem, as the wall behind them was made with obsidian blocks, which made me believe that the prison was all made with the same block.

I didn't know the layout of the prison, so I couldn't just break a random block, not to mention the noise I'd be making could be heard from the other side.

Suddenly one of the guards looked intensely at our general area which made me quickly grab Froggy and climb the stairs.

"What happened, why did you suddenly grab me like that?"

"I think one of the guards saw us."

"Are you sure about that? We're still under the effects of the potion."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure about that, now how would we get inside the prison?"

"Can't you break the block?"

"It would make too much noise and I don't know where to start mining."

If I had a golden bell I could've used it to see every living being through the walls.

Unfortunately, I don't have one on me, and I don't think I'll find one here either, as it seems they prefer goat horns to get attention.

"Maybe we should wait until another group of guards would come, and we can sneak with them."

That could work, the door used a lever instead of the button, so we had more time to sneak in.

So we waited around for someone to get out or come in, and to our luck, ten minutes later a group of three came towards the prison.

They were still tired from their expressions, so we didn't have to worry about them finding us since they could bearly find their way to work.

But we had a little problem when we got back down.

"Stop right there! Have any of you drank something recently?"

"Wha-No why would you say that?"

"I can s,ee particles floating around your group."

"OK... we may had a drink here and there, but we're fully capable of doing our jobs."

The guard in iron armor narrowed his eyes which intimated the poor Piligers.

"I'll ignore the attempts of you t rying to come to work under the influence, because of your good work streak, now all of you go drink some milk otherwise I'll report you."

This seems to be enough for all of them to 'sober' up and leave without complaining.

But that also meant we had to leave together with them, bringing us back at the start.

"I don't think we can sneak in there while being invisible, we almost got caught."

"That's true, the only way I can see us making some progress Is through gathering more information, we know too little about this place to know how or when to act."

"But I don'do t think our potions would last that long."

"Guess we're going in as disguised then. Try not to talk too often, the more our presence is known, the higher the chances of us getting found out."

Especially our eyes, they weren't green like everyone here so we also needed to find a hat.

"Let's go then and gather as much information as possible while we still have the invisible effects."

With that we started to do a full tour around the castle, looking at all the buildings outside, and even climbing on top of the walls together with the guards.

To my frustration, no one seems to notice our particles, but the two guards underground seems to be different since they immediately saw us.

We're they better trained them others, or we're they special like the girl from the obsidian factory?

The sun was starting to illuminate the sky and our invisibility was running out, but we didn't regret what we did since we learned a lot throughout the night.

Unfortunately the place was too big and had too many guards, resulting with us only seeing the garden and the bottom floor of the castle.

"Trader, I'm to tired to continue this, and our invisibility is running out. I think we should stop here for today."

"True,I'm also getting tired already, let's get out of here and build a place underground to get some rest, preferably closer to the outerwall since there's not a lot of people there."

With our job done we left in a hurry right as the effects wore off, making us visible once again, luckily it was still early in the morning so not a lot of people were awake.

Because of that we manged to get pretty far and I quickly made an underground base where we put our beds down and went to sleep.

Today we didn't finish the mission, and it was probably foolish for us to believe that we could it so quickly, but we are still making a lot of progress and we still have two month before the war would start.

With all that in mind, I let myself go to sleep, ready for the next day.