Chp.22: Finding the prison
The next day, Haku as usual returned with his sisters in their rat avatars and began to search the area for the place where Rhaegal was being held. By now they had reduced the area where they had to search to less than a hundred square meters, so they should have finished in a few hours.
The rats they were using had been, of course, perfectly modified to make them suitable for probing underground. The dragons had replaced their hearing apparatus with that of a bat and had modified their throats to be able to emit high-frequency sounds. When they sounded the ground, they simply rested their heads on it, and then screamed with all their might; the sound traveled through the earth and then bounced off the rocks below. If there was a cavity, they could easily find it. They had already identified some of them, but from their conformation they did not appear to be unnatural. More than dug by someone, in fact they seemed to have formed by themselves due to erosion due to some underground source. Therefore, they had to keep looking.
As they searched, Haku kept thinking in his mind. He was thinking about what Maldor had told him, and indeed now that he was calmer he could see that it made sense. If Maldor had used an avatar, then she could have gone into human society, enjoyed the glory for a few months, and then faked her death and disappear. It wasn't difficult; in fact, it was extremely easy. The biggest risk lay in the fact that humans might realize that what Maldor was using was only an avatar, but at the moment it seemed that the circumstances were in favor of the dragons: the upgraded invisibility rune could solve the problem of the legendary levels, while to circumvent the risk represented by Black Vulture mask it would have been enough to insert a false functioning heart in the avatar, something that both Maldor and all her siblings had been doing for some time. Of course these were still mere speculations, and had yet to be tested, but Haku was confident that these safeguards would work. As a result, Maldor could have gone into human society safely and without anyone discovering the deception, and then simply destroyed his avatar in a ruse. Perhaps there would not even be need for Maldor to act herself, staging a fire or an explosion; knowing the newcomers and the conflicts they continually had between them, with luck another nation or an extremist group would send a hit man to deal with her, and she could use that excuse to disappear.
And then, in that way, Maldor would get the fame she deserved for her extraordinary discovery. Even if Haku didn't consider it so important, he was a little sorry that his sister's work wasn't known around: she had created something brilliant and deserved that everyone praised her for it. So even if he found the perfect substitute for her, he wouldn't use it: he refused to let anyone else take the credit for his sister's discovery. But if Maldor had been able to spend a few months in human society, with the support and finances of the king on top of that, her name would have been spread worldwide and recorded in history. Haku felt a twinge of pride as he thought this; knowing that his sister would be remembered for the ages made him extremely happy for her.
He decided that maybe, if he really didn't have any further options, he would give that idea a chance. After all Maldor agreed for it, indeed she had been the one to propose it. At least when he got back he would have to apologize to her: he had reacted too impulsively at the moment, without thinking too much about it, because the thought of endangering another sibling at that moment was driving him crazy. He suspected this was due to excessive stress and lack of sleep; probably his intellectual faculties were starting to suffer from fatigue. The brain, after all, was an organ that needed periodic rest, and while dragons could stay awake for days without suffering the effects of sleep deprivation, beyond a certain point they too began to be affected. If we add to this a great deal of concern and the fact that Haku was constantly using his brain to come up with plans after plans, it was obvious that sooner or later he would start to suffer very strong effects on his character and his perception of reality. Luckily he had listened to Maldor's advice earlier and had slept a little, but he still hadn't been able to stay asleep for more than an hour; even if his brain had taken a break, it still wasn't enough. But Haku knew he wouldn't be able to sleep anymore, not until they freed Rhaegal.
While Haku was thinking this, suddenly Corgorin called out to him: "There's something here!"
Instantly everyone ran to where she was pointing; they leaned on the ground and screamed, and then waited for the sound to rebound. When it came back and poked their ears again, they could confirm it: underneath them was a hollow, but not a square hollow like the ones they had found earlier, but a perfectly rectangular one that could only be man-made! "It has to be this one. Great job, sister" Haku exclaimed triumphantly, and Corgorin lifted his head slightly in vanity. "Let's try to follow him. We have to find the entrance!"
If anyone had passed by that day they would have seen something really strange: four mice moving almost together keeping their heads on the ground and almost dragging it, occasionally screaming downwards. Haku and his sisters followed the cavity, which from the shape seemed to be a corridor, and as they moved it rose higher and higher, until the dragons found themselves on top of a small hill, at the base of which the cavity seemed to break off. "The entrance must be here" Haku muttered.
"I can't see anything. It's probably hidden with magic" Sisna said. "If we hit this point with the Nullification rune, a trap door, passage or something similar should appear. Maldor told me that the Academy of Magic used a similar system to protect the laboratory from intruders"
Haku reflected. He wasn't sure it would be that easy: most likely they would immediately find several guards behind the door. But maybe that could be to their advantage. "If we deactivate the door with the nullification rune, the enemies will surely assault us en masse. But doing so will draw them all out at once, or at least most of them. The problem, however, would remain the noise..."
Haku didn't believe that the newcomers, or at least the humans of the Jurao Kingdom, knew any way to communicate from an underground cavern to a tower several hundred meters away in seconds; if they had, they would have used it to immediately alert the entire capital when the gladiatorial revolt had occurred and Haku had been freed. As a result, it was highly unlikely that people inside the underground facility could warn their companions who were stationed at the foot of the God of Knowledge's tower. But despite that, the noise remained something no one could ignore. When the fighting started, they would cause so much noise that the soldiers stationed at the foot of the tower would hear everything and fly there in amphitrites or wyverns. Which clearly wouldn't have helped.
Haku couldn't be hurt in his avatar, and the same was true for all his sisters, but to take Rhaegal away they clearly couldn't have transported him into an avatar, but would have to use his real body. Even assuming they could handle two legendary levels and dozens of level adamantium soldiers at the same time, getting Rhaegal away in such a context without him being hacked, crushed, mangled or dissected was practically impossible. The ideal scenario for that escape would have been rather not a fight, but an infiltration, where Haku and his sisters would have knocked out their opponents directly inside the underground structure, where the earth would have blocked the sound; but that was impossible since the destruction of the magic that guarded the entrance would surely draw the guards outside long before the dragons could get far enough inside for no sound to come out.
A memory popped into his mind. Tikka and Teramon had told Kotaru, who had then told him, that while they were still separated following the mess he had made they had used an earth rune to create shelter. That idea wasn't all bad; if he had replicated it there, Haku could have created an earth shield that would have prevented the propagation of sound. If he had acted at night, no one would have noticed anything. Then he could use the nullification rune and lure the guards out into the open. However, for this to work, no one had to break through the earthen wall, so the guards would not have to go out through the trapdoor, entrance, or anything that allowed access to the underground structure.
A plan began to take shape in his mind. His sisters were many; if all of them had used very powerful avatars, and they had quite a few at their disposal, they could have easily detained the guards at the entrance. He, meanwhile, could sneak in using a rat avatar and drag his dimensional bag along with him, and once he did that he would pull a new, stronger avatar out of it; at that point he would have first eliminated all the guards left behind, then he would have freed his brother, and finally he would have gone back to give support to the sisters by attacking their enemies from behind and killing them all. Their carnage complete, they would then silently blow an exit in the earthen wall and flee. Another advantage of that plan was that the earthen wall would trap the smell of the corpses, thus preventing anyone from noticing what had happened until the next morning when the soldiers stationed at the tower noticed the appearance of a strange mound. of land. But by then, the dragons would already be far away.
It was a clever plan and it could work, but for this to happen, Haku would have to know in advance the number of enemies they would have to deal with, their position and the actual shape of the underground structure. "Let's follow the path back and find out where this tunnel leads. Whenever you spot something alive, warn me" he told his sisters, who immediately nodded.
Locating something alive beneath the surface of the earth was a somewhat complicated undertaking: sure, the soft body of a human being reacted to sound differently than hard rock, but the deeper the tunnel went, the more difficult this difference was to feel. Maybe with the dragon hearing they would be able to do it, but with the rat hearing, even if improved, it wasn't so simple. Furthermore, in order to locate something underground it was necessary for that something to be struck by sound; but the sound couldn't, for obvious reasons, travel in wide directions, but descended vertically into the ground. Which meant that unless a guard was directly below them they wouldn't be able to notice. So if a soldier just paced back and forth, they would most likely miss him.
Even with these limitations, however, they managed to orient themselves quite well. They found that the tunnel continued downward continuously in the form of a spiral, until it reached a chamber. Unfortunately this structure was so deep that it was impossible for the dragons to determine if there were living beings beyond the middle of the tunnel and consequently also in the chamber, but it was quite obvious that it was there that Rhaegal was locked up. In the first half of the tunnel alone, however, they had spotted at least fifteen guards, demonstrating that the place was well defended.
"We can't find out more now. Let's go back" Haku said. "We have enough information. We will act tonight and free our brother, once and for all!"
His sisters nodded accomplices. All of them had realized how close they were now to saving Rhaegal. Very soon the family would be finally reunited and their brother would be free again.