85

The slaves afforded to me were all low-profile killers and recycles bandits but I was only given forty of them despite the Guild doing the honors of outfitting them. These forty men were armed with simple spears and wooden bucklers as well as basic iron swords and wore single layer padded leather armor not unlike my own.

Grouped up together with shaved heads and collars plainly exposed, they honestly looked a little decent.

Behind this meat wall of slaves would fight around thirty subhumans, twelve enormous wolves, and two wisps bringing our numbers close to a hundred. After feeding all of them but the wisps both brands of horrible candies I had yet to invest time into making palatable, we were all more or less ready to go. I spent a few minutes eating and asking the guildmaster about the Robirstin name. He did not know of any connections between them and the princes.

When he said this, I told him about the leader of a large merchant family-group on his way here with an heir and paid four gold to hire two escorts to go out and meet them. While the two of them were merely coming here to oversee the transferring of ownership and shares in person, they were in for a big surprise. Let their haters here about this!

I left after that and led my team passed a network of guards who were watching the surrounding streets and alleyways. Whenever one of them would catch me looking at them, they would check out my group and simply nod as we passed. They must have been the guards working with the Guild.

Inside this network of watchmen were the closest entrances to the aqueducts but we never received and resistance or even a spare glance passed the single nod from every guard we came across. Once inside the sewers, though, I sent the wisps out in opposite directions and wasted a risky thirty minutes having them scout and report for any activity within a mile of the guild,

There were only a few small groups risking their necks by doing their usual jobs waiting and hiding in random spots.

I decided they were safe to ignore and simply sent a grass golem message back up to the Guild giving their general numbers and locations before heading out across the city back to that middle class industrial. I purposefully ran into a few groups of enforcers to increase my numbers a little with a proper meat wall of twenty random thugs with whatever they had on them.

The spears of the slaves afforded me would be able to pass between or even through their bodies should they become too heavily injured. While I had the mana to heal most injuries through regeneration I did not care to. I had too much money to organize as it was.

After developing a rearguard to replace the vanguard at any given time I made great process simply sweeping through grounds and letting the wisps handle looting. Thanks to darkness element being the source of most void magic, my wisps were capable of distorting the space within their bodies and had developed this into quite a skill. For now, they could hold all of their gold and jewelry loot.

When we finally got back to the smelting factories of the industrial district and its familiar noises of randomly rushing water I gathered up all of the new recruits and a fresh map to make them tell me all they knew. Most of them only knew of one or two current hides in the slum sewers but a couple of them knew of several areas near this district that were frequently manned. Something to do with a supply train for the slums during quiet raids by mine lord troops.

What made these supply caches points of interest was the fact that they usually had oddly high numbers of people for deployment, averaging at thirty per cache. These numbers were too high for me to risk dividing my current troops with their limited magic abilities, so we could only quickly and quietly attack to first in a short chain of locations.

These attacks usually involved encircling the area with wolves before using the vanguard and rearguard to pincer the first cache location.

While the pincer was taking place, I had the divided spear slaves support the pincer from its flanks while subhumans focused on capturing young targets. Four of my meat shields were ruined, but after only three minutes the battle was concluded with more captures than I intended. Its not because the subhumans intended to leave people alive, but they were used to it so their dismissive slaps that were capable of killing usually rendered the rag doll unconscious.

Once the lost numbers were replaced I had the 'young' captives roughly twenty-five and under set aside with the wolves. Because they were young they probably came from the city and that was why the guildmaster wanted me to spare them. Realization was a bitch, but it did not change much.

Loot from the first cache was mainly basic weapons and armor, but the armor actually turned out to be shirts of expensive steel chainmail. I happily stored away all of this disposable equipment after outfitting what subhumans the long chainmail shirts would fit. Whenever we were done with the second supply cache I could probably afford to transmute suits together for the other subhumans.

That second cache took twenty minutes to reach and encircle before enacting the same routine of two sets of pincers. With the second time came a little more efficiency from the meat shields so that I only ended up with a large number of injured bodies. Most of these enemies were all older and ruthless, which is what injured my meat shields, so few of them were spared even by accident.

Unlike the last cache this one was stocked with medical supplies like basic Guild med-kit, a large number of tools, and even pieces of walls and bridges and obstacles. Everything went into the void but let my company rest for as long as it took to heal the injured. This mostly meant giving out cheap potions that were just high enough in quality to compound with the candies and flashes of healing light.

Fifteen minutes later I was drinking a mana potion while leading the company onward just a block or two outside of the industrially sluiced sewers. Some of the subhumans were starting to show signs of tiring after despite their stats, meaning they had lived for long periods of time only doing minimal efforts.

They could have been slaves for as long as a few years in some cases and those conditions were being reflected.

Knowing it would be best to feed them again soon after so much effort the past two days, I could only hope that the next cache contained equipment to justify an extended rest period. The other caches may contain useful goods but I mostly wanted to increase the efficiency of my heavy hitters and high speed units. Armor for the subs was the easiest way to go.

I could have sent my wisps ahead to scout and pick a cache but we had to hit every cache eventually anyway. If I was lucky, there might just be something else of use. Even though I doubted it.

The path to the next cache was clear and the couple dozen people there were unaware of our presence because of how thoroughly I masked our presence and severed the flow of information. Once again, two groups of twenty assailed the opened intersection area from opposing tunnels and got everybody's attention on them. At first, the people here retaliated with light magical attacks whose sounds were hard to suppress,

Fire rushed around the wet tunnel and ice shattered on hard surfaces when it missed targets warded by magic. A few moments later, when the defenders had organized themselves together in the middle of the intersection, the second pincer closed in on their remaining sides. Two groups of twenty lightly armed and armored slaves rushed forth into the intersection.

Even with anti-magical warding we still managed to lose a few of the fodder in the initial confrontations. The people here were actually good at their jobs and managed to bring down eight and incapacitate five more of the initial pincer. However, their numbers were replaced with captures performed by my wisps.

They would literally reach up as giant PAC-Man mouths full of needles and drag people into their voids and underground whenever one of my units died.

Some of the subhumans managed to find roles around the corners to supplement weakened front liners but most of them just lobbed loose weapons freely at the turtle-like cluster of enemy bodies. They were actually pretty effective, at least knocking grown men into their companions so that several fell at a time. This fight, too, only lasted a few minutes.

Healing and cleaning only took a few minutes of me draining cores and the wisps breaking down matter, The loot here was a variety of things ranging from spare weapons and armor to food and cots and more med kits. This was more of a station for treating wounded than a supply cache.

Luckily, though, I still managed to find all of the chainmail and appropriate metal to make short dresses for all of the larger subhumans with transmutation. With their bodies made of of naturally dense magical tissues, they were already on the tank side and now were more resistant to piercing and cutting attacks with imbued armor.

The entire process of feeding, resting, and better arming my company took over half of an hour but the subhumans at least needed the break. The humans remained hyped on alchemy and mana at all times, anyway, but those same bodies also made use of the rest. I myself needed a break once all of these cache areas were cleared.

At the next cache area not only did we find another supply stations of weapons and medicine but also a small stockpile of ores and metals probably stolen from the refineries. I gladly deposited all of this windfall into a voided bag that was then stored in a smaller voided bag that finally fit back inside my voided purse. If I needed to, I could just withdraw the ore bag from the purse.

Many of the people from this area were captured to increase my numbers after coming to this area. There were originally over forty thugs here loosely organizing the place until they were closed in a pincer if the numbers at this place were higher then the next caches were also likely to have greater amounts of guards.

Just three hours passed while my company and I raided all of the thugs' slum supplies and tore through close to two hundred people. I lost over thirty people in the process but non of them were important subhumans and thus were relatively easy to replace. I was honestly just glad that I could give everyone another rest and some food in a medical cache full crates and cots of medicines and herbs.

Even though I had avoided taking part in combat for the most part I had continuously drained all of my mana to the point where my body temperature was rising a bit. I did not even experience this kind of exhaustion in the cave systems. However, my growth in the past few days along was over five percent of my maximum mana capacity. Fighting humans and sentient species was much more taxing than insects or other beasts.

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