The Martial Unity

The burying part was easy. What he needed to be more careful of was the envelope that he would send to Guildmaster Bradt that would inform him of the location of the esoteric resource supplies that he had just buried on the other side of the nation.

This was a bit more dangerous since Rui needed to make sure that he didn’t by mistake clue Guildmaster Bradt in on his location or identity.

He used the most generic and commonly available and supplied kinds of paper and envelopes with the most common kind of cheap pen. This way, there ought to be no real way Guildmaster Bradt could possibly track him based on the kind of paper, pen, or envelope used. Some might say Rui was being paranoid, but Rui knew better than to assume that Guildmaster wouldn’t at least thoroughly look into this avenue once.

He didn’t know the extent of the forensic investigative capabilities of this world, even if he knew it most likely was not on par with cutting-edge forensic investigation and analysis in the twenty-first century of Earth. In which case he had to be extremely careful not to leave even a speck of his DNA on the paper. He wore a head cap, a face mask, and gloves that went all the way up to his elbows among other things.

He also used his left hand to write instead of his write one in case Guildmaster Bradt put his letters through a thorough graphological analysis, even using handwriting very different from what he normally used. In his paranoia, he artificially boosted the humidity and moisture in his room by vaporizing a lot of water with his hot air windpipe. This way if Guildmaster Bradt had some means to gauge the location the letter was based on moisture absorbed, he would be sorely thrown off.

With all of these measures, born out of paranoia, in place, even he finally felt confident to begin writing down his letter.

It was a standard coded encryption cipher that the two of them had agreed upon in their meeting when they signed the contract, to convey the exact and hyper-precise coordinates of the buried supplies.

That was the easy part. The hard part was deciding whether he should try and scam Guildmaster Bradt by telling him about the location of the fourteenth floor in the new pierce of the Shionel Dungeon map that he would also be sending to the man as per their agreement.

He had already decided that he was not going to waste time trying to destroy the branches of the tree himself. Instead, he would rather get others to do the dirty work for himself.

(‘That’s not very nice of me,’) Rui mused.

He was aware of that. Still, he surprisingly didn’t even feel any compunctions about using others to get to his goal. This surprised even himself.

(‘I suppose it comes down to whether or not I deceived them directly,’) he considered.

He did not intend to lie to anybody, or even misconstrue the facts. Hell, he didn’t necessarily have intentions of even communicating any information. He could just guide them to the fourteenth floor and let them make their conclusions and decisions, that too would work out in his favor. At the end of it, when they successfully spend all the necessary time clearing the tree’s branches, he would then swoop in, store the thing in his dimensional ring, and then leave peacefully. That, he had no problem doing.

There were no rules in the Shionel Dungeon, and there was a titanic amount of competition. Such a thing was completely normal, expected, and implicitly consented to.

Any Martial Squire who entered the dungeon did so aware of the difficulty, risks, and dangers, there was an awareness that such a thing could happen and was allowed to happen, and was expected to at least be attempted to make happen. That, to Rui, was consent to being subjected to such a thing. Of course, he expected resistance, but he knew he could overcome it.

Although Kane’s Void Step did not work on the tree, it worked perfectly well on Martial Squires, and even more so in the Shionel Dungeon. Thus, there was nothing that they could do to stop them.

The only issue he had at the moment was choosing how to get a large group of Martial Squires to work hard on tearing down the branches of the tree in the middle of the fourteenth floor. The manner in which occurred needed to be organic and natural. He couldn’t slip a letter detailing the location of the floor and put it under the front door of his target’s house.

He could go about it by directly individually informing a large number of Martial Squires about the location indirectly, and have them raid the floor, but the issue was that it was too impractical to do this one by one. Furthermore, one of them was liable to blab and inform the Shionel Adventurer Guild about the location of the fourteenth floor in order to earn the huge bonus that came from doing so. Once that happened, the countless bounty hunters that were hunting for Rui and Kane would also flood the fourteenth floor, partaking in the raid but also keeping a close eye on anyone that could be the Voider.

This was an undesirable sequence of outcomes for Rui.

Why had he made the decision to seek out new floors and clear and plunder them before any other adventurer found them? It was precisely to avoid the hoards of bounty hunters that were greedily eying the extravagant hundred million Shionel Gold bounty that Chairman Deacon had placed on his head.

He did not want to invite all of them there.

But how on Earth could he get a large group of Martial Squires that weren’t part of the public that was infested with Voider bounty hunters?

(‘There are really only two forces that possess groups of private Martial Squires large enough for what I need,’) Rui’s eyes narrowed. (Guildmaster Bradt, and Chairman Deacon.’)