Godfather's System 226

Once the door started to crack open, some light finally entered the tunnel, allowing me to get a better view of the area. The first thing I noticed was a painting, drawn in the likeness of a snarling wolf surrounded by flames.

The sigil of General Amilin. Not his ancestral one, but the new one he had created for himself during the rebellion according to the interrogation. One of the many nuggets I had managed to extract. Seeing that sigil in place gave more validity to the information I got through the interrogation, but it was still nowhere near conclusive.

So, rather than drawing wild conjectures, I examined the drawing itself even as the door opened slowly.

It was an interesting choice. Not exactly a careless move like one might think, as anyone who managed to discover the tunnel, bypassing the security and patrols in the process would have a rough idea about what they might find inside.

I found it interesting, because it felt like an aggressive declaration. Not exactly the move of a man who treated it as just a temporary base. In a way, it was a declaration of intent to his followers, one that told them he had no intention of hiding forever.

But, as the door continued to open, creating a cloud of dust, I started paying attention to the interior. The tunnel continued, showing me the silhouettes of twelve people, four guards standing at both sides of the door, operating the defenses, and eight soldiers ready to join the patrol.

However, as the door opened, I heard the distant rumblings of people, the kind of indistinct mumble that could only be generated by thousands of people idling around.

I frowned. The hidden base was more crowded than I had anticipated. Even with the competency my accidental recruit had displayed, it was difficult to believe he had managed to gather such a large force while he was on the run alone.

I had done so back when I first escaped, but only because the people had been searching for me in the wrong direction. That, and the fact that none of my recruits had any kind of rare class or ability, nor did they have levels to make them a threat; other than my lucky find, Zolast.

The guards here alone were much stronger than I expected. More importantly, the way they moved comfortably suggested that they hadn’t leveled up recently. An interesting detail. If I hadn’t met with Marquis Somaton, I might have believed that the search teams would be incompetent enough to miss that.

However, that, combined with the nobles coming to join the general, suggested that Somaton wasn’t too different from Ralum when it came to internal conflict.

The guards were good, just not good enough to catch me as the dust and relative darkness blocked their sight while I stayed out of their field of vision, and their attention was inevitably on the patrol squad that was leaving. Once again, Speed and Concealment proved devastating, and I entered without raising any kind of an alarm.

The rest of the tunnel didn’t have any magic security measures, only occasional patrols, and checkpoints that I bypassed. However, the number of capable soldiers that my accidental recruit had long past the point of impressive, bypassed suspicious, and reached the point of condemnation.

I still wasn’t ready to make any judgment calls about him, but nothing I saw about him filled me with confidence.

Soon, I reached the main living area. An underground cave, far bigger than what I had expected, and it was filled with activity. The first thing I paid attention to was the size. Almost two miles at its widest point, and roughly circular. Its height was even grander, almost three hundred feet. Its walls were filled with mana lamps, filling the cave with a soft glow that allowed people to work and train.

It was filled mostly with tents, interrupted by occasional wooden buildings, either used as a warehouse or a residence of a noble.

Altogether, it reminded me less of a refugee camp or a temporary shelter, and more of a military camp. Most of the cave was filled with tents and training grounds as many recruits sparred and trained to get used to their skills. Almost a thousand people were using the training fields, while doubling their numbers were walking around, busy with various tasks.

Add in the people resting, patrolling, or busy with other tasks, it showed almost four thousand people. A shocking number for a satellite base. I watched them for a while, confirming that none of them were lower than level sixty. Suspicious, but not as suspicious as another fact.

Every single one of them was using master skills.

It wasn’t the rarity of the master skills that surprised me. Our recent experience showed that master skills were one of the things that had been restricted artificially by the royal families to maintain their monopoly of power as much as possible.

What surprised me was how the general had managed to get his hands on them.

The many high-level soldiers, even thousands of them, could be explained easily. Even a weak barony like House Maell was able to recruit and raise a hundred such individuals. Just one or two discontent ducal houses, or half a dozen earls, could secretly raise and transfer such numbers.

However, master skills were different.

I watched them train from a distance, doing my best to filter out the smell, which was easily the worst part of the cave. Thousands of people in an enclosed space, trying to keep their magic usage to a minimum and forgoing some wards that would have dealt with the smell, was not a good combination. The awful stench was strong enough to tempt me to abandon my infiltration attempt.

In a way, it was their strongest defense.

I shook my head, abandoning those sarcastic thoughts. They weren’t as fun without someone else with me to annoy. Instead, I stayed in my place under the flickering mana lights as I observed them from a distance. This time, I didn’t care about their levels or skills, instead focusing on the way they interacted with each other, trying to get a better understanding of the kinds of people there.

People underestimated just how much information they conveyed even when they weren’t acting or saying anything. Just the way people reacted to someone else’s presence when they had stepped into their presence told a story to a careful observer.

They might lean forward for a close friend or a family member, ready to share a quick laugh or a touch. They might even start subconsciously mirroring their actions based on how much they liked or respected their visitor.

Meanwhile, someone they knew but didn’t like would trigger a more hostile, defensive reaction. Tense expressions, crossed arms, and sharp reactions were common. Or, it might be something they weren’t very familiar with, and, in that case, the social class and convention would take priority, along with a lifetime of learned habits.

Naturally, it wasn’t exactly that easy, or everyone could do it. The biggest challenge was that everyone had their personal habits and quirks. Some people were more comfortable with touch, easily hugging strangers, while other people would be tense even in the presence of those they knew. They might hold certain prejudices that would make reading them more difficult.

Or, simply, they might be having a bad day…

As a consequence, reading the body language of the people from a distance could hardly be considered some kind of miracle spying technique.

Then, the System made it even more complicated. Some people had Perception, making their personal space larger, while some had Agility, making them more relaxed about the presence of others in their reach. Stats, skills, and even their preferred weapons affected the range of their comfort.

However, I still decided to use it.

First, while the technique wasn’t accurate, it was particularly useful for trying to get the general attitude of the larger group rather than the details of a smaller group. The more interaction people had with each other, the easier it was to make deductions, especially the sweeping kind I was trying to make, like where they had come from, who they reported to, whether they knew each other or they were forced together under their current circumstances…

Then, there were my Stats. The benefits of Perception for the current task didn’t even need to be mentioned. It allowed me to catch the smallest details from a great distance. Meanwhile, Intelligence helped me to multitask, splitting my attention between different groups, so I could analyze multiple groups at the same time.

Yet, the biggest benefit came from Memory, which I had received instead of Wisdom. Memory was more specialized than Wisdom, and didn’t bring any convenient benefits such as manipulation of mana toward healing spells and general comprehension.

However, when it came to increasing my ability to catch and recall information, it was far better. That way, what was supposed to be a long, fruitless observation job that would have required weeks to bear any useful fruits, I could get some very useful information in just hours.

So, I settled down, and watched.