Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)
Chapter 174: Underground Facility

I looked at the underground lab and fell into thought. The guards pretending to be alchemists were more numerous than I had been expecting. There were almost two dozen people at the entrance.

I grimaced. If there were this many people just outside of the entrance, how many more people were going to be inside of the lab? Direct confrontation was probably only a last resort, if this was the kind of numbers we would be facing. I was confident in our abilities, but charging an unknown but massive number of gun-wielding soldiers was just suicidal. There was a limit to how much essence we had, after all.

<I can probably disguise our presence using illusions,> I said. <I think we should just sneak past them. While we might win a direct confrontation, it’s probably best to avoid it unless we know for sure how many reinforcements they have.>

<I agree,> said Sallia. <A head on confrontation is a bad idea right now. If we just walk past them while using illusions, the ‘disappearance’ of Felix should also seem more mysterious, which will reduce the number of future problems we’ll encounter. Even if you disguise Felix after we break him out, we still want to make it as hard as possible to track him down afterwards. If they can’t even figure out how Felix escaped, it’ll be harder for them to figure out where he might have gone.> Sallia shrugged. <Though thinking we’ll make Felix vanish without a trace is a bit optimistic. We should still be ready for a fight. But the longer we go without raising the alarm, the better.>

I nodded, and focused on one of the alchemists who seemed to be on break and was looking directly at the door. She had a somewhat dreamy expression on her face, and I suspected that she was daydreaming.

In any case, she seemed distracted. Distracted meant that she would be more vulnerable to mental intrusion. I reached out with my third rune ability, and a moment later, I felt my mind connect with hers.

I took control of her vision, and began carefully locking down certain visual elements of the room. I wanted her to completely fail to notice us as we walked into the underground alchemy lab. Then, I activated the other component of my rune ability, and light near the door began to distort and change. In moments, the part of the room that the alchemist was looking at seemed to freeze in time. In particular, the door was now completely locked into place.

<Illusion is up. Remember, they can still hear, smell, and touch you - they just can’t see you. Be careful,> I said.

<Should we rinse off quickly? The smell of the sewers might give us away if they can still smell us.> said Anise.

I paused, and then nodded. <Good point.> I grabbed a bucket of water from my dress, before rinsing the three of us off by constantly altering the shape of the water. A few seconds later, we were a bit cleaner and smelled less like the sewers.

After that, we were ready.

Sallia silently reached out with her rune ability, and detached the metal hinges from the door.

We had no idea whether the door itself might have some sort of trap laid on its handle, so we had opted to open the door a different way. Rather than touch the handle of the door, we would simply remove the door from its hinges using Sallia’s magic, and then jam it back into place afterwards.

I grinned as the door’s metal hinges were disconnected from the wall, and then the door floated away under Sallia’s control. Meanwhile, none of the alchemists and guards noticed a thing.

The three of us slipped into the room, before Sallia placed the door back into its original position and welded the hinges together using her metal control. The door probably wouldn’t open after this, but that didn’t matter much. 

Hopefully.

With any luck, the people who next tried to open it would think that the hinges had broken from neglect or something. If we were in another world, people would probably immediately realize that someone was using magic to mess with them.

But more combat-oriented magic was very rare in this world. The lack of magic use outside of alchemy meant that most people wouldn’t think of magic when encountering odd things. I was hoping this would keep us under the radar until we completed our mission.

The three of us walked slowly and carefully towards the spot Anise had claimed was another hidden entrance. We had to move carefully, because a wrong step could still alert the people in the room that something was wrong.

Luckily, the noise of industrial mixers grinding potion ingredients together disguised any sounds we made. As we walked, I started to wonder if we were being too cautious in how slowly and carefully we were moving. The potion mixers were much louder than I had expected.

As we moved out of the line of sight for the first woman, I sent everyone a message to tell them to wait a moment, and then swapped targets. I found another man who was looking in our general direction from across the room. In moments, I used my rune ability to link up to his vision, and then copied the trick I had used on the first woman to keep us invisible.

We continued creeping forward, until we finally reached the hidden entrance. It took three different vision-hacks and careful walking, but nobody seemed to notice us.

<What’s the door made of?> I asked Sallia.

<Not much metal,> she said, with a grimace. <Looks like stone? I think it must be part of the older sewer system, before the industrial revolution. I can’t just warp it out of the way.>

I frowned, and started concentrating on the spot where the door was supposed to be.

In my eyes, it just looked like an ordinary patch of stone. I flicked through my items, trying to figure out if anything would help us move a giant stone door quietly.

{Cursed Tarot deck} wasn’t useful here - there was nothing to curse. {Lake Gazer’s Dress} wasn’t useful either. {Breath of the Storm}… might help blow smaller stones away without making a sound? Its use seemed dubious to me, though. My {Storage Pack} was filled with potions and not much else. The friendship bracelet had nothing to do with moving rocks quietly.

Sallia also grimaced. <Nothing much I can do. Are we abandoning stealth?>

<Uhh…> I looked at Anise. <Any ideas?>

<Hmm…>

Anise frowned. <You know, I might have found the mechanism to open the door. There’s a hollow space right behind that rock over there, and I think I can see a little lever inside of it. But I could also be completely wrong. Maybe that’s the ‘dump poison darts on intruders’ lever. Do you want to risk it, or should we just rip away the door and drop stealth completely?>

<Try flipping the lever,> I said, after a moment of thought. <If it dumps lava on us or something, I can probably teleport it away before it kills us. If it sounds an alarm… then I guess it sounds an alarm. We’ll deal with it if it happens.>

<Sounds good. Lift me up, then. The lever is too high, and it’s hard to reach,> said Anise. <The jerks who designed this base didn’t think of how short four year olds are at all!>

I tried not to laugh at Anise’s remark. Meanwhile, Sallia bent down, grabbed Anise, and lifted her up, giving Anise just enough height to reach the rock with a hollow space behind it.

It took almost a minute of fumbling around with the rock before Anise figured out how to remove it. Luckily, after forming three runes, Sallia’s body was incredibly strong, and she was able to easily hold Anise steady while Anise tried to move the rock around. After removing the rock, Anise fumbled with the lever for a few minutes, before figuring out the trick to flip it and open the door.

CREEEEEAAAAAK. With the loudest mixture of creaking and groaning sounds I had ever heard in my four lifetimes, the secret passage opened.

Any attempts at stealth the three of us had been maintaining was suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

The three of us froze and looked at the other people in the room, all of whom were now looking directly at the door.

<Are you KIDDING ME?> I yelled into the friendship bracelet, but I kept maintaining the illusion. Right now, they still shouldn’t see anything, and I didn’t see anyone raising their guns at us, either.

<Maybe they don’t see us?> said Anise, sounding hopeful.

Since my illusion was still being maintained, despite the absurdly loud creaking sound… the people in this room should just be seeing a completely ordinary stone wall. They probably knew about the secret passage, since the people here were likely guards for the hidden facility. But they wouldn’t see us or the open door at all.

I started preparing to hammer people with extinguish, just in case. I had three rune abilities and an advanced grade attunement again. I could probably extinguish twenty or so ordinary people comfortably. Maybe a bit less if they frequently trained and had a stronger life force. With the help of my teleportation abilities, I should be able to wipe out this room of people by myself if things went perfectly for me.

However, would we still have the strength to fight the people in the tunnels below this? If I spent all of my essence fighting the people in this room, I would definitely be low on essence afterwards. I had no idea how many people were still between us and Felix.

A few of the guards with hidden rifles pulled them out of their clothes, and then started slowly pointing their guns in our general direction.

“There might be tunnelers nearby,” said one of the guards. “Get someone to check the structural integrity of the nearby sewers. I’m bringing Jodie and Marvin to let someone in the hidden base know that we heard a weird noise. Could be nothing, but better safe than sorry.”

I resisted the urge to curse.

The guards didn’t see the three of us, and didn’t know that we had already opened the secret passage. But they were opting to play it safe anyway. Since they had heard such a loud sound, they still believed something was wrong.

That was bad news for us. The more cautious and competent the guards were, the harder it was going to be to rescue Felix.

The three of us quickly hurried into the tunnel that had opened up in front of us, and Anise quickly fumbled with the side of the wall for another few moments, before, with another ear-piercingly loud screech, the doors snapped shut again. I resisted the urge to curse whoever had made the door. Did they intentionally never oil the hinges to make sneaking in impossible? Or was it just laziness? I had no idea, but I felt very frustrated with the creaky hidden door.

Then, I started concentrating on one of the three guards who were walking up to the door we had just closed again, and started warping their vision.

The moment they opened the secret door, I was going to make us invisible again.

<Get ready,> I sent. Since the people in the room couldn’t see us, there was still a chance to salvage our very stealthy operation. 

I was hoping we could just let the guards run past us, and then follow them. Not only would that ensure that we avoided accidentally tripping any other traps, but it would also help us get at least some sense of direction in this place. We had no idea what the facility we were in looked like, after all. Felix had never been allowed out of his room, so he couldn’t give us any information about his place of captivity.

But even though I hoped we could use the guards as trapfinders, if one of them bumped into us, the guards would definitely realize something was wrong. And there were plenty of other ways the guards might discover us if we were unlucky.

Thus, we needed to be ready for a fight.

<Would it be better to kill them if they spot us?> sent Sallia, after a few moments.

<We don’t have a good way to deal with the bodies. My dimensional backpack can’t fit that the bodies of three large adult males inside of it.>

<Got it,> sent Sallia. <Try really hard to avoid a fight.> Then, the door to the secret passage opened up again with the exact same set of jarringly loud creaks and grinding sounds.

I immediately used my illusion abilities to make the three of us invisible.

The three guards spent a few moments warily examining their surroundings, but didn’t seem to see anything unusual. Their eyes passed right over us, as if we weren’t even there.

“I don’t see anything, captain,” said one of the guards.

“I don’t either. We should still have some time before whoever is tunneling illegally in this area connects to the base,” said the captain. “Let’s go report to the base commander, so that someone can figure out how to deal with this mess.”

The three quickly began jogging through the corridor, and the three of us followed right behind them.