Chapter 263 – The chase begins.

“Hey wait up… Hey! Is that thing really following us? and if it is, where are you taking us, what is this place?”

“I’ll explain later, you’ll have to trust me.”

“Trust you?”

Lobelia wanted to roll her eyes as she sprinted after the man dressed in full-body armor. To the side, she could see a ruby dire wolf running behind him and behind her were the other four party members she came with. All of them were in a daze after almost dying from the fall into the chasm. For a moment they thought they were safe but Wayland who they discovered here wasn’t of the same mind.

“Hey, are you sure that we can trust him?”

Jasmine appeared next to Lobelia and quickly used a hidden skill for forwarding information. It was called project sound, thanks to it the user could project sounds to any desired location. It was mostly used by thieves or scout classes to sneak around and confuse sentries.

However, it could also be used differently, by targeting someone’s ear and turning down the sound volume a person could communicate from a distance. Attacking it by shattering someone’s eardrums was also possible but only with a high enough skill level. Usually, there was not enough sound output for that, and pinpointing the right spot to his wasn’t easy either.

“My sister trusts him, so I’ll trust him too, do you think he would have saved us if he meant us harm?”

The archer nodded but Lobelia wasn’t sure if that was enough to drop the suspicion. In reality, she already had a theory of what had happened there and it was only confirmed after they arrived at a clearing. What they saw there was truly astonishing, all of them opened up their eyes to take in the view.

“What is this? Precious gems and metals? Hah, I knew you were hiding something!”

Armand shouted out while looking at the spider golems that were moving. The group was filled with adventurers so they somewhat knew that this place was akin to a goldmine. Dungeons always restored their mineral pockets with time. To them, it wasn’t that strange that Wayland had decided to keep this place to himself to keep the riches. If they were capable of doing the same they would probably do the same.

“By Felmjir’s beard, is that crimson mythril? And that’s… but this is…”

The only dwarf from the party stopped in his tracks while forgetting that they were being chased. To him, that was brought up around miners and blacksmiths, something like this was a true treasure trove. While he did not specialize in it as a dwarf he knew the true worth of a place like this.
“… Brother Dunan was right, ye wur hiding something!”

“Brother?”

Roland gave out an order to the spider golems to stop mining the moment he ran into the range of his skill. As he was planning he implemented a relay system into his bots that would forward the order to all of them automatically. Thanks to this he didn’t have to go through all ten of the golems one by one.

Some of the golems retreated towards the hidden exit while four others moved in the direction of the tunnel they ran out. Thanks to the signal enhancer he left in the chasm he could somewhat measure where the Lich was. At its current speed, it wouldn’t take it long to arrive here so he needed to have his golems block it from approaching them.

While his plan was in motion he could see all of the adventurers being astonished by this mining area. Probably all of them with perhaps the half-orc excluded knew about its worth. This area was already exposed so it would probably be impossible to keep it a secret, this was even less likely after he heard the dwarven adventurer shout at him.

“Aye, he told me about ye, greedy bastard, what do ye think ye wur doin’ ‘ere?”

“This is not the time for arguing, we need to leave but if you want to stay here and contend with that lich by yourself, then be my guest.”

Wedamir wasn’t amused and Roland had a suspicion as to why. First of all, he did mention one of the union leaders by name. Dwarven adventurers treated their craftsmen a lot differently than their human counterparts. To them, the creation of weapons and armor that kept them safe was something to be praised.

The dwarves in this world also had a delusion that for some reason all mining areas should belong to them. They would buy out each and everyone that they could get their hands on. The union in particular had contracts in place that would force nobles to prioritize them over others if they so desired. Thus from Wedamir’s standpoint, Roland’s attempt at hiding this mining area could have been akin to denying the dwarves their birthright.

This was certainly problematic, the dwarf would probably go running to the union bastards that disliked him. They on the other hand would see this as a chance of getting back at him. They would probably try to spin it as withholding information from the guild or the nobles that the mine really belonged to by law. Luckily they didn’t really have proof of him being here for long so he could always deny that he was mining the place for many months.

“Wedamir is thick headed but I don’t think even he wants to contend with a tier 3 Lich but isn’t this a dead end? I don’t see any exit, Wayland?”

“Give me a moment.”

Without giving an explanation he quickly ran up to the wall with the hidden runic symbols. While the way they operated wasn’t difficult, the way they were hidden was peculiar. Without his debugging skill guiding him through the process, it would take a higher-tier runesmith to even notice that there was a locking mechanism there.

“There really was an exit…”

Lobelia cheered out as she saw a bunch of runes lighting up when Roland touched the space above the door. Following the activation a large door that was big enough to fit his large mule golem appeared. With it now being open he ordered it to walk right back in through it. Luckily he had not even begun unpacking so it wasn’t hard to just retreat.

“So that’s how you’ve been able to do it…”

Not everyone here connected the dots when it came to this place. Lobelia on the other hand had realized that this had been discovered during the time the nobles visited this dungeon. This did bring up some questions though, was this actually discovered later by Roland or did he have some kind of deal with the nobles?

During that time no reports were made by them and the safe zone was supposed to have been destroyed when they were evacuating. This was not the time to ask about such things, they were still being chased by the monstrous Lich. Roland confirmed this fact as he had been constantly monitoring the pathway leading to the chasm.

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“It’s here… move now!”

He pointed to the opening while taking out a few more items from his satchel. Even though he had gone down here without expecting any problems there was still a contingency plan for if anything went wrong. First of all, four of the ten drones that he had moved inside of the tunnel.