"So you're telling me the super powerful merchant guy that we pissed off is forming a literal hunting team to gather information on us so that he can eventually take us out?" Kane frowned.
"Right," Rui nodded.
He had informed Kane about everything he had learned. After all, he couldn't withhold such information that had an impact on Kane.
"Alright, so what are we gonna do?" Kane asked.
Rui smiled back wordlessly. He had entertained the possibility of Kane quitting which would not be unreasonable. But he appreciated his friend's loyalty and commitment.
"You don't have to do this if you don't want to," Rui reminded him, just to make sure. "You can just leave it to me if this becomes too much at any given point."
Although things would become far harder for him, Rui did not want to use this as a justification to pressure his best friend to tag along with him in crazy circumstances.
"Don't worry about it, I intend to see this through to the end," he lightly said. "So what is it that we are going to about this predicament?"
"We cannot avoid it," Rui explained. "At least, now that I've joined the Voidhunters, any indications that the Voider learned of the plans to gather as much information on him as possible will put the sixteen Voidhunters in suspicion. That's far too much suspicion on me, and I cannot allow that to happen."
"So we're going to continue with our plans to harvest the twelfth floor… in the midst of sixteen Martial Squires that are literally there only to track us?" Kane scratched his head.
"Don't worry about it, they don't stand a chance of detecting us with your Void Step, however, we need to be more careful about how we use it from here on out," He explained. "From here on out, you indicate your time limit warning three minutes ahead of time, then I will locate a place where we can safely reach and dismount. Preferably even in tunnels and stuff like that. Going to such degrees is worth it, I don't care if we're slower, it's better to be safe than sorry."
"How will you even harvest esoteric resources if you're part of the Voidhunter team though?" Kane scratched his head, confused. "Won't they immediately realize since you wouldn't be part of the team?"
Rui shook his head. "There is no close-knit team, we need to surveil a large area, thus we're spread out, there is absolutely no benefit to grouping in dense areas. Thus none of the Voidhunters will actually be sensing me, since we're supposed to cover as much area as we can with no overlaps, which requires being outside of each other's sensory ranges. Although we have a general idea where each of us is supposed to be, they would not notice me gone."
"I see," Kane furrowed his eyebrows as he considered the matter and all the issues surrounding it. "That makes sense."
He turned towards Rui. "So you intend on successfully harvesting all of the esoteric deposits from right under their nose? That's something else entirely."
He laughed. It was such a diabolical plan, but it fit Rui.
The two of them worked out the details of how they would handle this particular extraction mission, they had worked out a really good system prior and had even practiced, thus any changes to it needed to be made carefully and prudently.
In the end, Rui increased the safety measures including the forewarning time, as well as the minimum distance that they maintained from every Martial Squire they came across.
With these measures, he reduced the probability that something that bad would happen. He needed to find a way to ensure that he didn't screw up matters for himself. These measures aided in that and ensured that the probability of something going wrong was low.
The downside was that their harvest was not going to be as great. Since they would be spending less time on mining the deposits from the land of the twelfth floor, but would also be reducing the net area over which that they would be mining over.
That was more than just an acceptable trade to Rui, he was more than willing to allow that to ensure that there was no way that he could possibly be overwhelmed by these circumstances and that nothing went wrong.
With that established, they had more or less made all the preparations that they needed to make as far as planning went.
Rui, however, still wasn't done. He was not one to be satisfied with basic half-assed measures as opposed to very concrete ways to improve their probability of success.
"What's this?" Kane frowned as Rui handed him a tiny vial of a strange black liquid.
"It's Festerine Venom," Rui explained. "It's a powerful Squire-grade poison, that paralyzes a target extremely quickly and costs an absurd sum of money for just half a milligram of it. We're going to equip you with a poisoned blade with this coated on it. You'll get a few uses to poison a Martial Squire and paralyze them and drop them on the spot."
Kane's eyes twinkled at the mention of that. This allowed his lethality to be relevant against the likes of Martial Squires, despite being a low-grade Martial Squire.
"Poison isn't really in-line with my Martial Path though," Kane murmured.
This was true, his Martial Path was centered around evasive maneuvering, which was exclusive of a field like poison arts.
"It's not a Martial Art technique," Rui told him. "Just a temporary measure, there's no saying what can happen in the circumstances that we're going to be entering now, just take it for now, and use it if needed, you'll thank me if you need to."
"Well, that does make sense," Kane shrugged. "I suppose that is true, at the very least. Better safe than sorry."
Now that the several preparations that they had made had been completed, they were both ready to ensure that this operation ended in success.
