In summary, the able adult farmers worked relentlessly while the elderly and the children who couldn’t work were used as leverage. The presence of arms as well as the powerful Martial Apprentice made their situation absolutely hopeless.
Rui only counted a little less than half of the gang members from the known number of members of the gang in his reconnaissance, which meant they were hidden in the village. He wasn’t able to pin-point which seismic signatures he was sensing via Seismic Mapping were the unseen gang members, but they were likely cooped up in the building.
Now that Rui had completed the initial reconnaissance surveillance of the village. He wanted to take his time gathering more information of the movements and activities of the villagers and the gang members before making a plan of how to complete the mission.
He had already ruled out running into the village at this very moment at attacking the gang. Although the human gang members with muskets weren’t a threat by themselves, they were a threat if he was fighting another powerful Martial Apprentice.
Although musket bullets were faster than he was to some degree, the humans firing them most certainly were not. By the time normal humans would shift, take aim and pull the trigger, Martial Apprentices could easily have killed all of them thanks to their enhanced battle cognition and superhuman speed, especially one as good as Rui. Even if some stray bullets hit Martial Artists, most of them had defensive techniques that could mitigate their damage.
The problem was that even though Rui could easily deal with the gang if they were by themselves, they weren’t by themselves. Rui would be distracted with fighting Vranil and they could pepper him with bullets or even take hostages.
Although Rui could probably still fight and even win under those extenuating circumstances, it would be far riskier and would certainly end up with a lot of dead villagers. One of the conditional constraints of the commission was that the loss of life to the villagers needed to be minimized, and he could certainly be violating that condition with this tactic.
Thus, this idea was immediately tossed out. Taking a head-on brute-force approach was not really viable. That left more covert measures.
He would need to ensure that the conflict between himself and the gang occurred asymmetrically and non-confrontally. Meaning, he attacked them in ways, timings and places that mitigated their advantages and increased the significance of their disadvantages.
He had hatched up several potential plans, but intended to gather more information to gauge their probabilities of success and flesh out the ones with the highest probability of desired success while tossing out the ideas that probably weren’t going to cut it.
Night was just an hour away, and Rui intended to see what their arrangements for the night were. That was a crucial piece of information that would be required before he decided on how to proceed.
Once it was night, he began circling the village while carefully observing what he saw. When it was night, the gang members who had patrolled throughout the day actually changed with a different set of guards who took their places.
(‘A day and night shift system.’) Rui observed. The working farmers stayed in the fields for quite some time more until they were finally allowed to sleep.
(‘They’re basically slaves.’)
One of his plans was to ambush them during the night, however he realized that might not be as easy as he had hoped. The night shift guards and patrollers were actually quite alert and sharp, to their credit. Rui could see they were highly aware of their surroundings at all times. Despite the night, it would be difficult to ambush them without being instantly noticed. It seems they were extremely wary of being attacked at night
If he had more stealth techniques it would have been manageable. Rui sighed. Even though this hadn’t meant to be a covert mission, it kind of was turning into one inadvertently because Rui wanted to optimize his approach.
He had Blink
Still, it was one of his best plans regardless. Unless something better popped up somehow, he would probably be sticking to this plan.
The night passed away boringly and statically. But in the morning, there was a change.
Early in the morning, a group of five of the gang members headed off into the forest, carrying muskets, ropes, a large bag among other things.
(‘They’re hunting.’) Rui mused. He had expected that. He decided to follow them at a distance, making sure he was never closer than two-hundred-and-fifty meters to them. With Seismic Mapping, he didn’t need to be particularly close to them. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to speak Sanskrit, so there was no intel he could gain from following them around.
In the span of four hours, they managed to catch four large boars as well as a deer. They hauled back their catch merrily, heading back to the village. The gang members feasted on the meal, even giving some to the villagers, albeit not much. What annoyed Rui was that he still hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of Vranil Fra yet. The man refused to come out of wherever the hell he was.
The rest of the day passed the same as the previous day, and Rui got a complete picture of all the activities of all the members of the village, gang or otherwise.
He already had a plan at hand, but the problem was his lack of information on Vranil. Ultimately, the information he had on Vranil was not as updated nor detailed as he would have liked. If he could see Vranil fight for even a bit, he would understand the man’s physical parameters, approach to conflict and even his combat mentality. These things could make the difference between life and death. It was possible that Vranil had grown much stronger since his last recorded fight.
In which case, Rui would be saving his own life by finding that out ahead of time.