Soul Trader

After long and tedious mountain climbing I finally found the cave entrance, unfortunately for me there were some bandits guarding the entrance. Whoever said bandits are lazy and villainous bunch is so wrong, I mean you can't compare them to army sure, but they aren't just some random bunch of mobs.

Fortunately for me I don't have to use this entrance, even though bandit's rarely spend their time improving their lair these guys really spent some effort on it, whole lair is composed of multitude of tunnels and unless you have a map most new comers would be lost once they entered.

Good news are that some time ago bandits caught some gnomes, oh gnomes? Those are little guys who are madly in love with science, two things they hate most are when people mix them with dwarves and when they are called midgets, but back to the topic, they enslaved those gnomes and made them improve their lair and one of those improvements was ventilation system. Yeah you heard it, I'm going mission impossible style and I'm going to crawl some tight spaces and get some booty. Sounds exciting right? Actually there are couple of quests related to this bandit lair, one of them is extermination of course, but there are two other quests, one of them is to infiltrate and rob them, the other one was slightly more popular because the previous quest is difficult, some people decided to join the bandits, all of this of course raised the extermination quest difficulty, but hey that quest had biggest reward so it should be hardest one to do. Actually the robing quest was part of promotion quest for thief like classes I think, and it was supposed to be one of most difficult ones, I seriously want to see which designer thought of a more difficult quest than this.

And now I'm crawling this extremely tight ventilation system, and I say tight because they were dug up by gnomes and I'm still perfectly human, try imagining trying to stick your fist into a bottle opening, that's how I feel right now. While I'm crawling I might as well describe you my plan, actually it's quite simple, using this ventilation system I will find where the loot is, I will secure that room with some formations and traps, I'll rob them clean and then I will trigger the alarm. Why alarm them? Because they are fat bunch of easy EXP, if I'm uninterrupted I can probably make a formation that can trap even a whole legion of bandits.

But something caught my interest while I was crawling in the vents, looks like I passed some meeting hall or something but I overheard some conversation which piqued my interest.

"When is the shipment coming?"

"Sir, they said shipment is coming late because they had some trouble smuggling it over the border, they even have balls to blame us for not opening a path for them, like it's a piece of cake for us to open a path on a border full of regional army."

"I'm not asking you for excuses, I'm asking you when is the shipment coming, our boys need to grow stronger soon, I caught wind that that little Viscount is preparing to attack us soon, we need to get those stones before that and increase our strength as much as we can, tell them to hurry up, my patience is running low, if they don't hurry they won't even have time to say goodbye to their families."

"Yes sir, I'll send the word right away."

Bingo, I think I just found some sub goals for me now, if I understood it properly this bandit guy is holding some people hostage and their family is smuggling something over the border, whatever they are smuggling can rapidly increase strength of people. Oh I can smell money, so I need to add some minor details to my goal; first rob the bandits, free the smugglers family, rob the smugglers and then I can continue to my second goal.

I admit this adds difficulty to my original goal but I feel obligated to help out people, bah who am I kidding I'm doing it for the money! And who wouldn't? They are smuggling something that can strengthen this whole lair and that's a lot of bandits, if I take that for myself and sell it to the army or some guild I will make a fortune! This might actually help me build foundation for my partnership with Sasha's sister, that would really kill two birds with one stone, and who knows, I might even strengthen myself while I'm at it.

With my vigor renewed I continued crawling while quietly humming some song I overheard on a radio somewhere, damn I hate this feeling, this song is stuck in my head this whole day and I don't even have a clue what song is it, and I'm still humming cheerfully!

Looks like luck was on my side today because I don't have to suffer from my own torture because soon enough I stumbled upon the doors of the treasure room. I can feel that feeling of gold in my hands, just imagine how big of a mountain will it be, I mean this lair still houses a little more than two hundred bandits, they should have quite a loot here!