Time passed quickly, and after nearly two weeks of arduous mountain travel, it was almost mid-October when Henry and his party of twenty people finally arrived near Lorenna Lake.

The terrain is much more gentle, and the terrain along the creeks and rivers is typical of river valleys, carved by the natural power of the water that flows from millions of years, beyond the perception of humans and any other civilization. Crossing the ridge and following the sloping slope of the river to the east, the vicinity of Lake Lorena, where the breeze is blowing, the endless green vegetation contrasts with the light blue water, and many of the larger herbivores drink in the distance, and a few small crocodiles float lazily in the middle of the lake.

No trace of the Aya snake dragon has yet been found, but Lake Lorenna is a large lake, and everyone is only coming to its western shore at the moment. On the other side, obscured by layers of trees, there is a wider area and higher depth, and the main source of water for the lake to the outside world, the Shire River, a major tributary of the largest river in the south, the Hete, is also located in that direction.

The habits of the Aya Snake Dragons are very similar to those of the mammals of the hippopotamus, and although they have the ability to land on land, they prefer to follow the river and spend most of the day in the water to keep their skin moist and comfortable—and one of the main reasons why the group does not go east to the Shire River and stay here is not to provoke these creatures.

Many of the large omnivores have a strong sense of territory, and although several of the people present are veteran mercenaries of the orange level, it would be terrible to really provoke even a minor individual weighing less than three tons to go crazy and trample everywhere.

A large group of Aya snakes and dragons marched in groups, and even crocodiles and wolf lizards two or three meters long would avoid them, and any predator under seven meters in length would have the guts to approach them - although they were still not the largest of the mixed dragons, they were the most familiar to humans.

It was morning when the group arrived on the shore of the West Lake, and they did not intend to continue their march towards the east, but began to prepare here.

From this detail, you can also see the fact that these hunting mercenaries are sophisticated. It is true that the lakes to the east are larger and have more targets to choose from, but given the fact that competition is bound to be fiercer there, the success rate of hunting is not necessarily proportional. As a creature with a strong sense of territory, the Aya snake dragon will not be safe when choosing a spawning site during the breeding season, and the east side of the beach wall is longer and more expansive, which is naturally owned by female individuals in their prime, and only inexperienced hunting mercenaries will choose to provoke these guys.

The choice of the west side, which is relatively more narrow and calm, as the ambush site, is obviously a place where weaker female snakes who have failed to compete will come, and most of them will go alone, considering various factors, it is obviously a more practical choice.

Greed is not enough to swallow an elephant, and the difference between the skin of a snake dragon with a relatively thin physique and a large and robust snake dragon is not particularly large, but the difficulty of hunting is very different. Younger, less experienced mercenaries will simply want as much as possible, while more experienced mercenaries will know how to give up a portion of their profits in order to have a higher chance of success - thus effectively increasing the final gains.

Ill-prepared, hot-headed gambling like the former, even if successful, is not worth advocating. The possibility of sustainable development of anything must be planned calmly and carefully, because the factors of gambling success are not in your own hands, so you can't replicate it a second time.

Time passed quietly, the morning and afternoon transitioned peacefully, and the basic things around them were set up without anyone to guide these novice mercenaries to do it. There are always many beaver animals on the lakeside and riverside in the south, and they are quite different in appearance from their cold temperate relatives in the tropics, with less body hair and relatively small size, but they have the same habit of moving wood and gnawing trees to build nests - which is why when the mercenaries come here every year to camp here, they always need to re-cut wood to make a perimeter fence.

It is foolish to camp on the shore of the lake without setting up a perimeter cordon, and the crocodiles here are not very large but not negligible, and a simple wooden fence with torches and night watchmen can effectively prevent this from happening. The flatbed carriage was placed on the other side as a defense facing the forest, the tent was set up directly in front of them, the mules and horses were around the perimeter and let them graze freely, and the busy preparations were finally over in the evening, and when the twenty people were resting in twos and threes, Juan, an old hunting expert with squinting eyes, found Henry.

In order to avoid suspicion among others, the two could not get far from the camp, and they did not have much contact for long. Fortunately, everyone was tired and resting at this time, and the light was relatively dim, so not many people paid attention to them. Somewhat because Mira was the only female member of the team, the tent of the Loan Maiden and the Sage was relatively close to the inside, and at this time Old Juan ran to talk to Henry, and was able to avoid the eyes of most people.

"You're right. Juan Sr. said this with a straight stab, and Mila on the side looked at them quietly. Henry stared at the old mercenary for a while, although relatively hidden, but there was not no one walking around, the sage beckoned to Mira decisively, took out a few pages of paper, quills and ink in small earthen bottles from the package in the tent, and began to write simple words on them.

'He's really secretly contacting outsiders?'

Old Juan watched him write these words, and then narrowed his eyes that had not been opened much and stared at Henry—we have already mentioned that there are many people in the world who can speak many languages in Rigal, but those who can read are very rare, and even in the relatively developed and rich commercial countries of the Southern City-States, most of the merchants only know simple numbers for bookkeeping— Under this premise, the sage chose to write directly without any prior inquiry, and the message revealed to the other party was naturally not very simple.

"Alas-" Old Juan sighed, this man was able to notice the strange details of the squad leader, and from the way he looked at the title of the book that the girl was holding when she was reading, he knew that he could understand the words, and it was natural that he could understand the words, and this level of observation and judgment, even though he was now on the same side, he still felt a chill down his spine.

Either way, there was something more important to do at the moment—Juan Sr. took the pen and began to write, and the clever Mira duly stepped outside and began to pack her bags to drown out the sound of writing with this small noise. It was strange that the two of them just sat quietly and said nothing, so Henry and Juan Sr. were chatting about unrelated topics while writing really important information with pen and paper.

Most of the bandits he colluded with were the Bhatti Merchant Group, which was said to have ties to many overseas black merchants, and although it was under the banner of the Merchant Group, it was a gangster organization that did all kinds of evil. Juan Sr. went on to write, but in words he was talking to Henry about the food: 'Someone in the regiment had seen Jerónimo getting too close to them, and he had been warned of it. ’

He wrote - Jerónimo is the name of the squad leader.

Old Juan sighed: "Actually, it is not difficult for me to understand his psychology, there are nine brigades in our regiment, and there are two squadrons in each brigade, and his rank as a squad leader is neither high nor low, and the remuneration from the sale of a hunt can only take a small share, and he has to hand over half of it to his boss Captain who has no task at all. ’

Although the equipment and manpower for the mission travel are provided by the regiment, and such an allocation is a matter of course, it is normal for the person who is responsible for leading the team to travel consciously and with high hard work, and the dirty work is done by himself but he gets very little pay, not to mention that he has not been able to be promoted, and the psychological imbalance is also a normal thing. As if he hadn't written so many words in a long time, Juan rubbed his wrist and rested for a while, then he continued to talk to Henry about the potato stew.

Coupled with the fact that he was warned that he was too close to the Barty Merchant Group, Jerónimo should have felt that he had no chance of promotion in his life, so he simply decided to cooperate with them. He dipped the ink from the small clay bottle, and then wrote: "If you bring it back to the regiment to complete the task, you can only get less than a few hundredths of the reward, and you can make a lot of money by selling it yourself, even if you have to share it." ’

'He did this......,' Juan Sr. hesitated for a moment, then decided to finish: 'I'm not surprised. ’

"......" The two fell silent, outside Mira roughly sorted out the contents of the package and walked in, she pulled out her long sword to check if it needed maintenance, and then glanced at what was written on the paper from another position, the two of them communicated in Lamanite, and many of them used abbreviations for convenience, Mira had some difficulty reading them, but she still understood some of the situation with her own speculation.

'What are you going to do?' Juan dipped himself in ink again and wrote, he was the oldest and most experienced person in the mercenary group, why Henry had found him, he had some guesses, the old mercenary was once again impressed by this man's understanding of the mercenary group, and also understood that this person would most likely have some ideas about how to save his life, so he asked, and Henry did not disappoint him and began to write.

The sound of "......" squirming continued, and the sage wrote the Lamanite language very smoothly and smoothly, and the font he used was quite different from that of old Juan, which looked more standardized and beautiful, which made Mira on the side look fascinated.

"I see. After writing for two or three minutes, Juan Sr. read it carefully and nodded.

Henry does have a good understanding of the general composition of the more advanced hunting mercenary groups, the so-called no rules are not a circle, the mercenary guild and ABC-DEF, as a part of the organization that has existed for hundreds of years longer than the history of many West Coast countries, naturally also has its own set of mature and efficient management and distribution systems for classes and internal personnel.

For example, the rules of the mercenary group to which Juan Sr. belonged were copied from many other mature mercenary groups, with the middle-aged more experienced squad leader in charge of taking care of things and directing his subordinates, while the hunting expert, who was the second largest in the support and team, was the most experienced veteran member. The position of Hunting Specialist is actually a bit higher than that of the Platoon Leader, because the Platoon Leader is a fixed position, while the Hunting Specialist only moves forward with the squad when he is out hunting.

Experienced people tend to take their opinions very seriously, so the big picture of the direction of the team, the location of the camp, and the distribution of traps are often dictated by hunting experts - and this combined with the circumstances, Henry has come up with a plan to avoid the battle directly.

- It should be mentioned that the continent of Rigal is very large.

We may not be able to perceive all of this from words alone, but even just the part of the southern forest where Henry and the others are located near Lake Lorenna, the terrain is vast and complex, and the unexplored area is actually quite terrifying. While we've mentioned several times how out of place humans are when they enter the wilderness, it's apparently limited to constant tracking, and is located closer to the main road.

When deep into the real uninhabited wilderness, the sheer expanse of terrain alone is more than enough to block any tracking. A person may be able to run twenty or thirty kilometers per hour on flat ground, but he must not be able to maintain this speed for an hour, and this speed will inevitably decrease if obstacles are added - and this is only the speed of a straight line, if you take into account the wide area on the left and right, it is a fantasy to run into the primeval forest in units of "100 square kilometers" to find people.

Experienced hunters don't go too far into the forest, and the supply of supplies is one aspect, and if they run to an unfamiliar place, even they may get lost. And with the above conditions as a premise, and in order to prevent the group from discovering that the only way to cooperate with the robbery between the squad leader Gironimo and the bandits of the Batti merchant group is naturally to plan the road and then ambush on the road in advance.

This ambush site should not be too close to the town, although the average robber does the same, and the chance of success in the ambush near the main road will be higher, but then the only surviving Jerónimo will be suspected of fornication by the people above - compared to the vast forest, it can be explained that it is bad luck to run into thieves wandering around, and the team members have no evidence of death, and there is no possibility that anyone witnesses in such an uninhabited place, so naturally the squad leader himself has the final say.

As long as he struggled to get some wounds or something, he could have written the whole story quite perfectly - and why he had a clear nervousness because of the delay in progress, now that I think about it, it is obvious that he is afraid that he has already lost two or three days by the time he is in a hurry, and if the hunt does not go well, he will miss the ambushed robbers, and everything will be lost.

Henry's solution of not needing to fight is extended from this reasoning, as we said earlier, old Juan has the power to lead the whole team forward in the overall situation, so he only needs to take a slight detour or something, anyway, if he doesn't follow the idea of the team leader Gironimo, he will definitely be able to avoid those bandits.

Of course, even this problem is not completely solved, there is no way to achieve all this if Gironimo is alone, the whole team has a total of about twenty people, and the ambush force of the Bhatti Chamber of Commerce should not exceed too many people in order to avoid exposing their traces, and in this case, if someone escapes when the battle starts, they will not be able to wipe it out, if this is the case, someone survives the testimony and Jerónimo has a discrepancy, and the upper authorities will naturally be suspicious, so he must kill anyone else who has nothing to do with him.

In order to ensure this, there will definitely be many people in the team who are on his side, and when the time comes, he will cooperate with the attack of the Barty Chamber of Commerce and quickly surround and kill the others.

However, this number is not too much, because the more people share such things as cakes, the less you will get for yourself, and all in all, it is best to solve it without starting a battle - Henry and Juan nodded at each other, and then the old mercenary got up and walked out.

The sage turned his head to look at Mira, and the girl of Roan had obviously learned something about the situation, and he quickly destroyed the paper for communication, although no one else in the team should be literate, but he was careful to sail the ship of ten thousand years.

It was still bustling outside, and people were starting to prepare dinner, Juan walked over and asked him what he had talked about with Henry with a smile on his face, and the old mercenary replied with a smile on his face, and said that you know that the West Coast people like potatoes and so on, and started talking about food. (To be continued.) )