Chapter 519: Information Gathering
(Righteous Faction, Zone Twelve Military Base. Two Days Later)
Over the next forty-eight hours, Leo and Veyr operated like spectres in uniform, drifting seamlessly through the heart of enemy command as they immersed themselves in the everyday rhythm of military life, speaking the language, executing the routines, and absorbing information with a quiet intensity that never once betrayed their true allegiance.
Leo stuck close to the officers, attending every field inspection, every patrol audit, and every mid-level strategy meeting that Larry was expected to show up for, using the silence between orders to review files, skim through troop breakdowns, and subtly quiz junior personnel on which sectors they were most afraid of being stationed in.
From idle gossip to technical manuals, every interaction was a breadcrumb, and by the end of the second day, he had already compiled a mental blueprint of the entire base structure, right down to the shift rotations and the frequency of air surveillance cycles.
Meanwhile, Veyr had taken a more fluid route, assuming the laid-back persona of Lieutenant Aaron while slyly inserting himself into off-duty poker nights and smoke breaks where pilots and gunners loosened their tongues.
He cracked jokes, bought cheap cigars, and slowly worked his way into conversations that spilled secrets through laughter, all the while taking mental notes.
Sometimes he deliberately asked dumb questions to confirm smart suspicions, as he pretended to misunderstand something just enough to prompt others to correct him with more detail than they should’ve shared.
By the end of the second day, they had a working list of nearly everything that mattered.
The warrior composition of this particular base consisted of seventy-six thousand master-level troops, around two thousand Grandmasters, and twenty Transcendent-level warriors.
It was the smallest zonal posting by size, and the other zones had anywhere between 1.5 to 2 times that number of men.