After collecting the last of the captives, Sage met up with the rest of the Jade Horde outside to get a situation report. The leader of the Slavers was confirmed having escaped with heavy injuries, but no others had passed their encirclement. Sage went underground again and collected the 600 Jade Horde members that were guarding the underground maze. Casualties were minor with the exception of two groups.

The two vice leaders of the Slavers had broken through at those places. The one with the exploding fire spheres had almost immediately killed twenty men, but then he was killed by a forest of spear heads. The remaining thirty then had to face the rush of escaping Slavers, where they sustained heavy injuries and lost another half of those remaining. Only twenty of them were left alive, and most heavily wounded. They’d had to pull back from the choke point and let the rest of the Slavers go. Sage was impressed by their bravery and marked them down to be awarded later.

The man with the giant hammer was far more difficult to deal with. In the tight confines of the underground area, he used his hammer head like a shield and smashed through a team of fifty in one push. Most of them were thrown off their feet by his incredible strength, and then the other Slavers rushed in to help. The whole squad was completely wiped out and all the Slavers who had escaped by this route were now dispersed through that underground labyrinth with no telling where they might end up.

Sage could only curse and collect corpses. He could only sigh at the loss of lives, both his men and the caged prisoners that he couldn’t save. Even so, it was a great victory. The casualties were less than against the first compound and they’d saved many more people. The worst part about the operation was letting the two enemy leaders escape and also the lack of spoils. From what they learned after defeating the first base and surveilling the second one, there wasn’t much wealth being kept in the outposts. That meant either the leaders were keeping it all for themselves, or someone else was calling all the shots and these outposts were only henchmen.

Well, time to check out Hei Bai’s stuff!

Sage ordered the remainder of the two Legions to finish dismantling the traps and searching the ruins of the Slaver’s outpost. Then he gave the order not to be disturbed, heading into a tent and then entering the Universe Ring. First, he checked up on King, Ruanfu and the other birds. King’s injuries were healing well, but Ruanfu was somewhat upset because he pulled her out of the fight, ‘just when it was getting good’. Sage talked her down by telling her about the end of the battle. With the building collapsing, there wasn’t anything else they could do afterwards.

From there he met up with the leader of Hoplite village, “Chushou Feng, how are they?”

The man nodded, immediately understanding, “Most of them are recovering nicely, a few are too injured to recover, and some have broken down,” The Hoplite pointed at his head, “the rest will only carry scars, both physical and mental.”

Hoplites were quite dimwitted in general, far below the normal human average, but some of them were unusual among their kind and could be considered quite normal for a human. Those few outstanding individuals were all made into the leaders of the Hoplites villages, and Chushou Feng was in the top three of his whole race. The other two who could match him were leading the Hoplites in the Inner World, and overseeing Tiankong Retreat: the first hidden village of Hoplites in the wilderness near the Eightfold Kingdom where he first fought King. He considered those three locations the most important to him, each of them were located in a different world. They were isolated in different ways, so it was important for them to have competent leaders yet stay hidden from humans.

Unfortunately, that rule had been broken at this time. The only way he could think of to save those that had been enslaved was to expose the power of the Universe Ring. That, or his Inner World. Since he wasn’t sure how things would end up, he didn’t send them into the Inner World, where they might be stuck for years if he was delayed. Now, within the Universe Ring, the village of Hoplites had been taking care of the hundreds of people. They had no idea where they were, or how they’d gotten there, so there was still a chance this could be handled secretly.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. If I just let them return to their homes, won’t I be inviting trouble for myself in the future?

Letting that problem stew for a while, he walked to his walled manor and went down into the basement. That was where he kept his huge stone warehouse, the area that he used for storage. It was basically just a much larger version of his old storage ring. With the help of the Hoplites and being able to put things into stasis, the warehouse was an order of magnitude larger than the old one. The sliver of the Universe Ring had room 100 by 100 feet wide, with a 20 foot ceiling. The new warehouse was 100 by 100 yards wide, which gave it nine times the square footage, and was also a cavernous chamber 100 feet tall. The warehouse was the size of an aircraft hanger: 9 million cubic feet in comparison to the old two hundred thousand.

Without the ability to freeze things into a sort of stasis it would have been near impossible for a few Hoplites to build such a massive chamber underground. The place would have collapsed under the weight of the rock and soil above, but with the stasis ability they merely had to excavate the place and then build a structure within it. There were a few large columns that wasted some of the space inside, but Sage only needed a large warehouse, not a real aircraft hanger to hold massive contiguous objects like passenger airliners. Even with the huge storage space, Sage still used his honeycomb like sorting method. Maximizing the speed at which he could retrieve objects while trying to waste the least amount of storage space. He could have pulled out Hei Bai’s corpse in an instant, but he didn’t want to arouse any attention in the camp with the smell of a corpse.

Walking into the huge warehouse, he moved into the stasis area he’d established and flew into the air. Inside the Universe Ring, once an area was put into ‘stasis’ it seemed that time, gravity, sound, smell, and even light was restricted. Fortunately, he could will those attributes back on, and even float around the area as he willed. Sage had no idea how it all worked, but it was extremely convenient. He floated over towards where he’d placed a huge stone and the mess underneath it. That mess used to be Hei Bai’s body before it was squished into a gruesome pulp.

Very carefully, he rolled over the huge stone onto its side, just like he was checking under a rock for bugs. Conveniently, the rock floated there as he lifted it, requiring no help to stay where it was while he bent down to take a peek underneath. At the sight he couldn’t help but to make a disgusted face, “Ewww.”