Eventually, even the leader had enough of chewing out the incompetent Martial Artist, before moving away from where the man was instructed to be.
"What have the scouts concluded regarding the tree?" The man asked one of his subordinates.
"They found no traces of any esoteric ore deposits, sir," His subordinate replied nervously.
The air grew tremendously heavy as his expression grew severe. "They found… nothing?"
"No ore deposits, sir. But their preliminary report does mention a giant hole size of a building in the ground beneath the trunk of the tree with traces of esoteric substances in the soil, indicating that there was a large deposit of esoteric ore in that location," The subordinate replied. "Apparently, it resembles the hole left behind when esoteric ores are extracted."
"Then it is safe to assume that there were ores there at some point? At all? Ever?" The leader asked gruffly.
"It is hard to say, sir," His subordinate shook his head. "The scouts were given very elementary training in the usage of instruments and in the execution of the protocols, we do not have any actual experts at hand. We're all just Martial Artists. Frankly, we have no idea whatsoever what this floor is, or what that hole means. All we can be sure of is that there are no esoteric ores to be mined."
The leader's expression grew even more ugly.
He did not like what he was hearing one bit at all. He was assigned to lead the raid of the fourteenth floor by Chairman Deacon himself. As the leader of the raid on the fourteenth floor, he held full responsibility for its outcome. If he succeeded, he would probably be a candidate for a promotion.
However, the outcome that he ended up with was far away from anything resembling success.
The actual objective of the operation had failed. It was certain that they would not be getting their hands on large supplies of esoteric ore deposits. On top of that, they had been sabotaged by some unknown force that the scouts had still been searching for without any clue. Worst of all, all of their Martial Squires had been injured to varying degrees, while three of them had died, due to the impulsive reaction of a grade-ten Martial Squire.
"What is the latest report on the smoke bomb situation?" He growled. "The scouts must have found something. Something at all. Anything! The Shionel Dungeon is feared for many reasons, but not because smoke bombs fall from fucking nowhere onto unsuspecting Martial Squires! Someone, somehow, is responsible for this! It must be some competing Martial Squires. I have no idea why they would drop a smoke bomb if they weren't going to attack us, but regardless, we were attacked."
His subordinate paused for a moment, looking as though she was told to swallow her foot. "There has been no discovery by the scouts regarding this matter, sir. However, there is an earlier report by one of the patrolling guards who reported managing to get a glimpse of some figures leaving the fourteenth floor during Squire Harens wide-scale attack."
"What?! Why didn't you inform me about this sooner?" He glared at her with a murderous expression as an avalanche of pressure crashed into her.
"S-Sir, you were the one who told us to refrain from bothering you with reports while the Martial Squires were being healed and saved," She managed to squeeze out.
In reality, he had told them to shut the fuck up before he killed one of them, but she decided it was better not to retort with the exact phrasing of his language.
"Hmph," he snorted, refusing to reply to that. "Bring that patrol guard to me, I want to speak to him myself."
Soon enough, the Martial Squire had gleaned a glimpse of Rui's and Kane's presence.
"Sir," The man bowed.
"You said you spotted some figures leaving the dungeon floor?" The leader asked with a severe tone.
"Did you see they carrying anything? Large bags or containers?" The leader asked.
"No sir, I did not see anything like that."
The leader frowned. ('So some rats entered and left empty-handed?')
"For how long?" The leader followed up. "How many were there? What did they look like?"
"It was for just a millisecond, sir. Frankly, it was just a swift blur, I couldn't make out any further details of any kind."
"Tsk," The leader tutted. "Are you unable to recall anything else?"
"…Unfortunately so, sir," The man's tone became meeker as he felt the anger in his assigned leader's tone.
A few seconds passed as the man finally got a chance to consider all the information he had at hand for the first time. He had been extremely busy with the healing and recovery of the Martial Squires who had got slammed in the head and other vitals with a grade-ten Squire-level attack without the appropriate defenses prepared. If not for the fact that the attack weakened the further it spread out, many more may have died.
His highest priority had been minimizing the losses to Deacon Industries.
Now that the most immediate crises had passed, he was finally beginning to see just how bizarre the events that unfolded were.
The lack of esoteric ore deposits.
The report from the patrol guard earlier.
('Could they all be related somehow? But what does it all mean? What in the world is going on?') He frowned with a solemn expression. ('I need to inform Chairman Deacon of this right now. He'll know what to do with this information.')
He wasn't an analyst, he was mostly relying on his gut instinct regarding the bizarreness of what happened. The only thing he was sure of was that something felt very wrong. Though he wasn't able to even postulate what was happening, things were just so disconnected to him that he wasn't sure what all of it meant.
Regardless, he would need to report all of this to Chairman Deacon and pray he didn't get fired.