Luck was not on the side of the newly created party since Fae was already herding the kids outside of their old room by dawn with sleep still hanging to their eyelids as they nodded a few times before meeting with the rest of Debauchery."Is this pay back for ignoring the lot of you yesterday? I had a mother to please, I think you already know you are in second place when it comes to mom right ?". Dustan had a victorious smile on his face "this is for not inviting us to such a delicious meal, how could you be so ungrateful!". "Wait, did you steal from an orphanage" asked Reina incredulously. "This is Debauchery we are talking about, of course they did steal from the orphanage" confirmed Leol. Fae rushed to defend Debauchery "hey!, we are not thieves, we just made a trade, we took the food and left behind enough gold for them to feast for a year", "did you ask first?", "No!" "Thieves!"
The bickering did not last long after, thanks to Bai declaring that he was the thief and if one is unhappy about it they can fight him, the Valyrians just shrugged it off and said "telling the truth is better than lying" and ended it at that. Fighting a cranky Bai before dawn was not a healthy option.
The destination for today was the eternal forest, home of the beasts and elves, a perfect training grounds for level 2 and 3, as well as a good feeding ground for Drogon thanks to the huge number of nests in the area, Fae teleported the group under the world tree, and made the arrangements allowing the kids to hunt and train in the forest as well as allow Debauchery to roam freely in search of the cult.
By noon everything was ready, and the first lesson was started "ranging and hunting in the forest" it worked like one would expect from Debauchery, Lucian would teach the kids about how identify tracks and traps, finding frequented paths, recognising the beasts by trail and what they leave behind. Meanwhile Dustan and Balin are to ambush the kids and run away with guerilla tactics, While Leader and Fae were to use magic to confuse the kids or lead them to traps or "encounters" as Leader named it.
As for Bai he was infiltrating the lab that the cult operated, he took the easy route of inserting himself into the memories of every person in that lab from the guards to the scientists, and enjoyed the best treatment as well as all the information they could possibly give him. The way Bai read memories was like a search engine looking for a keyword. He can read an article but might not understand it, so he got the scientists to teach him about all their findings. This helped him sort out and understand the memories he got and make sense of them. He also got more information about how the cult worked and how information was on a need to know basis, if a region was lost one day, no other regions would know about it, maybe with the exception of the higher ups in the central bases.
After that he planted himself in the memories of the transport team and sent himself to the central base that was responsible for the eternal forest, it was a global district responsible for all the scientists and technology recovery from the old era, here he sneaked about and found a list of sites and their findings. Bai then manipulated the officers in there to send him all reports and notify him about any new uncovered laboratories and the technology inside of them.
This special base was connected to the highest authority in the cult directly but they had to wait for the cult to contact them when there was a report to be made or something that requires the attention of the higher ups. Bai then returned to Debauchery while waiting to be notified about the link with cult arriving at the science base.
The first month of training without Bai was mostly about scouting and identification of the world around them, as well keep a part of their brains focused on danger detection, with the current attributes the kids had, it was hard to keep vigilance at all times but it was beaten into them by the unpredictable attacks from Balin and Dustan, they did not care about time or what the kids were doing, even the most embarra.s.sing times were not safe from the duo.
The Valyrians who barely left each other before, were now sticking together no matter what they were doing, from drawing water from a spring to s.h.i.tting and p.i.s.sing under guard. As for the innate vigilance they had learned, it only manifested during sleep time, since the kids were being consciously vigilant any other time. The kids also learned the basic scouting techniques Lucian had and were able to locate nests on their own to either hunt or leave alone.
The second month was mostly about fighting level 2 and level 3 monsters, as well as training Drogon into a creating a telepathic voice of his own to communicate with the kids, and that took feeding him a dozen level 2 nests before Drogon was big enough to project his voice into Yunan"s head, the first words it said were "hungry, food". And after eating his meal he told Yunan "strong monster, strong Drogon". Drogon also learned how to control the output of his flames, he went from filling a room into small precision fire b.a.l.l.s that hurts only one target, it also learned flight and spotting for his group helping them avoid those nasty ambushes.
On the third month, the kids were tasked to hide away from Balin and Dustan and take them on wild goose chase while staying out of their sight, they learned quickly how to fake tracks and hide their own but the hiding was a bit too much for them, and that is when Bai made a needed comeback. For the first time the kids thought that having Bai around was very nice and they made sure to suck up to Bai for all his experience and expertise.