208 Quest Loophole (1/2)

Before nightfall, Roland had walked three or four circles around the east main street and had already scouted out the general range of the quest area. It was basically a circle, and the center point was in a very large brothel compound.

The quest area was about a three hundred meter radius with this building as the center.

In other words, the clues related to the queen's disappearance were in this area.

The two magic spiders disappeared from the balcony with great speed.

Then, an image or two flashed in Roland's mind from time to time.

One spider went directly to the most central point of the quest, the extremely luxurious brothel compound.

The other one went from house to house to see if there was anything unusual.

Having only two magic spiders to scout wasn't too efficient, but it was much better than Roland risking being discovered during the curfew himself.

Originally there were three of them. Roland also kept one beside Mijil in case the Shadow Guild came looking for trouble again—only one guard puppet was still a bit unsafe. If he had eyes there, then it would be better to know what was going on, and in case something really happened, the rescue would become more targeted.

He wouldn't be like a headless fly ramming into things all over the place.

The first spider had lurked unnoticed from the shadowy corner of the street into the backyard of the brothel mansion, then crawled along the wall to a balcony on the second floor and infiltrated the room after verifying that no one was watching.

Meanwhile, the second spider had been moving in and out of the merchant buildings on the street, looking for anything suspicious.

These Spell Puppets would inherit the summoner's common sense and some cognitive abilities, while the magic spider had been specially enhanced by Roland in these areas until they were at a similar level as Roland.

In other words, the anomalies or clues that Roland could find, it was reasonable to say that they could as well.

Roland sat quietly on the balcony, enjoying the night view while savoring fruit wine.

All he had to do was to sit quietly and wait for the snippets of footage that the spider sent back.

But even then, Roland still felt that it was not very efficient. There were only two… If there were a hundred, or even if there were only forty-five, then the efficiency of scouting would be greatly improved.

It was just that as a level-zero spell, the Spell Puppet's model capacity was so only so large, and now it was just about at its limit. Roland estimated that fixing up another sound transmission function for it was the limit.

In other words, it was fine for scouting a small area or tracking one or two enemies, but it was less capable than desired for a large area search like this.

'How should I increase the number of scouting magic spiders?'

If he wanted to increase the number, he had to give up something, but both picture transmission and synchronized sound transmission were important.

”Is there any specialty in spell cloning or something like that?” Roland said to himself.

Then more and more images were transmitted into Roland's mind. There were merchants working on their tables, scholars reading books, and goblin couples fighting[1]. And when the first magic spider completely entered the brothel compound, there were more images of goblins fighting.

Roland felt a bit helpless, wanting very much to summon the first spider back, but the brothel compound was the central point of the quest area, so the search could not be abandoned.

Two spiders were still too inefficient in their search and found little that was useful or peculiar.

It would soon be morning, and the marble white color of the dawn sky already appeared on the horizon.

Roland reckoned that he might have to return home empty-handed tonight, but just then, the second spider suddenly sent over an image of several black-robed people holding a cloth sack, walking towards a gloomy alley.

Something seems to be wiggling in the cloth sack?

A kidnapping?

This world really was dark—at night, just by sending two spiders out, he could see terrible things.

Roland pondered for a while. Not waiting for him to decide whether to go and see what was going on or not, the quest system triggered once again.

Received secondary quest: Save the Poor Commoners.

It was a quest, a system-certified quest—it had to be completed no matter what.

Roland stood up and looked outside.