Golden Experience

Rare’s group continued advancing through the forest.

They confirmed that plants attacked them during the day while undead attacked at night. But how Deas saw it, daytime wasn’t a good reason for undead not to be active. Or maybe Deas’s rank was so high that he specifically was able to function during the day. If that were the case, then he should understand that most undead won’t come out while the sun is up. The reverse was true for plant monsters, too; essentially, if they couldn’t perform photosynthesis, then they wouldn’t really be all that active.

Whatever the case may be, the only things that attacked them now were low-ranked trash enemies. Probably around the same level as what they found at home in the Great Liebe Forest. Certainly stronger than the ant engineers and infantry, but not all that different from the knight or ambush units. For how much more mature this forest was, by Rare’s observation at least, their military strength was quite conservative.

“Given how things have developed, it seems there’s no real need to be so vigilant. There’s a chance that someone is playing us, the way we do it back home, but I’ll simply keep that possibility in the back of my mind.”

That day, they traveled as far as they had planned to, then made camp around sunrise. Now they were about two-thirds of the way to their destination. Even if there really were someone screwing with Rare, after her group got this far, there was no way they would simply stay quiet about it. If she were the one behind the curtain, then she would have long since eradicated this interloping group. However, while the sun was out today, the attacks they endured were at about the same level as ones from the day before. If this forest actually was under someone’s control, maybe that person just couldn’t regulate things.

Deas had more than proven his ability to lead a force of this size. Rare instructed him to head straight for the heart of the forest with minimal clearing and no more pointless shows of strength. None of the monsters they had encountered were capable of inflicting any damage on the adamantite soldiers. That meant they could be more aggressive as they maintained their march, pulverizing anything that got in their way.

After that shift in mentality, they arrived at the heart of the forest a little earlier than planned, just as the sun was about to come up.

“But man, there’s nothing here anyway. It’s just more forest.”

The cemetery where Deas and his men had been buried was in fact a bit removed from the center of the forest, and the forest itself was not a perfect circle either. For the time being, they could use this spot as a temporary base and slowly explore their surroundings. Rare wanted to call up some engineer ants to construct a provisional headquarters using the trees in the area, but they were Sugaru’s subordinates, so she couldn’t target them with [Summon].

“If instead of Knight’s Grudges I had Carpenter’s Grudges or Cook’s Grudges, I wonder if I could make like adamantite craftsmen…”

Maybe it was possible, but knowing would be of no help now. And even if she could, it was hard to justify wasting the adamantite on them; if combat strength was unnecessary, then it was better to use a less rare metal.

However, if she did want to conquer this forest, she needed to consider how to maintain and oversee it afterward. The Great Liebe Forest would more or less be fine as long as Sugaru and the ants were there; if it became necessary, the ice wolves were there too as not-quite bodyguards. If she also had this forest, then she’d need personnel who could manage it, but the only manpower Rare could spare were the heavy-metal skeletons, who essentially were good for nothing but combat.

“It would really be best to have a local monster oversee this place once we take control of it. I’d really like to tame an undead or plant boss.”

For now, it was about time to log out. She would head back from here for a short time again. She ordered Deas and the rest of the soldiers to set up the temporary base. Deas, as the leader of knights that had gone on expeditions, should more or less know how to set one up.

By the time Rare returned, it was just past noon in-game, but the platoon was still energetically processing lumber.

“Good morning. You’re certainly working hard.”

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<Good morning to you, Princess. No, this work is not hard at all.>

“But with the sun so high up in the sky, their attacks seem to be quite aggressive.”

Looking around, there was wood lying around everywhere. Since some must have been stored already, there must have been a ton overall.

“The fact that you’ve been attacked by all this means that either their growth cycle is extremely fast, or they’re someone’s followers and just respawning that quickly.”

In either case, once they took control of the forest, the potential profit was huge. Whether they wanted an XP farm or a second theme park, both options seemed practical.

“For starters, I’d like to try turning all this wood into charcoal, but first let’s clean up the area. We can have fun later.”

Rare [Summoned] more adamanscouts from Liebe and assigned them to Deas.

“Prioritize exploration first. If we need, I can call the Kenzakis over to search from the skies as well.”

<If efficiency is important, then that would be preferable. Since the forest is rather dense, if the undead leader is a human-type like myself, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.>

After some thought, Rare decided not to call the Kenzakis. It would still be extremely hard to find a human-sized target in an overgrown forest from the sky. Their efforts would be largely wasted since they weren’t even sure one existed. And if the boss was actually a plant monster, then it would be camouflaged unless someone got close enough anyway.

“We’ll keep waiting for reports from the scouts. In the meantime, I’d like to try chopping down some of these monsters as well. If they can’t scratch the adamantite soldiers, then they can’t possibly hurt me either.”

<As you wish.>

Yoroizaka unsheathed Kenzaki Ichirou, then joined the adamanknights on the front lines. In a display of skill that distinguished her from the adamanknights, she cut down a giant tree all by herself. She didn’t even need to use a skill. Rare was thinking of casting some kind of support spell but decided against it.

“Oh, that reminds me. I haven’t used it recently so I almost forgot about it, but I can try [Subordinate] on them to see if they’ve already been tamed or not.”

She could also test whether [Mental Magic] worked on plant monsters.

“[Stupefy]. Hmm, nothing happened, I don’t think? [Sleep], [Confusion]… neither seem to work, do they. What about [Fear] and [Charm]? [Charm] seems effective. I wonder why? So plant-type monsters do have minds, but the way they’re structured is different, perhaps?”

Since something worked, then this would go faster. Continuing on, she cast [Control], which appeared to succeed, so then she activated [Subordinate]. She didn’t sense much resistance, so the “Camphor Treant” stopped moving and looked at Rare… or maybe it didn’t (since there were no eyes), but anyway, its consciousness reached out to her.

“If I can tame them, then that speeds things up. Let’s just tame them all.”

A short time later, all the camphor treants that had attacked them were under Rare’s control (though it would have taken about the same amount of time to simply kill them).

“Since I could tame them, that means they were all just wild monsters. Which in turn means that either there are tons of them here in this forest, or they just reproduce extremely quickly.”

Looking at their skills, they had a skill tree called [Overgrowth] within which were skills like [Root Division] and [Photosynthesis]. The tree contained mainly skills related to the growth and reproduction of plants. She checked other unlocked skills and found that they did indeed have fast growth cycles.

“There are some weird requirements, too. If their population within a fixed area exceeds a specified amount, they start to die off… True, with these stats, if they kept reproducing without any limit whatsoever, they would take over all the human territory in a flash.”

It wasn’t impossible for this to be a evolutionary form of natural thinning, or a way to maximize the amount of nutrients gained from a given area, but it was more likely that the developers programmed them this way. The result of a previous disaster that came about from allowing them to propagate freely, perhaps.

“Will these treants be able to take root in Liebe, I wonder? Well, since they can walk, ‘take root’ isn’t really an applicable term.”

When they just stood there quietly, they looked just like regular trees; to compare them to a human’s anatomy, everything from below the ankle was stuck into the ground.

“We’ll take the biggest one back and try to plant it. If we make use of root-related skills in the [Overgrowth] tree, it may be able to settle in as a tree. The rest of them will stay here in this forest. Keep reproducing here, and exterminate any others that don’t belong with us.”

She was curious how the offspring of the [Subordinated] individuals would be treated. A new tree grown from a seed should be a completely new individual, but since they weren’t social monsters like the ants were, she would probably have to tame them separately. But what about new trees grown from [Root Division]? Would it be accurate to say that it was a duplicate of the same tree? If so, it should also automatically be one of Rare’s followers.

“We’ll have to investigate a bit.”

All that was left was the undead. They generally didn’t come out during the day, but it was possible for particularly strong ones to ignore that rule. Those were the ones she wanted to find, so she could search for them at any time of day. The scouts could ignore treants now, so for the time being she would have them only look for undead. If any could be found near the heart of the forest, then considering the radius of their search, she could probably get news at any time now.

In any case, it would get dark soon. Time for all the undead to start waking up. It was difficult to find a single undead monster that was active during the day, but being able to analyze the behavior of the entire undead horde might make things a tad easier.