Ch.973Where Shall We Go?

After obtaining the necessary information and supplies, I boarded the airship again and headed straight south.

The leisurely days were over. Now that I had arrived at the battlefield, I needed to move as quickly as possible.

News of my arrival at the Holy State’s border would soon reach the ears of those elves.

Before they could prepare countermeasures, I wanted to definitively resolve at least one of the three frontlines.

“Demiaaaaan!”

The first to welcome us upon our arrival at the southern front was Millia, whose face was half-contorted with longing for her lord.

Millia pounced on Demian like a werebeast that had finally found prey after decades of starvation, embracing him tightly.

“Ah, Milli—wait, stop… gack!”

Demian staggered, letting out a groan from the overly intense hug.

A charge so powerful it made even a hero as strong as me stagger.

If she had rushed at an ordinary person like that, wouldn’t they have died instantly, coughing blood? It was literally a murderous embrace.

“You’ve arrived, Lord Haschal. It seems the matters in the capital were resolved well.”

“I greet you, Kagan. Have you been well?”

“You’re back, miss? I see your clothes have changed again—looks like you burned your armor to a crisp this time too.”

Next, Nigel, Jahan, and Leonore welcomed me. All three seemed to have been through quite an ordeal, as their auras felt rougher and sharper than before.

Their strength had clearly increased. Not only Millia and Nigel who had already crossed the threshold, but Jahan and Leonore had also achieved significant growth.

Is one day of war better than a hundred days of training?

Comparing them to Frider who was just about to cross the threshold, there wasn’t much difference—both seemed just one step away from reaching the realm of heroes.

“It’s been a while, all of you. As for the capital… we won. We did win.”

I shrugged in greeting and gave an awkward smile through the cigarette smoke.

Since Hestella’s capital had also suffered considerable damage despite our victory, I felt somewhat embarrassed to claim it was well resolved.

“That’s an ominous answer…”

Leonore shook her head with a slight sigh.

Her tone suggested she could guess what happened without being told. Her hair, hanging limply perhaps from lack of time to maintain it, wafted a faint fragrance as it swayed insolently.

“We can talk about that later at our leisure. Let’s put out the urgent fires first. The urgent fires. How’s the situation here?”

I asked about the southwestern front as I walked down from the airship toward the temporary command tent.

“Well, same as always. The forest advances, elves and spirits charge in, we drive them back with all our might, push the forest back with dragon fire. Rinse and repeat.”

Leonore answered with a slight shudder, as if thoroughly sick of it.

It seemed the elves weren’t attacking with their full force either, resulting in daily repetitions of fruitless offensives and counteroffensives.

“The elven forces consist of eight Guardians and about a hundred Patrollers. Without the fire dragon, we would have been pushed back helplessly.”

Nigel added supplementary information.

Though they were struggling due to insufficient forces after Joshua and Heinrich were dispatched to Lacy’s side, they were somehow maintaining a stalemate thanks to the fire dragon Kudsedra.

“Where is she now?”

“She’s scouting the forest movements at the frontline. She’ll be back soon.”

Hmm. It was a good decision to send the fire dragon here.

Though I had my doubts about her reliability since she became a slave just to survive, it seemed she was performing more faithfully than expected.

If she continued to work hard, I might even consider reducing the term of her slave contract.

“Originally, we wanted to scout above the Great Forest, but she refused, saying it was impossible. It’s quite unfortunate.”

“Ah, she’s right about that. Flying over there would get her shot down in an instant.”

I corrected Nigel’s misunderstanding as I tossed my finished cigarette to the ground.

Refusing to scout over the Great Forest wasn’t work negligence but a necessary choice for survival. The homeland of Alvheim had an anti-air network directly laid by the World Tree.

Cone-shaped structures formed by hundreds of intertwined tree roots rising at an angle.

The moment the World Tree detected an enemy approaching the Great Forest by air, these structures would open their pointed tips wide and become giant anti-air cannons, firing high-temperature beams.

Light cannons that compressed the power of the sun absorbed through the vast forest and fired it through root barrels. The nickname was Solar Ray, wasn’t it?

Continuous firing would cause parts of the forest itself to wither and die, but even so, it wasn’t an anti-air network that could be breached by a single dragon.

If such a network didn’t exist, Alvheim would have fallen long ago.

After all, one could simply load several dwarven airships or airborne vessels with elite forces and advance straight to the World Tree for an assault.

But the elves and the World Tree knew this well, which is why they had obsessively covered the area with anti-air defenses.

Demian and I might be able to break through with some effort due to our small size, but a dragon would be impossible.

If dragons were agile enough to dodge beam-type anti-air fire despite their size, their status would be nearly ten times higher than it is now. They would truly be considered stronger than gods.

So I couldn’t order Kudsedra to fly over the Great Forest.

She would obey if I commanded it, but it would be meaningless.

With the Ring of Returning Seal, I could revive her even if she died from the light cannons, but unlike unicorns, dragons take longer to resummon.

Even if I used Kudsedra to waste the anti-air cannons and induce forest devastation, the World Tree would restore the damaged forest during the time it took to resummon her.

The speed of forest regeneration is slower than dragon resummoning, so if repeated infinitely, we might eventually inflict meaningful damage, but…

…who has time to wait for that?

Unless we planned to drag this war on for a hundred years, victory through infinite resurrection dragon dives was impossible.

Similarly, launching assault operations or bombing runs via airships would be like throwing money and military power down the drain.

“…Then how do we deal with them? If we can’t approach by air or land, isn’t the Great Forest essentially impregnable?”

“Yes, that’s right. They haven’t survived this long for nothing.”

To be frank, they’re a species that’s practically at odds with every other race, yet they’ve managed to hold out for eight hundred years.

That’s all thanks to the natural barrier called the Great Forest.

Approach from the air and you’ll be shot down by the anti-air network; advance ground troops into the forest and it’s practically suicide.

Thanks to the World Tree’s blessing, elves could manipulate the surrounding forest at will. In other words, the battlefield itself becomes the enemy’s weapon.

In fact, their siege technique “Flood” was exactly that kind of attack.

A wide-area destruction technique where the World Tree itself, not the elves, moves the forest to sweep away an area.

Considering the scale, it must consume divine power each time it’s used, but the fact that it’s been used two or three times already suggests the World Tree is quite determined.

Or perhaps it’s consuming some resource that can be used in place of divine power like water.

“…This is troublesome. Does this mean we really have no choice but to continue a long war of attrition? Against elves known to live for over a thousand years?”

Nigel sighed. His reaction seemed to ask if we could even win this.

His expression wasn’t one of despair from lost confidence, but rather one filled with urgency, as if thinking we needed to find some way.

“A war of attrition certainly isn’t ideal. They have abundant resources thanks to the forest and seem to be mass-producing Guardians, while we can’t do the same.

The Holy State might continue fighting to the end, but with Feilandria now openly making moves, I can’t afford to be tied down here for a decade or more.

A prolonged war wasn’t the answer. As always.

“Then…”

“If the sky doesn’t work and the ground doesn’t yield an answer, what other option is there?”

I looked down at my feet and grinned.

“We go underground.”

Infiltration through the underground. There was no other way to penetrate the Great Forest.

“Underground… you say?”

“Yes. Originally, infiltration operations begin with digging tunnels.”

“There she goes with another crazy idea. Miss, you must be from the plains and don’t know, but trees have these things called roots?”

Leonore, who had been listening intently, shook her head as if to say what nonsense.

I just chuckled. She was right, after all.

“You think I don’t know that?”

Just as it’s natural for you to have a witch mother, it’s natural for trees to have roots.

As Leonore said, even underground wasn’t a safe advance route. Or rather, it could be considered extremely dangerous.

The fact that they can control the forest at will means that tree roots will also attack us according to their will.

Even if we approached through tunnels, from the moment our presence was detected, tree roots from all directions would break through the soil to tear us apart.

However, even so…

“Isn’t it better to face just roots, rather than roots, trunks, branches, leaves, and elves all at once?”

It was certainly a much safer advance route than the surface.

There was a risk of the tunnel collapsing from root attacks, but that could be addressed by deploying a small elite force capable of responding even if the tunnel collapsed.

“Wait, why does that sound convincing…? It clearly doesn’t make sense…”

Leonore was confused. I smiled reassuringly and explained another advantage of the underground infiltration plan.

“We don’t even need to dig the tunnels ourselves. Perneisia said they have tunnels they dug before.”

This was information I had received from Perneisia while on the airship heading to the battlefield.

It was a product from the time when she was still a Guardian of Alvheim, when she led an anti-Senate movement with her sympathizers to demand reforms.

Originally created as an emergency escape route in case things went wrong, it was left hidden after they were all captured before they could use it.

Whether that passage still remained was unknown without checking, but even if it had been abandoned, it could still be useful as long as it hadn’t completely collapsed.