Chapter 480: Recruitment and Ambushes
For the next week, we followed the other two embers around as we wandered through the tundra. The [Priest] who could communicate with embers kept our three clans together, and while I wasn’t sure exactly how the communication happened or how the [Priest] kept our greedy and foolish ember in line, I was more than happy that our village-bearing beasts finally had some control over where we went.
Our primary objective was to recruit other nearby clans who had also been beaten by the universal tree’s invasion. Those who had suffered losses were also those who would harbor the greatest resentment, and thus be most likely to agree to our plan. Our efforts had good results - over the next few weeks, we managed to recruit twenty five more clans to our cause, creating a massive coalition of troops. Of course, the number of actual warriors in each village was much smaller - warriors had died more frequently than regular people during the attacks, and warriors had always been a small subset of the population to begin with. Even so, twenty five clans of people still brought our total population to about ninety thousand - an absolutely massive army by the standards of the tundra.
During the time that we worked on recruiting, our clan kept retreating from the advance of the universal tree. It would be nearly impossible to find surviving villages within the horde of rats, since most people either managed to escape the bulk of the rat army, or got consumed and nibbled down to bones and flesh within a few days. Even so, with every skirmish between our forces and the rats, I could feel how different things were from our panicked, hurried flight away from the invasion. With twenty eight clans working together to fight against the rat horde, the rats were no longer overwhelming - their numbers were actually on the small side, and they had a hard time inflicting serious casualties on our forces. Sometimes, smaller rat swarms were eradicated by mages and archers before they could even engage our melee warriors, which reduced casualties for those battles to practically nothing.
We only saw two giants during that time, which also made me feel somewhat relieved. Based on what I could see, the giants had yet to establish any sort of breeding base, meaning that the universal tree’s forces didn’t have any way to produce more giants besides direct reinforcements. Thus, the more of them that died, and the more area the giants needed to control, patrol, and safeguard, the thinner their numbers seemed to be. Of course, the giants were also far more dangerous than the rat swarms. Since Sallia didn’t have another use of her antimagic field ready when we fought the giants, they ended up killing a few villages before our mages finally managed to dispatch them. Several potential clans we could have recruited were flattened by the two giants right in front of our eyes - and both times, if the giants had been a bit faster, we might have joined those mobile villages in total annihilation.
Despite these problems, we continued to fight back - especially Anise, Felix and I. The three of us kept seeing rat bases pop up at the edge of my vision abilities, and decided that the enemy was having much too easy of a time. Seeing them constantly set up new breeding bases, massacre everything in their surroundings, and devour everything like a swarm of piranhas was infuriating, even if we mostly saw it through my dimensional sight. Thus, the three of us got to work, and after several days of experimentation and research, Felix managed to create a new weapon. It was a type of explosive made from the bodies of fallen rats, snow, Anise’s spells, and a little bit of ironleaf.
This explosive was one of the very few good things to come out of the invasion. While the invasion from the universal tree was a catastrophe for the residents of this world, it also brought an influx of plentiful rat blood, bones, and flesh - which other crafting-oriented sparks had immediately set to work experimenting with. [Bonesmiths], a spark type focused around converting monster bones into weapons and armor, were the first to discover how useful the bones of shapeshifting rats were. During the weeks we had been marching around, finding clans and recruiting them, the [Bonesmiths] had found a new type of arrow that could forcibly trigger a rat’s shapeshifting abilities. This caused the rat’s body to shapeshift in random and uncontrolled ways, which often screwed up their organs and killed them instantly. These arrows only cost a bit of mana and material to produce, and had become a staple of the front lines as we fought against the rats.
Felix was the one who discovered uses for the rat’s blood after he got the idea to start experimenting with rat corpses. During his experimentation, he realized that the rat blood was where their essence was stored - which was very different from how transmigrators worked. Our essence was stored in some kind of strange essence pool that existed due to the interaction between our soul and body, with no physical component to it at all, while the rats quite obviously stored their essence as if it were any other type of energy. This left all four of us scratching our heads after Felix’s discovery, but for now we attributed it to the different nature of different kinds of multiverse-level empires.
In any case, the rats storing large quantities of essence in their blood made their blood a very useful crafting material for weaker items. Felix found a way to turn a few drops of blood into a weapon, by boiling the blood while binding it all into a smaller and smaller quantity of actual blood. This process was tedious, but it could be done in large batches - and at the end of the boiling process, one would have a few drops of high-essence blood that were highly unstable. Normally, this would result in an explosion afterwards - but Anise had a sealing spell based around snow, so the two of them used a seal to lock the droplet of blood into a small snowball and keep it from blowing up in their face. After that, all they had to do was attack a few small fragments of ironleaf into the snow to create rudimentary magic grenades. The moment one of these snowballs was thrown, it would disrupt Anise’s seal, making the whole thing explode on contact.
Then, we started using my portals to teleport these exploding snowballs into rat nests every time one was nearby. Even though it was nowhere near able to keep up with the rate at which the rats seized territory, reproduced, and grew in number, it was still a way to at least control their population a little bit. It was also nice to receive some assists for each round of bombing - apparently, opening the portal was still enough for me to get some System rewards, even if Felix was the one that got credited for the actual kills.
| Slaughter: Assist in killing a rodent of the roots for the two hundred and fiftieth time, five hundredth time, and thousandth time.
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| Achievement +500, Achievement +600, Achievement +750
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I didn’t get any levels from the local System, since Felix was the one pushing the grenades through the portal, and according to the local System, that meant he got 100% of the level rewards. However, I wasn’t mad about that - Felix’s crafting abilities were still our greatest hope for a victorious battle when we returned to the Market. Felix was also the weakest in direct combat, so finding a good way to level up was more of a blessing in disguise than anything else.
Felix’s levelling progress wasn’t the only good news from him. The cooperation of all of the nearby clans also meant that it was very easy to get access to a wide variety of different sparks - which meant everyone was basically spoiled for choice. Felix took the opportunity to get another woodcarver spark when he reached level 41. He then proceeded to level up at a crazy pace, since the grenades continued to feed him generous servings of experience points whenever he dropped them into a base. Absurdly enough, even though Felix had been far behind me for most of the time spent in this world, he reached level 61 before I reached level 45. Then, he created a compound spark.
The bonuses he got for creating a compound spark finally gave him the confidence to carve the splinter of universal tree wood into a proper weapon, which he spent the last week working on. Even though it wasn’t directly useful to our battle against the universal tree, since we would have to save the weapon for the Market, it was one of the most important things Felix could do for our group’s survival as a whole.
Finally, during the third week of the clan alliance, Felix created a new Market item.
| Item: Splinter of Annihilation Effects: One time use item. Upon use, this item is destroyed permanently. This item targets a creature on a conceptual level. Then, it will fly towards the enemy and attempt to ‘bind’ with that enemy on a conceptual level. Regular physical attempts to dodge this item will not work - only manipulation at a conceptual level can interfere with this binding process. If successfully bound to another creature, that creature permanently annihilates ten grades of every stat. For several minutes after binding, the creature will experience extreme mental distress and weakness, extreme heaviness impacting every limb, slowed reaction times, hallucinations, and possible death if its remaining stats are not capable of fending off the splinter’s influence. Item can target any creature which you can perceive or understand at a conceptual level, regardless of distance, eyesight, or any other usual limitation on targeting. Maintenance cost - 0.0 Achievement
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A week after Felix made the {Splinter of Annihilation} and equipped it to one of his item slots in place of my old umbrella, things progressed on the local front. We stopped finding new clans to recruit, and after a few days, the leaders of each clan convened, and came to a decision. It was time to strike back. It was still a very dangerous mission, and most clans would have preferred finding more people to work with - but the rats were spreading every day, and we were having a harder and harder time finding more people to join us. Thus, it was time for our counterattack to begin.