Chapter 62: “Long Time No See. Did You Lose Weight?”
The day slowly faded away. The treants didn’t seem to have trouble moving or anything, but Rare still ordered them to become trees and rest while they waited for the undead to appear.
<Princess.>
“Yes, I know. Let’s go take a look.”
Just then, the scouts had reported back about one place where undead were gathering. As a whole, the undead in this forest hadn’t all awoken yet, so if there was already activity at a certain location, that must be the epicenter of undead activity. Even if it wasn’t a jackpot, it was still some kind of key location, no doubt.
<I am loath to recommend splitting up our forces, but shall we leave any here?>
“No, everyone will come. While this may be our temporary base, there’s nothing of importance here, only the sleeping treants. There’s no merit in protecting this specific location.”
They knew the distance and topography to their destination from the scouts’ report. No undead were active in this area yet, and all the treants were already converted, so there were no enemies. Therefore, they could safely prioritize speed.
Even if they were only going to another location around the central area, this forest was huge. It would still take a decent amount of time to get there. At some point, the sun had completely set, and they began to encounter undead starting to wake up. Since they were crawling up from the depths of the earth, normally they would have suffered from ambushes, but Rare and Deas could both generally tell where they would emerge. This was probably because they both had quite a lot of XP invested into [Necromancy]. They hurried along, trampling over any zombies that rose in their path or inside their formation; it felt a little like whack-a-mole.
“I knew it; skill trees aren’t only for learning skills, you can also get some kind of bonus based on how much total XP you’ve spent in that tree. It’s not represented in any way in your stats or anything, though.”