* * *[ Hilde ]* * *
The next morning.
A bit early for the morning sun to rise, I woke up before anyone else in the group and got up.
“Mmm…”
I carefully detached Friede, who was sleeping soundly while hugging my arm with her limbs, and Amy, who was pressed against my other arm.
They had both surely been sleeping inside their sleeping bags, but when I woke up, I found them clinging to my sides.
Well, I thought it might be because it was so cold. A person’s arm would be much warmer than a crude sleeping bag.
They probably unconsciously clung and hugged me in their sleep.
“Huaaam…”
I yawned long as I put on the helmet at my head again, fastened the gauntlets I had taken off onto my arms, and opened the tent entrance.
I thought I’d lightly warm up my body before the party members woke up.
“Yaaawn… Ah, Ms. Hilde…?”
Perhaps woken by the rustling sound, Gerda raised her upper body, cracked her neck left and right, and then spoke to me, looking at me with half-closed eyes.
“You’re up already… I see you don’t… sleep in much.”
Her voice was heavy with sleep.
“Oh, did I wake you? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb your deep sleep.”
I bowed my head slightly and offered a perfunctory apology.
“…No. It’s my habit to wake up around this time anyway.”
Gerda answered, shaking her head lightly as if to shake off the sleepiness.
“Is that so.”
That’s good then. I would have felt a bit sorry if I had woken someone who was sleeping well.
I smiled lightly and stepped out of the tent.
* * *
Stars shimmer like a school of silver fish swimming across the deep navy sky.
“Haa…”
I exhaled white breath like smoke and lowered my raised head to look around the camp.
It was still before sunrise.
The light from torches planted like spears between the temporary palisades surrounding the camp’s perimeter dimly illuminated the predawn darkness.
A few adventurers armed with bows or spears stood watch next to the torches, and several men presumed to be paladins were patrolling along the palisade, giving various instructions to the adventurers.
Well, by instructions, it was probably just advising them not to doze off or get absorbed in chatting, and to be thoroughly vigilant for any suspicious movements outside the palisade.
I walked to an open space about twenty paces away from the tent where Amy and Friede were sleeping, then drew the sword at my waist and began thrusting and swinging it in the air to warm up my body.
“Ha! Haa!”
The movements I had instinctively performed, the situations I had been in at the time, the minute movements of my fingers, even the control of my breathing.
I swing my sword as if imitating all of that while recalling it in my mind. Until I can perfectly embody that swordsmanship and recreate it freely.
This was my own method of training.
If I could perfectly master Brunhilde’s swordsmanship, at least I wouldn’t be outmatched in swordsmanship anywhere I went.
“Phew…”
After swinging my sword like that for about an hour, I took a short break to rehydrate, then started strength training.
Things like doing one-arm handstands in armor and repeatedly bending and straightening my arm… that sort of thing.
Since Brunhilde’s basic strength was already enough to easily surpass modern people who claimed to work out, I had to put this much load on or it wouldn’t train me at all.
Even this was barely enough to prevent muscle loss without increasing the weight further.
Anyway, after training like that for about two hours, the surroundings had noticeably brightened.
“Haa… Haa…”
I sat down on a tree stump to rest and waited for Amy and Friede to wake up.
My body radiated heat, soaked in sweat. White steam wafted out from between my clothes and armor. It felt almost like having a steam engine in my belly.
“Are you finished? To be so diligent in training from such an early hour, that’s rare dedication among adventurers.”
Gerda, who had come out of the tent at some point, spoke to me.
She was sitting cross-legged on a cloak spread on the bare ground of the open space, with small mortar-like tools laid out in front of her, grinding various plant-like things.
Things like bright red mushrooms or purple flower petals.
She was dividing the powders she made into small cloth pouches, or pouring them into small reagent bottles and shaking them…
“What’s that?”
It looked obviously suspicious from its appearance, and didn’t seem like something good for the body to anyone who saw it.
“It’s poison. It won’t be effective against undead… but it’s not bad to have it prepared.”
As expected.
The advantage and characteristic of the ranger profession is that they can do a bit of everything reasonably well, but conversely, this means they’re mediocre in all aspects.
That’s why, as I mentioned before, rangers actively employed various tools and techniques to make up for this weakness.
Gerda must have chosen poison. To supplement her somewhat mediocre killing power using deadly poisons she gathered and mixed herself.
For this request, the opponent is undead, so poison will rarely be effective, but if the enemy were ordinary monsters, it would have been very useful.
* * *
About ten minutes later.
“Huu… I overslept. I usually don’t do that…”
Friede, wrapped in a cloak and hood, came out of the tent rubbing her half-closed eyes and dragging her greatsword.
“Yaaawn… What, you all woke up early…”
Following behind her, Amy also came out stretching widely.
“Ah, you’re up? That’s good. I was just about to wake you.”
“Good morn- I mean, um, did you sleep well, Hilde! It’s a… it’s a good morning!”
“Yeah, good morning.”
Sitting by the campfire Gerda had lit, I waved my right hand slightly towards Friede and Amy, exchanging morning greetings.
“If you’re awake, come over here for now. Gerda prepared breakfast, so let’s eat before it gets cold. Wash your faces too.”
A stew made by boiling melted snow water with salt, herbs, rationed preserved food, and dried meat.
It was an incredibly crude dish, but… surprisingly quite edible. The herbs completely masked the gamey smell of the meat.
“It-It’s delicious…! Um, can I… can I have just one more bowl…?”
“Hmm… well, it’s not bad. Were you that hungry…?”
Friede and Amy also expressed satisfaction with the taste of the stew. Amy’s praise was a bit crooked, as usual for her.
To make this level of taste with ingredients no better than slop… As expected of a ranger. They’re really useful in many ways.
After filling our stomachs with warm stew and washing our faces with lukewarm water, we put on our equipment and stepped into the forest.
The second day of searching that began like this showed a somewhat different aspect from the first day.
The frequency of encountering undead decreased to less than three-tenths of the previous day, but instead, the number of undead encountered at once increased nearly fourfold.
Moreover, not just the numbers, but their intelligence seemed to have increased as well.
There were even instances where three or four revenants were used as bait, and ten wights hidden by digging into the ground launched a surprise encirclement attack.
“There, it seems like there’s another one hiding.”
Of course, we weren’t going to fall for such ambushes because we had a reliable ranger.
Even if the undead perfectly concealed their appearance, they couldn’t eliminate faint smells or traces of dug earth.
We just had to stop as Gerda instructed and pour murderous preemptive attacks in the direction she pointed.
However…
“…This is not good.”
“Indeed.”
While it wasn’t a big problem for us since we could deal with it in that way, looking at the search party as a whole, this was quite a serious matter.
Not only had the undead started gathering together, but the tactics they employed had progressed to an astonishing degree. What could this mean?
“It seems certain that the Abyss Priest is nearby. Looking at how they’ve come up with and implemented countermeasures just a day after we started searching.”
Amy muttered the answer.
That’s right.
The behavior patterns of the undead we encountered today were clearly designed to defeat the search parties scattered in party units one by one.
Our party could avoid ambushes thanks to Gerda, and with my and Friede’s skills being among the best within copper token, plus having a magician, we could fight comfortably…
“Um… weak… no, clumsy parties. Such, such parties might be in a bit of danger.”
As Friede said, even among copper token adventurers, those who were ambiguous could be surrounded and killed in an instant without it being strange.
Boom!
In fact, we saw flares, which we hadn’t seen even once yesterday, nearly five times today.
Although we couldn’t go to check because the locations were quite far.
“…Right. We should go back and talk about this first.”
Therefore, I decided to return much earlier than yesterday.
If the situation had changed, the countermeasures would have to change as well.
* * *
As expected, the atmosphere in the temporary camp we returned to was somewhat restless.
“Ah, you’ve returned! Um… was it Hilde you said? Thank goodness.”
The paladin who had remained in the camp even greeted us first, welcoming the return of a mere adventurer party.
“Thank goodness… so you also know what the state of the forest is like right now?”
“Yes. The search parties that returned earlier reported it. It’s become quite troublesome…”
The paladin exhaled a faint sigh and laid out the detailed story as if complaining.
The story of how nearly two-tenths of the search parties sent out today had been killed without returning.
In fact, even this was just the minimum estimated damage.
The number of two-tenths was only tallied from the reports of those who had barely returned alive after losing party members.
For parties that hadn’t returned yet, it was impossible to even grasp how many had died.
They had sent them with flares to prepare for such situations, but since the subjugation force’s manpower was also limited, they couldn’t rescue all of them?
Spreading the adventurers widely had turned out to be a bad move.
It was the only way to exterminate the undead spread throughout the forest and find the Abyss Priest hiding somewhere… but at this rate, the search party would be annihilated before finding the Abyss Priest.