Chapter 427 Mousefolk
As Jin's monsters mobbed up the Demon Rat horde with their surprise attack, there were a few casualties on their side. Mainly the Mousefolk as they tried to assassinate the retreating Demon Rats.
While those sentient looking mice were nimble and agile, most of them could not handle more than a hit or two from the enhanced demon rats with their steampunk technology. However, it was also thanks to their small build, providing them with great speed and agility that allowed them to crawl to their weak points, their tails. (Most of them were only thirty centimetres tall!)
Cutting a demon rat's tail was similar to cutting the carotid artery of a human being. Slash that part away, and the farm rats would go into a nervous breakdown which eventually paralysed them, making them unable to breathe. Thus, they would die from suffocating.
It was a newly made discovery, which the mousefolk had paid for to learn about it with a lot of blood. They didn't have the time to share this with Meomi yet, though seeing how she was able to kill them without cutting their tails off proved that their Lady had become even more formidable than the last time they had seen her.
"All the rats are accounted for. None survived, but I will move further into the forest to make sure that they are all truly dead." Peppers reported her findings to the secured System channel before flying on her magical wooden staff to the centre of the forest. With a flick of her finger, Shu appeared at a small clearing which she asked the Ancient Treant to enhance her search magic.
Shu acknowledged the commands of the Demonic Sage Queen as he dug his roots deep into the forest grounds and connected them with the trees in the vicinity. After which, he let Peppers plunge her magic stuff into him via one of his branches. In an instant, the forest lit up with a light greenish aura.
"Huh, so my hunch was right, there are some sneaky rats too. Guess the information about Demon Rats possessing certain attributes of crops or animals is really true." Peppers scribbled something down in her own notebook before she found a signal moving slowly, trying to avoid any detection.
But too bad for that rat.
With Peppers connected into the forest's 'network', masking their presence did nothing to avoid her search magic. Every step any animal or living creature made were all known to Peppers with her enhanced magic.
"Kraft, I need to borrow a few foxes from you." Peppers typed on the new phone she just bought with the System points. (It had a cosmetic magical staff key chain and an anti dust plug as a shape of a hat in the audio jack. Without saying, her phone cover had a picture of her new favourite anime character from Konnosoba.)
"That will be 15 System points!" Kraft gave a sly looking emoticon with a "Just Joking!" sticker before he sent out Ixel, Ixa, Itori to Peppers when he felt a phantom burning sensation behind his ears in the WundaPanda Theme Park. The three foxes popped out in front of Peppers and immediately knew their objective. They ran like quieter than a shadow through the forest in search of their prey.
"Instead of System Points, I can only offer you a toy. Get as much information from it as you can. Have fun~!
Speaking of captured Demon Rats, the System was initially happy to receive more minions to assist with the construction of the Dungeon City Fortress. It already made some calculations as to what task they would be assigned first. But to the System's dismay, it's plan encountered an unexpected error.
The Demon Rats did not spawn back as living breathing monsters… but instead as the original item that was once mutated by the viral plague.
Hence, the System received an assortment of crops, weapons, armour, plants, or animals and other weird junk. And the list continued to increase the more Jin's monsters killed them. (The ones assassinated or shot by the Mousefolk remained as dead Demon Rats.)
If it could only sigh at the disappointment for the anticipation of the war it had harboured, the System would have already done so. (It briefly even calculated whether to discourage Jin from participating in a full scale war against the Demon Rats) However, the death of those Demon Rats was essential to reopen the Farming World markets up again for trade. Lynn also needed crops from it, and for its future expansion. Thus, it was still a war with merits to fight
On a separate note, the werejackals gathered the injured mousefolk and began assisting them with whatever treatment they could manage without the help of Peppers or Milk. There were some crops they grew, which had healing properties and were useful for increasing the regeneration factor of the werehumans. (Since the mousefolk were therianthropic in nature.)
In the meantime, Flame Ripper had decided to scout a little more. Peppers informed them that the coast was clear, yet he did not feel safe at all and had that premonition that someone might be watching them. Besides, it was a good time to practice what his father had taught him during the trip to the Orc capital.
Most of his time had been spent listening while waiting to initiate their backup plan of assassinating Orc King Hamu, which never came to be. (The portals they had used were currently used by Frost Echo the current Orc King for travel and trade between the orcs and goblins.)
Meomi subsequently met up with Gold who was commanding the rest of the werejackals to salvage any possible equipment that was not burnt to be analysed by the researchers or Grey who was now the overall in charge of equipment and tactics for the werejackal.
That responsibility was previously on Gold, but he decided to release some of his duties to the vice leaders so that he could focus more time doing research on the therianthropy spell his friend had left behind. Despite Gold's orders, Grey had decided that the equipment should be sent to the researchers for an initial assessment before he tinkered with it. Gold eventually agreed with him and told his vice leader to proceed with the plan.
Meanwhile, for Gold, he imparted his responsibilities away to have more time for himself. Gold wanted to find out if the therianthropy spell could be improved to entirely isolate the viral plague or perhaps even kill the plague and reverse the effects of partially infected beings.
Unfortunately, it was hard to do purely in theory. The fact that the composition of the spell was a mess to begin with, did not help at all. The Scholar of the West seemed to have done it in a haste, unless, there was some underlying meaning to that messy composition which Gold had yet to discover.
"I am sorry, Gold." Meomi apologised as she knelt in front of him instead of being all high and haughty. "I've disobeyed orders to get in touch with my subjects." She admitted her wrong doings with her head down. Upon seeing that scene, the other mousefolk who were in the vicinity knelt immediately too to ask for forgiveness their Lady.
"How did you even get in touch with them? I thought there were at least 15 days worth of travelling – Wait a minute, did you use the System's portals?" Gold furrowed his eyebrows, and she nodded her head lightly.
"Jin said to use the System's portals as much as possible. When Flame Ripper and Sebastia concluded that there was no sight of any magical users, I immediately opened a portal to that place." She replied.
"But there is one thing I do not understand. Even if you have the System's portal to transport them, how did you know where to open the portal? Don't you need details like the map coordinates? We do not even have a proper map of the Farming world for our debriefing."
"Remember when Brown was previously scouting for the demons you suggested Jin slay? I asked for a favour from Bellator Zeru to give me the coordinates of that place when he went scouting with Brown." Meomi replied. The place they were mentioning was nicknamed the Ording's Sanctuary. It was one of the places which the Jacks were in control of but similar to the name, it was mainly filled with victims from the Ording Town incident.
"Great Master Zeru trained us hard for this very day, Lord Scholar." Poppy, one of the vice leaders that commanded the Mousefolk warriors suddenly spoke out which made Gold and Meomi surprised. Seeing the look of the Lord Scholar Gold and Lady Meomi, he grinned a little before explaining.
"It was very sudden, Great Master Zeru came to visit Ording's Sanctuary saying he was with Sir Brown," Poppy said as he unsheathed his weapon, presenting his katana and there was a Z imprinted on the crossguard. It was something that does not exist in this world and Poppy showed it to them to prove he were not lying. Gold and Meomi for once, did not even doubt him the moment Poppy said the word Zeru.
"He said that a day will come where we might need to fight aside our Lady. We had been worried that the Lady died fighting against the Demon Rats after she disappeared with the Lord Scholar who asked for her assistance. So, we did not believe him until he used some magical screen to show us Lady fighting against living humans as part of her training." Poppy explained.
"When we saw our Lady train herself to come back to us, how could we, as her subjects, not do the same? From that day on, we learned from Great Master Zeru at least an hour each day on a daily basis before he left us alone to train ourselves. Sometimes, he would even bring stockpile of food and weapons as an act of encouragement for seeing improvements in our training." Poppy added which allowed Gold to understand why the mousefolk were that capable of annihilating the Demon Rats. (He knew that most of them were just miners and civilians at the start.)
"I see…no wonder." A tear uncontrollably rolled down from her eyes as she now understood why Zeru out of the blue had told her to search for her hometown people the moment she joined the scouting team. "So…it was for this reason. I did not know there was so much going on behind the scenes. Thank you all for your efforts." Meomi said as she stood up and gave a noble bow as courteous as she could towards the mousefolk.
"There is no need to thank us! We are your subjects and will always be your subjects. Ever since the day you rescued and protected us from the relentless attacks of the Demon Rats with Lady Scholar of the West." Poppy graciously lowered his head once more to give his gratitude.
"Okay enough of all the mushy stuff." Brown interrupted the moment and told the abled body Mousefolk to aid the werejackals to pick up any usable items possible from the dead Demon Rats. Even though a number of the farm rats disappeared into the System's inventory, they left behind the steampunk enhancement armour and weapons all over the places.
If there was one thing that could be reused, it was definitely the equipment which Gold and the rest of Jin's minion knew that the System would find a way to make them reusable again. (or perhaps make them even stronger.)
"Let me help out too." Meomi said in a gentle voice as she assisted along with the mousefolk and caught up with them about what had been happening when she went 'missing'.