“There’s been a Behemoth sighting in the Sea of Trees?”
“Yes. And a very big one, bigger than even an Upper Construct. We can also confirm that it has powerful regenerative abilities.”
My eyes widened at Relisha’s report. A Behemoth even bigger than an Upper Construct? How was something like that missed for so long?
“Its name is the Tree Dragon, Yggdrasil. It’s a Dragon recorded in so few records that no one knows if it even exists. Or, it was, at least.”
“It was previously extinct, then?”
“Yes, and has now supercharged to become a much more troublesome foe.”
In other words, it was another magic beast that had been called through a distortion caused by the wicked devout.
Do they bring anything of value?
As Grandma Tokie’s servants, the time spirits would close up the tear, but we’d have to handle the beast that popped out. I asked Luli if she could do anything given it was a Dragon and all, but Yggdrasil was categorized as a Fiendrake, so it wasn’t under her purview.
“Useless lizard,” Kohaku muttered. Luli refused to take that sitting down and immediately lashed out at her. I let them fight among themselves, but I’d much rather they took it outside.
“The tribes of the Sea of Trees have sent an emergency request for aid,” Kousaka continued, holding out a letter sent through the Gate Mirror. As he said, it was a request from Pam, the chieftain of the tribes, asking for reinforcements.
I’d tried to give them smartphones before, but they didn’t take them, saying they found it too complicated to use. Getting them to at least accept a Gate Mirror was the best I could do. That said, the tribes didn’t make use of written text much, so all the letter contained was a simple “ENEMY HERE. SEND HELP.” It felt kind of like one of those old telegrams from long ago.
The Sea of Trees wasn’t part of the alliance, but they did have a treaty with Brunhild, so we couldn’t ignore them, which meant we definitely needed to provide aid. We were still suffering casualties after the battle at Lassei, however, so we were limited in how much support we could send.
For some reason, when I went up to Babylon to confirm how repairs were going and to explain the situation, Quun turned to me with sparkling eyes.
I’ve got a really bad feeling about this...
“What wonderful timing! I just finished the most perfect weapon!”
“Weapon? For the Frame Gears?”
Previous experience immediately told me that it was going to be some completely bonkers weapon. I couldn’t refuse her, though, so I at least tagged along with her to the hangar to see what she’d made.
“Take a look! Feast your eyes on the vibrating rotary blade, the Chainblade!”
“You mean a chain saw?”
Attached to a massive sword blade were a bunch of small phrasium blades. That big engine on the handle was probably what rotated it. Like I said, it was literally just a big chain saw.
And yet another unexpected gimmick is added to the collection...
“The little fine blades mean this weapon doesn’t specialize in cutting, but in shaving down! It’ll crush the wound so thoroughly that it won’t be able to regenerate easily! I guarantee you that it’ll turn even the wicked god into mincemeat! Calling it a killer of the divine would be no exaggeration!”
Hey, did you forget that your papa’s a god too? And you’re half god? What a frightening creation...
Still, she was probably right that it would work wonders against that Tree Dragon, especially since it looked like it could slice through thick bark easily. Apparently, Yggdrasil was a Dragon made entirely of trees, which was why it took so long for the tribes to notice it, despite it being a Behemoth.
Quite literally missing the Behemoth for the trees, huh?
First we had that stampede in the desert, now we’ve got this Tree Dragon in the Sea of Trees... Did these dimensional gaps never transport from a different place than where they opened? If the creature was pulled from the desert in the past, it would only appear in the desert in the present. If the creature was pulled from the Sea of Trees in the past, it would only appear in the Sea of Trees in the present. Maybe Yggdrasil had lived in the Sea of Trees before being transported here.
Since it was a Dragon made of trees, I’d considered just burning it, but that risked damaging the Sea of Trees as a whole, and live trees were resistant to fire anyway. There was so much water inside of one that heat didn’t travel very easily. Even if you managed to burn its surface, you often failed to burn the insides. And since Yggdrasil was a living creature, wouldn’t its water content be even higher than a regular tree? At worst, we could end up burning down the Sea of Trees and Yggdrasil would come out perfectly fine.
“Take it from me, this weapon is actually really good. The biggest bottleneck is the need to prepare a source of mana separately to use the thing, but you can account for that with replaceable mana cartridges. It won’t immediately slice through things, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s more likely to be able to cut than bounce off. It’s a fun little trinket.”
Doc Babylon’s rare unadulterated praise had Quun puffing her chest out in pride. She was exuding the aura of someone who wanted to be praised, so I gave her a good pat on the head. Admittedly, I was a little worried about how easily she was appeased by a good compliment...
“How many do you have?”
“I have three prototypes and one finished one. Oh, and one that’s made for the Ortlinde Overlord.”
She’d even made one for the Overlord? This Dragon was about to get torn to pieces, the poor thing.
“If you give us an hour, we could duplicate ten more with the workshop.”
It only took an hour to make ten of something like this? That meant they made one every six minutes...
What is this, cup chain saw?
I wasn’t about to deny that it was a real lifesaver, though. Apparently, they were able to do it that fast because the structure wasn’t that complicated. Did that mean chain saws were really simple to make too?
Yggdrasil wasn’t acting up right now, and it wasn’t heading toward any of the villages either, so we did have a few hours of leeway.
“All right, get started on producing them, then. We’ll head out an hour from now.”
“Roger that.”
Leaving the engineers to work their magic, I went to notify the knights to prepare to head out. We’d be the only ones on the field this time, since the tribes of the Sea of Trees weren’t part of the alliance. We’d purely be acting as Brunhild, which was good friends with the Rauli Tribe, home to the current Treelord.
This would also be the first time the knights would get to sortie on Val Albus. It would be faster to just teleport there using [Gate], but I’d never been to the areas near where Yggdrasil currently was, and it also served as good training for occasions where I wasn’t around to teleport people. Now that the Ark was destroyed, there was no need to hide the existence of the Val Albus anymore, so we’d use it as a transport vessel going forward.
Naturally, it had a camouflage feature, so we didn’t need to worry about causing a commotion when people caught sight of it. The fact that it could even avoid leaving a shadow was incredible. They said something about a “refractive index,” but hell if I knew what that meant.
Anyway, it’d be nice to let the knights enjoy their first flight through the air. Or at least, that was what I’d have liked to say, but I was actually going to be using [Gate] to get us and the Val Albus relatively near to the Great Wishing Tree first. From there, it wouldn’t take us even half an hour to reach our destination.
Got the wives and kids notified, so it’s time for me to get ready.