The collapsed power-supply tower.
What they found in the wrecked foundation was a small rabbit.
“...A rabbit.”
“Yes, Big Sister! It seems to be a fairly common monster! In the local language, it’s called a digging rabbit. In our terms, I suppose you’d call it a <Digging Rabbit>!”
Standing in front of the rabbit inside the metal cage, Asahi shouted that in high spirits.
The rabbit jerked, its whole body twitching, then shrank into the corner of the cage.
“Asahi, lower your voice. You’re scaring it.”
“Oops, my apologies. Well, rabbits are timid creatures by nature, so I suppose it can’t be helped!”
“No, it’s because you’re being loud.”
This <Digging Rabbit> apparently belonged to the very small end of the monster spectrum. According to information gathered in Northend City, the frontier base of the United Kingdom of Aphrasia, it was almost among the smallest classes of monster there were.
They lived widely throughout the <Demon Forest> and could apparently be found just about anywhere.
And this monster’s defining trait was its exceptional digging ability.
It lived by burrowing underground, and fed on things like bark and roots.
Apparently, it had already been hidden beneath the ground when <The Tree> began leveling the area, and had stayed concealed the whole time.
Then, while still in that state, it had punched straight through a foundation structure driven into the ground right beside it with some outrageously unreasonable fantasy-world ability. That, it seemed, was the truth of what had happened.
“It seems to receive some kind of mysterious correction specifically when it digs! We also observed values suggesting its forelegs are enhanced!”
“...We’ll have to redesign the structures too... We found a lot of mechanical weak points... in the foundations...”
“Oh my... Well, people don’t usually plan around someone attacking the foundation directly...”
As Eve soothed the disappointed Olive, gently stroking her head, her own face turned troubled too.
“There haven’t been any sightings of threat organisms like giant earthworms, so we got careless. We never expected monsters to be hiding underground.”
“I’ve already revised the subsurface-analysis algorithm, so we should now be able to detect these <Digging Rabbit>s almost reliably! But there may be other monsters with similar traits, so we still need to proceed carefully!”
The survey of the base area had already been completed. In fact, they had found no fewer than fourteen <Digging Rabbit>s lurking underground—or rather, buried there by the land-leveling work.
If construction had continued as it was, more structures might well have collapsed.
“For the moment, we secured several alive as samples like this. The rest were exterminated and sent to investigation! Still, it looks like we may be dealing with this kind of back-and-forth against monsters for a while yet!”
They had stumbled almost immediately after advancing, but for now, they had managed to recover. Clearing operations, including underground, were complete, and the front-line base was steadily nearing completion.
“And about the reconnaissance units getting hunted...”
“Yes, Big Sister. It appears they’ve been attacked by monsters called Climbing Wolves and Forest Bears. The moment they crossed out of black monkey territory, they were hit, so the <Demon Forest> really is packed with monsters.”
Climbing Wolves were one variety of monster adapted to the dense trees of the <Demon Forest>. They primarily hunted animals and monsters that lived in the trees, though they made their nests on the ground.
Throughout the <Demon Forest>, the trees grew large.
That was because they were growing by absorbing something other than sunlight—most likely mana, or something close to it. Their leaves spread wide overhead, limiting the sunlight that reached the ground, yet the trees still continued to stretch upward.
Still, an environment with almost no sunlight at all was harsh even here, and aside from plants capable of growing tall enough to reach upward, there was little vegetation to be seen.
In that sense, the ground level actually had very few plants. What there was instead consisted of tangled roots, and branches and trunks twisting their way upward.
And because that was the environment, most animals and monsters had shifted their living space into the trees.
The monster called a Forest Bear also lived mainly in the trees. However, because it was fairly large, it also seemed to move along the ground often enough.
“Wolves and bears, huh. It looked like black monkeys were getting eaten too...”
“Climbing Wolves and Forest Bears do not actually eat <Jumper>s. It seems they are intercepting them as intruders the moment they enter their territory.”
It seemed Climbing Wolves hunted <Jumper>s by driving them into corners in packs.
Forest Bears simply chased them down and smashed them. Apparently, their mobility was extremely high.
“Hm... I know we’re still in the phase where we gather information regardless of losses, but even so, this attrition rate is too high to ignore.”
“We’ve also had cases where the rearward <Backpacker> units were attacked. Our assessment is that if we advance any farther, we may end up with entire reconnaissance units wiped out, including the <Backpacker>s.”
“Yes... that makes sense.”
Which meant, in the end, that their attack power and defensive power were fundamentally insufficient.
With the units they were currently operating, pushing any deeper would be difficult.
To solve that, they either needed to develop even more powerful units, or else—
“We may have no choice but to start fully cooperating with the Chimiya Family after all...”
That was the conclusion Eve reached.
“At the very least, mass-producing units the size of humans with that level of defense and attack power is difficult.”
“Yes indeed, Commander Ma’am. At our current technological level, and especially if we take actual operation on an Earth-type planet into account, we would need to advance several more levels first.”
“And for that, we’d need some kind of breakthrough... We’re starting to clear the resource problem, but we’d still need manufacturing facilities for high-performance materials, or molecular synthesizers, something along those lines.”
With the manufacturing facilities currently operated by <The Tree>, high-end technologies that improved the strength of raw materials themselves were not yet achievable.
A shortage of materials for constructing those facilities was part of the problem, but the real bottleneck was the energy source.
To operate high-tier facilities like molecular synthesizers or atomic transmutation reactors on a regular basis required enormous amounts of energy. Supplying that on a planet came with all kinds of risks.
Take a collapse reactor, for example. That type contained a micro black hole inside it. If an accident happened, they would be lucky if it ended with nothing worse than a massive explosion engulfing several dozen kilometers around it.
In the worst case, it could convert the entire star system into a black hole.
To begin with, the amount of energy it produced was so absurdly vast that there was always a risk of it going out of ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) control simply because they could not consume the output fast enough.
Powerful facilities like that—ones that were difficult to handle—were things they wanted to build, at the very least, somewhere like interplanetary space, where nothing existed within thousands of kilometers.
And naturally, preparing on a planet the kinds of things that could only be produced in such facilities was extraordinarily difficult.
In other words, they were not in a position to mass-produce automated machines more advanced than what they already had.
“Well, that comes with the caveat that this only applies so long as we remain within our own scientific and technological framework!”
And yet the Chimiya Family could demonstrate capabilities equal to that sort of unit—or perhaps even beyond it—without needing all the environmental preparations such units required.
“The fact that they take at least fourteen years to raise is certainly a bottleneck, but if we’re just making use of what already exists, then that hardly matters!”
“If anything, the important part is that they actually have established know-how that lets them prepare them in fourteen years...”
In the Prava Divine Kingdom, citizens born in the country were screened at a certain age, those who met the standard were gathered together, trained, and put into service as cleric-soldiers. The department that had actually handled that process seemed to have been wiped out in the Divine Kingdom invasion, but the Chimiya Family still possessed enough of the information to reproduce it to some extent.
“After seeing both our power and what we actually do, they’ve become extremely cooperative! So long as our objectives remain aligned, that is, they should cooperate fully!”
Apparently, the Chimiya Family had toured the front-line base <The Tree> had developed, and they had been deeply impressed.
Up to now, whenever they built a base on the front, it had always bogged down because it took manpower to defend it. The idea that automated machines—which did not require any consideration for human attrition—could take over that role seemed to them to be truly revolutionary.
