Chapter 13: The Forest

Ben P.O.V

"Ah shit"

A few of the privates and private first class's helped Ben out of the hospital. Though his legs were just fine, his numbed arm was making him walk a bit lopsided. Despite that, he mostly managed to head towards the center of chaos without much help.

At the center of the foreign groups to enter the area, they had already set up a makeshift table and base of operations on their own.

The soldiers had allowed them into Fort Bragg but had prevented them from nearing the areas with more sensitive equipment, meaning the armory, vehicle bay, as well as the HQ which contained a TOC among other vital facilities.

In another corner were the elves huddled in a group. They more or less tolerated the high end nobles and Maxim's troops for that matter but it looked like they opposed heavily to intermingling themselves with mercenaries and workers.

Ben knew that this was quite a normal trait, they were possibly even tolerating being in the same area as humans were in the first place.

Ben decided to head towards the group of humans first. Maxim had given him a language scroll beforehand so he could understand the empires common language, but he still had his reservations on chatting with other's.

"Ben, whatever you do don't reveal any important information got it?"

One of the corporals reminded Ben on the situation here. Though the people here didn't have any hostile intentions, it was still risky to expose sensitive information.

Ben had previously been filled in on where Maxim and the rest of the group had gone, so he at least could provide an explanation to what was going on.

Ben cleared his throat before the man at the head of the table looked up. The talking at the table was silenced at once as all the attention was now on Ben.

" Ah! Looks like we can get something done now, would you happen to be the one in charge around here?"

Ben scratched his head while wincing a bit

"at the moment, yeah. The one in charge had to go on a business trip and will be back in a bit so for now I'll do the best I can. My name is Ben, a private first class of the U.S Army 82nd airborne"

Understanding that they were going along with introductions of each other, the man at the head also started to introduce everyone.

The man at the head was wearing a purple and golden suit of loose leather armor, which seemed to be more suited for decoration than actual practical use. It was correct to assume that he was the head of the group if his position at the table didn't give it away.

"Ah, introductions of course! I'm one of the guild leaders of the central Adventurers guild, tasked with surveying the area and initiating mutual information exchange with your kingdom. I control the western branch of the adventurers guild which is where your country lies. I'll introduce you to the people next to me."

He waved his hands at the other men sitting at the table. They all had quite the distinct features and clothing, marking this as a fantasy world for certain.

In all honesty, Ben was extremely thrilled yet cautious with approaching them. Politics was never fun after all.

"This here is Asher, the general secretary for our branch. He organizes most of the information and money in our guild"

The man with the glasses nodded, before turning back to the papyrus he had on hand, jotting something down. He had the stereotypical mage look, with the long flowy robes and long silver hair.

Though I suppose a secretary does work as well

"This here is our information collector, Julian. You can call it espionage if you will, but he get's the job done regardless."

A man in full black robes and a mask nodded his head in turn before playing with his knife. Twirling the knife handle on one of his fingertips like a basketball.

That was when Ben remembered something crucial.

He remembered James getting reports on shady figures attempting to get close to the gate before being chased off by the floodlights. They may not have realized they've been seen but the soldiers on guard and on patrol noticed their every move.

"...I'll have to ask something. Did you attempt to send spies into our base to obtain information?"

Francis glanced pointedly at Julian, who in turn shrugged and stabbed his knife into the table. Though his eyes widened a bit underneath the dark hood, it was more in an impressed manner than guilt or nervousness.

" Just following orders"

This made Francis give him a death glare before turning towards Ben.

"You must understand that merchants and investors must...gauge the powers of their possible allies"

"Yes we understand that. We assumed they were sent by your guild since they weren't attempting an attack. If we did try to silence them, there would be nobody left to report to you"

Yes, right now Ben was attempting a Maxim-esque speech.

Though the ones at the center of attention were now panicking fearing that the talks had started to come apart, Ben wasn't really exuding any type of hostility.

They also wouldn't know what NODS are, for obvious reasons.

"Anyways, putting that aside we'll have to ask you to come with us. We had quite an incident before you arrived, we'll need your views on this before we do anything."

Though it sounded to them like Ben had a plan, the truth was he was just going with it since he still had to wait for Maxim to come back.

In that case, he decided that it was fine to show them the previous battlefield with the wasps based on previous conversations with Maxim and the adventurers about the carcasses.

"Come on, let's go"

Ben left for one of the humvees as the other's shrugged and started to pile back into their magic-powered carriages.

Maxim P.O.V

"Seems like you've been pretty busy here"

Maxim really didn't know how to start it off. However, by the looks of everyone scurrying around it was evident that there was a great deal of work needing to be done.

Zhang sighed

" We are much too close to the border of that damn forest. Many of those bugs had attempted to leave the forest but we have managed to stop them in it's tracks, especially after eliminating the queen of the wasps. However, as you can see, there are still problems."

From what Maxim saw, they actually had to actively search for and destroy the monsters instead of staying at their base.

The squads sent out earlier were a good indication on how large the problem had actually become. With a combination of flamethrower unit as well as two squads (approximately 20 soldiers in this case) to deal with the problem, it was clear as day that the situation was getting out of hand.

"We have drones in the area heading deep within the forest, however out of the three that were sent in only one returned. If you have a bit of time we'll show you what happened"

Captain Zhang got up from his desk and pulled something down from the wall, making a projector screen roll down. The man at the door dimmed the lights.

"Gah!"

The sudden switch of the light made Sylvia and Flander jump a bit, with the previously bright room turning to dark.

The projector started projecting onto the screen, feeding an aerial view of three cameras which were presumably the drones.

"Wow! What type of magic is this!? How does-"

"Sylvia, quite!"

Flander stopped Sylvia before she could get into another one of her rants about technology. So far what they have seen has been nothing but abnormal to them.

When considering everything that had happened to them so far, it would be weirder to be completely aloof to the situation anyways, however Flander knew when situations called for emotions to be controlled. Like this one.

The drones pointed at each other for a moment, these were actually painted green it seems, possibly to match the forest colors. They split up into three different directions before heading towards different parts of the forest.

Traces of fighting and dead wasps were near the edges of the forest. Those were probably the wasps that were attempting to break out of the forest and attack Zhurihe, but had failed to do so. Distinct gunfire could be heard from the audio coming out of the speakers. At this, Zhang paused the video.

"We were attempting to lure the bugs out so there was a smaller possibility of the drones getting attacked. However, as you know, that didn't go as planned"

He resumed the video, showing the drones flying deeper and deeper into the forest. Though both Maxim and Zhang had gone through the forest, they were mostly the outskirts that had a minimum number of trees and a large, open path that made ambushes nearly impossible.

Among the inhabitants in the empire this forest was known as the devil's forest , a place where any subjugation squad that attempted to go in was absolutely annihilated.

It was quite literally half the size of the Lunama kingdom, which by itself was already quite large. However, compared to earthly standards those were still small numbers.

At most they were the sizes of U.S states, making it take at maximum a few hours to traverse it by air. These drones weren't UAV's however, just recon drones that had cameras.

This meant that there was a maximum distance that they could reach before being forced to turn back. They started going even deeper into the forest.

Strange and eerie sounds started to accompany the rotating blades of the drones, almost like a sort of whisper trailing behind them. This sent a shiver down almost everybody present, with the exclusion of Zhang since he had already watched the film earlier.

The surroundings of the video started to turn to black as they attempted to traverse further inwards.

At this point, the drones turned their small searchlights on which illuminated the path forwards. The buzzing of the wasps had long since disappeared, however some sort of winged animal (or monster?) was flapping near the drone, so close that the drone itself could see the shadow of it being illuminated on the ground.

spinning the lights around, a weird humanoid creature was revealed. A human with a type of bird-like body that had wings and talons but a human face. It didn't seem too phased by the light and continued to follow the drones despite that.

However, the creature let out a screech randomly before retreating into the darkness. Soon the speakers started to emit low humming and scurrying noises of animals on top of grass or leaves. Suddenly, a SPRK! sound was heard and one of the drones suddenly lost connection.

The other two drones witnessed the incident before another SPRK! sent a second one crashing to the ground.

The person who was piloting the last drone decided to retreat from the area quickly to at least preserve one of the drones, zigzagging in the air to dodge whatever was attempting to hit it before turning back, this was where Zhang stopped the video.

" The rest is the drone successfully making it back to base. However, there seems to be many threats that we do not know about in that forest. Even now, the wasps seem to be the least of our concerns."

"Holy shit, what the fuck are we getting ourselves into?"

This was getting out of hand. If the wasps were the start of the problems, then what was going to happen later on?

Maxim knew that he needed to contact the adventurers guild and ask about this. If those things were to spill out of the forest and attack their bases, they would be sitting ducks if they couldn't identify what the enemy could do.

As always, the most dangerous enemy was the unknown.

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And there's another chapter!

I'm gonna try to get this story back on trending, so lets do it!