Belli Mundi - Chapter 39
The next morning Steve was all healed up. That meant that the squad was once again ready for combat.
This time though, they were determined to make it out of the forest better than the day before. Thus they made sure to be as prepared as possible today.
Their first stop was a visit to the quartermaster. With them having to fight in between the trees and underbrush, their normal formations were pretty hard to use. If they had larger numbers, this wouldn’t be that much of a problem. At the moment though, they only had their one squad.
When they arrived, the grumpy quartermaster Sully wasn’t too happy to issue them different gear.
“What do you mean you need different weapons? You’re recruits, you will use our standard issue gear and be happy about it!”
“Sir, we’re being used as adventurers to patrol the forests. This means that we need to be much more versatile than normal recruits. Our short swords just don’t work on everything we might come across.”
“Hrmp, you don’t need fancy weapons to fight goblins and some wildlife. You can take your request and shove it.”
“Sir, have you been out there? Yesterday we were ambushed by a void cat. That wasn’t a fun fight with our standard gear.”
“Void cats? What are those doing here, I haven’t seen one of those in years.”
“We don’t know sir, but trainer Quincy told us to be prepared to fight those, and other special monsters.”
“Alright, what do you need?”
“We’d like to get some larger weapons with which we can stay at medium range. Maybe some two-handed weapons like claymores and battle-axes or something like that. Maybe halberds? Also, do you have some secondary weapons that are effective against those void cats?”
“Hrmp, halberds are useless in the forest. Pretty much every large weapon is something that you don’t want to swing in tight spaces.”
“What do you propose to use against some of those larger monsters then? Our short swords just don’t do enough damage.”
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“Yes, that’s quite the dilemma. I think you guys are better off using ranged weapons. That’s why you have archers and mages. I can issue you some one handed axes which you can also use to clear the underbrush. Those will deal a bit more damage than your swords. I’ll add an enchanted dagger for each of you, those should work on the cats.”
“Thanks, I guess, but we’d also like to use the weapons we trained with before we joined the legion.”
“We do have those stored, but are you sure? Like I said, you might be better off using our standard gear. Maneuverability is pretty important in the forest.”
“We’re sure, some of us were trained extensively with those weapons.”
“Alright then, you guys wait here and I’ll get your stuff.”
An hour later the squad was once again moving through the forest. This time they made sure to be on the lookout for the void cats. Having learned from the day before, they assigned Tia to keep an eye on the treetops. Other than last time, they entered the forest a few miles away. Thus they wouldn’t cover the same ground again.
Not long after they moved into the denser part of the forest, they came across a small patch of flowers. The flowers grew in a glade in the forest, surrounded by patches of blackberries. It was only luck that one of the archers noticed the shine from the sun on the golden leafs of the biggest flower. There were several different kinds of flowers in the glade, but one of them really stood out.
“I think that it’s called a ‘mooie bloem’ flower. That’s a pretty rare flower that’s used in some alchemy recipes.”
“Isn’t that a Dutch name?” Sam asked.
“What’s Dutch?”
“It’s a language from my world, I had a friend that came from a place where they spoke it. I think that ‘mooie bloem’ translates as ‘pretty flower’. That would mean that the flower is called pretty flower flower?”
“I don’t know, I never heard about it.”
“Well, I guess that I’m not the first person to be translated from my world to this one. It would be nice to find out if I can find one of them. They might have some insight about what happened.”
“Don’t hold your breath for this one. The flower has had this name for a long time. Maybe even from before the empire split apart.”
The squad picked several of the different flowers, but made sure to leave the most of them standing. No reason to pick the spot clean, and someone with the right class could probably get a much greater yield from the spot than they could. Once again they marked the spot on the map, while Jasper wrote down exactly what they found in the squads journal.
After they crawled back out of the blackberry bushes, they continued on their trek through the forest. Sam was once again at the back, and she was getting pretty good at scanning the forest for anything that looked out of place. Now that they had spent more time in the forest she was getting a better feel for how everything should look. She didn’t forget to watch if there was anything up in the trees, which was also the reason she was the one to spot the first void cat. At the moment she shouted a warning though, the guys at the front also shouted a warning. Soon the archers followed with their own separate warnings. They were surrounded!