Forces began to move towards the forest, the army creating a perimeter with the intention to prevent anyone from fleeing. Then the core of the army gathered into columns, ready to march inwards.

It would be nearly impossible for those within to miss the approaching mass of cultivators, but their concrete information would be limited. They seemed to have some belief they could withstand an attack because they had stayed, but Velvet had seen the numbers filling their camp. Even with the Limitless Edge, they shouldn’t be able to withstand the Spirit Slicing Sect and several other local sects.

Velvet wasn’t so sure about the Mustelid Menagerie. She’d seen beast tamers before but usually they went for large and powerful creatures instead of these creatures. They were supposed to be rather fierce, but they were sized from smaller than a housecat to some stocky ones barely the size of a small wolf. Fuzz might be able to eat them all in a single mouthful- the entire army they brought along. Then again, that was something they had going for them. Each tamer had at least a half dozen creatures, and they felt strong enough. Maybe the equivalent of Essence Collection, though some were stronger.

Then there were the Prospect Shapers. They were said to manipulate probability. Regardless of how it actually worked they would enhance their allies and hinder their enemies across a battlefield. And of course, they could fight for themselves.

At the head of the Spirit Slicing Sect were Emrik and Runa, for both morale and practical purposes. As they strode ahead into the forest, Velvet watched them approach some of the spying trees. A green mist seeped out of the trees as they got close, spreading out to a radius of five meters. Instead of going through it to assault the trees they simply circled around them, their void blades slicing at something Velvet would normally have called empty air.

But there was something there. A thin connection between both the trees and the cultivators further in. The trees shuddered as the connection was severed, shedding their leaves all at once. The foul mist faded away as it was no longer sustained by the plants.

Velvet wondered what the results of straightforwardly attacking the trees would have been. Certainly, it had to be possible- but it would also take some amount of energy to destroy them. They didn’t look like much, but being connected to cultivators they had to be tougher than they seemed. The connections, however, were severed almost without a thought. Obviously there was a bit more than waving around a void blade, but it seemed quite effective.

As they moved further into the forest, the trees began to react even before they approached. A half dozen of them somehow spread that noxious poison between them, creating a larger screen that forced the cultivators around them. Rather than being discouraged, however, Runa and Emrik split up and began to work faster. It seemed they were trying to make their possible path harder to predict.

The swiftness with which they worked meant those following behind hardly had to slow down, marching towards the enemy camp with purpose. They weren’t moving at combat speeds, of course, which meant that if the cultivators chose to flee they would be quite delayed. But that was why they had people watching.

Velvet was also fairly certain she would be able to sense if a mass of cultivators ran away with speed. That would be a significant exercise of upper energy, likely even more obvious than their army. And if the split off individually, they might still be noticed and would be more vulnerable to the encircling cultivators.

The Forest of Death clearly wasn’t willing to just lay down and accept their connections being severed. Among other things, they somehow rerouted their connections through the ground, throwing off Runa and Emrik for a moment. Once they found the connection, however, they swept aside a meter or two of dirt and sliced through them. That slightly slowed them down until the Mustelid Menagerie came forward with a handful of badgers that were able to dig up large sections of ground with seemingly the same effort as Integration cultivators- but saving those two the repeated expenditures of energy.

Eventually, they reached the camp- surrounding which was their basic formation. Velvet could feel the cultivators within, and nothing seemed especially different. There was still the higher density of connected trees that had to be dealt with, but they would take care of them. It would take more than just the sect head and Runa, however.

“Begin the plan,” Emrik ordered, looking towards the Mustelid Menagerie. They nodded.

Velvet didn’t know what the plan was. Perhaps it had been discussed while she was recovering, and it hadn’t seemed important to tell her. She was curious, but her curiosity was satisfied almost immediately as the sect made their way to the rear of the army and then… a dozen tunnels began being dug out. They didn’t look large enough for humans yet, but it was a potential way past the formation.

It was a pretty basic formation after all, not set into stone as well as requiring activation by the cultivators inside. It could probably be battered down as well, though trying alternate approaches first made enough sense. There was the matter of roots, however. Hopefully they had accounted for that.

Even as an Integration cultivator, Velvet would have been able to move a large amount of loose dirt. Despite that, she found herself impressed by the badgers digging into the ground, earth spraying out of their tunnels like an explosion, except constant. The tunnels were going deep into the ground- ten meters, in as many seconds, after which they began to crawl towards the enemy encampment.

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Velvet had no idea how the dirt rounded the bend with such velocity, but it sprayed into hills behind the openings, hills which the other small beasts and the cultivators were pushing away from the holes as they would otherwise rapidly grow large enough to pour into the burrows.

It didn’t take long for the badgers to close the small distance to reach the vertical plane of the barrier, at which point the Spirit Slicing Sect moved forward. Those of them who had void blades went for the trees, cutting off their connections, while the others made use of their techniques to do something to the barrier. It didn’t collapse, but the badgers weren’t hindered by anything underground. They even sped up, covering multiple meters each second.

Then the Mustelid Menagerie poured into the hole, hundreds of beasts of various small sizes… and then the cultivators, who had no room to do anything but wriggle with their arms at their sides. And yet, they moved quite rapidly. A few dozen meters was covered in a few moments of distraction, and then they burst from the ground, inside the enemy fortifications. Beasts poured out, biting at toes and heels, or the backs of knees where they were taller.

The enemy fought back, of course. It was simply that the Limitless Edge didn’t seem fit for fighting creatures of that size. They cut down two or three beasts in each swing of their blade, but were then beset by a dozen more, swarming over them and making them unable to attack as they pleased. Even Life Transformation cultivators would falter among simultaneous attacks from so many Essence Collection cultivators. The rarer Integration cultivators were dealt with by the larger beasts- there were a couple kinds of badgers, one of which seemed completely unafraid of blades, branches, roots, or anything at all.

The chaos both distracted those sustaining the barrier and also caused some of them to perish. Runa and Emrik attacked simultaneously, cutting a wide rectangular opening in the barrier. It wavered for a moment as it tried to restore the hole, but they held their void blades at opposite corners as people began to pour through.

Velvet had all sorts of ideas about how she was going to approach the battle, but when it came down to it she just followed the flow people, hiding among them. Picking her out specifically would be an exercise in frustration with all of the members of the Spirit Slicing Sect and the Prospect Shapers coming with them, their auras dominating the battlefield. Then of course there were the rabid animals inside… fighting alongside the actual beasts they commanded. Velvet reminded herself to never doubt the ferocity of that particular sect.

Killing people was… easy. Velvet knew that already, but she was reminded of it even more strongly as she slipped around the battlefield. Her greater power allowed her to conceal her presence well enough with the surrounding chaos, and it made puncturing defenses almost child’s play. Early Integration cultivators were finished off in a single attack just like anyone below them. She might have been able to kill mid Integration cultivators, but she figured guaranteeing the deaths of two or three weaker individuals was better than risking getting locked in combat.

The battle, though it had initially gone in their favor, was still closer than Velvet would like. People on both sides were falling, and though it took a lot more than she would expect to bring down the feral cultivators they did drop eventually.

Velvet picked up her pace, though she didn’t always go for the most likely target. People were beginning to notice people dying with no apparent attacker, and they were scanning for her- though with so many allies, they couldn’t even begin to attempt the wild tactics they had done to catch her before. Not without leaving every single one of them open to being taken out by others, and even then they’d probably barely touch her.

She attacked one individual, moved halfway across the battlefield to take out a Limitless Edge sect member, and then dodged behind some of the Forest of Death members.

Meanwhile, the Prospect Shapers were shielding the group from the poisonous mist released by the trees- until the Spirit Slicing Sect could sever each connection. They were over halfway through that project, making the Forest of Death weaker and weaker. Just as the trees responded to the connection being cut, the cultivators twinged in singles or small groups as each tree was removed from their network.

By the time they realized they should run, it was too late. It wasn’t just the swarm of beasts that was pouring over them, but also the fact that they couldn’t possibly flee quickly enough. The parasitic trees might slow down the armies pursuing them, but then again it might not.

More than that, Velvet was confident enough to try something big. As they turned to run, she gladly hung back, gathering some of her energy. While the One Hundred Stars was only particularly suited to visual illusions because of the aspect of light, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do others and she had many times in the past. Here, she provided a single one to all of the enemy cultivators. No, it was even more than that. She linked their perceptions in the most unhelpful way.

What she projected was nothing. No sound, light, or feeling. Unlike some illusions, it wasn’t meant to fool them but to stymie their senses. They could still feel the positions of their bodies and keep their balance- Velvet wasn’t confident in distorting all of that at once- and their energy senses would likely still benefit them, but that was where the last component came in. A linking of their senses, so that everything they could feel would be duplicated to each and every one of them. In theory.

In practice, Velvet didn’t have an opportunity to tell them what they felt. Instead, her energy forced a few moments of confusion upon all of them, during which over half of them were cut down… or bitten to death. It was only a few seconds, given that she had to push the illusion through their energy, but Velvet was still satisfied affecting so many at once in a non-trivial manner. She likely couldn’t have done it at the beginning of the battle, however. They would have resisted better when they were in optimal states. Even so, she put the idea away for later. If she grew a bit stronger, then it might be viable.

For now, she went back to cutting them down in secret- though there weren’t any who would have been able to stop her regardless.

It was unfortunate that the Limitless Edge would know about her, though. She wasn’t certain about the details of what they shared, but someone should know. Hopefully, they would decide it wasn’t worth coming back… instead of their sect head hunting her down. Because Augmentation or not, Velvet didn’t want to face someone who had beaten Chikere in a one-on-one sword match.

Leaving them wouldn’t have helped, though. Indeed, they needed to take as much advantage of Velvet’s advancement and the information she could gather as they could in the near future. And as long as she wasn’t going into a battle alone, Velvet felt quite confident about keeping herself safe.