Chapter 162: War Treant (?)

Crash!

Even so, the purple knight was forcefully whipped against the cave wall, violently smashing a human-shaped crater into the rock.

"What the hell! What is going on?"

Lan Qingyou stared at the scene in sheer astonishment.

It had all happened far too fast.

So fast, in fact, that she had no idea what had just sent the purple knight flying.

However, that hardly mattered now.

Because a split second later, she caught sight of their attacker...

It was a towering behemoth standing nearly thirty meters tall.

Well...

To put it simply, it was a giant treant.

But this particular treant hit with absolutely absurd, overwhelming force.

Rumble—

As Lan Qingyou watched in horror, the surrounding objects that she had initially mistaken for ordinary trees began to uproot themselves from the earth, one after another.

Before she knew it, she was entirely surrounded by over a dozen lively, imposing treants.

And more were steadily lumbering toward her from the distance.

[War Treant (?)]

[Health Points: ???]

[Mana Points: ???]

[Skills: (???) (???)]

[Description: ???]

...That single glance felt like an eternity...

Just one look was enough to completely silence an experienced Alchemist like Lan Qingyou.

If her appraisal failed to read its stats, the monster had to be at least C-rank, perhaps even a terrifying B-rank or A-rank existence.

Watching the treants close in, Lan Qingyou's eyes darted around. She immediately ordered her magic puppets to advance and attack the nearest treant.

Wham! Wham!

One by one, the magic puppets were violently swatted away by the War Treants, but Lan Qingyou's expression did not waver as she ordered them to keep charging.

Buzz—Crack!

Amidst the reckless charge of her golems, a Rolling Blade Beast seized a fleeting opening. With a brutal rev of its chainsaw arm, it cleanly severed one of the treant's whip-like branches.

Whoosh!

In a flash, Lan Qingyou, who had been hyper-focused on the clash, shifted her Magic Broom into third gear. She darted forward, swooping down to grab the arm-thick severed branch and instantly stowed it inside a Card. Moving swiftly, she then recalled all her scattered, damaged magic puppets before finally retrieving the ones still holding the frontline.

Once everything was safely collected, she rapidly retreated deep into the cavern passage.

"Damn it."

Gazing out toward the sunlit entrance, where the towering treants were slowly lumbering in her direction, Lan Qingyou let out a rare curse.

Fortunately, their massive bodies prevented them from squeezing into the narrow tunnel. Otherwise, she would have been relentlessly hunted down.

Still, she could not let her guard down just yet.

She waited inside the passage for over half an hour. Only after confirming that the behemoths were stuck aimlessly circling the entrance did she finally sigh in relief. She retreated a considerable distance, returning to the expansive cavern she had previously cleared.

Pitching her tent, she slipped inside and pulled out a Card to send a quick message to Shang Chuan.

To be honest, if she did not have the Card on hand, she likely would have waited until she could upgrade her Herb Pouch to a much larger capacity before making any major moves.

After all, when braving the perilous wilderness, solid logistical support was the absolute key to survival.

Tower: "Check the appraisal stats on this thing."

Moon: "What is this..."

Tower: "Just managed to slice it off a treant monster. Its level is a bit high."

Moon: "Leave it to me."

With that said, Shang Chuan went to appraise the item. Less than half a minute later, he sent the results back.

[Branch of the War Treant (C)]

[Function: Weapon Crafting, Potion Brewing.]

[Description: A severed part of a War Treant's body. It possesses immense toughness and enables rapid strikes, but its inherent defense is abnormally low.]

'Just as I suspected. A C-rank material.'

'This is going to be incredibly tough to deal with.'

Seeing Shang Chuan's message, Lan Qingyou's brow furrowed into a deep scowl.

She then took an inventory of her remaining magic puppets.

Out of a full forty magic puppets, twenty-one had been battered into scrap, and the vast majority of the casualties were her humanoid models.

Looking over the mangled frames, she knew there was no hope of repairing them anytime soon.

Even if she had spare parts lying around for replacements, they were all the leftover dregs that had already failed her initial quality checks.

Calling them defective would be a generous understatement.

After all, those twenty-one destroyed puppets had already been cobbled together from the best of her leftover, usable scraps.

What decent materials could possibly be left?

"Sigh..."

Feeling the sharp sting of such heavy losses, she let out a long sigh and began brainstorming ways to take down those C-rank treants.

This was not some video game where one could casually punch above their weight class and win cross-rank battles.

Well, it wasn't strictly impossible, but her D-rank magic puppets simply were not up to the task.

In fact, she was starting to seriously doubt the accuracy of the system's grading.

Her magic puppets were solid D-rank combatants, only a single tier lower than the treants. Yet, even when swarming the enemy, she had lost over twenty of them in the blink of an eye.

She had originally planned to rely on her puppets as her primary source of heavy firepower. Now, it was agonizingly clear that while they could hold their own against enemies of the same rank, they were entirely useless for fighting higher-tier foes.

At best, they could serve as cannon fodder—distracting the target, buying her some crucial reaction time, and absorbing a few hits just as they had today.

They weren't completely useless, but they certainly weren't the omnipotent solution she had hoped for.

While the massive loss left her feeling quite dejected, her overwhelming emotion right now was profound relief.

Her flawless string of past victories had nearly lulled her into a false sense of invincibility regarding her creations. After all, if a mere bundle of steel wire could pilot a Rolling Blade Beast and fend off a horde of unknown assailants, didn't that prove the overwhelming superiority of her golems?

But those brutal, crushing whips from the treant had utterly shattered her delusions of grandeur, reminding her that she was, in fact, just a mortal.

It was a blessing in disguise that she had learned this humbling lesson from a mindless monster.

Had she brought this fatal overconfidence into a battle against cunning, relentless human enemies, they would have mercilessly exploited her weakness and pounded her into the dirt.

Humans always understood the darkness of other humans best. She didn't consider this paranoid in the slightest.

But that brought her back to the pressing issue at hand.

Just how was she supposed to deal with those towering treants?

'Think! Come on, use your brain! Think carefully!'

'First of all, the treants are massive. Based on what I just saw, even the shortest among them was over twenty meters tall.'

'Next is their attack speed. Even the combined speed of my fastest purple knight and the Horned Lion Beast wasn't enough to completely evade their strikes. That means their Agility stat is absolutely terrifying, far surpassing the purple knight's.'

'Those are their terrifying strengths.'

'But their weaknesses are just as glaring. Their overall movement speed is incredibly sluggish. Compared to the flight speed of my Magic Broom, they are slower by leaps and bounds.'

It was exactly by exploiting this sluggish mobility that she had managed to order a Rolling Blade Beast to saw off a specimen for appraisal.

'The appraisal description stated that the treant's innate defense is abnormally low...'

'Yet, in that brief clash, I saw the truth. The Rolling Blade Beast might have cleanly severed the branch in one smooth motion, but the backlash completely ruined its chainsaw arm.'

'Without swapping out the damaged chain, that golem's combat efficiency is essentially nonexistent right now.'

'How could bark capable of destroying a steel chainsaw be classified as having an abnormally low defense?'

For a brief moment, Lan Qingyou wondered if she had misread the text, or if the appraisal results were simply glitched.

'I couldn't have been hallucinating, right?'

'Hmm... Wait! Low defense!?'

'Of course! How could I have been so blind?'

Struck by a sudden burst of inspiration, she instantly fired off another message to Shang Chuan to custom-order a very specific item.

Although it was already late into the night, Shang Chuan had not fallen asleep yet. Because he had been busy appraising the severed branch, he was still awake, merely lying in bed and trying to rest.

However, when her new message chimed, he immediately read it, dragged himself out of bed, and booted up his Magic Desk to relay the urgent manufacturing order straight to his factories.