Chapter 254

If there was one disadvantage of great planning before the battle, it was boredom...

I used the great number of magical detection wards I had spread underground to get a real-time view of the battle. As I predicted, the zombies were attacking from the wings, rushing in with a recklessness that was exaggerated even for disposable corpses of undead beings.

Some of the elven archers panicked at the unexpected strategy, but the numbers were simply too far apart for it to make any difference, especially with nature mana filling the forests to the brim, both allowing them to cast much stronger spells, and giving them a natural barrier to weaken any undead spell before they were even cast.

However, soon, the reaction of the elves disappointed me. They reacted to the attack rather more obviously than I expected, splitting into two to meet with the attack, and left the center almost completely empty.

I wasn’t afraid of the consequences, as I had already arranged for Seldanna to stay in the middle, ready to defend against the trap, but it was annoying to see elves not only missing the trap, but also reacting to it exaggeratedly.

They were excellent archers and decent mages in their sphere ... but their tactical acumen was nonexistent.

A topic for the future, I decided as I continued to watch the assault. Five minutes into the intense assault, I finally noticed a stirring in the middle...

And the monster came strolling in. I didn’t recognize the monster. It looked like a dragon, but with many weird changes on its body. Whether the beast had been a natural chimera when it was alive, or had been adjusted by the necromancers to create a very effective battering ram was a mystery.

But, since the battle was enough to distract the elves, I used the tree-elevator to go to the surface as well. I wanted to watch the battle with my own eyes, though more as a leisure activity than an actual need. With my Divine Spark-infused forest as my focus, my magical senses were much more useful than my eyes to catch anything extraordinary.

I just wanted to watch Seldanna throwing down against the great monstrosity.

Though, I had to admit, the monster rather looked intimidating to the naked eye. A hulking beast, a hundred feet tall and five hundred feet long, it was already scary enough without its skeletal dragon head open, displaying its teeth, each bigger than a sword.

Even at a distance, its roar was dangerous, radiating a huge flood of focused necrotic energy, an ugly facsimile of a dragon’s breath, the thickness of the necrotic energy intense enough to cut through the passive shield of the nature mana.

That was far from the full extent of the defenses I had created, but I was deliberately keeping them hidden — ready to appear only in case of mortal danger — as I let my beautiful priestess a chance to shine.

And, shine she did. “You dare!” she shouted as she raised her hands to the sky, and the mana that surrounded her answered, touching a little seed — one that turned into a huge tree to block the necrotic flood, absorbing it to its structure, rotting as the necrotic mana clashed with nature mana.

But, the elves surrounding Seldanna survived, looking at her with shock as she casually rewrote what was possible to do with nature magic. Understandable, as the strongest elf that visited the forest barely had five points of Divine Spark locked in Chosen form, limiting both their output and their control significantly.

What Seldanna did in a second, a coven barely replicate in a minute.

However, that only made the monster pause for a moment before it continued charging. Seldanne rushed forward as well, doing her best to meet with the monster without it could reach the first guardian tree at the perimeter.

She didn’t know that it didn’t matter to actually defend them and I could pull back its energy and spread along the other trees — though, considering the cultural importance of the guardian trees, I doubted that it would have mattered in the first place. She would have still done her best to defend them.

If there was one thing she was, she was earnest in her desire to defend the land.

The monster charged forward, uncaring of the small figure that it could easily squash standing in front of the first guardian tree — which was enough to confirm its lack of intelligence, and also confirmed that there was no necromancer that was directly controlling it.

Interesting choice, I decided as I stretched a little mana stream inside the beast. Ordinarily, using mana for diagnostics would have been very difficult from such a great distance, but another advantage of the forest was that I could manipulate mana in the forest almost as well as if I were standing next to the beast.

Luckily, I was there to help her. Just as the explosion was triggered, I took control of her shield, opening a gap at the top to channel the explosion away safely, while reinforcing the ground to avoid disaster from there.

{-2949 Mana}

Right in time, as the explosion happened hard enough to imitate an earthquake. I watched as Seldanna collapsed due to exhaustion, pushing herself to the limit to reinforce the shield, which showed she was too distracted to actually notice I had taken over the shield.

The elves rushed toward her, some in panic, but even from a distance, I could sense several of them had some bad motives — one even had his knife out already — showing that generations of tribal hatred weren’t just gone, but simmering underneath.

“How fun,” I muttered sarcastically even as I cast a spell, and roots appeared around Seldanna and pulled her into the ground. Since I had such a convenient excuse to intervene, I just did so.

Luckily, I was able to steal most of the Divine Spark the necromancers hid in the beast, making it not only a beautiful teaching moment, but also profitable.

{+192 Divine Spark}

{Strength: 8 Charisma: 10

Precision: 8 Perception: 9

Agility: 8 Manipulation: 10

Speed: 8 Intelligence: 10

Endurance: 8 Wisdom: 9}

{Purified Divine Spark: 712}

{Pseudo-HP: 2869 Mana: 7352}

{ADDITIONAL SPARKS

Light - Chosen 7.4

Nature - Chosen 10}

{MINIONS

Guardian God Forest - 2050}

Elven Priestess - 70}

[Level: 36 Experience: 631374 / 666000]