Volume 3 Chapter 117: Searching the Forest IV (1/2)
The next day.
The adventurers guild sent 15 adventurers to the place where we fought the elder treant yesterday.
Today we’ll be relying on their help to gather the lumber, but everything that can’t be stored in Raypin-san’s Dimension Home will have to be stored at the guild’s storage temporarily. The guild will deliver them by carriage at a later date.
Why? It’s simple. We killed too many treants. So many, in fact, that even the adventurers that were dispatched to help us were shocked when they saw the scene of carnage. That was a staggering forest of over 1000 dead treants.
There were just too many of them during the battle that we really couldn’t do anything unless we beat them first. And with every member of our party within their attacking range, we ended up defeating every single one of them. When all was said and done, this was the result.
Actually, I was pretty worried about the forest considering how many treants we killed, but when I asked the local adventurers about it, they said it was fine.
Apparently, the trees of this forest are a type of tree called Torigiri, and while there’s not that many places they can grow, they possess a powerful life force. In fact, they grow so fast, it only takes them half a month to grow back after being cut. And even in seed-form, they’re ridiculously fast, needing only about a year before they can be harvested as lumber.
That’s why even if we cut so many trees today, it doesn’t really matter. Come next year, this place will be thriving with the lush green of life, almost as if nothing had ever happened. In the first place, there’s not a lot of people who go this deep into the forest to harvest lumber, or at least that’s what the guy tells me.
And while his explanation managed to convince me that everything would be alright, it also served to remind me that I really am in another world.
How many years would it take for a seed to grow into a tree back on Earth? It would take decades for sure, and yet the seeds here only need a year. It seems Earth’s common sense doesn’t always work around here…
“Let us begin, de gozaru!” [Asagi]
At Asagi-san’s behest, we started gathering the treants. From time to time, we would happen onto a living treant, so we would swiftly take care of them, and then go back to gathering lumber.
Asagi-san and the others gathered the lumber in one place, then Raypin-san and I stuffed them into our Dimension Homes and went back to the village to store them. Rinse and repeat.
By working together and transporting the lumber with magic, we managed to finish everything by 3PM. I also sent Eins to the adventurers guild at Gimuru, so they could prepare to receive the lumber.
In any case, with this we have managed to complete another objective for our treant lumber gathering mission, and the adventurers that came to help us went back to town.
As for us, though, we still had one more job left to do.
“Sure saved the best for last, didn’t we?” [Syria]
It was time to disassemble the elder treant and claim our spoils.
The job we received from Gimuru was to gather lumber from the treants. The elder treant wasn’t part of our contract.
At times like this, its up to the discretion of the hunter on what to do with the hunted prey. In our case, we’re going to be using it to pay for the help we got from the adventurers guild. Or at least a part of it anyway. Elder treant lumber is actually a really good material to make staves with. They’ll surely sell for a high price in the market, so it would be really wasteful to just throw them away. As such, we’re going to be claiming a part of the treant for ourselves. We sure got our work cut out for us, though.
“Well, it’s the last job. Let’s hurry it up and get this over with.” [Wereanna]
Wereanna-san took out her nata hatchet. First things first was cutting the branches. I climbed up the ladder I prepared beforehand, but the elder treant was so big, there were still places I couldn’t reach even with the ladder.
So, I asked the others to deal with the branches I couldn’t reach, while I took care of only the ones I could.
Of the tools I used was the durable rope woven out of the sticky slime’s thread and the metal slimes that were turned into metal fittings for securing stuff.
First, I took the end of the rope and made a knot and a loop, then when I was sure that the metal slimes were in place and secured, my grappling hook was completed. I swung my grappling hook, and with my eyes set on the target, I threw it.
The grappling hook flew into the air just as I’ve intended, wrapping itself around the thick branches.
I tugged on the rope several times, but it didn’t even budge. Looks plenty sturdy to me.
Using the rope, I climbed up the tree until I was in a good position to aim, then I cut at the branches one by one using my Wind Cutter. When I’d run out of branches to cut, I changed positions and repeated the same thing.
At first, I thought it would be easier to just let the branches fall to the ground, but apparently, the branches are better suited for making wands or staves than the trunk, so since they’re likely to break if I cut them off from the tip, I had to do it the hard way.
Slowly but steadily, I cut the branches one after another, until eventually, there was nothing left to cut. I was able to finish cutting the branches within the day, but there was still work to be done. We decided to just leave it off for tomorrow, though. As expected, climbing up and down a tree over and over is really exhausting.
