The Liberomancer [Isekai Progression LitRPG]

Everyone in the city was waiting for the raiding party to come back successfully, and the next week, they did return successfully indeed; thankfully with minimal casualties. The raiding party had wide smiles on their faces as they walked back into the city triumphant.

They recounted how the two armies had trapped the dryads between two hills, finding the perfect position to sourround them while the Liberomancers rained down fire upon them until nothing but ashes remained.

If we had been more prepared for the dryad threat, we could have done this from the beginning and avoided most of the large-scale destruction that had occurred. But again, something along these lines had never happened before, though whether or not Chipker would need to consider this in the future was something that remained to be discussed.

The cost of preparing for a potential dryad invasion in the future would be high - Hitutsa could attest to that, though the cost of ignoring that kind of problem would be even higher. That, however, was an issue for people far above me in the administrative ladder to consider.

The important thing was that the threat of the dryads was over. Or at least the major threat was taken care of for now. There would be pockets of them in Chipker for a while that monster hunters like Zhen Liu would take care of, but that could take months if not years to do.

Time…

That was what the city really needed to recover from what had happened.

The issue that the humans had been pressing the lizardmen on - a death penalty for that particular lizardman who had killed a human in a drunken fit - was dropped entirely. Many of them couldn't even remember what it was that had caused the initial friction in the first place.

"People are like that," Granny Qi told me as I mentioned such. "But just you watch - give them another six months, and this unity will be forgotten and they'll be back at each other's throats for something else."

"Yeah," I said.

I could tell that her family wanted to go back to their village - or whatever would've remained of it. Many people had already left the city the moment the army had come back as much of the threat had been eliminated - but it wasn't like the outside world was completely safe now.

"Master Liberomancer," Suki Tang asked me. "I hate to burden you any further, but we would like to return to our village - though we do not know what lies for us out there. If we had someone like you to help us initially…"

They didn't have to say any more, because both Granny Qi and I set out in a few days to help them rebuild.

I had told Zeke I was resigning from my position, and after some mumbling he agreed that it wasn't really needed anymore.

My reservations had been about being caught between the two sides because of that job turned out to be needless worrying on my end. My newfound reputation made me a hero to both sides, something the bat hadn't been able to do.

We set out, a huge line of about twenty wagons, back towards her village with the Elephant Frog at the head of the column.

The outside world had changed quite a bit due to the dryad invasion even if the full extent of it was not completely evident from just atop the walls.

A lot of the roads had been damaged to the point that they were nearly untraversable to the wagons. Perhaps this was not intentionally, but by the sheer volume of traffic that had passed over them. The ones which were paved were mostly alright, but a good portion of the roads were made of dirt and mud, and those had transformed into what could generously be described as piles of wet mud.

Any crops that had been planted were uprooted and had withered away long ago.

Any farm animals that had been left behind; of which there were many since only a limited amount could be brought into Arconia, had been slain and drained of their blood by the dryads. Their carcasses littered the ground around us, and we would occasionally find one blocking the road.

Many of the animals brought into the city unfortunately also had to be culled as they couldn't be fed properly and also to feed their owners. All of this was going to be a problem now as there was going to be a huge shortage of them in the future.

Occasionally, we would run into other people who had also just left the city, or had somehow managed to hide somewhere in the wilderness away from the dryads. Many of the survivors were extremely haggard, barely clutching on to life, and could only be discerned from some of the corpses that littered the ground by the fact that they might occasionally twitch or gasp for air. You could see many of their rib cages very prominently along with their other bones - it reminded me of some of the photographs you'd see back on Earth of people who had survived severe famines.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The villagers carefully inspected such people to see if they were alive or not, though the stench of a rotting corpse was rather apparent once one got close enough. The survivors had delirious expressions even as they were offered a few drops of water, most of them being too sickly to speak more than a few words.

We accepted those people onto the carts, and carried them with us towards the village after I worked a bit of healing magic. I didn't need to use [Fish Haul] - we had stocked up well before heading out, though how things would be once we got to the village would be a different story.

As it was, even now, I had to preserve a good portion of my mana in case we were attacked.

We weren't - though we did also find the occasional animal who had escaped the wrath of the dryads as well. We found two pigs and a cow wandering off the trail who looked lost, which the villagers eagerly caught.

Given they had no marks to prove who owned them before, they were taken as the village's property - which I found kind of suspect, but then again I had no idea how the law would've handled something like this so I did not object.

As for the various human bodies we found, I wasn't sure what to do with them. The city guard or some other government body would have to round them up, and see if anyone recognized who they were. Those that couldn't be identified would be buried by the city. There were just too many of them for us to deal with.

While we didn't run into any dryads, a bear did pass by dangerously close before it lost interest and wandered somewhere else.

If it hadn't, I'd have been forced to kill it. The Tyrant Arachnea would have been more than a match for it - it had uses other than being lit on fire and with its deadly venom alone the bear wouldn't have stood much of a chance.

Because we were traveling while being burdened with a long train of carts and the like, we were not able to reach the village by nightfall and had to make camp.

We found a somewhat elevated hill in the afternoon, and decided to set up our camp there. We arranged the wagons in a protective circle and started a fire in the middle.

Dinner was fish again, and though I got some looks asking me to show off my [Poissonnier] skill, the thing was that I had to decline for now. I wanted to conserve my energy, because someone needed to keep watch at night - and I knew that it was likely that I would be woken up even after my watch was over because I was the only person who could deal with a large threat.

I turned out to be right, as once I fell asleep after my initial watch, someone shook me after what felt like only five minutes, saying that they thought they saw a dryad in the distance.

I got up, my [Unobstructed Sight] coming in handy here.

"That's not a dryad, that's just a normal tree," I told them.

"Wait - are you sure?" the villager asked, concerned.

"Yes, I am, I would see movement with these eyes of mine if it was a dryad," I told him. It was likely that in the darkness, and with how on edge most people were, that his eyes were just playing tricks on him. He did not have my night vision ability, after all. I yawned. "I'll be heading back to sleep for now."

Nothing else happened overnight, thankfully, and we started on our journey again.

Now that the roads were in a lot worse shape than they were in the city, the wagons began having extreme problems, oftentimes becoming stuck and requiring a group of people to pull them out. It wasn't that the dryads had caused more damage here, but rather that the roads there were more ill-maintained in the first place.

With all of that said, we did end up reaching the village - or where the village was supposed to be late in the evening on the second day.

The village was almost unrecognizable - Suki Tang's house was mostly intact thanks to the fact that it was mostly constructed from bricks, but the houses that had been less well-built, which included the vast majority of them, had been completely destroyed by the dryads likely while they were scrounging for food.

Many of the villagers burst into tears at the sight of their ruined homes. Some of them had nothing more than an empty plot of land to remind them of what had once been the place where they had lived in relative peace for what was likely their entire lives.

The fields fared no better - I doubted that the dryads had destroyed them intentionally, but with the mere passing of so many of them through these areas, the crops were all ruined, and the fields would need a large amount of work to get them ready for the next harvest.

The walls, which had been rather suspect even when I had come here before with Ganny Qi during the Spirit Festival, were just a few isolated stacks of bricks two or three bricks high now.

Assessing the situation, their first priority needed to be repairing the wall if they wanted to survive out here.

The dryads by now would be quite weak from having been starved, and a single rogue one could be defeated by even a group of farmhands with ease. However, they would still need some layer of protection, not just from the dryads but wild animals as well.

Even Suki Tang's house, on closer inspection, was not as intact as I'd thought. One wing of it had all but collapsed, and another area was almost uninhabitable. Small vermin like rats and mice were everywhere, having successfully infiltrated and seized Granny Qi's family home.

'This is less a village than two or three broken-down houses in the middle of the woods,' I thought to myself. We had repulsed the enemy, but scars like these would blemish the countryside as a reminder of the terror that had struck this land. The contrast between when I had last visited with Granny Qi and now couldn't have been more evident - whether you spoke of the village itself or the villager's morale.