CHAPTER 509: GIVE THEM THEIR OWN MEDICINE

The gods were silent.

This was not unusual to them. In fact, I didn’t really believe they would answer.

I was sure that they heard my prayers, but chose to ignore them, not to waste their precious influence on talking with me. Or perhaps because they thought my idea wasn’t even worth bothering.

Either way, I didn’t give in to despair.

Although I continued to repeat the same prayer to the gods daily, I also talked with my wife about what else we could do to prepare for a war against the other half of the continent.

After what my scouts have discovered, I believe that we should spend our effort on hunting the evolved deer first of all. But they were much more dangerous (and distant) opponents than ice-hole trees.

"I feel like the best way to solve this would be to force the deer to starve. These beasts procreate faster than rabbits! If we cut down their food base, they will eat each other out of food and die. I doubt they have evolution points or whatever to evolve, being completely not-reliant on food."

"Their current source of food is mostly ice-hole trees, isn’t it?" Ambrosia replied. "If we keep attacking and cutting them down, this would work toward the same goal... No, forget this. This was a silly thing to suggest."

She looked away, but I scooted closer to her on our couch, put a hand on her shoulder and smiled reassuringly.

"C’mon, it wasn’t so bad! If we could cut the trees down closer to the deer, or prevent them from regrowing, this would starve plenty of deer, yes. It’s too bad we are here and the deer are hundreds of thousands of kilometres away."

Amby looked at me and smiled back, but then her expression turned pensive again.

"I wonder... What if cutting the trees in the mountains isn’t useless, Necty?"

I blinked. Then I realised what she was thinking about—before the thought even fully formed in Amby’s own head—and perked up with excitement.

"This might work... Won’t be easy, but it might work. We can exacerbate things ourselves for it to work better... And a flood will wash away both the ice-hole trees and plenty of deer!"

Yes, Amby was suggesting that we create a flood, similar to the one we had to deal with recently, on the other side of the mountain range!

There were rivers that fed from the mountain snow and went from the mountains to the other half of the continent. At the moment, they were partially frozen by nearby ice-hole trees.

However, if the anti-tree army were to purposefully cut the trees near them (and possibly burn them to melt extra snow), it would cause melting.

There was one problem, though—the other side of the continent was covered in the ice-hole tree forest, and any falling flood could easily get lost and frozen in it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I believed that this would still cause just the wide-scale devastation I wanted it to. When the ice-hole trees meet water, they will freeze it—but it will just push them away. Then this mass of ice will push and crush any further trees in its way.

And the trees in the water will die and stop freezing things. Which will make flood cover an even larger area. The deer that won’t drown in the water will starve because there won’t be any trees to eat in the vicinity.

The ice-hole trees couldn’t grow on bare ground. They were very robust, but even they needed some soil, some sun and some air to survive.

"Amby, you are the best!" I declared, kissing her on the lips. While she blinked in surprise and smiled at me, I already jumped off the couch, waving my hands. "We have enough anti-tree soldiers to start a flood, and the weather is even warmer than it was when we got flooded."

It was summer, after all. The trees fighting against the deer were using this to spread faster and somewhat compete with the evolved deer, but the hot weather would also help us nicely.

I stood still and closed my eyes, recalling the last reports about the position of the anti-tree army and the trees they were cutting down. By my rough estimate, it would require them to go past several large tree groves to cut the trees that prevented snow from melting.

Bringing food to the anti-tree armies while they do it will be harder than usual, but the logistical chains were established well enough to allow some stretching.

This will let the trees spread back on the territories taken from them by the bees, but I decided that it was an acceptable sacrifice. And by this point, there were more anti-tree squads that could be sent in there to hold the line.

They will just need some time to get there, and then we will be golden.

I opened my eyes without going into a deep meditation and declared that I had to speak with the Bloodhero about this.

Within a week, the operation was planned out and set into motion.

After two weeks, the anti-tree soldiers cut down hundreds of thousands of bees over the mountain range, freeing dozens of rivers, large and small, from their grasp. They continued to cut more trees around these areas, trying to bring even more snow to melt.

After three weeks, an auspicious hot wave hit us, and the snow melted in heaps. The water level in all mountain rivers was rising.

By this point, I stopped praying. This clearly wasn’t working, so I decided that if gods deigned to speak with me, they would appear themselves.

After a month, the river banks couldn’t hold the water in anymore. The scouts reported the flood coming down the mountains, about to wash away both the ice-hole trees and the deer, both of which were still fighting viciously.

And I was ecstatic about it and eager to hear all about it... Until I was jumped in my own office!