Chapter 1330 — The Northern Line

In the second week of the Frost Moon, the cold winds howling down from the northern mountains did not let up, and a great snow fell the whole night through, blanketing the long defensive line of the northern regions. Even the fire and smoke raised by magic cannons and legion spells cooled before the power of nature, and the mountains at the edge of the Dark Wasteland stood clad in silver.

Yet even the lowliest soldiers knew this brief, silent winter would not last long—the cold could slow the aberrants only slightly; their assaults would not halt for any change in the weather. On that foul, corrupted land, the clashes between the frontline troops and the aberrants would soon resume—and in some ways... they had never ceased for a single moment.

In the northeastern reaches of the Gondo Wasteland, upon what had once been wasteland, Anluo Wendell walked across the cold, barren ground, listening to the faint crunch of trodden snow beneath her feet. Amid the wind that never stopped at her ear, she caught a faint, fragmented sound that seemed to rise from deep within the earth, and now and then a tremor, intermittent, came up through the soles of her feet, giving the illusion of an earthquake.

The Typhon commander halted and looked toward the dark mountains far to the north—there lay the Cecil defensive line, and there the "living forest" had taken root.

"Do you feel the trembling underfoot?" Anluo turned and looked at the aide walking beside her. "It seems to have started again."

"Yes, General," said the female aide with short silver-white hair and slightly dark skin, nodding, her expression precise and proper. "It is Lady Beiyila of the living forest launching an offensive underground. Her main root system has already spread beneath our feet, and I hear it has now reached near the arcane scorch—but there it has met with very fierce enemy resistance."

Anluo said nothing, only followed her senses to a frozen open patch and crouched, brushing away the layer of soft snow atop the ice. Because the great wall of the northern sector had collapsed, moisture and cold wind from beyond the wall had poured into the wasteland's northern fringes, and this land that had never known snow now bore snow and ice. Through the thick ice her gaze found a broad fissure that seemed to reach deep into the earth, at whose bottom a dim red glow churned. Peering closely through the gloom, she saw writhing rootlets, translucent conduits, and biomass solution flowing slowly through the conduits.

As though noticing the sunlight falling from above, one slender branch among those writhing underground rootlets suddenly wound its way upward. It pressed against the ice and tapped lightly on the underside of the block, as if greeting Anluo—then swiftly withdrew and went on spreading and growing toward the depths of the wasteland.

"...Should I have returned the greeting just now?" Anluo said, rising with a rather strange expression, half joking to the aide beside her. "I hear that even bark shed from the Thorin Great Tree theoretically carries Typhon royal blood..."

The aide was struck dumb by the question, and only after a long daze did she hesitantly speak: "This subordinate feels there is no need to go quite that far..."

Anluo smiled, raised her head, and gazed at the vast land behind her, and at the living forest at the land's end, still lush in this bitter winter, her expression thoughtful. "When the soldiers we sent to the Cecil camp returned, they brought me a fresh flower. Even then I suspected it might have something to do with some facility the Cecil had built near their camp, but never did I imagine they would let the Thorin Great Tree spread underground all the way to the border. I must admit, in the matter of wild ideas they are indeed a cut above the stiff-necked Typhon."

"Their 'wild ideas' ended up saving the northern situation and holding back a dreadful fate," the aide could not help but marvel as well. "That living forest blocked the main force of aberrants pouring from the breach, and to this day Lady Beiyila's underground offensive has greatly eased the pressure on the entire northern line and on part of our own. Without that outside force, never mind standing here—we would hardly have been able to hold the positions we had."

Anluo nodded slightly, and could not help but ponder the present state of this "Wasteland War."

Of the situation on the other fronts she knew little, but on the battlefield faced by Typhon and Cecil, at least, the situation could be called fully stabilized—there had even been a degree of "progress." With the living forest firmly rooted at the border, more than half the aberrants' northern main legion had been lost. The Typhon northern legion and the Cecil had weathered the most perilous and difficult challenges of the war's opening; now the two nations had not only steadied their lines but each, relying on its already formidable military, had launched several counterpushes, successfully driving the monsters that had poured from the wasteland back inside it, and had established several forward bases inside the original great wall—in a sense, this even amounted to realizing part of the initial goal of "counterattacking the wasteland."

At this very moment she stood on what had been the Gondo Wasteland. Near her were two forward bases the Typhon had established and one purification base; together these bases sustained the human army's survival and supply in this region, while steadily suppressing and weakening the corrupt forces entrenched in the land, preparing for further advances to come.

Of course, it was no easy thing for these vanguard forces that had entered the wasteland to take root. The aberrants never abandoned their counterattacks; every day monstrous legions of no small size swarmed up from the southern regions, and in fierce fighting destroyed the temporary fortifications and basic equipment the vanguard had barely managed to set up in the wild, causing fresh casualties and contamination. For mortals, every step forward on this land demanded a steep price.

Yet undeniably, whether Cecil or Typhon, the soldiers were growing swiftly in this war of attrition. Mortals, quick to learn, were rapidly accumulating experience in fighting aberrants, and effective methods for purifying this land. The northern line's advance was slow, but at least there was some progress every day.

The situation looked rather good, yet for some reason a faint unease kept fermenting in Anluo's heart. She knew this unease was no ethereal "intuition"—she did not much believe in such things anyway. It came from the intelligence she had gathered and pieced together through various channels, and from her observation and study of the aberrants since the war began.

"General, you look heavy-hearted," the aide beside her suddenly broke the silence, rousing Anluo from her thoughts. "Is it the aberrants' increasingly frequent counterattacks that worry you?"

"No, something else has occurred to me. Do you remember what happened at Hill 74 not long ago?" Anluo shook her head, looking at the aide. "That offensive—so grand in scale, and so feeble in the end."

"Hill 74? Ah, of course I remember," the aide said after a moment's thought, nodding at once. "A few days ago, on a defensive line near the Empire's southern regions, a vast number of aberrants and mixed behemoths launched a well-organized, ferocious counterattack. They punched through the line held by the 16th Mountain Regiment under Count Rake and seized Hill 74 and a great stretch of the surrounding area. But when the Imperial National Knights mustered their reinforcements in force and prepared to fight those monsters to the death, the monsters withdrew cleanly and decisively—apart from leaving behind a stretch of contaminated land and two burned towns, they seemed to have no intention of pushing further..."