" You can rest now, they don't attack at night. You will need to be on guard duty later, now let's talk about why they attacked. Obviously the demon beasts here are extremely territorial, once the first pack found us they attacked after we started eliminating them, their cries drove other nests and packs into a frenzy" although Captain Rai was explaining patiently he was not a happy man.
Of the 340 soldiers that set off twenty two had died at this point.
" The first layer is the territory of Archaic Demon Herons and the second, third and fourth are contested between Bengal Demon Tigers and Archaic Wind Condors for supremacy. Now as to why the bird monsters here are called archaic, these lands have not changed in ecology or environment much for a long time.
These winged creatures draw their blood from some Archaic legendary beasts, they don't improve forwards in terms of evolution they prefer atavism to a more primordial form, those type of demon beasts are give the prefix Archaic or Ancient and so on."
---
The military convoy set off after resting for a night and after the Healers had done their job and cleansed of poisons. Living in such an environment most creatures here had some abilities related to poison.
If one was not careful they could die of poison that suddenly flared up during battle, also the necessity of Healing mages couldn't be exaggerated for situations like these.
The next two days passed with much happening, the attacks of the Demon Herons had become a routine for the convoy, they would advance a few kilometres before the held their ground and eliminated the Herons and repeated this monotonous cycle until the third day, when they made it to the second layer the Deep Marsh layer.
In this layer, the depth of the Marsh had reached an insane rate that it could even trouble Super Earth mages using Earth Wave.
The first day of the convoy's stay in the Deep Marsh layer was uneventful and as they found a place to camp for the night, Captain Rai adjusted the plans and made his way to the national team.
" What are you plans?"
" We have bought a few Water Monitor Lizards, they can alert us to the presence of a Bengal Tiger when one is near".
" Good. Then you might need it pretty soon"
" I thought we were clear for the night" Guan Chen asked.
" I said the Demon Herons would not attack at night and neither will the Wind Condors. But tigers they hunt better at night also why the reason both the Archaic creatures don't move about at night.
They hunt other creatures like the apes, alligators here and the Bengal Tigers hunt everything and when they don't find enough prey they cross the layers quite easily as well.
So your first battle with a Bengal Tiger might be today and one more thing Water Monitor Lizards have limits too, any Advancing Commander is beyond their capacity to sense so we will need guards as well."
The team had managed to get just a few hours of sleep before the entire convoy's Water Monitor Lizards started chirping like crazy, obviously signalling the arrival of the apex predators of these swamp lands.
Cao Guang woke and saw a gigantic creature rise up from the swamp waters and attack the convoy.
The creature was similar to the descriptions of the Hunters reports. It was a tiger the size of a small airplane, it had two horns made of wood behind its eyes and a giant tree grew on its back.
That's right a tree twenty metres tall stood on its back. This tree was a part of the Tiger's body and not some convenient symbiont.
The Tiger's attack almost always caught unsuspecting prey off guard, one moment there were too many mangrove trees in the largest mangrove forest in the world and the next the apex predator had eaten you alive or killed you in a strike.
Cao Guang also saw a plethora of vines emerge from the tree on its back attacking the soldiers as they moved to safety. The creature had atleast a hundred of these vines, and mages needed at least an Advanced spell or repeated peak Intermediate spells to disarm the Tiger of these vines.
And this vine grappling was only the first stage of combat as far as these Tigers were concerned, those stuff grew back after a few days and some food. The only positive about the Bengal Tiger was they hunted alone like most Tigers.
Seriously, whose these things as an assessment target.