The Golden Experience Point

Chapter 74: "Remote Devastation"

Since they had come this far through the assault ants' hard work, Rare kind of wanted to let them just burn everything down, but the soldier vespoids had only been observing all this time and didn't have any other tasks. If the kingdom didn't have any air forces, then the soldier vespoids would primarily be fighting ground forces from here on out, so she wanted to let them take care of these foes, which would also double as practice.

"That's why I'm leaving this to them. They are free to decide how they want to handle it. Have the assault and infantry forces fall back to where the artillery are."

<I understand.>

At the same time as Sugaru responded, the soldier vespoids, who had been monitoring the progress of the invasion from high up in the air, suddenly dropped into nosedives.

"Waaah!!!"

"There are more enemies aside from just ants! Fuck, how come we didn't know about this?!"

"Those sellsword shits! Why didn't they report about them to us?!"

The knights laid all the blame at the sellswords' feet, but in this situation no one could have been expected to do any better. The soldier vespoids skimmed the ground as they pulled out of their dives, then picked up the knights one after the other and climbed back up into the air.

"Dammit! Stop! Let me go!!!"

After flying up about fifty meters, they simply tossed the knights to the side.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh...!!!"

The armor they wore was much more lavish than what the sellswords had, but it did nothing to reduce fall damage. When they collided with the ground, they sunk into it about halfway due to the weight of the armor, but that did nothing to mitigate the lethality of the impact, thus none of the fallen knights got back up.

Most of the knights got a free bungee jump, without a cord, by way of the swarm of soldier vespoids, and as a result the city lord's knight order was decimated. If any of the knights had been officially [Subordinated], then they should eventually respawn if left alone, but NPCs would only automatically respawn after one hour. Players were able to respawn immediately, but NPCs didn't receive system messages, so they had to wait out the full timer. This was why spawn camping NPCs was inefficient.

"That means we don't really need the lord's mansion for anything. Let's just crush it and move on to the next target."

She ordered the artillery ants to rain fire on the mansion. In the blink of an eye, it had become a mess of flames and rubble. She didn't know if the lord had been in there or not, but if they were, then surely all that remained would be a corpse by now. If they were still alive, then Rare would like to get rid of them for the XP, but stacked up against the value of destroying the city, the amount earned probably wouldn't be any more than a rounding error.

"Just in case, have the infantry look for someone who looks like they could be a lord. All other forces will continue the invasion. This city is so close to the forest that there's no real meaning in taking it for ourselves, so I don't mind if it turns into an empty plot of land."

Rare did want to create a new ruins-type monster territory. However, she wanted to find a place with more impact, in a position of power. The most suitable place would definitely be the royal capital, the symbol of the kingdom. She would purge it and turn it into an undead-infested wasteland.

"Well, I should save that for after Erfahren and Lourdes have been subjugated... or actually demolished... and after La Colline's been handled. Can we do all that within ten days? We're basically done here, but I wonder how things are going over in Lourdes..."