When Quest returned to Emerald Wood, it was raining heavily.

He rode a winter wolf, and the desert elf Brach rode a spirited red warhorse, and a mule followed two positions behind them.

The mules carried Queth's letters and Bradch's armor, their rolls, tents, clothes, many spiced strips of beef, half a pot of honey wine, and two bags of water.

Walking to the gate of Emerald Wood City, the two men restrained their horses. The iron anchor on the door had a human head stuck in it for public display, and it seemed that it had just been inserted, and the flesh was more pink than green, but it had already attracted a scavenging crow.

The deceased's lips and cheeks were torn and bitten through, and his eyes became two brown holes, and red tears slowly flowed through the dried blood scabs. His most drooping swagger was wide open, as if to preach to the travelers under his door.

Quest squinted his eyes and looked at it for a moment. "I seem to know this man," he said, glancing back at Bradge, "this man seems to be the leader of the rebel rake, and I think there's a promise I haven't made with him." ”

"It's been a few days since the adults were gone, and the city has changed lately," said Bradge, "and last week this man preached at the gates of the city against the gnomes for fooling all the Ramsey with the financial system, and he said, 'Those gnomes are not good allies.'" ”

"Green ordered him to be put to death?" asked Quest, "this is not like the style of the lord of Emerald Wood, the rake has black teeth, and apparently died of poisoning—it is not in the open, and it is easy to provoke a rebellion among the rebels and civilians." ”

"It was the fat mayor of Soft Maple that used to do it," Blatch added, "and he wanted to send his mercenaries to catch the rake, but it didn't work." The men retreated and forcibly fed him a bowl of poison......"

After a moment's pause, Quest and Brazz spurred their mounts into Emerald Wood City. As he walked along the road, the Desert Elf explained to him in detail the grievances between the Rake and the fat mayor of Soft Maple City, stories that had long since spread throughout the city like the wind.

"The two of them were originally brothers, and they both worked as apprentices in a great alchemist shop in Soft Maple City. It's just that the fat mayor's brain is more bright, and the rake is more obsessed with alchemy.

The former relied on the tonic of the previous mayor to enter the political arena and rose through the ranks, while the latter learned all the skills of the great alchemist and inherited the teacher's family business.

The rake has always believed that those gem coins issued by the gnomes are nothing of value at all, and that the dwarf island is intended to enslave and send the entire human race of Ramsay.

The fat mayor declared that his junior brother was a rebel, and the rake fled outside the city to become a rebel. Later, with his own skills, he slowly became a leader of the rebels. OK

Just after the dwarf island said that it would join the alliance army, the rake, who was already a member of the alliance army, jumped out and lashed out at the gnomes for what they did. The fat mayor then carried out an assassination of him.

When the rake died, Green was furious at the behavior of the soft maple mayor, which had actually torn a gap that could not be bridged by the Ramsay Human Alliance, which had been carefully assembled by him, but due to the pressure from the dwarf island, he still had to obey the gnomes' advice and stick the rake's head in front of the city gate for public display. ”

Quest had been busy with "business" before, so he just left the more stable desert elves and paladins in Emerald Wood City to deal with some daily affairs. When the change occurred, Brach directly used the spell scroll and teleported to the camp of the Scales Chamber of Eternal Order. Jensen, on the other hand, stayed with the Paladin (Dalton Jr.) troops of Heyronis according to the plan.

Since the gnomes had already sent a large number of men to Emerald Wood City, Quest did not use any unconventional means to hide his identity. Like an ordinary mortal, he drove his mount Starry Night back to Emerald Wood City.

Just walking through the city's neighborhoods, Quest could smell the smell of gunpowder in the air - and for the new "gnomes", the civilians of Emerald Wood City showed a hidden hostility.

This has something to do with the fact that the gnomes interfered with the traditions of Emerald Wood and supported the assassination of the exiled mayor of Soft Maple. But more, because after entering the city, without saying a word, they directly occupied the block that was destroyed by the emperor's air raid. Then, the gnomes built a city within a city that was forbidden to ordinary civilians of Emerald Wood.

It wasn't surprising that the civilians of Emerald Wood City would react in this way. Just ask, for the villain who suddenly broke into his house and then beat a cubicle to live without the owner's permission, which owner would color it?

In fact, in addition to ordinary civilians, Mayor Green is also mad by the behavior of the gnomes. His family has been rooted in this place, ruling Emerald Wood for hundreds of years. And he himself is now the titular commander-in-chief of the entire Ramsay Human Alliance. The dwarfs rebuilding another city here without permission is a naked provocation to his authority.

Had it not been for the attendants, and the Templars of Thom who accompanied him, to stop him and tell him how advanced the weapons and equipment the gnomes had brought, and how much to tear their faces at the same level as a terrible enemy for the Emperor, the Ramsay's hopes for the future rested on the weight of his endurance at this moment...... He had already ordered the storming of the city within a city.

It's just that, as those people say, the gnomes did come prepared for this trip. They directly used super-large airships to drop a large number of weapons and infrastructure equipment into the ruins of the city.

The first gnome commander to arrive here was the gnome elder Freg Ironbeard, nicknamed "The Dwarf of the Gurgies". As soon as the dwarf's feet touched the ground, construction work began.

He had five cavalry of mechanical chocobos armed with steam tanks disperse the civilians of nearby Emerald Wood, and then led his engineers and construction experts to use forklifts and other tools to pour all the rubble from the ruins into a compressed sheet making machine.

Immediately afterwards, they used cranes and other tools to stack the compressed plates like building blocks, layer by layer, and built a fortress building with an obvious dwarf style. Based on this building, Frege Ironbeard built some dungeons that could only be used by gnomes.

To tell the truth, his actions can be described as extremely executive, and the engineers under him are also a rare group of gnomes who are not so lazy on the current dwarf island. However, the steel-maned bearded gnome tough guy misses one thing (or he doesn't care) about it, and that is that the building location they chose wasn't some borderland.