With fewer personnel, the convoy moved much faster and more smoothly.
They left most of the Cat Spiders and Dragon Turtles at camp, keeping only the fastest batch. There was less food to prepare, and they could even gather ingredients on the spot. For example, two Giant Cats dug up some mushrooms from beneath the roots of a tree, cooked a fresh mushroom soup, and shared it around. Fortunately, the toxins were not too potent—they only poisoned to death two local rabbit-bears that had sneaked bites, adding an extra course for the witches and Giant Cats.
The witches also gathered food through various means. Paired with their rations, they ate quite happily—though they watched the witches and Giant Cats sharing the fresh mushroom soup with worried eyes.
After eating halfway through the journey, they set off again.
Though the Ring Zone was vast, as Anse's natural resource production area, it was not unbearably large.
It was just that the Anse Elves' road-building skills were truly lousy.
They used industrial bricks produced by the Sixth Arcane Empire—which had actually been destroyed eight times over the years, yet somehow still counted as a cosmic empire in scale. The bricks were made of common materials such as stone, tar, and asphalt, with large amounts of sawdust added to suit Anse's needs and reduce road construction costs. Those already poor materials, combined with the fact that Anse's young ladies only let their servant armies build the roads...
What resulted was a woodland highway that could barely be called pastoral in style: cracks everywhere, mushrooms sprouting from the fissures; sections of road that occasionally collapsed and sank into small pools; pavement overgrown with grass. There were also stretches blasted away by witch spells, and even overturned freight trains, which looked as though they had been