Chapter 339 – 339 – The March Through the Gray Forest

Chapter 339 – The March Through the Gray Forest

The Gray Ghoul’s stronghold in this land was not due to geographical reasons but rather political ones.

The Border Guard’s standing army had never actively sought out and eradicated monsters or magical beasts, allowing them to persist.

“Why should I?”

The previous lord of the Border Guard, who had left before Marcus, had dismissed hunting monsters like Gray Ghouls as unnecessary and wasteful of resources.

As a result, the approach had been limited to occasional clean-up efforts, focused mainly on maintaining trade routes near the Pen-Hanil River and a few others. Even then, only small-scale measures were taken.

Recently, roads near Green Pearl and the route to Martai had been cleared, but these efforts were far from thorough.

“Is someone tossing monsters into the area or what?”

This was one of Marcus’s complaints upon taking his position. The term “monster tossing” referred to luring monsters into neighboring territories. While such actions hadn’t occurred, Marcus’s frustration was understandable—monsters seemed to appear endlessly, as if from a bottomless pit.

When a new frontier city was established near the Border Guard, a gnoll colony had even emerged. Even with cultist involvement, such occurrences required a substantial population of monsters in the region.

This underscored that the Border Guard was not an ideal place to live. Consequently, defensive strategies had always been the norm, avoiding proactive operations to exterminate monsters.