"What's wrong? Joan?" Gradus immediately stood up, the bearded hunter who had previously retired but wanted to hunt once more quickly felt tensed up by Joan's expression.
"Shit… Why now?!" Joan quickly stood up. "Everyone, we are going back to the village, quickly!"
The other hunters immediately reacted with annoyed expressions or surprised ones, Joan didn't had much time to explain things, the army of undead was less than a hundred meters away from them.
"My mouse spotted an enormous army of undead coming straight to the village! We have to quickly tell everyone about this and prepare a defensive formation with all our fighters available! Come, let's go back, there's no time!" Joan immediately began running towards the village. The other hunters quickly began to panic, as they believed their leader and immediately began running behind him.
"Undead? Are you serious?!"
"You didn't saw something different, right Joan?"
"There's no way Undead are here, there hasn't been for a while! The forest got purified by the priests some time ago too!"
"It's the truth! I saw their rotting corpses walking in two feet. There were also weird undead with them, not only skeletons and zombies of people but also monsters with weird appearances, some looked mutated!" Joan said in panic, gritting his teeth.
The other hunters, already having what was happening confirmed by their trustful leader, quickly seemed to panic even more, running faster.
"We have to call the priests, and quickly!"
"Ugh, there's something smelling horrible here… Wait, the Undead?!"
"Yeah." Joan replied. "They're about a hundred meters away from us, if we slow down even a second we'll probably get caught by them."
As everyone ran, Joan began to panic more, feeling like the same thing that happened half a year ago with the Demons was repeating itself once more. They had yet to even have a year and something catastrophic was happening once more. Now that Joan had three kids to feed, he couldn't simply sit idle in his farm.
Even though Blake was independent and helped in the house by bringing food and other things weekly, his father didn't simply wanted to benefit from his son and become sedentary. He had been not only hunting wild boars but also gray wolves and horned rabbits in large quantities with his hunter friends to feed his two little children brought to the world just recently.
They had come to the world just a month ago and they were still very small and fragile. They had to be taken care all the time, so his wife and her mother were constantly taking care of them.
Now that he had to spend money constantly buying leather for their diapers, buying higher quality food for their baby food, custom baby clothes so they don't freeze to death at the cold night, and more, Joan needed an enormous amount of money that merely farming didn't gave, so he was proactively hunting, almost daily, to sell the things he hunted and also bring fresh meat back home.
If the entire village was overtaken by monsters, even worse, the terrifying Undead, the life of his children would be threatened, especially the two little twins, so small and fragile that it would be an almost impossible task to bring them away if they were running away. And even if they ran, where would they go?
The nearest village was several kilometers away from here, walking over the dangerous monster-infested forest with babies was something incredibly dangerous.
"Shit, shit, shit… I have to delay them!" He quickly looked into his bag, a special bag modified with spatial magic runes that increased its interior size by fifty times, and quickly took out a blue potion his son had gifted to him for his birthday alongside the bag, this was an extremely expensive Mana Potion which were also rare and hard to make even for his talented son.
Joan immediately infused all his Mana into his Spirit and then drank the potion while running as fast as possible, some potion came out of his mouth as his body was shaking while running, but he drank almost all of it in a single gulp. Mana immediately began to recover as he felt the flow emerge from his body, only for him to direct it towards his spirit once more.
"Now, little guy! Soil Manipulation!"
Suddenly, the mouse that had been in front of the undead army immediately activated one of Joan's Farmer Skills he had acquired in the battle against the demons, manipulating the soil completely and digging constantly underground, in less than a minute, an enormous hole opened in the ground, as several undead began to fall into it stupidly.
"Yes!" Joan smiled as he suddenly felt nausea all over himself, almost fully depleting his mana twice caused a terrible mana sickness that made his body limp and his mind dizzy. If it wasn't for his high stats he would had fallen unconscious.
Half of the undead army was successfully stopped on their tracks as they fell down a pitfall twenty meters deep into the ground, with sharp spikes reinforced with Soil Manipulation. This special skill of the Farmer Talent was amazing, but it was too costly with Mana, and Joan had little time every day to practice it due to his low MP compared to his son and his friends.
The Undead began to roar and bark, as there were also mutated wolf undead and the like, slowly crawling their way back to the surface with their sharp claws and endless stamina. Joan's efforts were only to delay their arrive by a few minutes, although a dozen of Undead were pierced by the spikes, many walked out of them like nothing.
Undead were terrifying in the fact that merely hitting their vitals didn't kill them, sometimes they would remain "alive" even as they lacked heads or limbs, incredibly vicious in nature. And while Joan and the hunters finally reached the village, the figure of a black cloaked man appeared behind his undead army.
"Hmph, to think you could fall for such a trap…"