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Chapter 248: Chapter 248: The Thing With Roots

Chapter 248: The Thing With Roots

The screaming echoed across the frozen mud of the killing ground.

It was a wet, ragged sound. The half-mutated Cultist clawed at his own face as thick, pale roots and jagged bone spurs violently ripped through his flesh.

Aegon Logcheville stood on the Vanguard wall. He gripped the silver communication crystal. He waited for Draven Mordis to deliver a flawless execution plan. He waited for the masked operative to dissect the monster into a simple mathematical problem.

The crystal remained dead silent.

"Draven," Aegon urged, watching the horrifying biological expansion. "It is mutating. Give me a target."

The silence stretched for another agonizing five seconds.

"The Cult did not make that thing, Aegon," Draven finally answered.

His voice was devoid of its usual cold, pragmatic certainty. It sounded heavy.

"They found it," Draven continued through the uplink. "Or they found something exactly like it. And they have been trying to reproduce what they discovered."

Draven stood in the dark bunker four hundred miles away, staring at the erratic red pulse on his interface map.

He recognized the mana signature. He had felt it inside Thaldrasil. Months ago, in the deep root system beneath that dead mountain, he had sensed a rotting, corrupted nature magic wrapped around roots that were nine thousand years old.

That rot predated the Church of the Eternal Eclipse. It predated the Vanguard. It was older than the Bastions themselves.

The Cult of the Eclipse worshipped the void. They erased matter. But the anomaly screaming on the plain was doing the exact opposite. It was growing.

Draven kept the terrifying implication to himself. The Cult was experimenting with the very plague that had murdered a nine-thousand-year-old elven civilization. They were weaponizing a disease they did not understand.

"How do we kill it?" Aegon demanded over the wind.

Draven gripped the edge of his tactical table. He ran a dozen different Vanguard combat models in his head. Every single one of them failed against unchecked, hyper-accelerated cellular growth.

"I do not know," Draven admitted.

Aegon went completely still. It was the first time in his entire life that he had asked Draven a direct combat question and received no answer.

"I have no battle plan for you," Draven confessed quietly. "But it is using a human host as an anchor. Human biology requires a central pump to distribute mana. Pierce the heart. That is the only logic I can give you."

The crystal went silent again.

Aegon looked down at the writhing mass of flesh and bone. He was entirely on his own.

He listened to the man trapped inside the monstrosity. The Cultist was weeping blood, begging for an end to the agonizing biological expansion.

Aegon tightened his grip on his heavy Vanguard spear. He made his decision.

He did not order a tactical retreat. He did not order the squad to stall for time. He made a humane, incredibly dangerous choice.

"We drop it now," Aegon ordered his squad, his voice ringing with true command. "Use everything. The man inside is still screaming."

The anomaly stopped clawing at its face.

The weeping man slowly lowered his twisted, elongated arms. His pale eyes rolled back into his skull. He reached down and pressed his malformed, root-covered hands into the frozen dirt.

The anomaly was not a creature of brute strength. It was something fundamentally wrong.

CRACK.

Reina’s pristine layer of black ice fractured from beneath.

Thick, pale roots erupted from the frozen mud. They did not smash the ice; they grew directly through it. The roots drank the ambient moisture, swelling rapidly. Jagged bone spurs shot up from the clay, tearing through the heavy iron boots of the dead Cultists lying in the gorge.

The terrain shifted violently. The Vanguard killing ground was hijacking itself.

The roots lashed out like whips, cracking the stone of the half-rebuilt wall. The anomaly was turning the earth against the defenders.

"Lucien!" Aegon roared.

Lucien stepped to the edge of the parapet. The Storm Sovereign did not bother with microscopic threads. He summoned a massive, blinding spear of solid blue lightning and hurled it directly into the anomaly’s chest.

KRAK-THOOM.

The electricity struck the pale, rotting flesh.

The anomaly did not burn. It shuddered, absorbing the massive kinetic heat. Living tissue conducts energy, and corrupted nature magic thrives on raw power. The lightning fed the mutation. The roots instantly thickened, surging upward to wrap around the iron scaffolding of the wall.

"Lightning feeds it!" Lucien shouted, stumbling back as a bone spur impaled the stone inches from his foot.

Natalie Tokks drew her bow. She fired three flawless wind arrows in rapid succession.

THWIP.

THWIP.

THWIP.

The compressed arrows buried themselves deep into the monster’s shifting mass. The pale flesh simply closed over the wounds, swallowing the kinetic pressure without a drop of blood spilling.

Natalie lowered her bow. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. She stopped looking at the terrifying monster and started looking at the grid.

She applied her father’s five-point sensory method. She mapped the chaotic, rapidly shifting biological mass. She watched the mana expand, contract, and mutate in real time.

"It is regenerating randomly," Natalie called out, her emerald eyes snapping open. "But the core is static."

She pointed a finger at the upper left quadrant of the anomaly’s bloated chest.

"There is a dead zone right there," Natalie yelled over the grinding of roots. "It is not a human heart. It is not beating. And it is not a Cult void-crystal. It is something ancient, and it is buried deep in the tissue."

"Estella!" Aegon barked, throwing his arm out. "Take the shot!"

Estella Everdawn stepped forward.

The Star Mage had been held in reserve the entire battle. She raised her right hand. She did not summon a wide, destructive pulse of pure starlight. She remembered the first month at the Academy. She remembered Draven telling her to stop spreading the beam and crush it into a single point instead.

She condensed the cosmic radiation. She crushed the brilliant light into a single, blinding pinpoint of pure thermal pressure.

FWOOSH.

A laser of solid starlight erupted from her palm.

It crossed the battlefield in a fraction of a second. It punched a flawless, perfectly round hole straight through the exact coordinate Natalie had painted on the anomaly’s chest.

The monster shrieked. It was a terrifying, hollow sound of grinding wood and snapping bone.

The rapid cellular growth instantly stopped.

The roots froze in place. The bone spurs stopped erupting from the mud. Estella had severed the distribution network.

But the anomaly did not fall.

It stood in the ruined mud, a massive, gaping hole burning in its chest. The ancient thing buried inside had been damaged, but it had not been destroyed.

The anomaly raised its head. It locked its pale, dead eyes onto the six teenagers standing on the wall.

Twenty yards away, Lord Commander Gunther Stillbane was locked in a brutal melee.

The ruler of Bastion Six stood inside the churning rock of [The Concrete Tomb]. He traded heavy, devastating blows with the Cult Elder. Gunther swung his heavy fists, using the terrain to grind the Elder’s dark armor down to the metal framework.

Gunther caught a flash of blinding starlight out of the corner of his eye.

He saw the anomaly shrug off Estella’s cosmic beam. The massive, pale monster turn its attention toward the exhausted Vanguard squad. The teenagers were tapped out. Lucien was breathing heavily. Estella’s hands were shaking. Reina was holding onto the parapet for support.

They could not handle the root-thing.

Gunther could.

The Lord Commander made a choice.

He parried a heavy strike from the Elder. Then, Gunther deliberately dropped his guard.

He turned his back on a Level 200 opponent.

Gunther broke away from the duel. He surged across the frozen mud, putting his massive, armored body directly between the half-rebuilt wall and the towering anomaly.

He raised his hands, preparing to rip the bedrock up to crush the anomaly.

Behind him, the Cult Elder stepped out of the churning stone.

The Elder raised his spiked dark-iron mace high into the air.

Gunther did not turn around. He focused entirely on protecting the six teenagers on the wall. He accepted the trade.

CRUNCH.

The spiked mace slammed into the center of Gunther’s spine.

The sound of shattering iron and breaking bone echoed across the silent killing ground.

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