Chapter 252: Chapter 252: The Planting
Chapter 252: The Planting
THUD.
Astraxion landed heavily on the Vanguard staging pad inside Bastion Six. The neon-purple Void Dragon folded his massive wings. He looked exhausted. He had flown four hundred miles north alone, carrying a single iron case strapped to his spiked back.
The city around the landing pad was visibly dying.
The corruption had advanced significantly since dawn. Sickly, ash-white veins crept through the cracks in the cobblestones of the second district. The rot was bleeding into the lower stone walls of the barracks. The air smelled of decaying leaves and wet earth.
Aegon Logcheville unbuckled the heavy iron case from the dragon’s scales. He threw the heavy latches open.
He stared at the payload.
It was a severed branch. The wood was coated in a thick, hardened alchemical resin. It smelled of sharp silver and raw pine. The heavy golden sap sealed beneath the resin pulsed with a very faint, dying light.
It was not a bomb. It was not a legendary weapon. It was a piece of wood.
Aegon picked up his silver communication crystal. He keyed the channel to Bastion Seven.
"Lyra," Aegon said flatly. "Astraxion delivered a dead stick."
"It is a living cutting," Lyra Voltaire’s voice echoed back through the stone. She sounded exhausted. "It is a piece of the World Tree. A cutting is not a sword, Aegon. You cannot swing it at a monster."
Aegon looked down at the pale, creeping veins in the courtyard dirt.
"Then what do I do with it?" Aegon asked.
Lyra did not offer a combat strategy. She gave him horticultural instructions.
"You plant it," Lyra instructed firmly. "The anomaly outside your southern wall is a counterfeit root system. You cannot burn it away. You have to contest the soil. You need to plant the cutting deeper than the corruption."
She paused, reading from her heavy Elven Encyclopedia four hundred miles away.
"A World Tree needs an anchor," Lyra continued. "It needs something solid in the bedrock to grip before it can fight back. Find a clean foundation."
Reina Frost stepped up to the iron case.
"The white stone," Reina realized aloud.
She looked at Aegon. She remembered the deep foundation tunnels from her mapping run the day before. The creeping rot had actively avoided a smooth block of ancient white stone buried deep in the earth.
"There is a stone in the lowest level," Reina reported. "The corruption will not touch it."
"Then that is your anchor," Lyra finalized.
Aegon closed the channel. He looked toward the heavy iron doors leading down into the subterranean bays. The Vanguard scouts reported that the lower tunnels were now heavily choked with pale roots.
Whoever carried the cutting down would be trapped underground while the massive anomaly was still alive and growing directly above them.
"Reina," Aegon assigned quickly. "You know the route. Lead the descent."
Reina nodded. She drew her heavy, double-sided axe.
"Estella," Aegon commanded. "Burn a path. Keep the tunnels clear."
The Star Mage gave a short, professional nod. She did not look at him. She was cold and precise, carrying the heavy weight of the closed door from the previous night.
"Lucien," Aegon finished. "The lightning fed the anomaly yesterday. Do not throw current at anything down there. Use your threads. If the roots compromise the structural iron, you have to keep the roof from collapsing on them."
Aegon gripped his spear. He was the commander. His job was to hold the surface garrison and watch the thing rooted outside the southern gate. He had to stay above ground while he sent his squad into the dark. It felt like cowardice, but he knew it was duty.
Bram Stonehelm pushed himself off the courtyard wall.
Thick, fresh blood soaked through his white bandages. His shattered collarbone jutted sharply under his skin. His left arm hung uselessly at his side.
"I am going," Bram rumbled.
"No," Aegon refused immediately. "You cannot lift a weapon. You cannot fight."
Bram took a heavy, agonizing step forward.
"A tree needs to be planted," Bram argued, his voice a low, pained rasp. "You need to know the exact depth of the bedrock. You need to know when you hit the bottom. None of them can feel the earth."
Aegon stared at the massive earth mage. Bram was broken. Sending him into a hostile, collapsing tunnel system was practically a death sentence.
But Bram was right.
Aegon gritted his teeth. It was the hardest command choice he had ever made.
"Go," Aegon ordered softly.
The four teenagers walked toward the heavy iron hatch. They descended into the earth.
The first three levels of the subterranean bays were a nightmare of human misery. Thousands of evacuated civilians huddled together on the cold concrete. Children cried in the dark. The air was thin and smelled of unwashed bodies and raw terror.
The squad moved past them in silence. They reached the heavy Vanguard blast doors marking the entrance to the lower foundation tunnels.
Reina pushed the doors open.
The tunnels had changed.
The pale, pulsing roots were no longer creeping vines. They were thick, fleshy cables. They pulsed with a slow, sickening heartbeat. The air in the deep corridor was suffocatingly hot and humid.
The corruption was responsive. It reacted to their body heat immediately.
As the squad stepped into the tunnel, the pale vines peeled off the walls and lunged forward.
FWOOSH.
Estella raised her hand. A pinpoint beam of condensed starlight erupted from her palm. She did not create an explosion. She used the cosmic radiation like a scalpel, cleanly severing the writhing roots before they could grab Reina’s boots.
The severed roots whipped wildly, smashing into the ancient iron support beams holding up the Bastion above them.
GROAN.
The ceiling shuddered. The heavy stone blocks began to crack.
Lucien raised his hands. His blue eyes glowed with raw power. He did not throw a bolt at anything. He threaded a lattice of solid blue lightning across the groaning iron supports, weaving the failing beams together into a single braced frame. He held millions of tons of failing infrastructure above their heads on a web of light.
They moved deeper.
The descent was agonizingly slow. Estella burned a narrow, clean path. Lucien held the sky. Bram carried the heavy iron case with his one good arm, his breathing ragged and shallow.
Behind them, the severed roots violently regenerated. The biological mass grew over the iron doors. The exit was gone. The anomaly had sealed them inside the earth.
"Keep moving," Reina ordered quietly, illuminating the dark with a sphere of cold light.
They finally reached the bottom of the Bastion.
The lowest foundation cavern was a massive expanse of raw bedrock. The pale roots were thickest here, feeding on the deep moisture of the earth.
Reina shined her light toward the far wall.
"There," Reina pointed.
The white stone was exposed. The corruption had eaten away the surrounding bedrock over the last twelve hours, pulling the dirt back to reveal the truth.
It was not a single block of stone.
It was a jagged, massive fragment of a colossal subterranean pillar. The white material was perfectly smooth. It looked like polished ivory, but it carried no magical aura. It was a piece of pre-Vanguard infrastructure, something built by hands that predated the written history of the continent.
The pale roots writhed in a dense, tangled ring around the fragment. They actively refused to touch the smooth white surface.
"We do not have time to study it," Lucien warned, his arms shaking from the strain of holding the cavern roof. "Plant it."
Bram dropped to his knees.
The impact sent a blinding flash of agony through his shattered collarbone. He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, stifling a scream.
He placed his good hand flat against the muddy bedrock right next to the white pillar. He closed his eyes. He bypassed the pain and pushed his senses deep into the earth. He felt the heavy, vibrating resonance of the planet.
"Here," Bram gasped, dragging his hand back. "Right here."
Reina stepped forward. She aimed her hands at the exact patch of dirt Bram had marked. She pushed a hyper-condensed stream of freezing mana into the mud, forming a precise, hollow shaft of black ice straight down into the bedrock.
Estella stepped up beside her.
The Star Mage aimed her palm down the center of the frozen tube. She fired a blinding needle of starlight. The cosmic heat instantly vaporized the ice and the dirt within it, leaving a deep, perfectly clean cylindrical hole without triggering a massive thermal reaction in the surrounding roots.
Bram opened the iron case.
He pulled out the resin-coated cutting. The heavy golden sap pulsed faintly against his fingers.
He gripped the top of the branch. He drove it downward into the vaporized shaft. He forced the wood deep into the earth, pressing the severed end flush against the smooth surface of the ancient white stone.
He packed the loose dirt over the top, burying it completely.
The squad stood in the dark cavern. Lucien kept his hands raised, his muscles screaming under the load. Reina held her axe ready. Estella kept her starlight ignited.
They waited.
Nothing happened.
The pale roots around them continued to pulse lazily. The damp walls of the cavern dripped with condensation. The dying branch was buried in the mud, and the corruption did not seem to care.
"Did it work?" Lucien grunted, sweat pouring down his face.
SCREEECH.
The sound hit them like a physical shockwave.
It did not come from the cavern. It echoed down through four hundred yards of solid rock. It was a deafening, terrifying shriek of pure biological agony originating from the surface.
Up on the southern killing ground, the towering anomaly was screaming.
It was the first sound the monster had made since it rooted itself outside the Vanguard wall.
Deep beneath the city, the dirt around the ancient white stone began to shift. The heavy golden sap buried in the mud flared with a sudden, blinding emerald light.
Something under Bastion Six had started growing.
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