In Kuroinu

"Absolutely not," Leonora said.

"The elder was specific." Lucie stood at the base of the spiral staircase with her hands clasped in front of her and her head tilted and the same untroubled expression she'd worn since we'd met her. "Four people. The root caves are narrow. Heavy armor catches on the growth and the vibrations disturb the deeper networks."

"I'm not wearing heavy armor." Leonora's hand was on her sword hilt and her jaw was tight and she was using the voice she used with recruits who'd disappointed her. "I'm wearing standard issue."

"Standard issue for a human soldier is heavy armor for an elf cave."

"Then I'll take it off."

"Leonora." Filia said it once. Quiet.

Leonora looked at Filia. Looked at me. Looked at Lucie. Her thumb rubbed the pommel of her sword in the circular pattern she defaulted to when she was stopping herself from saying the thing she wanted to say.

"I don't like this," she said.

"I know."

"The settlement is unknown territory. Nol's intentions are unverified. And you're taking our party leader and our ranged specialist underground while the rest of us sit on a platform eating fruit."

"Tianne's instant healing is here if anything happens topside. Mila's senses are better than any alarm system. And you're here."

Her jaw worked. "I'm only useful if something happens."

"Nothing's going to happen," Lucie said.

"You don't know that."

"The watchers have been reporting nothing unusual for three days. The settlement hasn't been threatened in decades. The corruption in the roots is the only active problem, and that's where Haruto is going."

Leonora looked at me. Her eyes were sharp and her mouth was a line.

"Come back in one piece," she said. "All three of you."

"Four," Lucie said. "I'm coming too."

"I'm aware." Leonora's eyes moved to Lucie and stayed there for a beat longer than necessary. "All four of you."

Mila was standing behind Leonora with a clay bowl of nuts and her tail at half-mast. She looked at me.

"Be careful," she said.

"Always."

Her tail wagged once. "That's a lie and we both know it." She held out the bowl. "Eat before you go. You skipped breakfast."

I took a handful. Tianne was beside the railing, her glowing hands pressed flat against the living wood of the platform, her eyes closed. Gold light pulsing faintly.

"The roots are deep," she said without opening her eyes. "I can feel the corruption from here. It's... wrong. The magic is inverted. Life energy running backward."

She opened her eyes. Looked at me. The gold rings in her irises were bright this morning.

"Be careful with Lucie down there. She's connected to this forest. If the corruption hurts the roots, it hurts her."

The cave entrance was at the base of the Holy Tree.

The tree was enormous. I'd seen it from the settlement platforms, a trunk rising above the canopy like a pillar holding up the sky, but from the ground the scale was different. The trunk was wider than a castle keep. The bark was grey-white and faintly luminous, the same gold-white glow as the settlement lanterns but dimmer, and the roots spread from the base in every direction, thick as houses, buried in the earth and rising above it in ridges and archways. Some of the roots were taller than I was.

Between two of the largest roots, a gap. A crack in the earth where the roots dove deep, wide enough for a person, sloping downward into darkness. The air coming out of it was cold and smelled like wet stone and rot.

Lucie stood at the edge and her whole body tightened. Her hands curled at her sides and her shoulders pulled in and the flower in her hair wilted. One petal dropped.

"I can feel it from here," she said. Her voice had gone thin. "The corruption. It's like- it's like hearing someone scream through a wall."

Filia drew her sword. The steel caught the filtered light through the canopy. She rolled her shoulders and set her feet and looked at the cave entrance the way she looked at every tactical problem: assessing, calculating, deciding.

"Formation," she said. "I'm on point. Llusse behind me with bow ready. Haruto covers Lucie. Lucie, you're our guide and our purification. Stay behind Haruto. If creatures attack, you do not engage. You channel. Understood?"

"Understood."

Llusse had her bow strung and an arrow loose in her quiver. Her ears were forward, pointed at the cave entrance, and her face had the blank focused look she wore in combat. Whatever had happened behind the treehouse yesterday was buried so deep you'd need a mining operation to find it.

"Dark down there," she said.

"I have light." Lucie raised one hand. Green glow, pale and warm, pushing back the shadows at the cave mouth. The glow flickered when it hit the cold air from below.

"Let's go," I said.

We went down.

The cave was a root tunnel. The walls were roots, the ceiling was roots, the floor was earth packed hard between root ridges. Lucie's green light illuminated fifteen feet ahead and the roots curved around us like the inside of a ribcage. The air got colder as we descended. Wet stone and rot and underneath both, a sweetness that was wrong. Sweetness like fruit left too long.

Filia moved quietly for someone carrying a sword. Her boots placed precisely, weight distributed, the swordsmanship that was second nature by now. Llusse was quieter. She moved through the root tunnel the way she moved through the forest above, like the spaces between things were made for her.

Lucie walked behind me and her breathing was getting shorter the deeper we went. Her green light flickered with each breath.

"You okay?" I asked. Low.

"The roots are in pain." She had her arms wrapped around herself. "Each one is connected to the tree. The corruption is- it's like touching a burn. I can feel every damaged root from here."

We passed a split in the tunnel where the roots branched and the left fork was dark. Wrong-dark. The roots along the left wall were black. Discolored from the inside, the grain patterns warped, and the blackness pulsed. A slow, rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat, except the light was a sickly violet-purple that made the air above the roots shimmer.

Lucie flinched. Her hand shot out and grabbed the back of my shirt.

"There," she whispered. "That's it."

I looked at the pulsing roots and the purple light and I knew what it was. I'd seen this in the source material, in the lore documents, in the descriptions of Maou's influence spreading across territory he wanted to claim. The corruption wasn't random. It wasn't disease. It was a channel. A pipeline. Magic being deliberately funneled through the root network toward the Holy Tree.

Someone was draining the tree on purpose.

The Demon King's signature. I was looking at Maou's work, hundreds of miles south of where his influence was supposed to reach. Which meant either his range was longer than anyone in Lesdea knew, or he had agents this far south, or both.

I couldn't explain any of that. Not to Filia, not to Llusse, not to Lucie. I couldn't say "I recognize this magic from another life where I watched it destroy kingdoms." So I looked at the blackened roots and the purple pulse and I kept my mouth shut.

"It's deliberate," Lucie said. She'd stepped past me, her hand still on my shirt, and pressed her palm against the wall beside one of the corrupted roots. Her green light flared and the corruption recoiled from the contact. The purple retreated two inches and Lucie gasped and snatched her hand back.

"What happened?"

"It pushed back." She was staring at her palm. The skin was red where she'd touched the wall, faintly blistered. "It's not just corruption. It's organized. Like someone built channels through the root network and they're pumping poison toward the tree."

Filia looked at the blackened roots. "Can you purify it?"

"The small veins, yes. The main channels..." Lucie shook her head. "I'd need to find the source. Wherever they're pumping from."

"Then we find it."

We went deeper. The corruption got worse. More roots blackened, the purple pulse stronger, the air thicker and sweeter. The rot smell was almost physical, pressing against the inside of my nose. Lucie was shaking. Each pulse made her flinch and her green light dimmed and brightened in time with the corruption's rhythm, like two heartbeats fighting each other.

Llusse's ears were swiveling. Forward, back, left.

"Movement," she said. "Ahead. Multiple."

Filia adjusted her grip. I moved Lucie behind me. She let go of my shirt and raised both hands, green light building.

They came from the deeper tunnels.

Fast. Low to the ground. Bodies made of corruption and root-matter, twisted things that had been insects or small animals and had been warped by the purple magic into something bigger. Chitinous legs and too many eyes and mouths that didn't belong on the bodies they were attached to. They bled purple when they moved, leaving smears on the root walls.

Filia killed the first one before it reached us. A clean cut, her sword through the center mass, and the creature split and the halves twitched and the purple blood hissed on the floor.

Three more behind it. Then five.

Llusse's bow sang. Arrow through the lead creature's cluster of eyes. It dropped. Another arrow, another drop. She was fast and accurate and her face was calm and her ears were tracking targets before her eyes found them.

"More coming from the right fork," she said. Loosed another arrow. "A lot more."

Filia was moving. Sword work in a root tunnel, the ceiling too low for full swings, so she used short, vicious strikes. Stabbing. The point, not the edge. Each strike precise, each creature dead in one hit.

I had my sword out. I'd gotten better. Filia's muscle memory through the Blessing and weeks of practice and the absorptions from every partner. But the tunnel was narrow and Filia and Llusse were handling the forward threats and my job was the one I was built for.

I stood in front of Lucie.

She was channeling. Her hands up, green light pouring from her palms in a wide cone that hit the corrupted roots and purified them on contact. The black receded, the purple winked out, the wood returned to its natural grey-white. Wherever her light touched, the corruption died. But it was coming back as fast as she could clean it, pouring through the deeper channels, and she was sweating and her teeth were clenched and the flower in her hair had lost two more petals.

A creature got past Filia. Skittering along the ceiling, too high for her short swings, moving fast toward us. I tracked it and waited until it dropped and cut it out of the air. Purple blood on my sword and my forearm and it burned, a chemical sting that made the skin go red.

Another one. From the right. I blocked its lunge with my blade and kicked it back and cut it in half and the halves kept moving and I stomped the larger piece and felt it crunch.

Another. This one got close. Too close. Its legs were longer than the others and it came from under a root ridge where I didn't see it and by the time I registered the movement it was already inside my guard and its mandibles slashed across my ribs.

I felt the skin open. A line of cold followed by heat. Blood, wet and warm, soaking into my shirt on the left side.

I killed it. Sword through the thorax. It died making a sound like wet paper tearing.

Lucie's green light stuttered. She'd seen.

"Haruto-"

"Keep channeling," I said. "I'm fine."

"You're bleeding-"

"I'm fine. Don't stop."

She didn't stop. But her left hand came off the channeling and pressed against my side, green light sinking into the wound, and the cold-then-heat reversed as the skin knit. I could feel the muscle reconnecting, the edges of the cut pulling together, and her hand was warm and her fingers were trembling against my ribs.

"You shielded me," she said.

Filia's voice from somewhere ahead in the tunnel, between sword strikes: "He does that."

The healing was fast. Faster than Tianne's had been before the forest. The cut sealed in seconds and Lucie's hand lingered on my side, the green light pulsing against my skin, and when she pulled away the wound was gone. Pink skin, no scar, and her eyes were wet.

"Don't do that again," she said.

"Lucie."

"Don't get hurt for me. I can heal but I can't-" She swallowed. "I can't heal if you're-"

"I won't die from a scratch."

"It wasn't a scratch."

Llusse's voice from the darkness: "Can you two have this conversation later? There are more of them."

There were more of them. We fought through another wave, Filia and Llusse covering the advance while I covered Lucie and she channeled purification into the root network. The corruption peeled back around us, a circle of clean wood in the purple-black, and the creatures came from the uncleaned sections in a steady stream.

Llusse ran out of arrows at some point. She drew a knife and fought with it in her off hand while her other hand held a shortbow she was using as a club. Her ears were flat and her teeth were bared and she was fighting ugly and effective.

Filia was breathing hard but her sword arm was steady. She'd taken a hit too, a shallow cut across her forearm that she hadn't mentioned. Her shirt was torn at the sleeve and the blood was drying brown.

We reached the source. Or what Lucie said was the source of this branch. A knot of corruption where dozens of root channels converged, a mass of blackened wood the size of a horse, pulsing purple so bright it lit the cave. The creatures were breeding here, larvae in the corrupted wood, and the smell was unbearable.

"I can purify this," Lucie said. "It'll take everything I have."

"Do it."

She planted her feet. Raised both hands. The green light erupted from her palms in a concentrated beam that hit the corrupted knot and the purple fought back. The two colors struggled against each other, green and purple, and the cave lit up in shifting waves and Lucie's face was clenched and her whole body was straining and the flower in her hair lost its last petal.

The green won. Slowly. The purple retreated, the blackness peeled away, and the roots beneath were grey-white and alive and the larvae curled and died and the breeding ground went silent.

Lucie dropped her hands. Swayed. I caught her before she fell. Light. Her body warm against mine, and she pressed her face against my chest and breathed.

"It's clean," she said. "This branch is clean."

Filia was checking the tunnel behind us. Llusse had found three of her arrows and was wiping purple blood off the shafts.

"The branch," I said. "One branch."

Lucie nodded against my chest. She pulled back enough to look up at me. Her blue eyes were exhausted and the green glow at her fingertips had dimmed to nothing. The flower in her hair was bare stem.

"This will come back," she said. "The channels are still there. Whoever built them will use them again. I cleaned one junction. There are dozens."

"We'll deal with it."

"How?"

I didn't have an answer for that. The answer was "find whatever agent Maou has running a corruption pipeline into the elven Holy Tree and kill them," but I couldn't say that because I wasn't supposed to know who was responsible.

Filia cleaned her sword on a dead creature's body. Slid it back into the sheath. Looked at me.

"Nol said clear the corruption. We cleared it."

"We cleared a symptom," Lucie said.

"Then we'll tell her it's a symptom and let her decide what to do about it." Filia's voice was steady. "We did what was asked. Let's get out of this cave."

We climbed back up. The air got warmer and the roots got cleaner and Lucie's hand found mine somewhere in the ascent and stayed there. She was too tired to generate light and we walked the last stretch by the faint glow of the healthy roots around us.

When we came out of the cave entrance into the forest floor, the sunlight hit us and Llusse sat down on a root and tipped her head back and closed her eyes.

"I hate caves," she said.

Filia sat beside her. Their shoulders touched. Neither moved.

Lucie was still holding my hand. Purple blood was drying on my sword arm and my shirt was torn where the creature had slashed me and the wound was gone but the blood was still there, dried brown against my skin.

She looked at the blood. Reached up and touched the spot where the cut had been. Her fingers traced the clean skin.

"Thank you," she said.

I squeezed her hand. The bare stem in her hair caught the light.

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