Chapter 802: The Second Nest Has Been Attacked...?

Chapter 802: The Second Nest Has Been Attacked...? [Bonus Chapter]

A pack of seven armored thorn-crawlers burst out of the ferns, their petrified scales glistening with slime as they lunged across the narrow path.

Before the Blessed Land girls could even shift their feet, Aki’s girls were already moving.

"Shields, left side!" the Captain barked.

The five new Shieldmaidens moved together perfectly.

Without waiting for Ther’Abella to tell them, they pivoted on their heels and slammed their shields down into the mud with a ringing snap.

KLANG!

The first crawler rammed headfirst into the middle shield, and its snout bounced right off the steel rim.

The Shieldmaiden held firm, dropped her weight, took the hit through her legs and drove her sword forward in a clean level thrust that went straight through the crawler’s throat.

SHUNK!

Beside her, Aki’s archers drew and loosed with smooth practiced rhythm.

TWANG! TWANG! TWANG! TWANG!

Four iron-tipped arrows hissed through the humid air in a tight spread and punched into the eyes and joints of the crawlers behind it.

Two spear girls lunged out from behind the shields and drove their spears through the thrashing bodies, pinning them to the ground until the green slime stopped bubbling.

SHLUNK! SHLUNK!

The whole thing was over in less than fifteen seconds.

Silas walked past the dead monsters with a quiet approving gleam in his dark blue eyes and gave the Captain a nod.

"Clean work," Silas said. "You girls are moving like veterans now..."

The Captain beamed and wiped her spear tip off on a fern.

"Good food makes for fast hands, Lord Silas! We won’t slow you down!"

The group climbed the eastern rise and pushed through a thick curtain of drooping crimson ferns that hung across an old stone archway like heavy velvet drapes.

The moment they stepped through it, the air went cold.

It was an unnatural clammy chill, and the sweet smell of nectar and damp earth vanished completely... In its place hung the sickening heavy stench of rot, bitter sap and cold old blood.

Silas stopped.

The girls fanned out behind him with their weapons half raised, and one by one, their fighting stances slowly went slack as they froze in horror.

Right below them lay the second nest.

It was a huge sunken stone bowl, twice as wide as the first hollow, and there wasn’t a single living monster prowling its ledges... no packs of thorn-crawlers, no hissing vine-spitters and no roaring bramble brutes either.

The whole horde was already dead.

Hundreds of monster corpses hung in the air, dangling from huge fibrous roots that snaked across the bowl like giant squirming pythons.

Every one of them had been drained completely dry and shriveled into brittle hollow husks of gray wood and flaking scales.

Thick leech-like roots were still buried deep in their bodies as the whole bowl was a lightless slaughterhouse full of empty shells swaying in the stale breeze, creaking with the dry hollow sound of a dead orchard.

C-creeeeak...

And standing in the middle of all of it, towering over the carnage, was the thing that had done it.

The tree rose well over a hundred feet into the canopy.

Its huge trunk was armored in gnarled black bark that looked denser and more jagged than volcanic slate, and its enormous branches moved with slow deliberate intelligence, bending and flexing like muscular clawed arms.

High above, its wide smothering crown was packed with hundreds of huge pitch-black flowers that wept dark oily sap down onto the roots below.

In the middle of the trunk, where the black wood split open in a jagged weeping crack, was a horrible imitation of a face.

Deep inside that hollow, a dull pulsing red glow burned like a half-smothered coal.

The moment Silas’s eyes locked onto it, a golden window snapped open in front of him with a sharp alarming chime.

DING!

[Name]: Blightheart Elder

[Tier]: 4

[Vitality]: 10,000

[Abilities]:

[Thornstorm Volley]: Fires thousands of iron-hard thorns from its branches in every direction at once.

[Strangler Root Field]: Floods the ground with barbed roots that burst up under its enemies, binding and crushing them.

[Sap Regeneration]: Drinks the blood and sap of everything that died around it to regrow lost limbs and bark. (Passive)

[Rotbloom Spores]: Opens the black flowers on its crown to release a cloud of spores that weakens and poisons anything that breathes it in.

[Heartwood Armor]: Its trunk is armored in petrified bark harder than steel, and its core sits deep inside it. (Passive)

"...It’s Tier 4."

A gasp went through the whole group.

"A-a Tier 4...?" Elowynn breathed, her amethyst eyes going as wide as dinner plates as her hands went to the hilts of her cutlasses. "Out here?! This early?!"

Beside her, Ther’Abella’s constellation marks flared with frantic unstable light, and her starlight daggers formed in her hands with a nervous hiss.

"The bodies... It ate the whole nest! It drank every drop out of them to make itself stronger!"

Aki stared up at the hundred-foot black monster, and the plates of her breastplate trembled a little as her royal mana flared up around her.

’Ten thousand...’ Aki thought, her heart hammering against her ribs. ’One hit from those branches could crush our whole shield wall... Can we really bring something like that down without Silas doing it himself?!’

Standing beside Silas, Morrighan’s molten gold eyes narrowed into thin slits.

Her obsidian horns caught the dim red light leaking out of the tree’s core, and behind her armored legs, her crimson spade tail started swinging with heavy slow violence, cutting the stale air with an ominous whistle.

’A Tier 4 core...’ Morrighan thought, her lips curving into the tiniest deadly smirk. ’Big and dense and full of life... It thinks that black bark is going to protect it. I’ll crack its chest open like a walnut and lay its heart at Lord Silas’s feet, Brida and Tasmin did it so we can too.’

Before anyone could say another word, the Blightheart Elder woke up.

The split bark of its face tore wide open, and it let out a deafening groaning shriek that shook the bedrock under their boots.

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

The hundred-foot tree saw the threat standing on the ridge and opened with overwhelming violence and every branch in its crown rattled like an armory full of spears.

KRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

The Blightheart Elder unleashed [Thornstorm Volley].

Thousands upon thousands of foot-long iron-hard black thorns tore loose from its branches and came screaming down in a solid shrieking black cloud that blanketed the whole bowl.

"LOCK SHIELDS!" Ther’Abella bellowed, her voice cracking.

The five Shieldmaidens lunged forward and slammed their shields together edge to edge over everyone’s heads, forming a sloped roof of Blessed Land steel.

KLANG!

The thorns hit.

KLANG-KLANG-KLANG-KLANG-KLANG-KLANG!

A deafening drumroll of iron thorns hammered the shields and threw sparks across the stone.

The Blessed Land steel held, but the sheer weight of it drove the Shieldmaidens’ boots two inches down into the rock, and their arms shook as they gritted their teeth and held on.

"HOLD IT!" the girl in the middle screamed. "HOLD IT!"

One thorn punched straight through the gap between two shields and stuck quivering in the stone an inch from a Shieldmaiden’s boot.

Ther’Abella vaulted up onto the roof of shields with her silver hair streaming out in the gale and spun her starlight staff over her head in a blinding flat whirl.

WHUM-WHUM-WHUM-WHUM!

Crescents of cutting light sheared through hundreds of incoming thorns and sliced them into harmless splinters before they could reach the girls on the sides.

On the right, Elowynn ripped both cutlasses out of their sheaths, and both blades burst into roaring sheets of liquid fire.

FWOOOOSH!

She danced straight into the storm with her blades weaving a burning cage around her that turned every thorn that touched it into drifting ash.

SHHH! SHHH! SHHHHHH!

A thorn the size of a spear came straight at her face however she caught it between her crossed cutlasses and melted it in half.

TSSSSSS!

’Heh,’ Elowynn thought, a fierce grin tugging at her lips as sweat rolled down her neck. ’That all you’ve got, stick...?’

Before the thorns had even stopped falling, the ground under them heaved.

The Blightheart Elder unleashed [Strangler Root Field].

KRAAACK!

The stone floor shattered into thousands of jagged shards as hundreds of thick barbed roots burst out of the earth like striking snakes.

Three of Aki’s young archers screamed as thorny roots whipped around their ankles and yanked them off their feet toward the mud...

A fourth root wrapped around one of the Shieldmaidens’ waists and started to squeeze, and her armor groaned.

KRRRRRK!

"Mine!" Lupina’s wild bark echoed across the bowl.

The wolf-girl moved in a blurring sprint. Her three-inch steel claws flashed under the dim red glow as she tore through the writhing roots one after another.

SHRRK! SHRRK! SHRRRRK!

She cut the archers loose, grabbed two of them by their belts and hurled them back toward the ridge with one twist of her body.

She spun, kicked off the root strangling the Shieldmaiden and dragged her claws all the way down its length as she fell.

’Beast-Kin Burst!’

Her heel came down on the root’s base with a shockwave packed behind it.

KA-BOOOM!

The root exploded into splinters, and the Shieldmaiden dropped free, coughing.

"Thanks!" the Shieldmaiden gasped.

"No problem!" Lupina barked with a grin, and then a root slammed into her from the side and sent her tumbling across the stone.

WHAM!

She rolled three times, popped back up onto all fours and shook her head with her ears ringing.

"Ow! OW! Okay, that one was rude!"

High above them, the black flowers in the Blightheart Elder’s crown swelled, and their fleshy petals peeled back like rotting lips.

The Blightheart Elder unleashed [Rotbloom Spores].

PFFFFFFFFFFFT!

A thick choking cloud of oily black and sickly violet spores spilled out of the canopy and rolled down the ledges like a poisonous avalanche, hissing and eating through the moss wherever it touched.

Two of the spear girls at the edge breathed in the first wisps of it and dropped to their knees, coughing and clawing at their throats.

...Even the moss on the stones withered and turned black where the spores touched it.

KOFF! KOFF! KOFF!

"Stand behind me!" Aurelia’s voice rang out, clear and not afraid in the slightest.

The Saintess stepped right up to the edge of the ridge, her white robes snapping in the wind.

She raised both arms, and her golden-amber eyes lit up with pure blinding silver.

’Argent Pyre!’

FWHUMMMMMMMMP!

A roaring column of argent flame burst up out of her palms and shot straight into the falling cloud of spores like a pillar of living starlight.

The silver fire burned through the poison and scrubbed it right out of the air.

The black cloud vanished with a clean sizzling hiss, and the bowl filled with the crisp sweet smell of incense and lightning.

’Come on argent flame... Don’t fail me now.’

TSSSSSSSSSSHHHHH!

She turned without missing a beat and laid her hand on the two coughing spear girls.

’Argent Restoration!’

Soft silver light poured into them, and both girls sucked in a deep clean breath and stood up.

"Hit it now!" Aki shouted, her voice ringing with fury. "Break its shell!"

Rowenna was already moving.

She teleported off the ridge in a flicker of violet and reappeared ten feet in the air right in front of the tree with her fingers already carving three huge deep-purple runes into the empty air.

FWIP!

’Omni-Elemental Runic Array!’

The three runes slammed into the Blightheart Elder’s trunk one on top of another.

BOOOOM! BOOOOM! BOOOOOOM!

The triple blast tore a ten-foot slab of black bark clean off the trunk in a shower of smoking splinters and showed the fibrous green wood underneath.

At the same time, Elowynn came bounding across the boulders, snapping her fingers in a nonstop rhythm.

SNAP! BOOM! SNAP! BOOM! SNAP! BOOM!

A dozen sparks went off inside the fresh wound and tore deep into the soft green wood behind the shell.

"YES!" Lupina howled. "GET IT!"

Ther’Abella saw her opening.

She dropped off the shield roof, sprinted straight up a falling branch like it was a ramp and threw herself at the wound with her staff raised over her head.

’Not getting away from me!’

She slammed the staff down into the soft green wood with everything she had, and the starlight burst out of its tip in a spray of silver blades that shredded the inside of the wound.

SHHRRRAAAK!

The tree shrieked.

A branch whipped around at her, and she flipped backward off the trunk, landed on the branch itself and ran right back down it to the ground then the whole bowl groaned.

The hundreds of drained corpses hanging from the roots shriveled even further and crumbled into gray powder as thick red sap was pulled out of the root network and pumped straight into the tree’s broken trunk.

The Blightheart Elder’s [Sap Regeneration] kicked in.

SHLUUUUUURRRRP!

With a nauseating squirming sound, the shredded wood knitted itself back together in a heartbeat.

The black bark grew back over the wound in a smooth unbroken layer, as hard and whole as it had been a second ago.

"It heals too fast!" Rowenna called down from the air, her voice shaking. "It’s drinking from everything around it! We have to hit it hard and fast, or it’ll outlast all of us!"