Chapter 474 - The Ancient Forest (Patreon)

Zeke plummeted through the air, a brief moment of panic suffusing his mind.  However, after only a couple of seconds, he realized that he had nothing to worry about.  Not because his momentum was arrested.  No – he still fell at a truly frightening speed.  However, he’d fallen from great heights before, and he knew that hitting the ground would do little more than annoy him. 

But Talia wasn’t nearly as durable as he was.

Yet, when Zeke glanced up, he saw that she was unconcerned.  So, he pushed her well-being from his mind and threw his arms out wide.  The speed of his fall dissipated ever so slightly as he took a moment to study the terrain.  A primordial forest stretched as far as he could see, though in the distance, a giant stone pyramid jutted toward the sky.  Zeke only had time to notice the weathered exterior that suggested advanced age before he hit the first branches, snapping them as he tore through the canopy. 

Finally, he hit the ground, the impact digging a sizable crater in the soft, loamy turf.  Meanwhile, Talia simply appeared at the edge of the crater, completely unharmed. 

“She must have a skill like [Shifting Sands],” Eveline remarked.  “She just disappeared and reappeared here, dissipating all momentum along the way.  Impressive at her level.”

“Talia’s just as special as I am,” Zeke said.  Indeed, he believed it, too.  She was wholly unique – at least as far as he knew – and her abilities reflected that.  He wasn’t certain what she’d been through since their ascension – she’d told him a little, but he knew there was much more to it – but he suspected that her path had been similarly harrowing. 

And the Framework always rewarded danger with progression, assuming that one managed to survive.

“It’s cute that you actually believe that,” Eveline stated.

Zeke ignored her as he pushed himself to his knees.  The impact hadn’t done much damage, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.  So, he pulsed [Cambion’s Awakening] as he climbed to his feet.  Then, he used [Triune Colossus] to make climbing out of the small crater easier, and once he’d reached the top, he asked, “Are you alright?”

“I am,” Talia stated, her eyes darting around.  “I can tell why no one comes here.  The vital aura is intense.”

Zeke felt it as well, which was saying something.  Normally, life attuned mana sort of faded into the background.  The fact that he could even feel it without concentrating was a testament to how powerfully dense it was.  Still, it wasn’t uncomfortable for him.  He asked, “Can you endure it?”

“I can.  It just itches,” she said.  “This would instantly kill all but the most powerful undead, though.  Even elites would be weakened.  We do not belong here.”

It was further evidence that Talia had fully adopted El’kireth as her home and its people as her own.  They had taken her under their wing, given her responsibility and purpose, and accepted her in a way that the Mortal Realm never had.  Even before her transformation, she’d been an outcast.  That was by design.  Her mother had curated Talia’s upbringing to such a degree that she’d never formed any meaningful connections with anyone else.  As a result, she’d made for a perfect sacrifice, but a socially crippled one. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. 

“Just glad you’ve found a place,” Zeke said.  “You’ve come a long way since Jariq.”

She sighed – another alien expression in which she never would have engaged in the Radiant Isles – then said, “They want to destroy it, you know.”

“Who?”

“The Expansionists.  They won’t come out and say it, but there’s something pushing them,” she said. “I believe it’s a foreign actor.  A plot by someone like Adontis.  If we leave El’kireth in force, the rest of the world will respond.  They will band together in order to defeat us.”

“You think so?” Zeke asked.  Eveline had already informed him that that was how the demon realm worked.  If an undead threat arose, the entirety of Hell would put aside their many differences so they could put it down. 

“I do,” Talia answered.  “We frighten people, and on a very fundamental level.  El’kireth represents a self-imposed but altogether necessary exile.  Without it to restrain us…”

“At least she understands the stakes,” Eveline said.

“You think she’s right?”

“Of course.  Suffer not the undead,” Eveline answered to Zeke’s non-verbal question.  “Excluding your friend.  Obviously.  And her allies.  They seem okay.”

Zeke didn’t respond.  Instead, he spoke aloud, asking, “Did you see the pyramid?”

“Yes.  That is the obvious goal,” Talia said.  “There were other ruins, though.  Perhaps we must explore those.”

Before Zeke could offer his opinion on the subject, a rustling nearby alerted him that they were not alone.  He muttered, “Get ready for a fight.”

Talia’s claws extended, and she erupted into a miasma of rot that surrounded her like an aura.  It was powerful enough that even Zeke felt it.  Clearly, she’d had seen the benefit of plenty of lucky encounters of her own. 

For his part, Zeke only summoned Voromir.  He couldn’t activate the tower’s gate function inside of a dungeon, but the storage ability still worked the same as it always did.  A good thing, too, because he didn’t want to tote his weapon around.  In any case, the sudden appearance of the bone-hafted hammer elicited a response from the surrounding enemies.

Suddenly, the trees shifted, and not because of the wind.  Instead, Zeke was shocked to find that they weren’t trees at all.  Or at least some of them weren’t.  They were bipedal creatures made of twisted limbs, thick trunks, and moss.  The moment he recognized that they weren’t trees, Zeke used [Inspect]:

Treant – Level 64

He did the same with the other fifteen creatures surrounding them, and he saw that they ranged from levels sixty-one to sixty-six, meaning that they were powerful enough not to completely dismiss.  Or ignore.

“Intruder,” the first creature rumbled.  “Declare your allegiance or perish.”

“Allegiance?” Zeke responded.  “Only to myself and my people.”

That was the wrong answer, as evidenced by the monster’s sudden charge.  The shape of a tree implied that the creatures would be slow and ponderous, but the reality couldn’t have been further from the truth.  The first treant hit Zeke before he could even move, sending him staggering back a couple of steps.

Which was impressive enough, given his enormous strength and the massive size of his earthen colossal form.  Yet, that wasn’t the end of the creature’s first salvo.  Instead, it hammered him with arms like tree-trunks, swinging them as if they were clubs.  Meanwhile, the ground came alive with vines and roots, each one ripping out of the soft soil to wrap around Zeke’s legs. 

He ripped them free, raising his arms to block the treant’s attack.  However, even as one vine was destroyed, another took its place.  Finally, after the first few seconds, Zeke had had enough, and with a roar, he activated [Shifting Sands], giving him some extra time to think. 

He slipped into the earth, but he didn’t go far.  Instead, he exploded from the ground behind the treant, bathing it in rock and fire as he swung Voromir with as much power as he could muster.  The hammer’s head hit with momentous impact, splintering the monster’s twisted-trunk torso and ripping it into two pieces.

Yet, in the split second the creature was separated into two halves, more vines snaked out, intertwining with one another, and arresting its momentum.  A second later, they pulled back together, mending the damage Zeke’s hammer had just wrought. 

“Oh, that’s not fair,” he muttered inwardly.  Then, he waded forward, aiming another attack at the monster.  This time, it blocked with its club-like arms, but it could do nothing about the sheer momentum of the attack, and it was launched away like a rocket. 

Even as it flew away, the other treants reached him, burying him beneath hundreds of battering blows.  He bore them as well as he could, but each one dislodged a bit of his rocky flesh, hinting at the degree of power the monsters possessed.  They were strong, which told Zeke that he couldn’t simply turtle up and endure.  He needed to attack.

Fortunately, Talia had the same idea, and she descended on the creatures from behind, raking her claws across their limbs with ruthless precision and unstoppable speed.  Zeke couldn’t see her, but he could feel the insurmountable aura of rot as it intensified more with every passing second.  In only moments, it had reached a point that, if it had been directed at him, it would have alarmed even Zeke.

And the treants were ill-equipped to stand up to such power. 

They rumbled in pain, increasing the fervor of their attacks.  Yet, Zeke wasn’t willing to stand idle and let Talia have all the fun.  So, he shouted, “Get away!  At least forty yards!”

  He waited a couple of moments for Talia to obey his command, then he embraced [Hell Geyser], stomping on the ground.  The earth erupted directly beneath his feet, sending a pillar of hellfire and molten rock erupting into the sky.  The treants let out a full-throated scream.  For his part, Zeke used [Cambion’s Awakening] to repair the damage of his own skill. 

He could endure it better than anyone else, but that didn’t mean he was completely safe from the forces he could bring to bear.  But with [Cambion’s Awakening], he managed to reach the termination point of the skill relatively unscathed.  Relatively wasn’t completely, though, and he ended up smoking with quite few bits and pieces of his earthen body having been melted.

Thankfully, what should have been an agonizing event only twinged a bit, due to his racial pain dampening. 

The treants were not so lucky, and a full half of them had perished in the gout of flame.  The rest were still alive, though they were much the worse for wear.  As Zeke looked back, he saw that Talia had already returned, and with a beam of dark energy, she cut one into pieces.  She moved like a blur, and Zeke knew that if it weren’t for his high levels and the increased perception speed that came with his mental statistics, he never would’ve been capable of tracking her.

“Oh, she is special,” remarked Eveline.  “I like her.  Even if she is unliving.”

“I’m not sure she’s completely undead,” Zeke stated.  “I think she’s a blend, like me.”

“Interesting,” was Eveline’s only response.

Even as she said that single word, Zeke waded back into battle.  He didn’t bother using anymore skills.  Instead, he simply swung his hammer, tearing through some of the monsters while sending others rocketing into the forest.  It was a massacre, and though Zeke had fought his way through Darukar, he’d been forced to hold back.  After all, he didn’t want to completely destroy the city.  As a result, he hadn’t let loose in quite some time, so finally being able to against the treants, without any regard for the collateral damage, was freeing. 

The battle didn’t last much longer after Zeke’s use of [Hell Geyser], and only a few minutes later, he stood next to Talia, looking down on their fallen foes.  Both wore expressions of subtle disappointment. 

“Seems like they should have been a little more difficult,” Zeke said.

Talia looked at him with horror written across her pale face.  When Zeke asked why, she let out an exasperated sigh.  “You’re not supposed to say things like that,” she stated. 

“What?  Why?  Are you afraid I jinxed it?” he asked.  “I don’t believe in –”

The ground shook, cutting Zeke off.  He glanced toward one of the fallen treants, and when the ground shook once again, he saw its leaves rustle.  A moment later, the tremble in the earth repeated. 

“What is it?”

Talia shook her head.  “I don’t know.  Earthquake?”

“Too even,” Zeke said, already suspecting the origin of the shaking earth.  “Plus, I think I’d feel that.”

“You had to say it,” Talia muttered.

“This isn’t my fault,” Zeke argued, holding his hands out wide.  The ground shook again, this time slightly more violently.  In addition, the sound of snapping branches and falling trees echoed through the region. 

“Footsteps,” Eveline said unhelpfully.

“I know,” Zeke muttered inwardly.  “This isn’t good.”

Indeed, anything that could shake the ground that violently was bound to be enormous.  And given his experiences in dungeons, Zeke expected that size would correlate to power.

“I think we need to move,” Talia stated.  “How fast can you go?”

“Fast enough,” Zeke said with a nod.  Talia blurred, disappearing into the brush.  He muttered to himself, “But not that fast.”

Then, he shifted to his unattuned colossal form before setting off in the same direction.  Pointedly, it was away from the rumbling footsteps.  Zeke didn’t mind fighting whatever was out there, but he didn’t want to do so before taking stock.  That just seemed like a good way to get killed.  After all, he knew that not everything in a dungeon was meant to be killable. 

“Except you already killed one that wasn’t,” Eveline stated.  “Or did you forget the cyclops?”

Indeed, that creature had never been meant to be an opponent.  Instead, it was more like an environmental danger.  Still, Zeke had found a way to tear it down, and he suspected that he could do the same to whatever was stomping through the forest.  And if it was just him, he’d have already gone to check it out.

But it wasn’t.

He still had Talia to worry about, and that meant he wasn’t going to put her in unnecessary danger. 

“Mature,” Eveline said.

“Yeah.  That’s me.  Really mature.  Everyone says so,” he stated inwardly, rushing past the trees.  In his unattuned form, he felt much more coordinated than in when fueling [Triune Colossus] with earth attuned mana, and he used that to great advantage, dodging most of the trees in his way.  Hopefully, that would be enough to keep the creature from tracking them.

If it was even coming their way, which was an unconfirmed assumption.

Gradually, Zeke sprinted through the forest.  Every now and again, he’d catch sight of Talia waiting on him, which just further confirmed that she was much, much faster than he could ever hope to be.  Regardless, she put that speed to good use, picking a path through the forest until, at last, they reached a series of ruins.

The area was so deteriorated that architecture was largely unidentifiable, though there was a pile of stone that rose nearly a hundred feet above the surrounding forest’s canopy.  So, Zeke and Talia climbed that hill of discarded stone and looked back the way they had come.

“Wow,” Zeke muttered, seeing the monster that followed them.  “I can’t say I expected that.”

“Me neither,” Talia agreed.

Eveline manifested, stating, “I think you may have finally found a monster you can’t kill.”