CHAPTER 144

  GOING BACK TO THE ROOTS

  The trio, a budding beauty, a chiselled boy in his late teens, and right behind them was a terrifying man, moved with measured steps.

  “You didn’t have to escort us this far, commander Homar.”

  Delimira said to him.

  They had fought together, faced odds like Xandor and even his more terrifying thirteen captains.

  Bled and healed together, and since Homar had no extra love for Samson, Chris felt he was the only one who had accepted him around the Imperial worshipping fanatics.

  “Yes, commander. You didn’t have to.” He agreed with her.

  “You never know. The last thing I want to be on a negotiating table with Xandor and staking your heads. Your Imperial friend seems like he would charge without thinking if that were to happen.”

  “Because we’d do the same, commander.” Chris answered.

  “Ha… these idiots.” Delimira cut sharply. “That’s just as same as offering yourselves up— and you say I’m emotional.”

  “Well, that’s how we are, Deli. There is time for you to step in, knowing well you’ll lose.”

  “Stop quoting Hans.” She sighed, “your master is a bad influence on you, Chris, so-called his first knight.”

  As they quibbled to and fro. The gates of Clandor node city appeared. The spacedoor was just out of their walls, but they had taken a detour. With a small unit assigned by Arat to track Xandor and his goons in a place where they could least expect them to be.

  Delimira and Chris were part of that squad.

  But it failed too. He wasn’t near the Parvian borders.

  “That’s my cue, children. Don’t die.” Looking at the gates, Homar bid them goodbyes.

  Delimira nodded. She was polite rarely, and this was the very rare time. “Thanks for teaching us—”

  “You both have learned yourself. The experience of Eclipse just made you sharper. Don’t be too humble. Take pride in what you can achieve. It will stop you questioning yourself.”

  With those words, the third-ranked knight in the world disappeared.

  They were late by a week. The red demon raid only had the starting period; anyone capable, a knight more than grade sixties or a mage with five circles, was eligible to join at any time after inauguration.

  Striding fast, they crossed the node city and the gates of the node castle, all thanks to the permits Reina herself had written along with the referral for the raids.

  “So you ready, Deli?” Chris asked, his sword hand perspiring. He didn’t know if it was fear of the unknown or just excitement.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Let’s find Hans, god knows what kind of shitshow he is doing this time.”

  But Hans was facing several red demons.

  They emerged like shards of night breaking apart: each taller than his torso in human form but now scarcely larger than his wooden fingers. Four-bladed arms. A chitinous ribcage that glimmered. And behind them, wings that flickered in and out of reality—like they were half-phased in a direction Hans’s mind refused to parse.

  His challenging roar had attracted the captains. One he barely defeated earlier was now in swarms. They screamed, unified. One, two, twenty…he lost the count.

  “Well, this is a nice way of saying challenge accepted.”

  They warped, jerked, shimmered.

  Space folded. Space snapped back.

  A hundred blinks of movement pulling closer.

  Soon they were all over the sky, blinking like stars, surrounding him, trying to understand what he was.

  Hans’s giant eyes—hollows of glowing green—tracked them without anything; his mana control was superior in Elderform, so did his ManaVision, that now barely registered the movements of warping.

  He positioned himself, crouching in four like a turtle was ready to withdraw into its shell, hinting to his predators that he was taking on a defensive measure.

  But he was lining up his kills.

  The sun hit him like a pulse. His bark drank the light greedily.

  “Photonise,” he rumbled.

  Deep inside his titanic chest, the solar reservoir churned—raw heat wrapped in green energy, begging to be released.

  The red-demon captains struck first.

  A dozen warped into existence on his forearm, slicing with their four razor-limbs. Bark splintered. Chips flew like fragments of obsidian. But Hans’s arm, full of solar energy coming from his chest, jerked, massive and deliberate, smashing three of them against the stony ground with a thunderous crack that sent dust shaking.

  Yet they survived thanks to their space-warping abilities.

  They warped again—but this time, too close. They reappeared inside his defensive radius.

  That was exactly where he wanted them.

  His fingers split open towards them like blooming wooden claws; from the cracks, thick thorn-covered creepers burst outward like snakes awakened by hunger.

  He predicted their location after the warp, but the result was different.

  Dozens had warped, but he only caught a handful.

  The vines whipped around, snagging two, three, four bodies in thorny coils.

  They screeched, wings flickering as they tried to warp away—but the vines tightened across their limbs and thoraxes. It moved like a saw digging into their exoskeleton, anchoring them in space.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Pinned.

  Shackled.

  Hans crushed them with a flex of his solar-charged wooden fist.

  Black ichor dripped like tar onto the pale Dead Lands.

  His vines moved again, digging their corpses with surgical precision and extracting their hearts.

  But the swarm wasn’t intimidated. Instead, the air around him buckled and shimmered as hundreds of the creatures warped above him, all Two-hands falling onto his humongous body.

  “Remember the terrifying aspect of a Red demon captain. Their followers, the infantry, swarm in, and the captain uses them as he wishes, like a chess master, warping them into strategic positions.”

  He recalled one of his mentor’s warnings about a single Four-hands, but now he was facing dozens, and those dozens had called hundreds of Two-hands.

  All appearing in a circular formation around him. Their limbs vibrated at a frequency that made the ground tremble. Their mandibles clicked in unison, then separated as if preparing to release something.

  Hans sensed the distortion a heartbeat before it hit.

  The sky rippled—and a wave of inverted gravity crashed down on him, crushing and stretching in the same instant. It was far stronger than Rudolf had served him in Theodred’s form. And that made his barked skin groan.

  The rubble embedded within him cracked and powdered. His massive knees bent under the pressure.

  “This was not in syllabus.” He muttered, struggling but not breaking.

  Solar energy pulsed in his chest. He forced himself upward again, bark plates splitting as he grew further, towering. The glow in his chest brightened, pushing back the gravitational compression like a sun trying to tear open the night.

  He roared like wind plowing through a forest during a hurricane.

  The swarm faltered.

  With one sweeping motion, Hans slammed his arm upward through the cloud of Red demon wings formation. Several of them warped—but too slowly. Too predictably. Their space manipulation was set to evade his attack through short distances, but Hans’s sweeping strike wasn’t aimed at where they were—he swung to punish every place they could reappear.

  Solar Storm

  A dozen bodies were pulped against his bark-coated knuckles, and the shredding heat cauterised their directed limbs.

  A lot of died but there was no end to them. As if they knew no fear of death.

  More tried to warp behind him.

  The vines responded before Hans commanded them.

  They lashed out from his back like living whips, catching the warped intruders mid-blink. The moment the red-demon captains rematerialised, they were already snared. Thorns the size of human daggers pierced chitin. Ichor sprayed in fine black arcs.

  Hans didn’t even turn. He simply tightened the vines behind him and listened to the crunch.

  He was overusing the solar energy he contained. Drunk on power, he acted as his instinct guided.

  But the swarm was adapting too.

  They began warping in synchronised waves, circling him faster and faster—blinking, scattering, condensing in unpredictable patterns that even Hans’s enhanced vision struggled to track.

  Their wings’ hum escalated, forming a dissonant, vibrating pressure that threatened to make his bark crack.

  “They are harmonising. At this rate, I’ll lose the elderform.”

  He tightened his barks, reinforcing them over and over. But that struggle kept straining his solar reservoir. The energy inside him throbbed—barely contained sunlight compressed into destructive potential.

  The pressure doubled—crushed into his spine like a mountain leaning—and Hans dropped flat, unable even to siphon the barrier’s energy anymore.

  “Think!” he growled, forcing his breath through splintering bark.

  Steel-like thorns erupted along his back, bristling like a massive porcupine. Another spell called SharpDeathovergrowing on his elderform flesh.

  But before he could stabilise, something slammed into him from above and drove his head down, his forehead grinding into the dirt. He braced on all fours out of instinct, not strength.

  They were overtaking him.

  Even with the fresh steel-like spikes along his back, the frenzy of bodies crawling over him didn’t slow. The four-hand captains hurled infantry waves after waves forward, uncaring who died so long as they could hurt him.

  And the Red Demon infantry followed their intentions, swarmed his limbs, ripping themselves apart on the thorns if it meant one chitin blade could press deeper into sap and stone.

  They were all suicidal—brutes with no real minds, only a single command burning in them.

  And the result, the green giant withering.

  The captains mistook his curling form for surrender. They thought they had him pinned.

  They pushed for the final, taking matters on their own hands instead of infantry.

  Air rippled violently as another wave phased in, appearing targeting his shoulders in a cyclone of wings and blades. They clung to him—on his back, on his ribs, along the joints of his arms—digging, slicing, trying to peel him open like a fruit.

  His vines renewed, coiled tighter, not to save him so much as to focus the repair—his entire body growing the green skin over and over.

  But he was tiring himself out. It needed to be stopped.

  He didn’t want to do it.

  “Damn it,” he hissed.

  The sunstones he had dug out earlier stirred beneath his bark—then crawled toward his chest like insects made of molten light. Each one pulsed with stolen radiance. They pressed together, fusing. Heating. Becoming more than they were meant to be.

  His bark joints unlatched like the petals of a poisoned flower.

  From his chest, seams split wide. The green-gold light that had been patient as a seed became a furnace.

  The air itself shuddered.

  The soil around his planted limbs smoked as stored heat licked through roots.

  And then he exploded.

  Not with a wild, directionless implosion—but with a brutal, layered eruption.

  First came the pressure.

  As the fusing of sunstone core began, colossal pulses blasted outward, ripping off the nearest Red Demons from his skin and keeping them off the bay. It was like a god exhaling. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t come near him.

  The second layer hit quickly, sharper—hotter.

  The completion of fusion unleashed a devastating, all-directional burst of green-gold power—an antimatter detonation wrapped inside sunlight.

  It detonated beneath his massive torso, a blast that stripped the battlefield clean.

  Even space-warping abilities sputtered and died mid-activation. Creatures didn’t even have time to scream. Whether they had four hands or two, whether they phased or fled, all were erased without discrimination.

  The explosion was not of long-range, but it ignited the arsenal of needles along his back. Every thorn absorbed the blast and fired outward—dozens, hundreds—guided javelins tearing into the sky with unnatural precision.

  Hans saw that as an opportunity. His control over nature grew, making hundred so guided path that captured the high speed javelins.

  They curved mid-flight like hunting hounds on a scent, pursuing warp trails and ghost-images.

  Red demons mid-phase reappeared only to find themselves impaled in half-formed bodies. Their attempts to reform collapsed as the javelins detonated inside them—explosions that mangled both flesh and the warped pockets of space they travelled through.

  The third layer roared from the ground itself.

  The earth that had absorbed the initial blast finally bucked.

  The ground split into jagged blooms beneath him, sucking air downward as the lands caved in, dragging everything into the cracks.

  Hans also used this opportunity to latch the stragglers down into the closing cracks.

  Vines snapped out like whips, wrapped around stunned, smoking bodies, and crushed them without hesitation.

  The world became pure motion—light ripping across the ground, fire raging with no intention of calming, roots glowing, stone breaking.

  When the roar faded, a crater—wide enough to swallow a town—smoked at the battlefield’s centre.And in the middle of it, half-buried in ash and charcoal, lay Hans’s charred elder form.

  The swarm that had blanketed the horizon minutes earlier was gone—shredded into burning confetti scattered across the blackened plain.

  Crackling and hissing filled the silence, the new soundscape of a land scorched pitch-black even under the red hue of the Deadlands sky.

  “I only wanted an explosion— but this will do.”