Chapter 100: The Battle of the Jungle

With the Flower Spirit’s swift flight, it still managed to intercept Grim and his party in the middle of the Corrupted Jungle.
“Still you, you reckless fool. If you’ve come this time, do not even imagine leaving here alive!”

When it saw Grim’s familiar face, a flare of psychic fury rose in the Flower Spirit’s eyes, as long as a forearm. It was as if tangible mental pressure, across a hundred meters of air, had shaken Grim’s mind so hard his thoughts trembled and nearly broke.

Damn it. A wizard-tier monster was never one to be handled by such meager strength as mine.

Grim kept stepping back until the great stone python coiled its vast body around him, sealing him inside a ring of scales. Only then did his panic settle and his thinking return.

“Lightning Giant, wrap it up. Don’t give it a chance to strike me!”
Through a hidden mental channel, Grim passed on the order.

In the next instant, the Lightning Giant brought his hands together and shot out a chain of lightning as thick as a basin, aimed straight at the Flower Spirit hovering in midair.

Sure of its rose carapace beyond any doubt, the Flower Spirit did not dodge. Instead it pressed straight into the wild elemental current, lunging at the Lightning Giant while he still guided it. Rose branches pushed up from its body, twisting and knitting into a perfect armored bloom that sealed its form within. It still barreled forward under arcs of scattering blue fire, one claw thrusting forward like a blade toward the center of the giant’s chest.

The Flower Spirit’s combat instincts were immense, and it saw with painful clarity where the Lightning Giant excelled and where it was weak.
In a battle against an elemental construct like this, a slow grind was never the ideal approach. It might reduce incoming blows, but it would drag the fight into a long, hard-to-control war of attrition. So the best way was to sacrifice some defense from the outset and carve down the Lightning Giant as fast as possible, preventing it from seizing the tempo.

Faced with the Flower Spirit’s single-minded rush, the Lightning Giant was unmoved. Thunder cracked inside its frame, and the lightning chains between its palms thickened at once. And just as the Flower Spirit’s fine paw, throwing off countless sparks, came within half a finger of piercing the Giant’s chest, the giant flickered with electricity and vanished from view.

“Lightning leap!”
It was called a leap, but in effect it was little different from a close-range teleport.

A crackle of thunder boomed from a hundred meters away. Entwined in electric light, the Lightning Giant reappeared. With no pause at all, the moment he manifested, a new lash of lightning crossed that same span and struck the Flower Spirit’s lithe form again.

Among all elemental magic, lightning magic was by far the swiftest of all—almost to the level of thought-to-reach, as if summoned by will alone. To evade such attacks, only those whose speed reached—or nearly reached—twenty, one might dare to do so.

A glimmer of hope lit Grim’s face.
But before the smile fully opened, bitter disappointment replaced it.

Yes. On raw strength alone, the Lightning Giant was enough to hold its own against this terrifying Flower Spirit. Yet because the giant was so outstanding, Grim’s own frailty as its master had just been laid bare. If the Flower Spirit could not gain the edge against the giant, it would surely turn its intent to…

As Grim silently weighed this, after several swift exchanges with the Lightning Giant, the Flower Spirit suddenly slowed its relentless assault, then slowly turned and faced him.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Grim said nothing. With the stone python wound around him, he wheeled and ran for the distance.

………

As storm clouds rolled over the sky above the Corrupted Jungle and enormous thunder roared through the cave, not far beyond, near the approach to the cave entrance, a violent surge of earthen energy erupted from the ground and quickly condensed into a three-meter-wide circular witch-rune.
Thick gray dust surged up, then quickly resolved inside the circle into five dim, uncanny, spectral figures.

With a dull, suffocating thud, a pale yellow earthen halo exploded outward in a puffing column, and the dust burst apart, revealing five fallen quasi-sorcerers who had crossed through space.
Landen, Philip, Hegel, and two more fallen quasi-sorcerers whose names could not be placed.

The five bodies shook for an instant, then, with sheer force of will, drove out the earthen corruption soaking into them and steadied their minds.

Ley-line travel was far faster than marching step by step, but after each jump there was always a long dizziness. It was unsuitable for a sudden assault and served only as an auxiliary means of long-distance transfer.

As each of them recovered from that dizziness and set their eyes on the nearby jungle, their attention was immediately seized by the deafening thunder.

Clearly, that place had already become a field of slaughter.

Landen’s tall frame looked up into the rolling thunder, then watched the two blurred figures darting and striking beneath it. A strange surge of grim satisfaction rose within him.
“Damn you, brat. This time, where are you going to run? No matter how many you bring, die nicely right here in this Corrupted Jungle!”

“Move! It is our time to make our entrance.”
With a cruel grin, Landen strode into the jungle first. Behind him, the other four fallen quasi-sorcerers exchanged a single glance and followed in silence.

………

Just as the distant thunder rolled in from afar, a red bat flapped furiously through the air and came to the ruins’ entrance.

Sensing the life-breath within the bat, a vine suddenly shot out from the dense tangle that covered the ruins and wrapped around the low-flying creature.

Mary cried out, her form shifting in an instant back into a human shape. A pair of sharp, cruel claws flashed through the air. In the span of a few blinks she carved the vine’s extended tendrils into countless pieces.

It was like prodding a nest of hornets. The next second, countless vines rose upward across the vast green ground and formed a whole forest of green spears, wildly stabbing and coiling toward Mary.

Mary’s face too hardened into feral fury. Her body became a streak of red lightning and she careened into the heart of that green bramble. Her jagged claws never stopped. Every swing snapped a thick vine; viscous green sap spurted out.

At that moment, while Mary fought the vine-thicket at full force, an uncanny magical vine emerged from beneath a giant green leaf and extended its tip toward her from afar. Its end spread open like a petal, showing a bizarre, staring eye fixed on Mary, from which she could not break free no matter how she weaved and dodged.

Nearly in unison with that vine-eye, an image flared in the Flower Spirit’s mind in the distant battle: Mary struggling and slaying the vines with terrible force. That made its movements slow by a little.

Such small hesitation would be hard for anyone else to notice, but to the Lightning Giant it stood out in utter clarity. A crackling spear of lightning, roaring as it arced, landed in an instant on the Flower Spirit’s outer rose carapace.
A small storm burst suddenly around it, a violent electric storm testing the full resilience of the rose shell.

Up to this point, the Lightning Giant had fought the Flower Spirit for a long time yet could not break through its defense. The vine-like rose branches kept sprouting without end—burn one, and another sprang up; crush one bloom, and another bloomed in its place.
Though the Lightning Giant had exhausted all its effort, it still had not inflicted real injury, only worn down some of the Flower Spirit’s magical defenses.

The fresh enemies appearing in the distance undoubtedly stirred the Flower Spirit’s instincts, and it let out a rage-cry, attempting to leave the battlefield. So the Lightning Giant, which had been fighting with a guerrilla style all along, rushed forward at once and slammed into it, pinning it amid the Flower Spirit’s fierce storm of attacks.

At the ruins, after Mary’s reckless and savage onslaught, the ground was already littered with warped, writhing severed vine limbs. As the vines were chopped down far enough, a hidden black opening came into view.

And while Mary fought on, locked with the vine forest, a gray stone nobody noticed had been inching closer to that opening little by little.

Kabi moved with care, slipping between the rolling branches and forked shoots across the ground, trying not to let any green sap cling to him. Through a slit in the threads of his raised cloak, he kept scanning for hidden danger, creeping forward one deliberate step after another toward the ruins.

Clearly, Mary had understood his intentions and was deliberately drawing the vines’ attention aside, so this cautious green-skinned goblin Kabi could, with his camouflage, slip straight into the enemy’s heart.

At last, after crossing mountains and seas, Kabi reached the opening.

After hesitating only a few breaths, he touched the enchanted collar around his neck and felt the magic contract active within him, and finally resolved himself to carry out the task his master had assigned.
There had been no alternative. Before coming, worried it might still be unsafe, Grim had even visited the wizard Angus once more and bought a familiar-bound contract from him.

That contract now worked on him. If he showed even the slightest thought or action of betraying the master, that young man could perceive it completely. Then, by intoning a single sorcerous password, the enchanted collar set around Kabi’s neck would instantly crush his skull.

So if Kabi wished to stay alive, he had only one path: obey and finish the task exactly as ordered.

Pushing aside thoughts that had no right to exist in his mind, Kabi quietly removed the illusion that concealed him, then swung his short wooden rod and cast invisibility over himself. He then drove straight into the opening without hesitation.

In the instant Kabi crossed into the opening, several of the principal figures far away all felt a faint stir of intuition and together directed their gaze toward the position of the ruins’ entrance.