Markus stepped into the clearing, the serene harvesting vibe vanishing instantly. His 80-point Perception screamed a warning. Ahead of him sat the guardian: a Siberian-class Tiger Beast, nearly twenty feet long, its fur ragged and wild. But the tiger wasn't alone.
A massive, dark emerald vine—the Ancient Verdant Parasite—had completely infested the beast. Thick tendrils pulsed as they dug into the tiger's spine, creating a network of wood-element armor that covered its ribs. Its eyes glowed with a sick, green light.
The vines didn't just empower the beast; they had replaced its anatomy, turning it into a biological marionette of raw vitality.
"Nagini, target the host first," Markus commanded, drawing the Void Repulsor. "Let's see how much fuel that plant has."
The fight began with explosive force. Nagini lunged, flickering through space to constrict the tiger's rear legs, her Void energy beginning to freeze the parasitic cells. Markus followed with a precision strike that sheared cleanly through the tiger's shoulder, taking the left arm off completely.
[Void Severance]
[-150 Mana]
Markus watched the limb fall, expecting the battle to shift.
Before the detached limb even hit the ground, the severed stump began to writhe. Green, root-like tendrils erupted from the raw muscle, anchoring themselves back to the shoulder.
In four seconds, the entire limb had reattached and healed perfectly. The tiger roared, its wounds vanishing as the giant vine pumped years of stolen jungle vitality into the repair.
[Starlight Bow]
[-5,000 Mana]
Markus fired a volley from his Starlight Bow, targeting the vine-network itself. Arrows of solid light pierced the vine core, exploding inside.
[Spatial Detonation] x 5
[- 1,000 Mana]
He spent 1000 Mana on consecutive Spatial Detonations within the tiger's torso, turning its insides to slurry.
It didn't matter. The parasite simply rewrote the cells faster than Markus could destroy them. His 80-point Perception locked onto the horror: the vine's mana signature was barely dented. It had converted the entire glade's ecosystem into its backup battery.
The battle raged on for an hour. Markus was forced to use Spatial Blink defensively, dodging a torrent of thorny vine-lashes that moved faster than sound. Nagini, usually the definition of unlimited stamina, was visibly slower.
Her scales, once shiny, looked dull; she had constricted and crushed the tiger hundreds of times, but the vine-armor simply reformed instantly, locking her coils out.
"Master... there is too much life here," Nagini rasped through their bond, her mind foggy. "I cannot... find the beginning of the vine."
Markus checked his own status.
[Markus Blackwell]
[Mana: 3,000/70,000]
He had nothing left. The tiger-puppet stood before them, its hide perfectly intact, gloating in its stolen vitality.
"We can't outrun it, and we can't out-damage it," Markus whispered, leaning heavily on his blade. He looked up at the parasitic heart pulsing in the tree canopy above the tiger. "One chance."
He signaled Nagini to prepare for a synchronization.
Markus focused his final point of mana. He didn't use it on the Void Repulsor. He lowered his defenses, allowing the jungle's parasitic field to interface directly with his 80-point sense. It was agonizing—like pouring acid on his nervous system—but it allowed him to map the exact root network back to the Mother-Seed hidden deep beneath the glade.
"NOW, NAGINI! THE EARTH, NOT THE BEAST!" Markus roared.
[Dark Singularity]
[-2,000 Mana]
Nagini didn't question. She focused her remaining sliver of Void power into a final, localized collapse. She burrowed under the tiger, ignoring the monster entirely. She collapsed the spatial pocket around the ancient Mother-Seed that fed the entire Glade network.
The effect was instantaneous.
The giant vine gave a monstrous, subsonic scream. Deprived of its ecological anchor, it could no longer sustain the crazy regeneration. The tiger-puppet groaned as the vines instantly withered into gray ash. Its colossal structure failed.
The tiger collapsed, the parasite dying inside it. Markus and Nagini lay side-by-side, entirely drained, unable to move a muscle.
They had won, but they were entirely at the mercy of the cleared dungeon. Markus looked at Nagini's dull scales. "At least... we know your scales are... insanely hard," he whispered sleepily, before consciousness finally claimed him.
**
Markus gasped for air, his fingers clawing into the damp moss of the Iron-Root Glade. The 20-minute blackout had been a gamble, but his body had reached its breaking point. His vision pulsed in time with his shallow heartbeat as he summoned his status window. The numbers were grim—a sea of red warnings that confirmed what his aching nerves already knew.
----------------------------------------------------------
Name: Markus Blackwell
Age: 10
Class: Void Apprentice
Affinities: Space (L), Time (L)(Sealed), Fate (EX)
Health: 21,000/40,000
Mana: 2,000/70,000
Level: 50
Strength: 250
Agility: 250
Constitution: 250
Intelligence: 250
Hidden Attribute
Perception: 80
Available free attributes: 0
Laws: Space (90%)
Active Skills: (Damage Multiplier: 9x)
Spatial Slash
Void Severance
Spatial Bubble
Spatial Domain
Spatial Detonation
Dark Singularity
Sword Skills:
Vorpal Strike
Meteor Strike
Spatial Ascension
Legacy Skills: (Damage Multiplier: 9x)
[Legacy of Sagittarius]
Starlight Bow
Passive Skills:
Body refinement (Tier 6)
Void Perception
Dimensional Inventory (100 x 100 sqm)
Fate's Eye
Equipment:
Heavenly Scriptures of Space
Key to the Temple of Space
Valerian Academy Student Badge
Aurelian Royal Family Crest
Dimensional Storage Ring (Tier 3)
Prayer Cushion
----------------------------------------------------------
With a trembling flick of his wrist, Markus commanded the air to part. The massive, withered remains of the Peak Tier 5 Tiger—once a mountain of muscle and parasitic wood—shimmered as they were caught in a flickering spatial aperture. With a final, agonizing pulse of his remaining willpower, he forced the carcass into his inventory.
The weight of the beast vanished from the glade, leaving behind only a vacuum and the ghost-scent of iron and rot.
Markus stood over the crater, his gaze fixed on the shattered remains of the Mother-Seed. Even in its broken state, the core of the parasite pulsed with a dying, rhythmic light.
He reached down and claimed the fragments, his movements heavy with regret. It was a profound loss; had he taken it alive, he could have unraveled the secrets of its hyper-regeneration within a controlled lab.
To see such a masterpiece of biological engineering reduced to stagnant splinters was a crime against his own curiosity. He sealed the shards in a stasis-glass container, a hollow consolation for the living miracle he had been forced to destroy.
Markus looked one last time at the wreckage of the glade—the shattered wood, the empty husks, and the missing Mother-Seed. "Let's get out of here," he whispered, "before I start to smell like the rot." He turned away from the jungle that once teemed with life, feeling the weight of the Peak Tier 5 carcass in his inventory like a promise of future power.