Chapter 87: The Hunter's Geometry and the Forest of Flesh
The sun fell like a melted gold coin over Skull Rock. The four previous battles had turned the immense jade coliseum into a field of craters, corrosive ash, black ice, and fractured rocks. The array forgers had barely managed to flatten the terrain and reinforce the protective barriers of the stands. The air still smelled of ozone, blood, and ruin. But the Morningstar legion didn't need a pristine stage to kill.
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar held Celeste. His daughter, with her silver-blue hair shining under the sunset, opened her frigid blue left eye and her dark violet right eye, fixing her attention on the arena doors. Samael spoke no word. His gravitational tyranny was a protective and expectant mantle. Beside him, Seraphina nodded imperceptibly. The final act of this phase was about to begin.
Below, the herald, with a dry throat but a spirit burning with fanaticism, raised the bone horn.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The closing of the quarterfinals!" the herald's shout echoed throughout the stadium. "The sniper who never misses against the mother of botanical nightmares! Sequence 21, Varian Morningstar, against Sequence 7, Elowen Morningstar!"
The south doors opened.
Varian Morningstar advanced. His thin, sinewy build seemed to absorb the shadows of the dusk. His dark green hair waved under the constant current of air he generated himself. He walked toward the center with the mathematical precision of a metronome. In his left hand, he held his bow, made of a matte black material. His emerald eyes, with pupils that contracted like mechanical lenses, were already evaluating the shattered topography of the arena. To him, the craters weren't rubble; they were shooting angles and temporary cover. He showed no emotion. Only calculation.
From the north, the doors slid open heavily.
Elowen Morningstar crossed the threshold. Tall and of ethereal beauty, her emerald green hair was intertwined with living vines that pulsed slightly. She wore deep moss and brown robes. Her aura was that of a goddess of nature, but the nature she controlled didn't give life; it usurped it. With every step she took, the melted jade and ash beneath her feet sprouted tiny blades of black grass that died seconds later. Her smile was maternal, compassionate, and deeply terrifying.
They stopped fifty meters apart, the maximum separation the coliseum allowed.
"Your bow is beautiful, Varian," Elowen said, her soft voice resonating in the silence. "Made of petrified wood from the Valley of Lament. But dead wood always yearns to return to the earth. I can help it take root in your heart."
Varian did not reply. He raised his left arm, positioning himself in a perfect profile. He closed his eyes for a second and activated [Eagle Vision].
The world lost its color. Everything turned gray. The wind flows lit up in neon blue, and fifty meters away, Elowen's vital core glowed with incandescent red.
Distance: Fifty meters. Crosswind of three knots to the east. Humidity at fifteen percent. Neutral elevation, Varian calculated in the time it took him to open his eyes.
DOOONG!
The gong barely grazed the air and the first arrow was already in flight.
Varian drew the bow without nocking a physical projectile. He molded compressed air and the pure energy of his Stage 4 into a thread of cyan-white light. [Radiant Void Arrow].
The shot broke the sound barrier right at the grip. The projectile crossed the arena like an emerald and white laser, leaving a perfect vacuum tunnel in its wake. It aimed directly at Elowen's larynx, calculated to decapitate her before she could lift a finger.
Elowen didn't blink, much less try to dodge a supersonic projectile.
In the millisecond before impact, she injected her Qi into the ground.
An immense wall of dark wood and reddish veins erupted from the jade in front of her at an unnatural speed. It was the [Seeds of Blood Plague]. The biological wall was as thick as a millennial oak.
The void arrow struck. The drill of wind and energy pierced the first layer of bark, tore through the second layer of hardened sap, and began to disintegrate the wood from the inside. The power of Varian's arrow was colossal; it completely pierced the biological barrier.
But when the tip of pure light emerged on the other side of the wood, inches from Elowen's neck, its inertia had been devoured. The arrow dissipated into a harmless breeze that barely ruffled the alchemist's hair.
"Wood absorbs inertia, Varian," whispered Elowen, resting her fingers on the immense bleeding trunk she had just summoned. "And mine is very hungry."
Elowen sank her nails into the wood of her own defensive wall. The wall wasn't a static object; it was a living organism.
The entire floor of the coliseum began to tremble.
From beneath the fractured jade slabs, thousands of roots thick as python snakes emerged violently. The arena turned into a sea of thorny vines that lunged at Varian from all directions. They didn't just seek to trap him; the thorns exuded a corrosive acid designed to liquefy flesh.
Varian didn't change his expression. Ground coverage at seventy percent. Exponential growth. Remaining static is a death sentence.
The sniper let go of the bow with one hand, channeled wind Qi into the soles of his boots, and shot backward with a directional mini-explosion. The roots crushed the spot where he had been standing a millisecond before, chewing up the stone.
Varian began a dance of perfect evasion. He ran backward, leaping from crater to crater, using small wind detonations to propel himself into the air and change his trajectory mid-flight, avoiding the botanical maws sprouting from the ground beneath his feet.
While performing suicidal acrobatics to stay out of the vines' reach, Varian drew the bow and fired in bursts of three.
Zzz-zap. Zzz-zap. Zzz-zap.
He wasn't aiming at Elowen; he was firing [Radiant Void Arrows] at the main intersections of the roots, calculating the structural stress points of the biological mass. The arrows drilled into the dark wood, and the void collapsed the root knots, making them burst in a shower of red sap and splinters. Varian was pruning the killer forest with surgical precision while retreating at fifty kilometers per hour.
Elowen, watching from the other side of the arena, smiled. Her Qi flowed directly into the earth.
"Pruning a garden only makes it grow stronger, little bird."
The roots Varian destroyed did not die. The red sap splattering the slabs acted as Qi-infused fertilizer. For every root Varian shattered, three more sprouted from the remains, thicker, faster, and more furious. In less than a minute, the coliseum had become a dark, suffocating jungle. The vines rose up to ten meters high, forming a shifting, deadly labyrinth that threatened to devour the sniper.
Varian found himself cornered against the arena's immense south wall. The sea of thorns rose before him like a green and red tsunami.
Distance to target obstructed, his cold mind analyzed. Linear trajectory blocked. Target attempts to suffocate ballistics through mass saturation.
Varian jumped. He channeled all the wind into a powerful [Ascending Impulse] and literally ran vertically up the arena's containment wall. He climbed fifteen meters until he reached the edge of the stands' security arrays. His boots clung to the vertical wall using wind suction. Hanging upside down like a spider, Varian had a bird's-eye view of the jungle Elowen had created.
From that height, he aimed at the open sky, drawing the bow until the thread of light emitted a high-pitched shriek. He poured nearly a third of his Stage 4 reserves into a single shot.
[Rain of Green Meteors].
He fired a massive arrow into the clouds. At forty meters high, the projectile exploded. The sky turned a lethal neon green, and a thousand darts of compressed wind and energy began to rain down upon the entire arena.
It was a saturation bombardment. Every meteor struck with the force of a cannon shot, shredding the parasitic jungle. Wood exploded. Acid hissed. The entire coliseum shook under the rain of energetic shrapnel. Varian was razing Elowen's ecosystem with brute firepower.
Rank 7, trapped in the center of the bombardment, had to create an immense shell of intertwined roots over her head to avoid being riddled. The shell barely held, splintering under the punishment of the green meteors.
But Elowen wasn't just defending passively. Inside her botanical bunker, she was weaving her counterattack.
"If you don't want to step on my earth, Varian... then don't breathe my air."
Elowen opened the palms of her hands and blew a cloud of yellowish dust that mixed with the boiled sap of her destroyed plants.
[Puppet Pollen].
It wasn't a visible cloud that could be dodged. The parasitic pollen, empowered by the immense amount of biomass destroyed in the arena, spread microscopically. It was an odorless, almost invisible gas that seeped through the root shield and rose into the air, filling the space above the arena, exactly where Varian hung from the wall.
Varian, focused on holding his position and assessing the damage, inhaled.
In less than three seconds, the sniper's perfect, geometric world fractured.
Varian's Eagle Vision flickered. The blue wind vectors began to twist, turning into snakes that hissed in his ear. The red dot of Elowen's core multiplied into hundreds of fake lights dancing on his retina. His heart rate skyrocketed, and a sensation of toxic euphoria flooded his brain, threatening to relax his muscles and make him fall into the root shredder still surviving below.
Neuro-parasitic hallucinogen, Varian diagnosed, his logical mind desperately fighting the chemistry in his blood. Visual cortex interruption. Motor control failure. If I blink, I die.
Varian closed his eyes for an instant. He bit his tongue so hard that hot blood flooded his mouth, using the sharp pain to anchor his mind to reality, cutting through the pollen's euphoria.
He held his breath. His Stage 4 cultivator lungs allowed him to fight without oxygen for several minutes, but the pollen was already in his bloodstream.
Knowing he couldn't trust his normal vision, Varian kept his eyes closed. He purged the toxic air around him by generating a two-meter wind repulsion sphere, clearing his immediate living space.
Blindly, suspended fifteen meters in the air, Varian raised the bow.
His Eagle Vision was corrupted by hundreds of fake red dots. Elowen was camouflaged among the hallucinogenic signals.
If I can't see her with my eyes, I'll see her with the wind, the hunter thought.
Varian extended his tactile perception through the coliseum's air currents. He felt the convective currents of the residual heat, he felt the dense mass of the moving roots, and he felt the exact empty space in the center of the shattered shell where someone was breathing and manipulating plant Qi.
Varian drew the string. He ignored the Eagle Vision and channeled a dark, resonant Qi vibration into an incorporeal arrow.
[Predator's Mark].
He fired blindly. The energy arrow, which sought no physical damage, traced a perfect parabola, slipped through a gap in the root shell, and harmlessly lodged itself in Elowen's shoulder.
Inside the darkness of her refuge, Elowen felt the lash of Qi marking her soul. A cyan aura in the shape of an eagle's eye glowed intensely on her chest.
In Varian's mind, even through the poison's delirium and with his eyes closed, that cyan eye shone like a beacon in absolute night.
The sniper let go of the wall, plummeting in a free fall toward the arena, toward the jungle of thorns.
As he fell in free fall, he drew the bow at a speed that blurred his arms. He was firing continuous bursts of Radiant Void Arrows. He fired five, ten, fifteen arrows in a matter of three seconds.
He didn't aim them at the shell. He fired them to the sides, toward the stands, toward the sky.
But the Predator's Mark was active.
The magnetic effect took absolute control of the ballistics.
The fifteen emerald laser arrows, traveling in completely opposite directions, turned violently in mid-air at impossible angles of ninety and one hundred eighty degrees. Defying all physics, the fifteen arrows converged like a swarm of light wasps, drilling into Elowen's root shell from all possible angles simultaneously.
CRACK-BOOM!
Elowen's biological bunker was shredded by the saturation of concentrated void. The thick layers of petrified wood exploded.
Three of the arrows broke through the shattered defense. Two deeply tore the alchemist's thighs, and the third passed clean through her left shoulder, instantly cauterizing the flesh due to the friction of the supersonic wind.
Elowen was thrown backward, falling flat on her back onto a nest of her own vines, coughing blood. The impact broke her concentration, and the jungle around her shuddered.
Varian, using a blast of air at his feet, slowed his free fall and landed gracefully on the branch of a dying root, twenty meters from the wounded Elowen. His breath was held, his eyes bloodshot from enduring the poison. His bow aimed straight at the woman's skull.
"You're locked on," Varian said, his voice cold and metallic. "There aren't enough trees in the world to hide you from a bullet that bends around corners. Yield."
Silence took over the arena, broken only by the creaking of shattered wood. The disciples watched with bated breath. Had the botanical monster fallen?
Elowen, lying on the ground, began to laugh.
It was a soft, gurgling laugh, because her own lungs were filling with blood. She propped herself up on her right elbow, ignoring the smoking hole in her left shoulder. Her red-stained face showed no pain. It showed devotion.
"I never wanted to hide, Varian," Elowen murmured, her gaze shining with macabre ecstasy. "I just needed to water the earth."
Elowen raised her right hand, drenched in her own blood, and pressed it against the shattered jade floor. Her Stage 4 core squeezed to the absolute limit. She wasn't healing her wounds. She was pouring her own vitality, her blood, and all her Qi into a single seed buried miles deep during the fight.
[Sprout of the Tree of Death].
The entire coliseum let out a structural groan. The earth-grade containment arrays protecting the five thousand disciples cracked with a sharp screech, flashing a warning red.
A colossal earthquake knocked Varian off his improvised branch, forcing him to land and use the wind to stabilize himself.
The ground in front of Elowen erupted like a volcano of biomass.
It wasn't a vine. It wasn't a forest. It was a single tree of titanic, abominable, and grotesque proportions.
The trunk, ten meters thick, was composed of black wood, twisted tendons, pulsating veins, and pale flesh that beat in unison with Elowen's heart. Colossal branches, topped with maws dripping acid and flowers exhaling necrotic gas, blotted out the arena's sky, forming a dome over the coliseum. The Tree of Death didn't grow in the soil; it devoured stone, jade, and air, corrupting physical reality within a hundred-meter radius.
Elowen wasn't standing next to the tree; she was fused with it. Her lower half had been absorbed by the pulsating roots of the main trunk. The fleshy wood had wrapped around her waist and arms, connecting her directly to the aberration's neural network. Her blood fed the monster, and the monster was her. Her wounds closed instantly with black sap.
From the VIP platform, Lord Magnar Varian jumped up, drawing half of The Fang of Winter out of sheer instinct.
"By all the gods of the north!" roared Magnar, horror and martial admiration mixing on his face. "That woman has summoned a strategic-grade plague! That monstrosity can devour an entire citadel! She is fused to its core!"
Saira Varian watched, trembling, as the branches of the Tree of Death whipped against the audience's energy shields, trying to reach the spectators to drain their life.
"The sniper can't destroy that with arrows. It's like trying to fell a millennial forest by shooting needles," Saira said, panic setting in.
Below, Varian backed away, evading a branch as thick as a temple pillar that crushed the ground where he stood. The entire arena was a sea of jagged roots, toxic gas, and corrosive sap. The Tree of Death was an active biological fortress relentlessly hunting the only being that wasn't a part of it.
Varian leaped frantically, his wind Qi reserves dwindling to maintain his hyper-sonic speed. The pollen in his blood made the immense tree seem to pulsate and laugh at him. He could barely breathe. Every evasion cost him triple the energy. The Predator's Mark on Elowen's chest glowed intensely high up on the massive trunk, thirty meters off the ground, completely surrounded by dozens of layers of living wood, flesh, and crystallized sap shields.
He was cornered. The ecosystem would suffocate or crush him in a matter of seconds.
Varian dodged another lunge from three toothed roots, landing on the stump of a stone column. He took a deep breath, swallowing a mouthful of stale air.
If he couldn't kill the beast with a thousand needles, he would kill it with a single divine bolt.
The hunter disconnected himself from the pain in his lungs, from the hallucinations in his brain, from the cosmic terror of the tree of flesh. His mind returned to the perfect geometric equation.
Varian planted himself firmly on the column. He raised his black bow and aimed at the shapeless mass of wood and flesh, straight toward where the cyan eye of his mark throbbed in the distance.
He wasn't going to fire a fast arrow. He was going to execute the forbidden technique of his style, the one that erased the concept of "obstacle."
[Arrow of Inevitable Judgment].
Varian channeled everything he had left. Absolutely everything. He emptied the last percentage of his Stage 4 core, pouring his own vitality into the bow. His hands began to bleed profusely, capillaries bursting from the overpressure. The bowstring, instead of being a fine thread, became a cable of pure, unstable white light, emitting plasma sparks that melted the stone at his feet. The wind around Varian stopped completely, all the oxygen sucked into the projectile.
Elowen, from her altar of wood and flesh high atop the tree, felt the immense accumulation of singular energy. The plant's biological instinct screamed in terror.
With a movement of her hands trapped in the wood, Elowen ordered the entirety of the Tree of Death to defend the core.
Thousands of branches, roots, vines of vegetable steel, and ten-meter-thick layers of wood swirled in front of her, forming a colossal carapace, an impenetrable wall of pure biomass between her and Varian. At the same time, fifty spears of diamond-hard wood shot out from the base of the tree straight at the sniper's immobile position to impale him before he released the string.
The biological spears closed in on Varian's heart.
The carapace around Elowen closed completely.
Varian didn't blink. His emerald eyes shone with the intensity of a sniper who had pulled the trigger of God.
He released the string.
There was no sonic "boom." There was a tear in the fabric of the world.
The Arrow of Inevitable Judgment did not travel like a projectile. It became a continuous beam of pure white light, wrapped in a drill of absolute vacuum, connecting Varian's bow to Elowen's chest in a millisecond.
Physics collapsed.
The beam of white light pierced the fifty spears meant to impale Varian, disintegrating them into atoms as it grazed them. The beam slammed into the Tree of Death's immense ten-meter-thick carapace of wood and flesh.
The arrow didn't try to penetrate the biomass by blunt force. The unstable energy "burned" through the magical defenses, and the vacuum drill, spinning at impossible speeds, annihilated matter. The beam of light bored a perfect, smooth, polished tunnel through the tree's impenetrable mass, ignoring friction, density, and sap.
It pierced through wood, flesh, bone, and bark in a straight line of annihilation, guided magnetically by the Predator's Mark to its final destination.
High atop the tree, Elowen Morningstar's eyes widened, her pupils dilating to the maximum.
The vacuum tunnel emerged in front of her, and the beam of pure light struck directly in the center of her sternum.
The sound arrived an instant later. The dry "crack" of infinite glass shattering.
The light exploded.
A shockwave of white energy and pure wind swept across Skull Rock, dispersing the toxic gas, pollen, and smoke in an instant.
The immense Tree of Death, with its summoner's core pierced, let out a deafening biological shriek. The massive branches dried up in a matter of seconds, the pale flesh rotted rapidly, and the wooden monstrosity collapsed onto the arena, crumbling into an immense pile of dry firewood and dead organic ash.
The earthquake ceased. The stands' arrays stopped flashing red.
In the center of the coliseum, amidst mountains of dry branches and dead vines, silence fell like a lead slab.
Varian Morningstar was on his knees atop the stone column. His petrified wood bow had snapped in half from the immense pressure of the final arrow. The sniper's hands were ruined, covered in friction burns and bleeding profusely. Trembling, Varian vomited a clot of black blood, expelling the rest of the parasitic pollen from his system now that the toxin's source had died. His eyes returned to their normal emerald color, devoid of eagle vision, temporarily blind from overexertion, seeing only green spots.
His body gave out. Varian slumped forward, falling onto a thick dry branch, completely unconscious from the total exhaustion of his Qi, his blood, and his mind. He had given everything.
Fifty meters away, at the base of the rotted trunk, Elowen hung from the withered roots that previously embraced her.
The hole in her chest was a perfect, cauterized cylinder, millimeters from her heart and piercing her left lung. Rank 7 spat blood, her face pale and sweaty, but the monstrous vitality of her alchemical affinity refused to let her die, keeping her vital organs beating despite the vacuum that had crossed her body. She was incapacitated, paralyzed, but miraculously alive thanks to the slight deflection caused by the monstrous thickness of her shield.
The entire arena was plunged into breathless awe.
In the VIP box, Lord Magnar Varian released the hilt of his greatsword. His shoulders dropped in a mix of exhaustion and reverence.
"The beast that created a world to hide herself... was pierced by the man who sees no walls, only mathematics." The Emperor looked at Saira, his gray eyes loaded with a dark premonition. "Never, ever, let that sniper have a direct line of sight on me or you on a battlefield. No armor would save us from that arrow."
Saira swallowed hard, her legs weak beneath the armor. "They are both down, father. They destroyed each other."
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar nodded imperceptibly. The tactical massacre had been perfect. The hunter had overcome the infestation, taking the art of long-distance killing to its absolute pinnacle in the Origin Realm.
The herald, breaking the trance of awe he shared with the five thousand disciples, raised the bone horn.
BOOOOOMMM!
"Heaven dictates victory!" bellowed the herald, his voice unleashing a deafening roar from the disciples that shook the stands. "Though the hunter has fallen under the weight of his own power, his arrow found the truth! Sequence 21, Varian Morningstar, pierces the biological nightmare and advances to the semifinal of the Final Rank Tournament!"
Hundreds of healers stormed into the arena, running over the dead firewood. One team headed toward Varian to stabilize his shattered hands and restore his empty core, while another, larger team surrounded Elowen to fill the void wound in her chest with vital suture seals.
The close of the quarterfinals had exceeded the worst expectations of destruction. The hierarchy of the Morningstar legion had bathed in blood to prove its worth. With Kael, Violeta, Cedric, Xylia, and Varian as the five surviving monsters, the semifinals promised to be not a test of skill, but a catastrophe that threatened to tear the mountain itself apart.
The empire in the shadows had shown its claws, and the outside world was not prepared for the tactical horror of the Morningstars.