Chapter 211: Chapter 211

The urgency in Lake’s voice was unmistakable. Even he couldn’t face ’that’.

Like threads unraveling at the seams, the intertwined vines slowly untwisted from top to bottom, each root peeling away like the petals of a grotesque, blooming flower.

Gwen was still disoriented from the impact, but Lake’s sharp command snapped her back to focus.

"Ugh." She grunted, forcing herself off the ground.

Lake rose beside her just as the coiled vines finally moved—their sheer force triggering a disaster.

The shockwave uprooted trees and shattered rocks, hurling debris into the air. Lake and Gwen were flung backward, the wind pressure alone nearly crushing them.

Lake reacted instantly, seizing Gwen’s arm and using the momentum to propel them away from the roots. His expression darkened as his senses dissected the monstrosity before them.

Its body plunged deep into the ravine, its true scale impossible to gauge—only a fraction of its mass breached the surface, yet it dwarfed the forest around it.

"We have to regroup with the others!" Gwen shouted, scanning the chaos for her team.

Lake had already spotted them.

His pupils constricted.

At a glance, they seemed unharmed—Hana, Landur, and Jayce had retreated with a handful of hunters, only minor injuries among them.

’You’ve got to be kidding me...’

But what his enhanced senses revealed was anything but safety.

Gritting his teeth, he conjured a midair platform and lunged forward, cutting through the sky toward them.

Gwen, clutched against him, paled as she finally saw it too.

Her voice trembled, thick with dread.

Lake didn’t answer. He only pushed faster, watching as the trap closed around them.

"Phew, I think we’re safe..."

"What the hell is up with that root?"

"I don’t know, but we’ve got to get out of here."

A few hunters were discussing amongst themselves as they recovered their stamina. The massive root’s upheaval had displaced them from their original teams, but none planned to stick around and wait for reinforcements.

Hana, Landur and Jayce stood slightly apart from the others, watching the commotion with worried expressions. They whispered urgently among themselves.

"Are Lake and Gwen okay?" Hana asked as she slid down from Jayce’s back, wincing slightly from her lingering injuries.

"I didn’t see what happened to them after that first swing," Jayce admitted with a sigh, simultaneously checking himself for serious wounds while keeping one eye on their surroundings.

"They’re together, so they should be fine. It’s us we should be worrying about." Landur was the last to speak, and as his words faded, another violent tremor shook the ground beneath them.

They screamed in unison as they instinctively braced themselves. The earth split apart with a thunderous crack, a jagged crevice large enough to swallow a grown man whole opening up right beside them.

The hunters on the opposite side of the fissure wasted no time. They turned and sprinted desperately toward the relative safety of the treeline.

The sound of something slicing through the air at incredible speed was immediately followed by a series of soft, wet impacts. The fleeing hunters’ heads tumbled to the ground, their headless bodies taking several more stumbling steps before collapsing.

Hana and her companions turned deathly pale as they watched the horrific scene unfold. Their horror only deepened as twisted creatures began emerging from the treeline and crawling up from the newly-formed crevice.

"This is insane..." Landur murmured, his voice dry and cracking with tension.

The nightmarish creatures walked upright on two legs, their bodies composed of writhing vines and gnarled branches. Where eyes should have been, two grotesque flowers bloomed, their petals opening and closing rhythmically like blinking eyelids. It was a sight they’d encountered before - one that had chilled their blood then and did so now.

"Ents..." Jayce swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously as he watched the group of corrupted ents quickly surrounding their position.

Hana was equally pale, but she clenched her jaw and forcefully suppressed her rising panic. "We have to break through their encirclement."

"How?" Landur asked sharply, his grip tightening on his sword. "We’re completely surrounded on all sides, and I don’t fancy our chances of fighting through them alone."

"That..." Hana’s voice trembled slightly before she gritted her teeth and drew her bow with practiced ease, nocking an arrow in one smooth motion.

"Damn it! Jayce, be ready to bulldoze through them. Landur, prepare to strike when I give the signal."

Before Landur could finish his question, Hana had already loosed two arrows in rapid succession.

Both projectiles found their mark, burying themselves deep in the flowering eyes of a nearby corrupted ent. The creature reeled back, its petals spasming as it was temporarily blinded.

"Shit, a little warning would be nice!" Landur complained even as his body was already moving, charging toward the disoriented ent the moment Hana’s arrows struck home.

He dashed forward with explosive speed, only for razor-sharp thorny spikes to erupt from the ground in his path, seeking to impale him. Reacting instantly, Landur stomped down hard, using the impact to propel himself forward in a blur of motion that carried him past the deadly spikes before they could fully emerge.

His blade cut through the air with lethal precision, aimed straight for the ent’s core.

Landur barely managed to twist his body mid-air as his sword was deflected by the supposedly blinded ent. He landed in a crouch several feet back, his eyes widening in realization. "It’s still connected to the other ents! They’re sharing vision!"

His warning came just as more spikes shot up from the ground to block his retreat, forming an impassable thicket of deadly thorns.

The earth shook violently as Jayce slammed his feet down with all his might, his tremendous strength causing the ground to ripple and buckle. The newly-formed spikes shattered under the force, but the resulting shockwave destabilized the already precarious ground.

"Shit, Jayce! Did you forget where we are?!" Landur shouted in alarm as the earth beneath him began crumbling away into the dark ravine below.

With movements as light as a feather, Landur leaped from one crumbling foothold to another, his balance perfect despite the treacherous terrain. He barely managed to reach solid ground, landing directly in front of Jayce with a fierce glare.

"...Ahem. Sorry about that," Jayce apologized awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Would you two stop messing around?! We’re still getting surrounded!" Hana shouted as she fired another volley of arrows at the approaching ents. While her shots found their marks, temporarily slowing the creatures’ advance, their numbers were overwhelming, and her quiver was nearly empty.

Landur and Jayce quickly moved to form a protective circle around Hana, their backs to her as they watched the deadly encirclement tighten around them.

"...Is this the end?" Jayce asked quietly, his usual bravado gone.

"What are you talking about? Of course it’s the end," Landur replied matter-of-factly, his sword held ready.

"Would the two of you just shut up already?! I still want to live, you know!?" Hana snapped, her voice cracking slightly despite her fierce words.

Landur rolled his eyes at her outburst. It wasn’t that he or Jayce particularly wanted to die, but faced with these impossible odds, they couldn’t see any way out of their predicament.

"At the very least, we can put up a fight, right?" Jayce said, lowering into a defensive stance. "Maybe if we hold out long enough, someone will come to help us?"

Landur sighed but adjusted his grip on his sword, deliberately moving closer to Hana’s side. All three braced themselves for what would likely be their final stand.

Then, just as they were steeling themselves for the fight of their lives, something inexplicable happened.

"...Did they stop moving?" Landur murmured, noticing the ents had suddenly frozen in place.

As the words left his mouth, his gaze was drawn upward where two familiar figures were descending from the sky like angels sent down to save them.

Lake landed with a light thud, the wind cushioning his descent. His Phantom Assassination technique—the name he’d given to his wide-range instant kill ability—drained an incredible amount of mana, leaving him unable to sustain flight for both himself and Gwen.

Gwen, who had been clinging to him, immediately detached upon landing and rushed toward the others. After a quick visual inspection confirmed no major injuries among them, she exhaled in relief.

"It’s good you’re all okay."

"I hate to interrupt this reunion, but we need to move. Now." Lake’s warning cut through the moment as his senses remained fixed on the distant epicenter of chaos.

’...The world looks like it was painted in death.’

The earth had been torn asunder. Hundreds, if not thousands, of vines and roots surged from the ground in a desperate attempt to restrain a single figure.

Restrain—that was the only word for it.

Even amid the writhing tangle of thorns and vines, even beneath the assault of massive roots that towered into the sky, the forest could do nothing more than temporarily impede him. A palpable aura of death radiated outward, causing any living thing within its reach to wither and perish.

’He’s definitely above Grandmaster. At least Lord-level.’

Lake’s frown deepened as he assessed the man’s power. The vines regenerated at an astonishing rate, barely keeping pace with the death aura’s corrosive decay. Meanwhile, hundreds of ents and other forest creatures continued emerging from fissures in the earth, slaughtering the remaining scattered hunters.

’They came prepared...’

As Lake scanned the battlefield, he noticed something peculiar.

’...They’re collecting the corpses?’

For every fallen hunter, roots slithered forth to drag the bodies into crevasses. Tracing their movement with his enhanced senses, Lake watched as the corpses were drained of blood—just like the buried pile he’d discovered earlier.

A sudden surge of energy erupted from the central conflict. The death aura expanded violently, now matching the towering roots in scale and covering over half a kilometer. Its potency had increased too; the vines could no longer regenerate fast enough, crumbling to ash almost instantly.

As the decaying forest receded, Lake finally glimpsed the figure at the heart of the devastation—a man with silver hair flowing unnaturally in the still air, standing amidst a monochrome wasteland.

Liam’s cold gaze was fixed on three figures perched atop a distant hill.

A blink monk, a jester, and an one eyed old man.

"...Hmm. I didn’t expect such prominent guests." The old man’s voice carried across the distance.

"See! I told you, old man! I wasn’t imagining things when I said they had a big shot among them!" The jester’s shrill voice rang out.

"Quiet, Harlequin." The old man’s rebuke silenced her instantly. His single eye remained locked on Liam, who stared back impassively. "Born from countless slaughters, nurtured as a ruthless killer... To think I’d encounter the infamous Assassin Lord here." Despite Liam’s murderous glare, the old man sounded amused. "Though judging by this Death Field, perhaps we should upgrade your title to ’King.’"

Liam didn’t respond. He simply raised his hand, and the death aura coalesced into a solid blade.

"Huhuhu... Eager to kill us, are you?" The old man chuckled as his companions smirked. "But I’m afraid today isn’t your day."

Lake frowned at the old man’s ominous words, but before anyone could react, another earthquake shook the rift—this one hundreds of times more intense than the others.

The very fabric of space began tearing as jagged wounds appeared in the sky itself, slowly unraveling reality at its seams.

"The rift’s collapsing!"

Panic spread like wildfire as hunters scrambled in all directions while the world around them literally fell apart. The ground fractured into floating islands as the laws of physics seemed to dissolve.

A deafening explosion erupted from the mountainside, sending massive chunks of stone raining across the landscape. From the gaping wound in the mountain’s face, an enormous stem began emerging—rising higher and higher until it dwarfed even the giant roots they’d faced earlier by hundreds of meters.

Every eye turned upward simultaneously, shock written across every face.

With his advanced vision, Lake could see details the others couldn’t perceive. The massive flower bud at the stem’s apex remained tightly closed at first, but then, with deliberate slowness, the petals began unfolding one by one. Layer after layer peeled back to reveal what lay nestled within—the naked form of a woman curled in repose.

For a long moment, Lake could only stare in stunned silence. Her impossibly long green hair cascaded down like a waterfall, the ends brushing against her heels. Her eyes gleamed like crystallized emeralds that somehow reflected the entire world while simultaneously hiding unfathomable depths within their facets. Delicate pointed ears twitched slightly as she stretched with a lazy yawn—that simple, casual motion sending fresh shockwaves of destabilization through the already crumbling rift.

While chaos and panic reigned around him, Lake remained transfixed. Something about her appearance struck him with an odd sense of familiarity—a connection so improbable his mind refused to accept it.

Then her eyes snapped directly to his despite the huge distance.

Her lips curved into a knowing smile as they formed silent words he couldn’t hear but somehow understood in his bones. An icy shiver crawled up his spine as he recognized the look in her eyes.

It was as if something she had been searching for had finally appeared before her. It was the look of a predator who had found her prey.