"Ah, it hurts," Cael groaned, still in pain after his arms had been released from the clutches of the vines.
His joints throbbed, unfamiliar with this kind of pressure — not even in the slums had he felt this before.
His bones felt like they would shatter if they had been subjected to one more second of that strain.
Cael was in pain — but so was the tree. It could move, which meant it must have a central nervous system. At least, that's what Cael concluded.
Cutting the vines had disoriented the tree, which in turn caused the vines clutching his feet to loosen, even if just for a second.
That gave Cael enough time to free himself.
First, he used his teeth to remove the now-dead vines around his arm. Juices began to leak when he bit into them. They tasted strangely sweet, but also made his brain tingle.
Next, he freed his feet.
Using the tree's trunk as support, he stood up. He felt the weakness in his legs.
They had been stripped of all blood, just like his arms, turning his already deathly pale skin even paler.
Cael leaned forward, trying to run, but his legs wouldn't budge an inch.
Panic set in. Sweat formed on his dirt-smeared forehead.
His hands were shaking from the fear of being killed without any way to resist. His heartbeat quickened, and his breath grew shaky and shallow.
He could already feel the tremors in the ground — a sign the tree was beginning to recover.
Cael wasn't unfamiliar with powerlessness, with being unable to fight back. But this time, his underhanded tricks wouldn't work.
He wasn't prepared for this. He felt helpless. He could even feel death breathing down his neck.
All he wanted to do was lie down, be embraced by the soft ground — free of all desires, without any worries, before perishing.
Oh, how nice that would be, he sighed to himself with a smile.
Why couldn't he rest just this once? Didn't he deserve it? After all the things he had gone through, couldn't he finally take a sigh of relief?
Something in his consciousness whispered for him to give up.
But then, something snapped inside him. He finally figured it out — what had been bothering him ever since he had been transported here.
Cael clenched his hand into a fist. A frown appeared on his beaten face.
"No!" he yelled.
'I won't give up, not in a million years,' he decided at that moment.
Cael, a broken boy who had tried to survive just one more day in the brutal, unforgiving slums, had finally gained the chance to be free — to become one of the most powerful people the world had ever seen.
He wasn't about to give away that opportunity. Not to anyone. If they wanted it that badly, they would have to pry it from the grasp of his dead body.
Now, with a second goal, a flame began to ignite in his closed eyes. He began to think more clearly, trying to come up with a reliable way of escaping.
That's when things started to fall into place.
The tree, having recovered from the loss of one of its limbs, began to shake — summoning even more branches to catch the prey that stood beneath it. They were slow compared to monsters of the same rank, but wouldn't have any trouble getting hold of a paralysed victim.
Cael, still having his eyes closed — knowing damn well that if he opened them, he would be screwed — could still hear the branches moving and the leaves shuffling.
As the soft ground beneath him shook, he felt an attack coming. Instinctively, he pushed himself off the tree, rolling on the ground to minimise the impact.
Just then, he felt the attack graze the back of his tattered clothes, missing him by a hair's breadth.
But the attacks didn't stop there. More attacks continued to come from different directions.
Cael kept dodging by either rolling away or by briefly standing up so he could jump aside, slowly trying to get further away from the tree.
He didn't know how he was predicting all the attacks, but it could be described as if he was inside the tree's brain, knowing what it was going to do before it actually decided to do it.
He took a deep breath, calming himself down. He couldn't get arrogant — even the tiniest mistake would cost him his life.
For every second that passed, Cael could feel more strength returning to his legs, but the fatigue was also starting to accumulate, evening things out.
He knew that things couldn't continue like this forever, as he would be the first to give out since he was just a regular human.
That's exactly why he was trying to distance himself from the beast. All for this moment.
At that moment, he opened his eyes. The bright light temporarily blinded him. But he managed.
Making use of the fact that he wasn't facing the beast, he located and then began running toward the tree with spikes sprouting from its base.
Even while escaping, Cael was still being assaulted by the beast from behind. He kept skillfully dodging without looking back.
'Almost there,' he told himself, pushing his body past its limit — and then some more.
He looked up, still feeling like an ant compared to the tree standing in front of him.
Just then, tremors could be felt as the gigantic tree began to move. Its hanging vines shot forward, faster than any of the previous attacks he had had to dodge.
But this time, Cael could actually see the attack coming, which gave him an advantage compared to having only a vague feeling of being attacked.
He removed himself from the attack's trajectory by jumping to the side. As he lay there on the ground, he felt a similar sensation behind him.
The tree behind him launched an attack instinctively, not giving Cael the chance to process what had just happened.
Cael didn't want to die. He refused to die. But he couldn't do anything, he had no choice but to lay there and be impaled.
The attack was mere meters away from killing Cael, but then something happened. Something Cael had hoped to achieve by running toward the dark-purple tree from the very beginning.
The branch was cut off by the gigantic tree.
It wasn't just defending Cael, it was marking its territory, as if to say that this was its meal.