Before he even set foot in the Weeping Woods, Lin Ke spent a full day in the cool, sterile sanctuary of his lab, doing his homework. He dove deep into the Guild's restricted database, his Gene Editor assisting as he absorbed every scrap of data on the C-Rank zone. It was nothing like the Blackstone Wilderness. This was a dense, ancient forest, a place the Jamaican sun struggled to pierce, creating a claustrophobic, humid gloom. The official reports were sparse—never a good sign—and spoke of unnaturally accelerated plant growth and insects exhibiting a creepy, hive-mind-like aggression. Great, he thought with a dry, humorless smirk. Just what I wanted to hear.
The next morning, armed with knowledge, he set out. Beyond the Guild's ominous warning beacon, the forest immediately lived up to its name. The trees were colossal, ancient things, their gnarled branches weighed down with thick, hanging moss that constantly dripped a slow, steady stream of black, viscous sap. The drip… drip… drip was a maddening, constant sound, as if the entire forest were perpetually crying. The warm island air was trapped beneath the dense canopy, becoming thick, heavy, and difficult to breathe, smelling of rot and damp earth. But the silence… the silence was the worst part. There was no birdsong, no calls of lizards or monkeys. Just a faint, unsettling, high-pitched buzz of unseen insects.
"Stay close," Lin Ke said, his voice a low whisper that seemed to be swallowed by the oppressive quiet. The Terran Titan Vole walked beside him, its heavy, solid footsteps a small, reassuring comfort in the listening gloom.
The corruption was everywhere, a visible sickness upon the land. Sickly purple veins pulsed in the bark of trees. Thorny, unnatural vines, thick as a man's arm, strangled the undergrowth.
They weren't even a hundred meters in when the welcome wagon arrived. It wasn't a single monster; it was the forest itself attacking. The thorny vines erupted from the ground like angry green snakes, whipping through the air, trying to ensnare the Titan Vole's legs.
At the exact same instant, a high-pitched chittering exploded from the canopy above, and dozens of insects, each the size of a man's fist with a single, glowing purple eye, rained down from the leaves. Corrupted Thorn-Crawlers. They immediately opened fire, launching a volley of sharp, needle-like thorns from their abdomens with a series of sharp thwip-thwip-thwip sounds.
A coordinated attack, Lin Ke analyzed instantly, his mind a calm island in the chaos. His Editor confirmed his tactical assessment: Ground-based immobilization coupled with ranged suppression. Synergistic threat. Brute force wasn't the answer here. A single, massive Earth Spike would be a waste of energy against so many fast-moving, scattered targets. This was a new kind of puzzle.
"Ignore the bugs! Use your weight! Trample the damn vines!" Lin Ke commanded, his voice a sharp bark.
The Titan Vole let out a defiant, rumbling roar. It lowered its obsidian-plated head and charged, not dodging, but plowing forward like a living bulldozer. Its immense weight and crystalline armor tore the lashing vines from their roots with a sound of rending wood and snapping thorns.
"Good! Now, disrupt their terrain! Earth Spike, rolling barrage!"
This time, the Titan wasn't aiming for the creatures. It slammed its paw into the ground, and then again, and again, creating a moving wave of churning earth and rock spikes that tore through the forest floor. The ground became a chaotic, unstable mess. The fast-moving Thorn-Crawlers, suddenly finding the earth literally collapsing and erupting beneath them, stumbled and were thrown into disarray. Their speed, their greatest asset, was rendered useless.
"Excellent," Lin Ke praised. "Now, clean them up."
With the crawlers now clumped together, struggling for purchase on the broken earth, the Titan Vole unleashed one final, focused Earth Spike into the center of their ranks, wiping out the remaining threats in a single, brutal exclamation point of stone and chitin. The sudden silence that followed was as shocking as the attack itself.
After quickly purifying the minimal amount of essence from the defeated creatures, Lin Ke assessed his partner. Its armor was peppered with new scratches from the thorn barrage, and the two-stage tactic had drained a noticeable chunk of its energy. This place wore you down.
He pushed deeper. That little ambush… that was just an appetizer. His real mission objective lay ahead. The Gene Editor's scanner showed a massive, singular concentration of Abyssal Corruption, a blazing red sun on his mental map, emanating from the heart of the forest. That was the alpha-level threat Director Thorne was paying him to neutralize. But the coordinated attack raised a chilling new question. What was commanding them? He and his titan, having adapted to the creepy new rules of this place, moved forward cautiously, a single, unified, problem-solving machine, ready to find and cut out the rotten, and perhaps intelligent, heart of the Weeping Woods.