The scream of the Guardian was a physical force. It was a sonic blast that shattered the stalactites on the cavern ceiling, raining jagged stone down onto the battlefield.
Briar didn't flinch.
"Finally," Briar whispered, the air around her distorting from the heat rising off her skin. "Something I don't have to hold back against."
She kicked the ground.
BOOM.
The stone floor beneath her boots pulverized into dust. She didn't run, she vanished. She became a red blur, moving faster than the sound of her own departure.
She reappeared fifty feet in the air, right in front of the Guardian's massive, vertical mouth.
"Thorn Art: CometFall!"
Briar swung her sword. The blade extended into a twenty-foot whip of condensed, white-hot plasma. She slashed downward.
The strike hit the Guardian with the force of a tactical missile. The abomination's shoulder exploded, burned instantly by the heat. Flesh, metal, and rot vaporized. The monster staggered back, crashing into the cavern wall with enough force to shake the entire root system.
"Target destabilized," Lyra announced from the ground.
Lyra wasn't running. She was floating. A complex geometric circle of blue light rotated beneath her boots, defying gravity. Her eyes glowed with mana as she processed the battlefield like a living computer.
"Calculating structural integrity," Lyra muttered, her wand moving in a blur. "Right flank is weak. Gravity Coefficient... multiplied by ten."
She pointed her wand at the Guardian's legs.
A cylinder of blue light slammed down from the ceiling. The air inside the cylinder shimmered as gravity increased tenfold. The Guardian roared as its knees buckled, the stone floor cracking under its sudden, immense weight.
"Nyx, now!" Lyra shouted, her voice amplified by wind magic. "The chest plate is exposed!"
Nyx moved.
He didn't use a technique. He didn't cast a spell. He simply exerted force.
He leaped.
The crater he left behind was ten feet wide. He launched himself like a cannonball, bypassing Briar in mid-air. The wind of his passage nearly knocked her out of the sky.
Nyx slammed into the Guardian's chest.
He didn't use his sword yet. He used his fist.
BOOM!
The impact created a shockwave that cleared the dust from the cavern. Nyx's fist, fueled by the unlocked First Shackle, punched straight through the amalgamation of corpses and metal armor.
The Guardian shrieked, a digital, glitching sound.
Nyx grabbed a rib, a massive bone fused with black piping, and pulled.
With a wet tearing sound, he ripped a chunk of the monster's torso out and threw it into the abyss below.
"Inefficient," Nyx growled, landing on a protruding root. "It has no vital organs. It's just a mass of flesh driven by the machine."
The Guardian recovered. The gravity spell shattered as the monster surged with white, alien energy. The hole in its chest knitted itself back together in seconds, the black sludge acting like living glue.
A panel on the machine behind it opened. A beam of blinding white light shot into the Guardian's back, overcharging it.
The monster grew. Metal spikes erupted from its skin. Its rotating saw-mouth spun faster, glowing with heat.
"It's drawing directly from the Siphon!" Lyra warned, dodging a spray of acidic sludge. "Its regeneration rate is exceeding my damage output calculations! We can't kill it while it's plugged in!"
"Then we unplug it," Briar yelled.
She landed beside Nyx, her sword wreathed in flames that turned the air to ozone. "Cover me! I'm going for the cables!"
Briar dashed forward, weaving through the massive tentacles the Guardian lashed out with. She moved like liquid fire, slashing, ducking, and parrying blows that would have flattened a tank.
A massive claw, the size of a carriage, came down on her.
Briar didn't dodge. She braced herself. "Thorn Art: Sun Guard!"
A dome of fire erupted around her. The claw slammed into it, and for a second, the Lunar Realm warrior held the weight of the beast. But her boots were sliding backward, carving deep furrows in the rock.
"I can't... hold it... forever!" Briar gritted out, blood leaking from her nose.
Nyx looked at the machine. It was pulsing, pumping the life of the world into the void of space.
The Second Shackle roared. It demanded retribution.
Nyx sheathed Requiem.
"Lyra," Nyx said calmly, his voice cutting through the chaos. "Shield Briar."
"I can't shield both of you!" Lyra screamed, firing bolts of kinetic force at the monster's eyes.
"Just her," Nyx said.
He turned and looked at the Guardian.
He walked toward it.
The Guardian sensed the threat. It ignored Briar. It ignored Lyra. All twelve of its eyes locked onto Nyx.
It opened its vertical mouth. A ball of white, alien energy gathered in its throat, the same energy that had destroyed the Purifiers, but magnified a hundred times. A beam capable of erasing a mountain.
"Nyx, move!" Briar screamed.
Nyx didn't move. He stopped directly in the path of the blast.
He spread his arms.
"You stole my light," Nyx whispered to the machine. "Give it back."
ZZZ-ZARKA.
The beam fired. A column of pure destruction engulfed Nyx.
The cavern turned white. Briar screamed his name. Lyra shielded her eyes, her heart stopping.
But the beam didn't pass through. It stopped.
In the center of the white inferno, a shadow stood.
Nyx wasn't burning. He was drinking.
The Void inside him expanded. It wasn't a passive drain this time. It was a whirlpool. The energy of the beam spiraled into his chest, disappearing into the singularity of his being.
His clothes burned away, leaving him bare from the waist up. His skin glowed with complex, golden tattoos, the markings of unknown, that ignited as he absorbed the power.
The Guardian screeched in confusion. Its attack was being eaten.
Nyx took a step forward. Then another. He walked up the beam of light, fighting the pressure with sheer physical dominance.
He reached the Guardian's face.
He reached out and grabbed the upper and lower jaws of the vertical mouth.
"You are loud," Nyx snarled.
He pulled.
The muscles of his back rippled, harder than dragon scales. The First Shackle broke its limits.
RIP.
With a sound like tearing steel, Nyx ripped the Guardian in half.
He split the monster down the middle, separating the left side from the right.
The beam died. The two halves of the monster flopped onto the ground, twitching and dissolving into black sludge.
Nyx stood there, panting, steam rising from his golden markings. He looked like a demon. He looked like a god.
He looked past the corpse at the machine, the Seed.
It was a sleek, white metal obelisk, humming with a hateful resonance. It was pumping the blue blood of the World Tree into the ground.
Nyx walked up to it.
He placed his hand on the smooth, alien metal.
It felt cold. It felt like the faces in his dream.
"Break," Nyx commanded.
He punched the machine.
He didn't use mana. He used the concentrated weight of the entire planet's anger.
CRUNCH.
The alien metal buckled.
Nyx hit it again. And again. With every blow, the cavern shook. He pummeled the high-tech siphon until it was nothing but sparked wires and twisted scrap.
HISSSS.
A final release of pressure hissed from the broken pipes. The blue liquid, the mana of Yggdrasil, stopped flowing downward. It pooled on the floor, then began to seep back into the roots.
The black veins in the wood stopped pulsing. They turned gray, then flaked away.
The Rot was dead.
Nyx fell to his knees. The adrenaline crashed. The massive intake of energy fought against his mortal shell.
"Nyx!"
Briar was there instantly. She didn't care about the sludge or the heat. She slid onto her knees, catching him before he hit the ground.
"I've got you," she gasped, her hands checking him for wounds. "I've got you."
Lyra landed beside them, her levitation spell fading. She scanned him with her wand.
"His vitals are spiking," Lyra said, her voice shaking. "Heart rate is 200. Body temperature is critical. He... he overdosed on mana."
"I'm fine," Nyx rasped, leaning his head against Briar's shoulder. "Just... full."
He looked at his chest.
There was a sound. A beautiful, crystal-clear sound like a bell ringing in a quiet valley.
PING.
The Second Shackle shattered fully.
It didn't just unlock. It dissolved.
A wave of green energy exploded from Nyx's body. It washed over Briar and Lyra, healing their cuts and refilling their mana reserves instantly. It washed over the cavern, turning the dead gray roots into vibrant, golden wood. Moss bloomed. Flowers erupted from the stone.
And far above them, in the city of Sylaphu, the World Tree gasped.
The leaves turned a brilliant, healthy emerald. The barrier around the city thickened, shimmering with renewed power.
Nyx closed his eyes.
He felt it. He felt the forest. Not just the plants, but the life. He felt the heartbeat of every squirrel, every elf, every blade of grass.
And he felt something else.
A memory.
He was standing in a garden of stars. A woman made of an infinite number of nebulaes was smiling at him. she handed him a seed, but inside it millions or more seeds could be seen.
"Protect the garden, my son," She whispered."It is all we have".
The memory faded.
Nyx opened his eyes. He saw Briar looking down at him, her eyes wet with tears. He saw Lyra holding his hand, relieved.
"Did we win?" Briar asked softly.
Nyx looked at the broken alien machine. He looked at the roots healing themselves.
"We won the battle," Nyx said, his voice stronger now as the Second Shackle's power integrated with his soul.
He stood up smiling, pulling Briar and Lyra with him.
"But the war..."
Nyx looked at the broken pipes that led deep into the earth. Toward the center of the continent. Toward the Heart.
"The war is down there."
He summoned Requiem. The sword flew into his hand.
"The Siphon is broken," Nyx declared. "Now, we go hunt the thing that was drinking from it."
"But how did we win, even an constellation realm elf lost fifty years ago," Lyra still couldn't believe it was that easy for them to solve the problem the elves faced for thousands of years.
"It was weakened greatly, the moment I came here I somehow gained command over nature, over the elves without much of a trouble. It was that power the Rot has been using all this time to make elves feel helpless".
He continued,
"When I regained that power the Rot was weakened greatly because I took it from the Rot forcefully." He smiled.
"No wonder, no wonder" Briar nodded her head in understanding.
"Let's get out of here.....as I said this is still not over until we kill the source of this Rot" Nyx walked out with the two of them, back to the gate, back to the people awaiting for their victory.