The deeper they marched into the Eternal Forest, the less it looked like a forest and the more it looked like a graveyard of reality.
The trees here were not made of wood; they were petrified pillars of black carbon. The ground wasn't soil, it was a grey, ash like dust that swallowed sound. The gravity was oppressive, weighing down on their souls like wet wool.
"Sector 7," High Tinker Gorn grunted, tapping the glass of his pressure gauge. The glass cracked. "Atmospheric density is critical. My steam-pistons are working at 200% capacity just to lift my feet. How are the meat-shields holding up?"
Kaelith looked back. The ten Royal Guards, the elite warriors of the Aethelgard Empire, were stumbling. Their faces were grey, blood trickling from their noses.
"They are reaching their limit," Kaelith said, her voice tight. She activated the [Aether-Resonance] rune on her armor, projecting a blue bubble of filtered air around the squad. "Volkan, slow down. We need to conserve stamina."
"Dragons do not slow down," Volkan growled from the front.
In his human form, he looked like a walking furnace. His skin was glowing with a dangerous cherry-red hue. The sheer cold of the forest was trying to extinguish his Internal Furnace, and his body was fighting back by running hotter. Steam hissed off his shoulders.
"The silence," Elara whispered, gripping her staff. "It's ending."
CRACK.
It sounded like a whip breaking the sound barrier.
From the twisted shadows of the petrified trees, they emerged.
They were not beasts. They were Void Walkers.
Mutated by the Progenitor's ambient aura, these local wolves had evolved into something horrific. Their bodies were composed of shifting, unstable smoke. They had no eyes, only rows of jagged, white teeth floating in the darkness of their faces.
"Hostiles!" Kaelith screamed. "Defensive Ring!"
"Finally!" Volkan grinned, baring his teeth. "Something to burn!"
Volkan lunged. He moved with the speed of a Stage 5 powerhouse, breaking the sound barrier instantly. His fist, wreathed in Aether, punched straight through the lead Void Walker.
SWISH.
Volkan stumbled.
His fist had passed harmlessly through the monster's chest.
The Void Walker didn't even flinch. It solidified instantly behind him, its smoky claws hardening into obsidian blades.
SLASH.
"Urgh!" Volkan grunted, spinning around. Three deep gashes appeared on his back, tearing through his expensive crimson coat and scoring the golden scales beneath.
"Physical immunity?" Volkan roared, his eyes widening in disbelief. "I am a Dragon King! My scales are harder than diamond!"
"They phase!" Kaelith analyzed instantly, her eyes glowing blue as she entered [Tactical Overdrive], an ability that lets her analyse all kinds of things to molecular level. "They shift their molecular density to match the attack! Elara, hold them! Gorn, suppressive fire!"
"On it!" Gorn slammed a lever on his chest.
CLICK-CLACK.
Two mechanical arms unfolded from his backpack, wielding twin gatling guns fueled by Aether Energy.
"Eat this, you smoky bastards!"
BRRRRRRT!
A wall of glowing tracer rounds tore into the pack. The bullets were enchanted with explosive runes. Explosions rocked the forest, shredding the trees and turning the ground into a crater.
The Void Walkers screeched, their forms disrupting. They couldn't phase through the rapid-fire explosions fast enough.
"Now, Elara!" Kaelith commanded.
Elara slammed her staff into the ash. "Resonance Art: Root Bind!"
She forced her will into the dead earth. Massive, thorny roots erupted from the ground, glowing with green life force. They wrapped around the disoriented monsters, pinning them down.
"Kaelith, strike the cores!" Elara yelled, sweat pouring down her face. "I can't hold them! Their aura... it's eating my energy!"
Kaelith dashed forward. She didn't run, she glided, her armor boosting her speed. She channeled all her Core Fusion energy into the tip of her rapier.
[Royal Art: Piercing Star]
She thrust. A beam of condensed blue light shot from her sword, piercing the chest of the restrained Void Walker.
SCREEE!
The monster dissolved into ash.
"One down!" Gorn shouted. "Forty more incoming!"
The shadows lengthened. More Void Walkers poured from the trees. And bigger ones. Alpha Stalkers, twice the size of the others, moving with intelligent coordination.
"They are swarming us!" Kaelith gritted her teeth, parrying a claw strike that nearly took her head off. The impact shook her bones. "These are just Stage 3 equivalents? Why are they hitting like Stage 4s?"
"Because they are evolved!" Volkan shouted, smashing a monster aside with a backhand. "This forest... it forces survival of the fittest to the extreme!"
One of the Royal Guards screamed.
A Void Walker had phased up through the ground, grabbing the soldier by the ankle. It dragged him down into the earth.
"Save him!" Elara cried, trying to redirect a root.
"Too late!" Gorn yelled, tossing a [Gravity-Grenade]. The grenade imploded, crushing three monsters into a singularity, but the guard was gone.
The situation was spiraling. The team was strong, but the environment was hostile. Every spell Elara cast cost her double the energy. Every step Kaelith took felt like running in mud.
And Volkan... Volkan was bleeding.
A massive Alpha Stalker bit down on Volkan's arm. The dragon scales held, but the pressure was immense.
"Get... OFF!" Volkan punched the beast, but another one jumped on his back. Then another. They were piling on him, trying to smother his heat.
"My King!" General Krogan, one of the dragon guards shouted, trying to reach him.
Volkan felt the cold seeping into his bones. The humiliation. He was the Scourge of the South. He was the Lord of Magma. And he was being mauled by dogs.
"ENOUGH!"
Volkan's human eyes vanished, replaced entirely by pools of molten gold.
"FALL BACK!" Volkan's voice changed. It wasn't human anymore. It was a resonance that vibrated the marrow of everyone present.
Kaelith grabbed Elara and Gorn. "Retreat! He's undoing the polymorph!"
They scrambled behind a massive fallen log.
In the center of the swarm, Volkan stopped fighting. He simply let go.
BOOOM!
A pillar of fire erupted from Volkan's body, piercing the grey canopy and shooting into the sky. The heat was instantaneous. The ash on the ground turned into glass.
The Void Walkers shrieking as they were incinerated by the mere proximity.
From the fire, a shape expanded. Wings unfurled, blotting out the sky. A tail as thick as a tower smashed the surrounding trees into splinters.
When the fire cleared, a Red Dragon, fifty meters long, stood in the clearing.
His scales were not just red, they were flowing magma, hardened into armor plates. His horns were a crown of obsidian.
King Volkan: True Form.
The Alpha Stalker looked up. For the first time, the monster knew fear.
Volkan looked down at the "little" wolves.
"YOU DARE TOUCH THE SCALES OF A KING?"
Volkan didn't use a technique. He simply inhaled.
The air around his maw distorted. The oxygen in the clearing was sucked into his chest, feeding the nuclear reactor of his heart.
Dragon Breath: Calamity Stream, An ability unique to Stage 4 Dragons, strengthened more when he broke through to Stage 5.
He opened his mouth.
A beam of concentrated plasma, white hot and blinding, erased the world in front of him.
It wasn't just fire, it was a eraser. The Void Walkers didn't burn, they ceased to exist. The trees, the ground, the very air was atomized.
He swept his head from left to right.
A fan of destruction carved a scar into the forest, five hundred meters long and fifty meters wide.
Silence returned.
The steam hissed as the molten ground began to cool.
Volkan morphed back. It wasn't instant, his massive form shrank rapidly, condensing back into the human shape. He landed on one knee, panting heavily. His clothes were gone, leaving him in his scaled armored trousers.
"Clear," Volkan wheezed, wiping blood from his lip. "Threat... neutralized."
Kaelith stood up from behind the log, her armor smoking from the residual heat. She looked at the devastation.
"You killed them," Kaelith said, her voice trembling. "But Volkan... look."
Volkan looked up.
At the edges of the scorched trench he had created, the grey fog was already returning. And from the fog, the silhouette of more beasts began to form.
They weren't dead. There were just more of them.
"More?" Gorn spat, reloading his gatling guns. "We can't kill our way to the center. We'll run out of ammo before they run out of bodies."
Elara walked over to a dead Void Walker's ashes. She touched the ground.
"They are guarding something," Elara whispered. "They aren't hunting us. They are stalling us. Something deeper in the forest is commanding them to keep us away."
"The source," Kaelith said grimly.
Volkan stood up, his pride battered but his resolve hardened. "Then we stop playing games. We move fast. No more skirmishes. If something gets in our way, we obliterate it and keep moving."
They healed their wounds, popped stamina pills, and marched forward into the smoke.
They thought the Void Walkers were the worst of it. They thought surviving that ambush proved they were ready.
They had no idea that a few miles ahead, a pig named Bacon was currently sniffing out truffles for his master.