Chapter 149: The Root of Things (2) - Markets and Multiverses

The first thing we needed to deal with was locating the tree root. If we didn’t keep track of it, it might pop out of space and assassinate one of us at the worst possible moment.

I spent a few moments trying to locate the tree root using my spatial sense, and after a moment, managed to locate a distortion in space creeping up behind me. If it weren’t for the fact that the spatial distortion was so big, I would have missed it.

Clearly, the weak spatial sense my second rune gave me wasn’t very good, since I was having a hard time detecting even the blatant manipulation of the tree root. I swapped to using my soul-sight, and got a much clearer view of the giant tree root soul tunneling through a hidden layer of space as if it were a fish in water. I grimaced, and then fired a pulse of anti-spatial manipulation directly towards the tree root to knock it out of the twisted space it had hidden itself within.

I saw the soul of the giant tree root get jostled for a moment, before a massive tree root seemed to get jostled in midair. A fraction of a second later, a tree root appeared, floating in midair. Instead of being stunned, it oriented itself towards me again, and tried to rip through my spine.

I dodged, not trusting my dress to protect me.

As I dodged to the side, twenty-four wooden butterflies tried to blast into Sallia’s locked-down space again. One more wooden butterfly than there had been a moment ago.

Sallia’s locked-down space bent and warped even further, like a tin can being crushed by the pressure of the ocean. Sallia fought to keep control of it, and I fired another pulse of anti-spatial magic at the wooden butterflies to remove some of their attacks, and the tree root tunneled into midair again.

A fraction of a second later, I saw another wooden butterfly peel out of midair and join its siblings, just as my anti-space pulse evaporated the spatial distortion attacks of the butterflies.

I felt the urge to curse.

I suddenly realized that Sallia and I had never managed to stress-test our spatial manipulation blocking abilities. I had simply assumed that they would hold up perfectly when we fought for real.

It was evident that this was not the case. As my ability punched through the spatial blasts of the wooden butterflies, it got weaker and weaker, until whiffing away as it tore through the ninth rippling patch of spatially-broken air.

My stronger pulses of anti-spatial manipulation could shut down nine butterfly attacks, but it only had so much essence before it would fizzle out. And we had way more than nine enemies to deal with.

Worse, the butterflies were still being continuously born. I hadn’t realized it before, since I could see several butterfly souls before we entered the building, but it was almost like the tree root was simply creating more butterflies out of nothing. Every couple seconds, a new butterfly tore itself free from the tree root. I could tell that some kind of essence was being used to fuel the whole process, but I doubted we could outlast the tree root.

This was much, much more dangerous than we had expected it to be. We needed to end this battle as fast as we could, all while hoping the main body of the tree root didn’t notice pay attention to us.

Anise started firing arrows at the wooden butterflies, and on her third shot, managed to hit one of them. The wooden butterfly shuddered for a moment, and the arrow ripped open a hole in its wing before it fell to the ground. However, she was missing most of her shots because the little creatures were both small and agile.

Felix sent a spray of metal shrapnel into the creatures, dropping another three of them.

21 butterflies left.

Sallia and I took one look at the fight, and decided that the butterflies had to go. If we had to fight them and keep track of the dimension-crawling tree root, we would get overwhelmed. We had to get rid of more of them before Sallia’s spatial-lockdown collapsed. If it fell apart, the tree root would definitely take advantage of our moment of weakness and kill one of us.

Sallia tossed a few spells at herself using manifestation essence, and suddenly, her speed became far, far higher than before. She burned absorption essence to boost her speed even further, and then sped forward at a speed I could barely track with my eyes.

Sallia seemed to reappear in the middle of the wooden butterflies, and three of them collapsed out of midiar after she cut them apart. Immediately, Sallia grabbed ahold of their corpses with her rune ability and turned them into a storm of wooden shrapnel that was tossed directly at the remaining butterflies. Felix immediately threw in a few larger spikes of metal to help down the creatures, and the butterflies started to fall.

I suddenly lost sight of the tree root, and realized that it had figured out how to hide itself from my soul sight. I felt a prickling sense of danger to my left, and fired another blast of anti-spatial manipulation at it out of pure instinct.

My combat instincts saved me from getting beheaded as the tree root was once again knocked out of its sub-dimension.

As I prepared to throw an extinguish at it, the blood-red mana on the underside of the tree root glowed like a furnace. I felt something inside of my body twist.

I gasped in pain as I saw something red and white erupt from my skin, and for a horrifying moment, I thought my bones and blood were ripping their way out of my body, just like when we had been killed by the living galaxy of our previous life.

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I immediately slammed a huge renewal burst into my body with every drop of alteration essence I could muster at once, trying to heal my body and stop it from collapsing.

If I died, the rest of the group would be helpless against the sneak attacks of the roots. I couldn’t die here.

As I was preoccupied keeping myself alive, I saw one of the metal swords on a nearby shop shelf to ripple and shatter apart. Felix was doing something while Sallia finished off the butterflies.

The tree root didn’t sit around and wait for us, though. Its body flashed with more and more essence as it tried to rip my body apart from inside, and it tore towards me.

With my body already on the verge of collapse, I couldn’t dodge out of the way, and none of my abilities could block it.

So I teleported several meters to the left. The tree root immediately disappeared back into its strange sub-dimension trick, just as Sallia finished killing the last of the wooden butterflies and rejoined us. Mercifully, I felt the horrendous, wrenching pain in my body start to subside as the tree root flickered out of reality again. Clearly, the tree root couldn’t keep up whatever attack it had been using on me and hide in its sub-dimension at the same time. Which was probably the only reason I was still alive.

But I had lost track of the creature again.

I looked at Sallia, hoping that she had finished up dealing with the wooden butterflies, and was relieved to see that there were only four left. Sallia was now stuck dodging spatial distortions though, because her spatial lockdown had collapsed under the pressure of the wooden butterflies .

As I watched, a fifth butterfly popped into existence, which Anise managed to take down with an arrow moments later.

“Miria, can you flood the area with a pulse of anti-spatial essence?” asked Sallia, as she cut down the last four butterflies with a thin wire of rune-controlled wood.

I gasped in pain, as I tried to force my body to recover, but I nodded. “I don’t have enough essence to do it more than twice, since I can’t pinpoint a target. Make it count.”

Sallia nodded.

I fired a blast of anti-spatial manipulation at the entire room. The tree root popped out of the air right behind Sallia, whose eyes immediately widened. She threw herself to the side as Felix launched a giant spike of metal at the creature, which ripped into the side of it like a giant metal nail.

The tree root did not like that. As Sallia tried to cut into it and Anise missed it with an arrow, the tree root suddenly glowed.

I felt as if space all around us suddenly flattened and thinned out and realized with horror that Sallia’s spatial lockdown was still recovering.

I flung myself to the ground, hoping to dodge whatever came next, but it wasn’t enough.

I felt pain tear its way through my legs as I suddenly found myself flying through the air.

Time seemed to slow down for a moment, as I looked beneath me.

There, I saw my legs and part of my dress laying on the ground. The tree root had cut through my thighs and my dress as if they were made of paper mache.

As I flew through the air, the tree root suddenly turned red again. I felt as if a mountain had fallen on me. Things inside of my body started to try to rip their way outside of my body, aggravating my already severe wounds.

I slammed into the ground and grunted in pain. Glowing light started to pour out of my wounds, and I hurriedly clamped down on the bleeding stumps of my leg with a bit of healing.

Then, I threw an extinguish at the tree root with almost half of my alteration essence, which caused the creature to seize up for a moment. Sallia took advantage of that to form a much larger sword, made entirely out of bones and wood, and hacked directly into the giant tree root with it. The tree root tried to fly away, but refused to pop back into its sub-dimension. It seemed determined to kill me before hunting down the others. Sallia’s attack hit it and managed to cut a huge portion of the way into the tree root, before it got stuck. Felix took both of his blades and rammed them into the side of the tree root, perfectly ripping into Sallia’s cut, and Anise continued to pepper the tree root with arrows.

My extinguish had weakened it, but nowhere near enough to kill it yet.

The tree root writhed in pain, almost like a giant wooden worm, and shed a small fountain of golden sap.

I had a terrible premonition that the golden sap was not good, and immediately tried shape the golden sap into random bits of water before they hit the ground.

I got almost two thirds of the drops of golden liquid before the rest made contact with the store floor.

The golden ichor that had touched the ground started to warp and transform, turning into giant viney tendrils that drilled their way through the floor of the former Market store. I could see spines and thorns, and a strange sweet smell started to pervade the air around us. At the same time, I saw a horribly twisted soul spring into existence inside of each of the giant thorny tendrils. They looked almost like miniature versions of the tree root we were fighting.

“Don’t breathe anymore!” I yelled, before holding my breath. Whatever the sweet smell was, it was bad news.

A few more wooden butterflies puffed into existence in the air near the wooden branch, and Sallia’s locked-down space shattered again as they pelted it with a few more spatial distortions.

Anise shot down the butterflies, but the tree root wasn’t done with us. After shedding golden ichor, it seemed to have recovered a little bit. It oriented itself towards me again, and shot a beam of brown energy directly towards my head.

I tried to teleport out of the way, but felt my teleportation spell get stuck as the tree root somehow messed with my rune ability. I shoved myself out of the way with my arms, grunting in pain as it disturbed my leg stumps. The brown beam hit the floor behind me, which started to transform into wood the moment it was hit.

I fired another heavy extinguish at the creature, leaving only a tenth of my keyword-enhanced alteration essence pool behind to keep myself alive. The creature writhed in pain for a moment, and Sallia took advantage of the opening to bring down another bone and wood wire sword onto the creature in the exact same spot as before, finally cutting the damned root in half. The root finally dropped to the ground, dead.

I got another System notification, but couldn’t look at it, because we still weren’t done yet.

The spiny plans created by the golden ichor of the creature warped their way around Anise and Felix, and then started rotating. The giant thorns and spines ripped into their bodies like chainsaws, causing them to scream in pain before Sallia flickered again.

I felt a ridiculous amount of absorption essence disappear from Sallia’s body, and for a brief moment, I had the strangest sensation that somebody had turned the gravity off in our area.

The corpse of the tree root suddenly distorted and flickered, before it turned into a third giant wire-sword, and then quickly cut apart the roots of the giant vines that were killing Felix and Anise.

I used most of my remaining essence to drop two more exinguishes on the vines, killing them before they finished ripping apart Felix and Anise. Then, I collapsed onto the ground, my stump-legs continuing to bleed light as I saw Felix and Anise drop to the floor, gasping and bleeding light from the massive puncture wounds and rips in their face and torso.

That was the last thing I saw before I passed out.