12.
The guardian’s chamber was hewed of rough stone. Stairs led him further down, through the floor of the temple and into a natural cave. Luminescent moss gave off a blue light, gentle in contrast to the harsh blaze of the road flare he had left at the top of the steps. This stairway had been burned in his memory. The quiet descent, the party still reeling from Harry’s death as they walked down to face the rift guardian. Death was a constant, but when they had entered the rift they had been the eight strongest fighters on campus.
It hadn’t been enough.
Santi hoped that the rift guardian would be weakened like all of the kobolds had. Who knew how long they had been drifting between worlds. The rift heart gradually degrades as the guardian weakens with it. When they had launched their attack, the rift had been feasting on earth’s potential for months. It had been one of the reasons the campus had been such a deadzone. They hadn’t known that then, simply content to stay away from it while they safely leveled.
The stairs grew damp, condensation dripping from the ceiling far above him and splattering on the stone. He stepped carefully, his leg weak. The heavy maul was a burden on him by now, the weight straining his arms. Some of the other rifts he had explored had been massive, with the guardians possibly days of travel away from the entrance. This one was weak, he would have been able to clear it in minutes if he had his power. Now, it was starting to look like it would be his crypt. He hoped Tank got to survive and find his notebook.
The bottom of the stairwell came abruptly, opening to a wide natural passage in the stone. Plodding toward his fate, Santi cracked his neck, feeling the bandages on his shoulders twisting. The moss clung to nearly every inch of space, the light hardly enough to see by. If he had brought his flare though, the moss would have retreated and he would have been reliant on just the flare during the fight. Which wasn’t the greatest idea.
The guardian’s cave was just as gorgeous as he remembered. A wide sphere of space, a single black tree growing in the center of it. The floors were covered in vivid red poppies, purple in the light of the moss. A pulsing mass of amber sat in the far back of the cavern, no larger than a softball. That was the core of the rift, the heart of it. That stone would absorb all the potential and mana of an area, growing larger and larger until it either evolved or shattered under its own weight. Or it was taken and used. A rift stone was a powerful alchemical ingredient. One that Santi was going to take or die trying.
He limped down into the glade of flowers, eyes fastened to the black tree in the center. Its branches were skeletal and thin, the trunk wizened. White sap trickled out of a series of deep gouges near the base. Santi looked at the wounds, wondering if perhaps some desperate kobolds had come and tested their luck against the guardian. They had obviously failed, their bodies used to fertilize the cavern and its denizen.
The whole reason he had brought the maul instead of a bat or something similar. Something lighter that wouldn’t have caused his arms to burn as he lugged it for hours. Nothing was better for a tree than a good axe.The ent resting in the center of the cavern was the guardian. When they had come down here and used Analyze, it had called it a Rift-Born Ent. Santi didn’t care what it was actually called. It was a tree with a bad attitude and horror inducing eating habits. He could play lumberjack today.
“All right, let’s get this over with. I’m going to chop you into kindling, take the rift core and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop me!” Santi hollered at the tree. For a moment the cavern was silent. The weight of the moment grew, the silence building as Santi waited. Finally, the cavern groaned as the tree began to move, its limbs swaying as it rose.
Roots broke the floor, dislodging the red flowers in a wave of dirt and bones. Thousands of bones shards, for that’s what the cavern floor was made of. It’s what the ent lived on and the flowers grew out of. The tree grew, eight feet, nine, ten, and then it finished standing at nearly eleven feet tall. The thin trunk groaned in protest of the weight, bark cracking as it moved forward. It was in terrible shape and Santi thanked every god he knew that it was.
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The middle of the tree broke open, revealing a crimson orb with a cat-like pupil in the center. The twisting branches made it look like it had six arms, three on each side, while the roots twisted together into five thick but squat legs. More white sap came pouring out as the trunk was put under stress, but the rift guardian started to lumber forward.
Each step shook the earth as the twisted parody of life closed the distance. It was surprisingly fast for how slow each step was. The long strides eating away the distance between the two of them. Hefting his splitting maul, Santi surged forward. Every step shifted bone beneath his feet, threatening to trip him. The ent stopped, twisting as three arms came at him. Santi poured on the speed, leaping and rolling on his shoulder. He could feel the bandages rip off, but couldn’t bother to care as he scambled to his feet.
One of its five legs were solidly planted in front of him, a target he couldn’t say no to. He hauled back and struck, twisting his hips to put as much power as he could into it. The maul split the wood like it was glass, shards of it flying around as the ent groaned and backpedaled. Santi didn’t give it space, staying close to it and kept hacking at the long leg. The dozens of twisting roots wrapped up and formed the leg, meeting at the trunk in a twisted knob. Santi kept attacking the thick nodule where leg met the trunk. Each strike digging deeper and deeper as rotten wood peeled away.
Instinct warned him. He aborted his latest attack, falling to the ground and rolling as fast as he could. The passage of dozens of skeletal branches stirred his hair as the wide sweep of the ents arms missed him by bare inches. The cold steel of the axe pressed against his thin shirt as Santi tried to stop himself from rolling over the sharp edge.
He got to his feet, standing in the center of the cave now, having switched spots with the ent. It turned slowly and Santi didn’t let the opportunity go. He couldn’t afford to take even a single blow from the tall tree. Those long branches were sharp and would rip him to pieces with ease. He had to keep close to its legs and he found the one he had been working on. The dark wood was covered in sticky sap that bubbled from the wounds he had inflicted.
His next blow sent a splash of the sap out, a puddle of it having formed in the depression he had been cutting. He landed two more shallow blows, hacking away at the nodule where the roots connected. Santi leaped forward this time as the ent slashed the ground, spraying bone chips around as it tore gouges in the earth. It had learned its lesson about Santi rolling on the ground quickly.
This close to it, he could smell the tree. It was cloying, the scent of rot and mildew. The ent was sick, barely alive, and was on its last legs. The rift had fed it so it had been strong and powerful when he had first encountered it, but it had arrived so weak. Santi finished off the leg with two more blows. The limb of roots fell away and the ent staggered as its four other legs tried to keep up. Santi nearly died as one of the legs landed inches from him. The legs weren’t tall enough to crush him like an ant, but it would shatter him if he got stepped on.
As the ent was staggering, he lashed out at the next leg in the line. Splinters flew as he began to chew his way through that knot of wood. A violent smile had emerged on Santi’s dirty face. Hope was blossoming finally. The rift guardian was weak and he had a viable strategy to kill it. He just had to avoid the six arms and four remaining legs. The sticky sap that had sprayed all over him had numbed his skin wherever it landed and that was a concern seeing as his hands were drenched in the sap.
Santi cut through the next leg, once again staggering the ent as it fell back. Behind him, the rift heart pulsed slowly, flashes of amber light washing through the cave. Santi watched in horror as the ent started to shrink, limbs cracking and molding together as it condensed from eleven feet tall to seven. The sap stopped spilling out of its wounds. The roots of its legs split apart, unraveling like a million worms, only to combine together to make four thinner and more nimble legs. The six thick branch arms became four, while the lowest two branches were absorbed into the trunk, thickening it.
“What the fuck!?” Santi yelled in disbelief. The ent was still towering, but now it wasn’t a lumbering monster that had little chance of hitting him. Santi looked back at the rift heart and was shocked to see it had shrunk, from a softball to a baseball in size. Its amber glow was nearly extinguished.
The ent started to lope toward him, its four legs moving it quickly. Santi brought his axe up in a guard position as his newly acquired hope fled. The ent had absorbed most of its mass to reinforce itself and speed itself up, fueled by the rift stone. His fight had degraded from hopeful to lethal.