Immediately following the battle with the three-headed beast, Cookie had teleported back to the compound. Hannah, the loyal friend that she was, had rushed over to try and help. Every time Cookie had shown up like this before, she had fallen unconscious. This time was different. Cookie was in excellent shape and looked as strong as she had ever been.
“What happened?” Hannah asked.
“I think I just found a way to keep them occupied until Yggdrasil is done growing.”
Hannah started to get excited. She had spent so much time trying to work on the plan to occupy everyone while the tree grew its roots. “Really?” she asked.
Cookie's expression changed to one of satisfaction. Hannah couldn’t understand why Cookie wasn’t more concerned. This is what she had been worried about for months, but now she seemed fine with it. “Yeah, unfortunately, my dad’s bloodline just started full activation. The stupid monster we just fought had the two missing mana types, and as soon as my dad got close enough, it kick-started his evolution. But I kind of sabotaged it. As soon as I felt it, I pushed extra origin mana into one of my dad’s new cores without him noticing. It’s gonna cause him some issues and make it take longer to fully activate, so this may end up working out in our favor.”
“He didn’t notice?” Hannah said in total shock. “I thought he was a lot stronger than you.”
“He was distracted, and I snuck it in as soon as I felt it start. If he did notice, he was too slow to stop it. Either way, it worked, so it doesn’t matter if he felt it or not.”
Hannah was starting to get excited. This new update could mean that they can relax a little instead of constantly worrying about someone finding out about their plan and trying to stop them. “What about everyone else?” she asked.
Cookie seemed to visibly relax finally. She walked over and sat down in her chair. “With the system not completed, the creation process is taking up most of their resources. So we should be safe for a while. As far as Mia, my brothers, and all the people they gave mana to, I didn’t kill the monster, so they’ll be fighting it for a long time. It creates these little mini-monsters that are a pain in the butt for anyone who doesn’t have my void mana. I guess they’re not mini, but compared to the big one, they are. My dad’s dog is in a weird flux state. I think it’s evolving, so it’s not doing anything right now. No one else has any void mana, so we may be clear until my dad gets back.”
As Hannah sat down next to Cookie, she started to get a grin on her face. “Sooo, does this mean you can give me mana channels now?”
Cookie looked at Hannah and squinted her eyes. She always tried not to pry into Hannah’s mind when possible, but sometimes her thoughts were so loud she couldn’t keep them out. “Please please please please,” she heard over and over in her head. “Hold still,” she told her.
Hannah’s eyes lit up. Her excitement was plastered across her face. She actually stood up and started jumping in place. Hannah stopped after a few seconds, looked at Cookie, and sat back down. “Sorry,” she said.
Cookie closed her eyes and channeled her mana. She scanned Hannah’s body. She could see that Hannah had been around her and quite a few different mana sources long enough to already have the start of pathways leading to a core space. She had tried to block her body from creating pathways so they could remain untraceable, but it looks like they had started anyway. Luckily, they didn’t complete before the most recent events, or she would have been traceable and possibly found.
As Cookie focused her power, she pushed origin mana through the current pathways, expanding them throughout Hannah’s body. This made the channels create themselves in a direct line behind where Cookie was working. She did this for about the next 12 hours. She was not allowing Hannah’s body to create her own pathways; she was forcing a particular design. This would allow her to impart certain skills that only some people would be capable of. She wanted Hannah to be able to have a form of her bloodline. The mental skills the bloodline imparted were extremely rare in the multiverse, and allowing Hannah to have these skills would help propel her to the top tier of power much quicker than the average person.
Once completed and finally connected, Cookie pushed a final massive stream of origin mana directly into Hannah’s core space. She kept pushing and pushing until a full Dyson sphere was created and started spinning. A gigantic blast of white mana energy shot out of Cookie’s core and into Hannah. Cookie quickly blocked it from expanding out so it didn’t alert anyone of what they were doing and made sure Hannah absorbed all of it into her core. Hannah dropped to the ground and fell unconscious. Cookie grabbed her and teleported her into the same chamber she was in to absorb mana as she recovered. She then touched Hannah in the center of her forehead, granting her three skills. The first was telepathy, the second was teleportation, and the final skill was the mental force push needed to open the chamber once she awoke. By recovering in this chamber, it will push her abilities to a much higher tier than they would be otherwise. How high would be determined by how much mana Hannah’s body absorbed during recovery.
….
During the next year, Cookie did everything she could to help Yggdrasil grow. She found every source of mana she could and brought it to Yggdrasil’s base. Once Yggdrasil reached over 75% completion, she finally felt like she could relax. This is when two things happened. Hannah finally woke up. As soon as she was recovered and awake, she teleported up to the office. Cookie couldn’t stop smiling. She had been working alone for so long that she couldn’t help herself. She ran up and gave Hannah a huge hug.
As they stood there talking about everything that had gone on over the past year, they both stopped. The beast that Cookie had crippled so long ago was finally surfacing. They could both sense it surfacing in Japan. They could also sense that both Mia and Peaches were trying to stop it.
“Why does everything happen right when one of us finishes healing?” Cookie exclaimed. “I’m getting tired of this. Luckily, my dad still has a long way to go. I can sense that he still hasn’t finished all of his cores, so it will still be a while before he’s back.”
“What happens if they beat it? It’s too late to stop the tree, right?” Hannah asked.
“Not if Peaches or Mia find it and decide to destroy it. They are both powerful enough to do it. I can probably hold Mia off for a little while, but Peaches would destroy me.”
“So what do we do?” Hannah asked.
“We just have to wait and see what happens,” Cookie replied.
As the fight went on, they watched Mia start to get the upper hand. This was when she tried attacking the final head producing mana.
“I don’t think she knows it’s the eyes. If she destroys the eyes, the monster would die,” Cookie told Hannah.
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All of a sudden, Cookie's face went white. Hannah had a scared reaction as she was focusing on Mia. They had just watched as some of the smaller beasts negated Mia’s power, and she was obliterated in a single hit. They both looked at each other with horrified expressions. Then they suddenly felt a gigantic explosion of raw power. Peaches had just exploded with rage. She was instantly in front of the beast and started eating it, absorbing all forms of mana within a 1,000-mile radius. The little beasts were gone in an instant. Yggdrasil’s root system that was attempting to grow near Japan was instantly killed and absorbed. The large beast then dissolved into nothing. Both Cookie and Hannah could feel the power being condensed inside of Peaches right before she passed out and fell to the ground. The next thing they knew, she was gone.
“Crap,” Cookie said. “My dad is gonna lose his shit when he finds out she’s gone. Especially if he ever finds out we just watched it happen. I have to complete the tree now. If he comes back and Peaches tells him that she absorbed the roots and he finds the tree before it’s done, he could ruin everything.”
Hannah looked at Cookie with concern in her eyes. “What does that mean?”
“I’m sorry, Hannah, but I have to meld with the tree to complete it. I’ll be gone until the shield fails and all the mana from the core is released.”
Hannah started to get angry. “This isn't fair. Every time one of us comes back, we get split apart again. When do we get to relax?”
Cookie looked at Hannah. “Spend the rest of the time until the mana is released building your skills. Master your abilities so we have a fighting chance after the mana is released. We still have to prepare for the invasion. My dad will have to handle the great kings that are coming, but he can’t do everything. We have to be powerful enough to help; we have to have the tree, not just for the shield, but to bolster everyone’s growth.”
Hannah was getting more and more irritated by the second. “Can you wait? Can’t we just relax for a little bit?”
“After what Peaches just absorbed, Yggdrasil will start to rot. I have to go now.” Cookie reached over and grasped Hannah in a hug. “I’ll be back; get as strong as you can.” Cookie teleported away as Hannah stood there. As she started screaming, the entire building shook. She didn’t realize she had that much power already. For over a minute, the building shook as Hannah screamed in a furious rage. Once she started to calm down, she dropped to her knees and began to weep.
….
At the base of Yggdrasil, Cookie appeared next to some druids who were running around trying to figure out what had happened. She smiled and mentally told them it would be alright. As they visibly calmed down, Cookie began to inspect the base. She noticed minute cracks and small spots in the mana channels where they were starting to rot.
She walked up to the tree and placed her hand on the trunk. As she mentally connected to the tree, she pushed some of her mana into the base. She added some divine mana with origin and then activated one of her bloodline traits that allowed her to create connections between sentient beings. The tree was still in the physical growth process. This was a perfect time to meld with the tree to not only bolster its growth but to connect and help teach the tree of its true purpose.
As Cookie started to flicker in and out of the physical realm, the wood nymphs could feel a connection forming. They rushed over to make sure Cookie wasn’t attempting to harm the tree. As more and more appeared, Cookie reached out and calmed their minds. She was about to attempt something that would either allow Yggdrasil to push its growth to unprecedented speeds or it would absorb Cookie and slowly take over her consciousness.
Cookie was the one to originally create the seed that ultimately became the world tree base. She felt that she knew exactly how to help and not lose herself in the process. The biggest concern was the nature of Yggdrasil’s growth. In order to fully activate its powers, Yggdrasil needed to absorb around 500 million mana-linked life forms. This was the real reason she had hidden the tree from her father. He would never allow that many people’s lives to be ended just to shield the Earth. He would have fought to find another way.
If Cookie failed at melding exactly right, her life force would be absorbed and she would be one of the casualties. She had debated on sacrificing herself when the requirements became known to her but she ultimately decided not to. Whether it was out of selfishness or because of a lack of empathy for people she didn’t know, it didn’t matter to her. She could save hundreds of millions of people if she would just sacrifice herself because her power level was so high, but she didn’t care. She either had to live through everything or she wouldn’t even put any effort in. The tree would save billions in the long run as long as the sacrifice was made upfront. But how do you kill yourself to save others? She wasn’t a hero. She had taken lives. Never of anyone innocent, but she had killed on multiple occasions.
All of this was in the front of her mind as she forced herself and the tree to merge. She phased out of their dimension and teleported to the exact center of the tree where the core would be once enough mana was obtained. As she sat and meditated, she pushed every bit of her mana she could spare into root expansion, causing the vibration of the earth to slightly change. As she pushed, she could sense that the roots were traveling at over 1,000 miles per hour, connecting to every bit of flora they came into contact with. Not long after she began, the root system finished its expansion. It was now encompassing the entire earth under the surface.
Cookie didn’t stop. She kept pushing more and more mana to strengthen the entire system. She didn’t want to take a chance of anything being able to damage it, so she was creating an extremely thin mana barrier around the entire network. Just before she completed it, she could tell she was going to run out of mana.
This wasn’t a simple process. The entire root system stretched hundreds of thousands of miles. It was like an interlocking mesh network under every part of the earth's crust. She pushed one last command into the system to finish the barrier as the mana became available and then help her recharge and awaken. She then passed out just as she finished cocooning herself in the center of the tree.
….
Months and months went by without any signs of change. Hannah had been monitoring the tree and forcing every operative to do nothing but collect mana. With her newfound abilities, Hannah had developed a way to transport mana in plasma form and deliver it to the trunk of the tree.
The first attempt not only killed two wood nymphs but also morphed some of the bugs, and she ended up having to kill an entire ant colony. This particular ant was known as the Tocandira. It was a carnivorous species, and as soon as a small drop of plasma mana fell into their home, they all started morphing into larger, more aggressive versions of themselves. They began attacking birds, reptiles, and any mammals they could find. Hannah had been working on her mental force power and was able to quickly dispatch the entire colony. After a few mistakes, she learned that once you separate a head from a thorax, ants don’t last very long.
In order to process the plasma mana, Hannah had created a sort of shielded hole directly beneath the base of one of the larger branch offshoots. She then created a minute mana channel and willed the plasma to slowly travel towards Yggdrasil. As it got closer and closer, it was naturally converted into liquid mana by Yggdrasil and absorbed.
She had been paying attention to how much more was needed, and after about eight months, the root system had full shielding. All of the mana was now regenerating Cookie as it was absorbed. As soon as she noticed the shift, Hannah became very irrational. She demanded that every operative work faster and gather all sources immediately. This caused a few unfortunate accidents, and within the first few weeks, four people had died, and two were mutated beyond recognition. She ultimately had to kill them as well to avoid any exposure.
This was the point when she felt a gigantic wave of power shoot across the entire earth. She closed her eyes and focused on the source. When she was unable to see anything besides a nonstop slew of the three-headed beasts flying towards a singular point, she knew Cookie's dad was back, and he was not happy. Hannah hurried and teleported back to the safe house. It was the only point on earth that Cookie said was shielded from him.
Before the root system was completed, Cookie had forced a portion of the roots to grow up into the main office of the compound in a platform-type shape. She used this to meditate, allowing her to help the tree grow in the beginning. The main purpose was to allow her to remain in physical contact with Yggdrasil but still be shielded should a situation exactly like this occur. As Hannah sat meditating on the platform, she felt an enormous amount of power. Cookie’s dad was in physical contact with the tree. Hannah had never felt anything like this. Cookie’s capabilities felt like a droplet compared to the unending ocean he controlled. She almost jumped up to get away so he couldn’t sense her, but there ultimately wasn’t a need. All he did was leave a message for Cookie and then was gone.