248 Divine Forest King
248 Divine Forest King
“Done,” Ms. Life said as she released my arm.
Warmth receded from her fingers, leaving behind a fragile sense of stability. My lungs no longer burned like they were lined with acid. The hairline fractures in my bones had sealed. The micro-tears in muscle and organ tissue were patched over.
I felt better, already.
The fix was temporary. I could tell from the way my biokinesis responded sluggishly beneath the surface. Whatever fundamental deterioration I was experiencing had merely been postponed.
I rolled my shoulder once and exhaled slowly. “I’ve just reached Intangibility-20. The rest are hovering around rated-15. Do I stand even a remote chance against the Entity at my current state?”
Ms. Life didn’t hesitate. “No. At best, you might inconvenience it. It would still be a slaughter.”
I appreciated her honesty.
“Any advice?” I asked.
“Yes. Pursue a singular rating from here and abandon the rest. They are obstructing your apotheosis. You are spreading yourself across too many vectors.”
I frowned slightly. “And if I want more detail?”
“The best person to consult would be Dr. Time.”
Of course it would be. That was the last thing she said before departing, red hair swaying as she stepped through a spatial fold and vanished. I stood alone in the SRC facility that existed slightly out of sync with ordinary time and tried not to feel irritated.
I did not like interacting with Dr. Time any more than absolutely necessary. There was something fundamentally wrong about him, something that didn’t show in the surface level but pressed against instinct. The Archives offered nothing concrete about surpassing a twenty-rating threshold. Past that point, documentation became sparse, theoretical, or redacted.
I stretched, testing the elasticity of newly repaired tissue.
A knock sounded against the reinforced glass door before Guesswork entered without waiting for permission.
“Yo, my man,” he said casually. “How are you doing?”
“Functional,” I replied. “Can you bring me one of those anti-power potions? Just in case I need them…”
He didn’t answer verbally.
Instead, he placed a briefcase on the table and flipped it open.
Inside were the vials.
I stared at him.
“Let me guess,” I said dryly. “You guessed.”
He shook his head. “Nope. Dr. Time asked me to deliver them.”
My enthusiasm deflated immediately.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
He closed the briefcase and handed it to me anyway. “Consume at your leisure.”
“I said I’d think about it.”
I took the case and phased it into my body, sliding it through my chest cavity into a pocket of folded space I had learned to maintain internally. It was a recent application of intangibility, treating myself like a storage dimension.
“Your eyes,” I said, staring at the unfamiliar blue pupils. “Got them healed or something?”
He grinned.
They were no longer clouded. They were sharp, focused, and unnervingly aware.
“Yeah, I got them recently,” he replied. “Power transplant. Boosts my precognition. Before, I could only guess outcomes. Now I can approximate the distance between present and predicted future. It’s more actionable.”
“That sounds dangerous,” I said.
“For everyone else,” he answered cheerfully. “Hey, this is random, but I’ve got a favor.”
That caught my attention.
“What is it?”
“Take care of my family.”
I blinked.
Guesswork was not the type to speak sentimentally. He did not have a wife or children in any conventional registry. The only consistent link was financial support to an orphanage that operated under multiple shell identities.
“You expect something to happen?” I asked.
He shrugged in a way that was deliberately ambiguous.
“Just a precaution.”
I opened my mouth to press further, but he cut me off with theatrical flair.
“Reports from home,” he said, clapping his hands once. “How would you like them presented? Song? Poem? Interpretative dance?”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
“Preferably with visual aids,” I said.
“Boring,” Guesswork replied, though he was already sliding a tablet into my hands.
“There was a debate between the GDF and the NSD,” he continued. “Faction leaders themselves. It turned into a riot in all but name. The NSD might have bitten off more than they could chew.”
I leaned back against the reinforced wall of the SRC facility and began scrolling.
Video snippets loaded first. Griffin at a podium, posture straight, eyes bright with conviction. Opposite her stood the Führer, massive frame contained in a tailored uniform, presence swallowing the stage even through a screen. The crowd had been divided, tension palpable even through compressed footage.
Commentary threads scrolled endlessly beneath the clips. Analysts dissected rhetoric. Civilians argued in caps lock. Conspiracy theorists drew lines between unrelated events. My name surfaced more than once.
I imagined that was why I had been getting looks in the corridors. This entire escalation violated standing SRC directives. My world was supposed to remain peripheral, a low-priority theater. The upper echelons had chosen to indulge me for now, but the rank and file did not hide their disapproval well.
They were grunts to a system that operated on cold calculus. Their superiors had decided my world was off-limits for strategic reasons tied to me. That protection was conditional.
If I died, the leash would snap.
That alone was reason enough not to.
Guesswork’s tone shifted subtly.
“There was another explosion,” he said. “Similar signature to Mirch University. Markend scrapyard this time. Sewer systems compromised. Adjacent port heavily damaged. Nicole sent you a brief.”
I opened Nicole’s report.
The Company had moved against the faction responsible for attacking them, theorized accomplices of Paleman. Chad had taken the assignment, posing as me. The operation had uncovered something unexpected. Tree entities. Alien. Hostile. Not aligned with Paleman’s group.
Silver and Onyx had engaged a specimen that surfaced during the incursion. Nicole had deemed it strategically disadvantageous to allow the broader world to learn of their existence prematurely, especially with the NSD suddenly proposing an inter-civilizational alliance.
That proposal alone was unprecedented. The Archives were clear on one point: multiverse-class civilizations rarely allied in any meaningful way. Their identities were too deeply rooted in incompatible environments, ideologies, and evolutionary pressures.
And yet the NSD had appealed for cooperation.
The real shock came further down.
Chad had reported a portal in the scrapyard basement. The tree creatures were not emerging randomly. They were invading through a constructed gateway.
Paleman’s accomplices had been fighting them.
Hostile factions colliding in my city.
Had letting Huston go in Lockworld been a mistake? That tree monster definitely have a connection to this. At the time, I had calculated the risk of direct confrontation as too costly. Every faction like Lockworld’s represented resources, leverage, and potential future utility. Burning bridges blindly was inefficient. If Huston became a direct threat to my world, however, I would not hesitate to put him down. I would uproot him completely and cast what remained into the sun if necessary.
I continued reading.
In order to prevent what Nicole assessed as a catastrophic escalation, Chad had destroyed the portal. He had followed her instructions and forced a self-destruction cascade.
The tone of the report was clinical.
The implication was not.
I stared at the final lines longer than necessary.
Chad.
The former young master. The arrogant bully. He had chosen to detonate a portal to prevent an invasion.
I exhaled slowly.
“I did not think he had that in him,” I admitted quietly.
Guesswork watched me.
“What are the chances he’s still alive?” I asked.
He grimaced, and for once there was no humor in it. “Less than one percent,” he said. “Strangely enough, if I stop using my new eyes and rely on my old method, it comes out closer to fifty percent.”
I looked up sharply.
“That discrepancy is not comforting,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
“What are the chances Huston is involved in this?” I asked.
Guesswork blinked. “Who?”
“He called himself the Divine Forest King in Lockworld. One of the four faction leaders. Eventually exiled as part of a deal I brokered. He owes me. I can’t have him stomping around my world unchecked.”
Recognition flickered across Guesswork’s face.
“Oh,” he said slowly. “That Huston.”
He took the tablet from my hands and began scrolling, eyes moving far too quickly for ordinary reading. The new implants glowed faintly when he focused.
He hummed to himself.
“That’s not a comforting sound,” I said.
“It’s highly likely,” he replied at last, angling the tablet back toward me. “Same biokinetic signature patterns. Same preference for invasive arboreal constructs. I’m telling you, this isn’t limited to the NSD theater. This might be more urgent than we thought.”
I felt my jaw tighten.
“There are reasons he was put in Lockworld,” Guesswork continued. “Probably the same reasons the other faction leaders were incarcerated there. Candyland’s boss being the only exception. That woman was just unhinged in a more conventional way.”
“How bad?” I asked. “Huston, I mean…”
He winced.
“Probably another multiverse-class civilization,” he said. “One with an obsession for converting biomass into compliant arboreal forms. Yes, it’s bad.”
I exhaled slowly.
He glanced at me sideways. “You let him go, right?”
“I negotiated his exile,” I corrected.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Guesswork said. “If I had to extrapolate, you might have prevented something worse. Imagine Huston subjugating every cape in Lockworld. The other prisoners barely managed a stalemate against that damned tree entity. Mr. Known probably played a part too, nudging that Gameboy into sealing the thing’s soul without realizing he was being guided.”
He scrolled further, nodding to himself.
“These eyes are convenient,” he added. “I can deduce all of that just from cross-referencing public archives and residual energy signatures.”
The idea unsettled me.
“What do you mean by subjugate?” I asked.
Guesswork leaned back against the console.
“Huston was one of the most powerful biokinetics the SRC ever documented,” he said. “He could mold biomass freely. Not just shape it, but integrate and repurpose it. If a power had a biological component, he could theoretically graft it, replicate it, or simulate it by restructuring tissue. Lockworld was the worst possible environment for someone like him. A prison world packed with capes and unique genetic anomalies. Frankly, I still don’t understand how that project was approved.”
“Ms. Life’s faction pushed it through,” I said. “I saw it in the Archives.”
“Which explains a lot and nothing at the same time,” he replied.
Silence lingered between us for a moment.
“So,” Guesswork asked, “what’s your move?”
I thought it through carefully.
Huston with access to open ecosystems and potential multiversal resources was exponentially more dangerous than Huston in a contained prison environment. If he was expanding beyond isolated incursions, hesitation would only compound the threat.
“I’m going to pay him a visit,” I said.
Guesswork’s expression tightened slightly, but he did not argue.
“Preparation first,” I added.
“Define preparation.”
“Nukes,” I said. “I need a lot of them. Portable if possible. Something I can carry myself. If they come in fist-sized packages, even better.”
Guesswork stared at me.
“Do you think nuclear warheads are plush toys?” he asked dryly. “Or perhaps pocket grenades you can order in bulk?”
“If you have a better suggestion, I’m listening.”
He sighed theatrically. “Forget standard nukes. Too bulky, too messy, too many political ramifications. I’ll arrange gravity bombs.”
I tilted my head slightly. “Are they sufficient for the job?”
He gave me a thin smile.
“Oh,” he said, “you have no idea.”
Just like that, I was portalled into what used to be NSD territory.
I stood on the edge of a skyscraper, coat fluttering in wind that smelled of sap and rot. Before deploying, I had filled my internal pocket dimension with gravity bombs until the folded space inside me felt dense and heavy despite having no true mass.
From my perch, the city was unrecognizable.
Vegetation had swallowed everything.
Skyscrapers were strangled by colossal vines. Roads had split apart, replaced by thick root systems pulsing faintly with bioluminescent veins. Entire blocks had been reshaped into grotesque gardens of warped bark and organic spires.
According to Guesswork, Huston was here.
Finding him in this sprawl manually would have been inefficient.
So I chose the direct method.
I stepped off the skyscraper and let myself hover, intangibility extended not just to matter but to the conceptual hold of gravity itself. The air could not claim me. The earth could not demand my return.
I reached into my internal storage and withdrew a gravity bomb.
It resembled a smooth white orb, no larger than a grapefruit, marred by thin dark crevices that pulsed faintly. I pressed a thumb into one of the grooves and felt the internal mechanism awaken.
Then I dropped it.
The orb fell silently.
It struck the vegetation-choked avenue below with a dull impact.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then a black sphere bloomed outward, devouring light and matter alike. The air screamed as it was violently displaced. Buildings, roots, soil, and entire sections of infrastructure were dragged inward and compressed beyond recognition before vanishing.
The implosion howled like a living thing.
“It makes nukes look like a child’s toy,” I muttered to myself.
I accelerated, streaking across the sky. One by one, I pulled more orbs from my pocket dimension and cast them down in measured intervals.
I had underestimated them.
Entire districts disappeared.
The secondary shockwaves alone pulverized structures that the singularities did not directly consume. Concrete turned to dust. Root networks snapped like brittle bones. After each detonation, only a vast crater remained, edges warped and glassed.
They were like controlled black holes, brief and surgical, yet catastrophically thorough.
Through telepathy sharpened by empathy, I projected my voice across the region.
“Huston. It’s me. Eclipse. Show yourself.”
No answer came.
I decided to experiment.
I phased two gravity bombs partially out of conventional dimensional alignment before triggering them and tossing them downward.
I expected malfunction.
Instead, the distortion seemed to agitate their cores.
The resulting singularities were monstrous.
The blast radius expanded nearly tenfold, shearing away an entire swath of vegetation in a single violent gulp. The displaced air alone flattened remaining structures kilometers away.
Interesting.
All manner of arboreal xenoforms surged toward me in response. Some flew on leaf-like wings. Others launched barbed seeds that detonated midair. A few projected spores that shimmered with parasitic intent.
They came in shapes both humanoid and utterly alien, each radiating different bio-energetic signatures.
It did not matter.
I passed through their attacks effortlessly. I flattened into two dimensions to slip through grasping branches. I severed limbs with dimensional edges. I crushed cores by phasing my hand through bark and solidifying only long enough to rupture vital nodes.
Between motions, I continued releasing gravity bombs, my movements almost casual.
If I sustained this pace for a week, I might strip this world to bedrock.
Then the ground convulsed.
At first, I did not register it. I was airborne, untouched by tremors. But collapsing towers and splitting earth told the story clearly enough.
The surface cracked open in a widening fissure that spanned miles.
From within, a colossal wooden arm emerged, forcing itself upward with titanic strength. Soil and shattered infrastructure cascaded from it like dust from a waking god.
An ancient face rose next.
Bark layered over features that had once been human. Eyes like burning emerald cores locked onto me. He was vastly larger than when I last saw him before exile. His full height pierced the cloud layer, his crown brushing the lower atmosphere.
The Divine Forest King stood revealed.
“What do you want, Eclipse?”