Chapter 131: The Guardian Treants
Evan and Jessica exchanged a glance, both her and Emma's eyes flickering with visible worry. Just then, Xiaoshuang let out a sharp cry. Evan didn't wait to assess the situation — he threw himself through the portal at once, the others close behind. Two treants stood at the passage entrance, branches lashing out as they chased Xiaoshuang, who darted and wove through the air just ahead of their reach.
Evan raised a hand at the sight, a thin whistle cutting through the air as he channeled mental power into his bracer, sending a Wind Blade out to sever the branches pursuing her. What he hadn't expected was the sound it made on impact — a ring of metal on metal, steel against steel.
The blade wasn't wasted, though. The branch faltered just enough, and Xiaoshuang broke free, landing on Evan's shoulder, breathless, shaking a tiny fist. "Get them! Get them!"
Emma and Jessica moved to attack. The students were still chanting, but Jessica finished first — her incantation strikingly short. Evan caught it at once: not the standard chant, but a compressed version of it, a variant casting method she'd developed, several syllables fused into a single pulse of sound. It was an advanced technique, one that took long practice to master. The moment her chant ended, a ripple passed through the air, and her Legend Beast appeared, a beam of silver light shooting from its mouth. Branches and leaves scattered everywhere — the wood was tough, but plenty of it still came apart under the strike.
Evan's Legend Beast was his own invention, though not spun entirely from nothing — he'd drawn loosely on old imagery from his past life, its true origin a mythical flying sword. Evan had taken it further, giving the blade a mouth, nose, and eyes, spitting beams of sword-light from its jaws. This world had no concept of an immortal's sword, but Evan had described its function so precisely, in such thorough detail, that Jessica had initially believed such a creature genuinely existed — enough that she'd visualized it properly and given it form through the ordinary summoning method.
Once manifested, the Legend Beast inevitably carried the sword-force trait of cutting through anything, however sturdy — which was exactly why the treants, tough as they were, still lost so many of their limbs.
At the same time, Emma's chain of fireballs slammed home, each detonation following the last in a display of real force. Both treants went up in flame almost at once, their branches charring to blackened stumps. While the two women pressed the attack, the students finished their own spells, and a burst of colored light streaked in from every side, each with its own effect.
The treants proved genuinely stubborn. Even after what looked like a killing blow, once the smoke and flame cleared, the group found them stripped bare of every branch and leaf — but still alive.
Evan moved in then. Black smoke rose around him, carrying with it a faint chorus of ghostly wailing, gathering upward until both trees stood suddenly rigid, unmoving. In that same instant, a surge of vitality slammed into him from within, startling him badly. He moved to expel it at once — he'd overlooked, in the moment, that anything belonging to a treant tied to the goddess of life would carry her divine power with it, a force fundamentally opposed to the cold current running through him. Before he could act, the chill circulating quietly through his organs — a sensation so constant he'd stopped noticing it at all — suddenly transformed, cold turning to heat all at once. For the first time, his whole body felt as though he'd been lowered into warm water, a strange, indescribable comfort spreading through him.
The warmth spread through his entire frame and pushed outward past his own skin. Xiaoshuang felt a rush of heat pour into her as well, without disturbing the death-aura within her in the slightest — strange, given how contradictory the two should have been. In that instant, Evan felt, for just a moment, almost human again.
It faded as quickly as it had come. Evan noted the strangeness of the sensation again — it seemed to do him some good, though he had no idea how to investigate it further. What he didn't know was that in that same instant, the cells within his body — long since withered and dead — had somehow been touched with new vitality under that surge, a kind of life fundamentally unlike ordinary vitality, buried deep within cold ash, unnoticed even by Evan himself.
On his shoulder, Xiaoshuang pumped her small fists in the air, shouting with excitement, nothing like her usual self — full of a sudden violent glee, her small face flushed red. "Get them, get them!"
Then, abruptly, she went quiet. A surge of vital, balanced energy poured into her — unlike ordinary life force, this one carried stillness and death folded together within life, and life folded within death. Xiaoshuang froze mid-motion, fist raised and stuck there — only for an instant, but in that instant, faint black sigils flickered across her skin before vanishing again. She looked at Evan with open curiosity, muttering to herself. What's wrong with this lich, being so generous all of a sudden? Oh, I get it — he can't absorb this life-touched energy at all, so he just handed the whole thing over to me. Ha! What a haul!
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The others surged forward. The two treants had lost all trace of vitality now, but their wood remained hard as ever, and its magical properties made for excellent wand material — useful for plenty of other purposes besides. The students wasted no time claiming what they could, storing every fallen branch away in their rings without hesitation. But the trunks themselves posed a problem: not that they couldn't be stored, but that they still stood upright, rooted where they'd died.
Everyone pulled out their own tools, hoping to break the trunks down and fell them properly, but progress crawled. They'd brought some equipment along — axes and the like, stored in their rings, forged from refined steel — but against wood like this, the tools proved hopelessly inadequate. One swing of an axe rang out with a clash of metal, barely scoring a shallow notch, and left a small chip in the blade itself.
Even Jessica and Emma found themselves at a loss. Evan watched and said, "Hand me the axe. Let me try."
Bruffer passed it over, the other students watching. Evan tucked his cane away into his ring, took the axe in hand, and gave it a testing weight. Few knights bothered with a battle-axe, but that didn't mean a knight couldn't wield one. He dropped into a slight crouch — to anyone watching, he looked almost like a centaur — and a strange resonance passed through the axe head. From the outside, it looked as though a sheen of sword-light had settled over the blade.
Evan drove the force up from his feet, through his hips, into his hands, funneling it all into the axe. Light blazed along the edge like a small sun, and with a single shout, he swung — meeting almost no resistance at all, the axe passing through cleanly, and the massive trunk came crashing down.
He worked through it in a handful of strokes, cutting the tree into several sections. The students cheered and hurried to store the pieces away. Evan let out a breath and set the axe down.
"Professor Wang, you actually cultivate both magic and swordsmanship. You'll have to teach us sometime once we're back," the students said, crowding around him, all talking at once.
"Dual cultivation isn't something usually encouraged — most people's strength only stretches so far. I spent a stretch of time as a ranger once, and dual cultivation came out of that, more by circumstance than plan. If you're interested, feel free to practice in your spare time — but don't put your hopes in knightly technique, and never let it come at the expense of magic. Magic will always be your true foundation," Evan said with a smile.
"Well," Emma said, "we've collected most of the material worth having. We should keep moving — we came here to rescue people. This half-plane is enormous, several hundred miles by the feel of it, and the air here is remarkably clear. They should still be alive. There's some kind of energy here too, unlike ordinary magic — it seems to sharpen the mind." Emma had always been unusually sensitive to magical energy, likely tied to her work.
Xiaoshuang spoke up. "That's divine power. The goddess of life's own divine power!"
"Divine power, of all things. That explains it — Professor Damire's group must have stumbled onto this place, which is why they came under attack. In the crisis, they must have broken through and taken shelter in here," Jessica guessed.
"Could be. Or it might have gone the other way — they ran into the attackers first, and stumbled into this place while trying to break free," Emma offered.
"Either way, there's a good chance Professor Damire's group is somewhere in here — though whether whoever's been hunting them followed them in, we can't say. Everyone stay alert. Don't overlook anything, however small," Evan said, and led the way deeper in.
The further they went, the more Evan's expression darkened, until he came upon two bodies — one in a Hollingburton mage's robe, clearly a student; the other dressed in black, not one of their own. The rest of the group fell silent at the sight. Seeing their own classmate lying dead did nothing good for anyone's spirits.
Evan crouched beside the bodies, examining them closely. Nothing had been taken from either of them, which suggested haste on both sides — the fleeing party's urgency made sense enough, but the pursuers leaving without stripping the bodies too was strange. Not even a search of the corpses, no attempt to clean up after themselves. What exactly had happened here?
Evan stood. "Bring his body back with us. He shouldn't have to rest in foreign soil. We may still be able to recall his soul — ask him whether he'd wish to remain at Hollingburton."
It was Hollingburton's custom that any student who died away from home, provided the body could be recovered, could have their soul called back through a particular array the school maintained. Some souls chose to remain at Hollingburton for centuries afterward; others declined. The choice always rested with the individual. Liches held a similar ability, though only in the moments right after death, not days later — the school's array, by contrast, was extraordinarily costly and troublesome to arrange, which was exactly why only institutions like Hollingburton bothered with it at all. A soul transformed this way often lost most of its memories in the process, which was why so few ever chose to make the transition.
At Evan's word, one of the students stepped forward, examined the dead student's hand, and slid the ring free — plenty of storage space inside — using it to hold the body. "What about the other one?" he asked.
"Store him too. He might turn out to be useful evidence," Evan said.