Chapter 137: Rescue
Under cover of darkness, Evan layered Haste and Feather Fall onto himself, his body moving like a thread of smoke. He split off from the group — Emma and the others would go rescue Professor Damire's party, while Evan worked alone. They still gathered together briefly before approaching the compound. Calling it a compound was generous — really it was a cluster of nests hanging from the trees, ringed by a dense wall of thorns rather than any proper palisade or wall. The thorns rose impossibly high and thick, reaching all the way to the treetops, dense enough to block out light entirely. Evan hadn't expected a barrier quite like it.
None of that stopped him, though. Rather than climb over the thorn wall, he simply walked in through the front gate. The gate itself stood barely guarded at all — the beastmen ruled here unchallenged, with nothing above them in this domain, and their defenses reflected that confidence.
Evan moved under cover of night, his faint sight open, taking in every detail of the compound. He got his first real look at the beastmen's three tiers of settlement. Massive nests hung from the trees rather than proper treehouses, each shaped like an oversized bird's nest. At the center hung the largest of them, surrounded by thirty-six smaller ones — home, according to Dier's account, to the king and his thirty-six loyal followers.
Below that level sat countless smaller nests, numbering in the hundreds across several miles, housing the ordinary members of the tribe. Lower still, at ground level, the beastmen kept their tamed animals alongside captured wild beasts. Near the edge of the compound, Professor Damire and his students were being held — bound to trees at the moment.
Evan raised a hand, and the group behind him halted, spreading out silently. He moved alone toward the gate like a wisp of smoke. Two nest-like structures hung above the gate itself, pulsing faintly with life inside. Evan gave a light leap and landed atop the gate — no one so much as glanced his way — though he took no chances all the same, sending two threads of black smoke into the nests above. Both occupants lost their lives without ever waking from sleep.
He landed lightly and opened the gate from within, waving a hand. Emma and the others slipped through quickly and silently. The moment they were inside, a voice rang out. "You've come. Don't bother trying to leave!"
Evan froze for an instant, then understood quickly enough — they'd known he was coming all along. A flicker of insight crossed his mind, and he thought of Dier's strange behavior earlier. Understanding settled over him, and he said mildly, "You know what happened to Dier."
His hand twitched slightly, black smoke gathering swiftly into the shape of a spear — unseen in the darkness, which gave him some comfort. Whatever advantage his opponent held, at least the dark denied him full sight.
"Foolish human. Did you think I couldn't sense my own followers at any moment I chose? I'd have sacrificed them regardless, if it meant drawing you into my trap. Those two were low-level thugs, nothing more. Worth losing, if it hooked you," the voice said, clearly pleased with itself.
"So they lied to me during the day?" Evan asked.
"They told you the truth. I can control them, but I can't make them lie."
Xiaoshuang whispered quietly at Evan's ear. "He's not lying. I can smell it."
"Good. Then you can die now," Evan said, and flung his hand out. Spear of Hadir shot forth, a flicker of green light preceding an earth-shattering explosion, a massive skull roaring within a rising column of black mushroom-shaped cloud.
"Damn you!" the voice screamed, several cries of pain following close behind, clearly injured.
"Go, save them now!" Evan called out to Emma and the others, his mouth already forming a string of clipped syllables — Undead Calamity, unleashed at once. In an instant, a cloud of smoke rose above the treetops and rolled forward, thick with skeletons, death knights, wraiths, gargoyles, and a zombie dragon, ghostly voices shrieking through the air like a wall of the dead bearing down on the beastmen.
The beastmen had never imagined Evan capable of magic like this. Their king, clever as he was, found even his best calculations shattered under the sheer, brutal weight of absolute power. He'd never anticipated Evan showing this much strength — the Spear of Hadir had already cost him several loyal followers with that single explosion, a real setback in its own right. He'd been about to order the Net of Life deployed to seize Evan when Undead Calamity broke out instead.
It wasn't entirely his fault. However clever a beastman raised within this half-plane might be, none of them had ever set foot beyond it, their experience of the wider world painfully limited. He'd thought himself sharp enough, using his own gifts to lay a trap that no small feat to begin with — but nothing could have prepared him for a reversal like this, his own scheme thrown into utter disarray.
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Screams reached his ears, the mental link binding him to his kin thinning with each passing moment, and his fury finally broke loose entirely. "By the gods, I'll cut you into a thousand pieces, ten thousand — I'll grind your bones to powder!"
"Save your breath. Beat me first," Evan said mildly, his real attention elsewhere. He was tracking Emma's progress far more closely than the beastman king's threats. Undead Calamity had already seized control of the field, buying the rescue party exactly the opening they needed. Through his own awareness, he could sense Emma and the students closing quickly on the spot where Damire and his students were held. They hadn't been mistreated badly, likely to keep the sacrificial offerings presentable, but they were bound to the trees, gags stuffed in their mouths.
Vine-like restraints held them in place, laced with divine power that suppressed the magic within their bodies, and with their mouths sealed shut besides, not even a full reserve of magic could do them any good.
Damire had heard the beastman king's voice and felt his stomach drop — it seemed their rescuers had walked straight into a trap. But Evan hadn't so much as flinched. The ambush had failed, so he'd simply gone straight to overwhelming force instead, crushing his way through with sheer strength.
The moment Emma and Jessica arrived, they pulled small blades from their rings and cut through the vines quickly — sturdy as the restraints were, they were no match for sharpened steel. One by one, the captives were freed, and at the sight of Hollingburton's rescue party, tears welled up in their eyes. "Quick, take this — help us free the others," Jessica said, pressing a knife into the hands of one of the freed students.
They worked fast, cutting the rest free. Meanwhile, Evan's Undead Calamity had taken its toll, and watching his own people die one after another beneath it, the beastman king finally unleashed his divine art. Green light flared, and a beam shot straight toward Evan, dissolving black smoke and reducing skeletons to ash wherever it passed. A divine art — Life's Blessing, an unstoppable ray saturated with divine power, bearing down with irresistible force.
Evan knew life-aligned divine power intimately by now, having crossed paths with it more than once. Some quiet part of him had begun to suspect that divine power carried more than raw energy — something closer to an intention woven into it, though not a person's will exactly, more like a kind of purpose, capable of producing strange effects. It seemed that the barest thread of connection was enough to draw its attention and its wrath. What kind of attack was this, exactly — deliberate, and yet without true consciousness behind it? Yes — something like cause and effect made manifest, absolute and utterly domineering.
Something about this beam felt off, though — laced deep with a savage, bloody edge Evan had never encountered before in life-aligned power. The goddess of life's power was never meant for combat; it belonged to healing and growth. And this was only borrowed power to begin with, thinner still. Evan shifted his body aside, and the beam struck nothing, continuing forward a short distance before fading into nothing.
Suspicion rose in him. What had happened here, that the goddess of life's power had turned to blood sacrifice, twisted into something that behaved like an evil god's — the divine power itself corrupted?
There was no time to dwell on it. He waved a hand, sending more skeletons forward in waves, joined now by the fallen beastmen themselves, eyes vacant, turning on their own kin without mercy.
Wherever the assault passed, the trees began to wither, leaves falling like rain, the attack growing stronger by the moment. But Evan knew that once an assault reached its peak, decline would follow. Just then, a low murmur of chanting rose, and twenty or thirty threads of green light flared to life, weaving into a net of light that rose to block the beastmen's advance, vibrant and alive, the trees around them responding in kind, sprouting thousands of new branches to form a dense mesh, holding against the wall of undead smoke.
For a moment, neither side could advance an inch. Evan let out a breath, feeling the strain of it. He didn't need to feel dissatisfied at merely holding the line — by any fair measure, he had reason to take pride in this. One man alone, against thirty-odd beastmen. Even having lost two or three of them, the beastman king and his followers had fused their strength into one, and Evan was holding all thirty of them back single-handed. Something worth genuine pride, whatever else came of it.
In another part of the compound, Emma had already freed everyone and was pulling the group back at speed. Evan held the beastmen's assault steady, buying them a clean retreat, and once he sensed they'd cleared the area, he laughed — a long, genuine laugh. "Your heads can stay on your shoulders a while longer!"
His body flickered and withdrew like a wisp of smoke, leaving Undead Calamity running behind him. The spell wasn't like ordinary magic — really a fusion of large-scale summoning and dark mist effects combined. Though Evan had already left, the spell kept operating for a time on its own, though without him actively directing it, it began to unravel at a visible pace. Even unraveling, it still carried real destructive force. On the other side, the Net of Life had been pressing hard against Undead Calamity when a sharp crack sounded — the undead's defensive line collapsed entirely all at once, and the green net surged forward.
With Undead Calamity's collapse, the skeletons dissolved along with it, black smoke billowing out to blanket the whole compound. Trees and thorns alike corroded wherever the smoke touched. By the time the green net of light finally burned the smoke away, the compound stood half withered and half still lush with green, even the thorn wall showing a long stretch of visible rot.
Both faces on the beastman king's head twisted with grief and rage. He already knew the toll had been severe — more than a hundred dead, over a third of his people, the worst losses he'd suffered since taking the throne. He roared, ready to give chase, but his loyal followers hurried to hold him back.
Evan and the others, meanwhile, had run into a different problem entirely.