Chapter 38: The First Root
The room pulsed with ancient silence.
Thalen stood before the jagged pedestal, the veins of crimson light still spiraling slowly across its blackened stone. Behind him, the SSS Hero Elarin watched with folded arms, eyes sharp beneath the furrow of her brow. They had descended into the Forgotten Hollow a chamber buried beneath centuries of rubble and myth. Only those acknowledged by the Tyrant’s Spirit were said to be able to awaken what lay here: the First Root.
He wasn’t even sure what that meant yet.
Thalen’s hand hovered over the relic, his blade aura resonating faintly in his chest. The sword on his back now forged from rare Dreadsteel shimmered subtly in response. But it wasn’t the sword that mattered now. It was him. His aura. His spirit.
The First Root wasn’t an object.
It was a force.
"Reach not with your hands," Elarin whispered. Her voice echoed as if the chamber itself were listening. "Let the Tyrant within you call it."
Thalen closed his eyes.
The path behind him was soaked in trial and pain. Ever since awakening the Tyrant Spirit, he’d felt like a vessel splitting open from within. The power didn’t obey easily it clawed, it raged, it demanded more from him than he had ever given. And now it brought him here, to a place only the SSS Heroes had ever known.
The chamber stirred.
Faint whispers rippled through the walls. Voices. Screams. Echoes of ancient battles long buried. The air thickened as Thalen extended his aura not through strength, but through surrender. Blade Aura hummed from the core of his soul, a fine edge of control and clarity, honed by years of effort. Beside it now burned the deeper flame the Tyrant’s Spirit. Not fire. Not fury. But pressure.