Dex stood at the edge of the violet Meadow of Dreams, his mind dissecting the variables at the speed of a computer processor.
Threat assessment: hundreds of concealed Serpent Vines. Projected strike speed equivalent to a venomous serpent's lunge. Crushing force sufficient to shatter ribs that have barely healed. The enemy is invisible and entirely within its own environment.
Dex understood with complete clarity that he could not fight hundreds of vines simultaneously. His Mana Core, despite having recently reached the peak of Rank E, did not possess the capacity to launch wide-area incendiary spells powerful enough to vaporise the entire meadow. And using his dagger to hack through the vines was simple-minded suicide: these plants regenerated faster than he could sever them, and in the end they would coil around his throat and snap it.
Within these lethal calculations, Dex settled on the most effective tactic he had learned on the overcrowded yard of the prison-the tactic thin inmates used to overpower musclebound giants.
"If the enemy is bigger than you, stronger than you, and has more limbs than you..." Dex smiled coldly, his eyes converging on an invisible point at the heart of the flowering meadow. "Do not attack its limbs. Do not strike its armoured face. Hit it in the knees. Cripple its foundation. Then strike the heart directly."
His plan was built around the central node-the enormous bulb-that he had located through his sonar pulse. If he could destroy that neural centre, the entire vine network would be immediately paralysed and killed. The problem was that the node lay buried three metres deep in the forest's hard soil, fortified by the roots of the vines themselves, and he could not reach it with an ordinary ground strike without the vines sensing his approach and defending their core.
He needed to draw the vines away from the centre, then execute a precise, surgical, dual-element strike in a fraction of a second.
Dex drew his black dagger from its sheath in one fluid motion and drew a deep, steady breath.
Mana at ninety percent. Speed at its peak. No margin for error.
Rather than a covert approach, he decided to become the bait himself. He began to run. Not toward the centre-but in a fast, jagged sprint along the circular edge of the meadow, driving his feet down with deliberate force to strike the earth and generate the maximum possible noise and vibration.
The Hanging Garden responded immediately. What followed was not plants moving-it was an eruption of enraged nature. The earth beneath the beautiful violet flowers cracked open like wounds splitting wide. Dozens of deep-green vines, sheathed in curved black thorns, detonated from beneath the soil. They were thick as a man's arm and moved through the air with the speed of a slaver's whip, pursuing him like a nest of furious serpents disturbed by a trespasser.
Swiiish- Swiiish-
The sound of vines cleaving the air was terrifying. One of them struck the trunk of a nearby tree and split the bark, scattering splinters of wood like shrapnel. Had it struck his body, it would have cut him in two.
"Come on, you fleshy idiots," Dex thought as he slid with preternatural suppleness beneath a protruding root, dodging a thorned lash that would have separated his head from his shoulders. He rolled over his right shoulder and sprang instantly upright, evading another vine that attempted to loop around his ankle.
He was dancing with death. Adrenaline boiled through his veins. He read the vines as flying blades in a chaotic gang fight, anticipating their trajectories by instinct before they struck, spending every drop of the Shadow Wolf core's agility to evade them by a hair's breadth.
He continued circling the perimeter until he had confirmed one thing: he had successfully drawn more than eighty percent of the vines to his side of the meadow, leaving the centre unguarded and exposed-its defensive arms all occupied in pursuing this swift and infuriating prey.
"Now."
At the perfect moment-when dozens of vines had converged at a single point, attempting to form a cage to crush and suffocate him-Dex stopped running. He planted his feet in the earth with force and, ignoring a thorned vine that nearly grazed his left cheek, did not direct his weapon or his magic at the vines about to kill him. Instead he turned with an expressionless face and pointed his left hand toward the centre of the meadow, precisely toward the hidden point beneath which the central node lay buried.
Here, Dex executed the most complex magical manoeuvre he had ever attempted-one that consumed seventy percent of his Mana in a single second.
"Water Element: Deep Saturation."
He released no water bullets, no shields. Instead he drove a massive surge of Water Mana through the air, bypassing the flowers entirely, forcing it directly into the dense soil surrounding the central bulb below ground. The Water magic reacted with the soil's minerals in a chemically destructive chain reaction, converting the hard, compacted earth that protected the node into fluid, loose, viscous mud in a fraction of a second. The enemy's natural armour had been stripped away.
And in the very next instant-before the vines could register that their centre had been laid bare-Dex reversed the polarity of the Mana in his body with a violence that nearly ruptured his blood vessels.
"Earth Element: Stone Grave."
He drew the Earth Mana with crushing force from that waterlogged zone. With a closing motion-gathering his fingers into an iron fist-he compelled the saturated mud to collapse inward, driving the weight of tons of sodden earth down upon the central node. Then he tore every last drop of moisture from it instantly, hardening that mud into a constricting, unrelenting mass of stone-a shrinking, impenetrable prison that sealed around the plant's heart like an eternal tomb.
CRRRUNCH.
A sound of catastrophic compression rose from beneath the ground-like the shattering of a giant's skull under an iron press. The central bulb was crushed completely under the enormous stone weight.
The instant the neural centre was destroyed, the entire vine network-above ground and below-emitted a sharp, revolting shriek: the sound of a thousand insects screaming at once. The thorned vine that had been millimetres from piercing Dex's eye stopped dead in mid-air, shuddered violently, and fell to the ground like a severed rope.
Within seconds, every vine that had been pursuing him wilted. Their deep green darkened to a dead grey, and they stiffened until they were as brittle as autumn branches. The exquisite violet flowers that had carpeted the meadow began to fall and rot immediately, the moment the life-Mana supply from the dead centre was severed.
The plan had worked. He had severed the serpent's head, and the arms had died with it.
Dex stood in the silence that had reclaimed the forest. He breathed with difficulty, his chest rising and falling, dizzy from the sharp drop in his Mana reserves. He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and brushed the phantom dust of battle from his leather coat with a motion of lethal professional calm.
He returned his dagger to its sheath with deliberate slowness. He looked at the meadow-transformed from an enchanting garden into a graveyard of grey, withered vines. Then he walked forward with quiet, unhurried strides, crossing through the dead meadow and stepping over the stiffened remains of the vines. He moved toward his destination without troubling himself to look back. He had defeated one of the most insidious and lethal traps in all of Falus Forest, and had done it with complex magic, without cutting a single flower or spilling a single drop of his own blood.
"Another point for the prison method," Dex murmured as he disappeared between the trees of the eastern sector.
Now the forest's foul odour had begun to fade again-but this time, what replaced it was a different scent, one he recognised at a deeper level. The dense, pervasive smell of humidity. Fresh water. And beneath it, threaded through it, something older and stranger: the pulse of an ancient and formidable magic.
Dex had finally reached the shore of the Lake of Silver Tears.