When Lumia severed that transparent thread of Mana with her cold fingers, no material body fell to the ground, and no wound bled in the conventional sense. Instead, the reaction was catastrophic-commensurate with the scale of the place itself. The entire Forbidden Falus Forest shook with a violent sub-sonic tremor whose roar reverberated through Dex's bone marrow before his hearing could register it. That tremor was the dark bell that officially announced the end of the stealth phase, and the beginning of the open slaughter.
A single second of absolute, terrifying silence followed the severing of the thread-a second in which time appeared to freeze. Then the green hell detonated from every direction.
The dense upper branches that had appeared dead or dormant hundreds of metres overhead began to twist and convulse with disgusting spasmodic movements, as though they were thousands of the limbs of a colossal arthropod awakening from a thousand-year slumber, starving. The blue-Mana-pulsing vines, which had been hanging quietly as forgotten curtains, suddenly launched themselves in the form of electricity-charged whips and sharp wooden spines.
These were not random attacks by raging vegetation. They were assaults orchestrated with surgical precision, communicating through the Mana network, targeting weak points, and seeking to choke off movement and seal every escape route before beginning to consume the prey alive.
"Behind you, Lumia!" Dex roared in warning, slamming his momentum to a halt by driving his feet into the earth and twisting on himself in a fast circular motion, answering an imminent danger closing on her back.
He did not limit himself to the dagger-he summoned the full power of the Core.
"Flame Maelstrom!"
Phoenix fire erupted from every pore of his body, forming in a fraction of a second a spinning, cyclonic disc of pure blue flame around them. Dozens of spiked branches and vine-lances drove themselves against the fire barrier and charred to flying ash in fractions of a second before they could pierce it. But the forest showed no sign of retreat and no indication of pain. For this colossal entity spanning the continent, the loss of a hundred branches-or even a thousand-was nothing more than a human losing a single strand of hair. The burnt branches compensated themselves at a terrifying, despair-inducing speed: fresh shoots grew from the neighbouring trunks and surged forward with greater impetus and ferocity than their predecessors.
Dex fought with the ferocity of the Prisoner cornered in a cell who refused to return to the cage or die in chains. His blazing dagger carved intersecting lines of light across the darkness, severing the vines that crept from underground to shackle their ankles. Sweat poured from his brow only to evaporate the instant it touched his fire aura. His breathing rose above the roar of combustion and the cracking of wood.
But with his growing combat experience, he understood with terrifying speed that brute force alone would not extract them from this trap. The forest was not merely attacking-it was absorbing his heat with intelligence. Every surrounding tree was acting as a conductor, attempting to earth the Phoenix Mana through its deep roots and draw it down into the soil, forcing Dex to expend double the energy merely to maintain his flame. He was fighting an entire environment with a sword.
In the midst of this colossal roar of shattering wood, the thunder of fire, and the psychological pressure that nearly crushed every mind... came Lumia's voice.
"Dex... stop wasting your energy striking the limbs."
Her voice was terrifyingly calm and entirely out of proportion with the chaos surrounding them-a stillness belonging to a nature that did not belong to the world of the panicked and mortal.
Dex glanced at her through his wall of fire. Lumia stood precisely at the centre of the protected circle he had formed. She had not raised a single finger in self-defence. She had not moved one step left or right to dodge the attacks. Yet though some branches had managed to pierce the fire wall for seconds before burning entirely, not one branch had touched her. The scene was surrealist: the ferocious branches and vines that closed on Lumia's body would veer violently off course at the last instant, coiling back on themselves-as though striking an invisible wall of divine rejection. The forest's corrupt green Mana disintegrated on contact with the profoundly cold, pure silver aura of the Celestial. Her silver eyes were not watching the attacking branches at all. They were staring with total concentration at a point in the air above-reading the invisible Mana flow that fed and directed this coordinated assault.
"You are striking dead limbs and draining your Core, while the true heart of this attack is laughing at you in silence," Lumia said in a strict, analytical tone, raising her hand and pointing toward a patch of air that appeared entirely ordinary-located between the trunks of two enormous, intertwined trees swallowed by darkness and mist. "There... do you see that empty space? It is not empty. It is the neural node governing this entire geographical sector. Mana converges there from every root in the forest and takes the form of commands controlling these trees. Destroy the node... and the attack dies."
Dex narrowed his blazing blue eyes and looked with everything he had in the direction she pointed. He enhanced his human vision with Phoenix Mana to the absolute limit his body allowed-but he saw nothing. Only darkness, thick green mist, and the tangle of branches. His senses as the Phoenix's Heir were immensely powerful and dominant, but they were ultimately material senses-dependent on reading heat, light, and solid matter. Lumia, by contrast, possessed the trans-dimensional Celestial Sight: the exclusive ability to perceive the programming and spiritual skeleton of magic itself, piercing barriers of matter and spatial illusion.
"Damn it-I cannot see it, Lumia! It is hidden by Mana mist or a spatial illusion!" Dex shouted in frustration, swinging his dagger with immense force to shatter a wooden trunk the size of a full cart that was plunging to crush his skull from above-it exploded into burning shards raining like luminous fragments. "If I cannot see the target, I cannot focus my power to destroy it-I will keep burning air for nothing!"
Lumia understood that time was running out-and that the Phoenix fire, for all its power, had the limits of a human body as its vessel.
She took a single step out of her stillness, drawing close to his blazing back. Then, in a commanding, regal tone his ears had never heard from her before, she spoke:
"Then close your human eyes, Dex."