Low-Fantasy Occultist

Chapter 446

Nick pushed his flight to its utmost limit, boots skimming over the gnarled roots of the Green Ocean as he ducked under branches and ferns. Behind him, Gaelen moved like a shadow, his breathing even and controlled despite the grueling pace. Elia glided through the underbrush, her white and red robes completely untouched by the thorns, while Rhea had drunk some sort of agility potion, granting her the speed needed to keep up.

They moved in silence, but the forest around them was screaming.

The repelling artifact the intruders had deployed earlier had acted like a blunt instrument, violently shoving the natural wildlife out of its territorial boundaries, and as Nick’s team sprinted east, the consequences were clear everywhere.

Flocks of birds burst from the canopy in panicked swarms, abandoning their nests. A herd of iron-tusked boars trampled blindly through a nearby fern thicket, completely ignoring the humans in their frantic rush to flee.

The woods were emptying, and if whatever lurked ahead was fully roused, that chaotic exodus would turn into an unstoppable stampede, crashing straight into the vulnerable workers at the edge of Floria.

"The mana density is spiking," Nick called back over his shoulder. "We are about to cross into the crystal forest.”

The shadows from the thick canopy stretched farther, stubbornly clinging to the tree bark.

After another ten minutes of relentless sprinting, the thick foliage finally began to thin, revealing an eerie, iridescent glow that Nick remembered well. They had reached the edge of the crystal forest, the former domain of the corrupted Fae dungeon.

Nick raised a closed fist, causing his team to suddenly stop on the top of a ridge of hardened earth overlooking the area.

He stepped forward, glancing down at his family’s property, and a cold rage took hold of him.

The crystal forest was once a breathtaking expanse of pristine quartz trees, structures that echoed with the pure mana they drew from the ether.

It was a long-term investment, an invaluable resource that would eventually support Floria’s growth for generations, and had captured the interest of every player in the West due to its sheer potential.

Now, it was being strangled.

Thick vines had tightly wrapped around the towering quartz pillars. The parasitic flora was actively siphoning energy from the crystals, acting like engorged leeches.

Where the vines touched the trees, the quartz's vibrant translucence faded into a dull, lifeless gray stone.

The magnitude of the theft was staggering, but after controlling his emotions and keeping them in reserve for later use, Nick redirected his attention to the more pressing issue.

Near the entrance of the crystal forest, the intruders were fighting a losing battle.

The four adventurers were completely surrounded, their expensive armor battered and scored with deep gouges. The tall, blonde-haired leader held up a cracked octagonal shield artifact that projected a flickering dome of hard light, but the barrier was failing under a relentless assault.

One of his companions was already on the ground, holding his badly injured leg, while the other two blindly threw fire talismans into the darkness around them. Essentially, they were burning through their fortunes just to survive the next few seconds.

"What in the hells is that?" Gaelen whispered.

Multiple shadows surrounding the failing shield shifted, tearing away from the tree line to reveal the new master of the forest, the apex predator Ogden had warned him about.

It was an amalgamation of petrified wood, thick thorny creepers, and chunks of stolen crystal fused into its armored hide. It stood on four trunk-like legs, its central body a twisting knot of vines protecting a violently glowing, oversized core that pulsed with the stolen energy of the quartz forest.

Another Vine Devil? No, it might have been one, once, but it’s something else now.

As seriously as Nick had taken the old alchemist’s warning, even he hadn’t expected the creature to be a Prestige-tier one, but unfortunately, that was exactly what it was.

By aggressively draining the crystal forest's natural resources, the monster forced its own evolution, becoming more than just a Vine Devil. It had crossed the line that separated the strong from the legendary, and now, it was furious.

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"They are feeding it," Nick said, his voice dropping into a dangerously quiet tone. "It has absorbed the ambient mana of the forest, and those fools brought highly magical artifacts right to its door. If it kills them and consumes their gear, it will solidify its advancement.”

The one thing stopping him from turning around and leaving this matter to people more powerful than he was was that he would be condemning the adventurers to their deaths, which he believed they very much deserved, thieves that they were. However, the monster had likely just crossed into Prestige and had not yet consolidated its power.

Leaving it to do as it pleased now meant allowing it to grow even more, and while Marthas, Arthur, Ogden, and Xander could still handle it, there was no telling the damage it might do to the crystal forest in the meantime.

“Well, we can't let that happen," Rhea said, as she drew two flasks of a volatile, deep-green acid, arriving at the same conclusion.

“Yeah, we have to go in," Nick spat, pulling the Shard of Human Ambition from his spatial ring. The familiar, comforting weight of the wooden staff settled into his palm. "Elia, try to purify the area as much as possible. Those vines must be rooted underground, and we don’t want them to have control of the battlefield. Gaelen, sever the creepers attaching it to the quartz pillars. We have to cut off its food supply.”

Without waiting for acknowledgment, Nick hurled himself off the edge of the ridge, falling toward the basin floor amid the rushing wind.

Below, the cracked artifact shield protecting the capital team finally shattered into a shower of useless sparks. The monster reared back, raising two huge, scythe-like limbs, ready to crush the intruders into the dirt.

However much Nick wanted to keep experimenting with fire, now was definitely not the time, so he reached deep into his soul and summoned his righteous anger, his judgment of thieves stealing from his family’s lands.

Still falling, he swung the Shard of Human Ambition, and a crescent of compressed wind, thin as a wire and carrying the conceptual weight of his sense of justice, screamed across the forest.

The blade of air hit the raised appendages just as they started their descent, slicing cleanly through the petrified wood and shattering the quartz plating, severing both limbs.

The beast let out a deafening roar that shook the ground, and it stumbled backward as pieces of its body slammed to the earth.

As I suspected, it hasn’t fully harnessed its power yet. This part of the Green Ocean has been neutered for months, so it probably grew without having to fight anything stronger than weak monsters.

Nick landed lightly on the ground, positioning himself right between the towering horror and the frightened adventurers. Gaelen hit the ground a second later, his cursed blade already drawn and spilling dark mist, then immediately darted toward the nearest tree.

Elia and Rhea positioned themselves on either side as the Miko's silver bells chimed, and she summoned a perimeter of sacred golden fire.

The blonde-haired leader stared at Nick, his face pale and smeared with mud. “You are... the boy from the gate.”

"Shut your mouth and fall back," Nick commanded without looking at him, his eyes locked on the regenerating stumps. "You've done enough damage to my property.”

The creature recovered rapidly, its glowing core pulsing as it drew fresh mana from the parasitic vines connected to the surrounding quartz pillars. New limbs of twisting wood and sharp crystal began to knit themselves together within instants, confirming that it truly was a Prestige monster.

Nick’s spiritual magic did not leave residue as a curse would, but it was still far more complex than typical elemental spells. For it to recover so quickly, it had to be specialized in regeneration, making this fight especially frustrating.

“We’ll stop its connection, focus on keeping it busy!” Rhea shouted, hurling her acid flasks. The glass shattered against a cluster of thick roots anchoring the beast to the nearest pillar, and the alchemical compound ate through the wood with a furious hiss, temporarily severing the connection.

Gaelen darted to another tree, slicing more vines, but the monster simply shifted its weight and extended new tendrils into the ground.

"Hey!" the blonde leader suddenly yelled from behind.

Nick looked back, expecting the man to try coordinating a combined strike. Instead, he saw him holding a smooth, black gemstone in his hand.

The man’s eyes were wide, and Nick could feel a blend of fear and cold calculation inside his mind.

“I would apologize," the blonde sneered, his voice trembling. "But the Valerius Consortium cannot afford to lose its investments today.”

His piece said he crushed the black gemstone in his fist.

A surge of sickly mana burst from the broken stone, splashing directly onto Nick, Gaelen, Elia, and Rhea.

It was a premium hunter’s lure, an artifact created to mark a target with an irresistible scent that caused monsters to frenzy uncontrollably.

Before Nick could react, another adventurer triggered a scroll, and a flash of silver light enveloped the four battered intruders, folding the space around them. With a sharp crack, they disappeared from the basin, teleporting away and leaving Nick’s team standing in the center of the arena, coated in the aggressive lure.

It probably wasn’t very far, since such artifacts were ridiculously expensive, but that didn't help them now.

Nick stared at the empty spot where the cowards had just been. Rage completely overshadowed his earlier annoyance. They had come to his town, acted like royalty, destroyed his forest, awakened a Prestige-tier threat, and then abandoned the people who tried to save them.

The monster roared.

Driven completely rabid by the new scent, it abandoned its defensive stance. Its glowing core flared with blinding intensity, and the ground beneath them shook violently as dozens of thick, spear-like roots erupted from the soil, aiming to impale them all at once.

“Oh, fuck off," Nick snarled.

He slammed the base of his staff against the cracked ground and unleashed the unchangeable weight of his soul into the physical world.

The conceptual pressure of [Territory], refined by the ancient spirits of the Tower, slammed down upon the battlefield. The air instantly thickened, becoming heavy and oppressive. The rising roots, caught within Nick's domain, shuddered and slowed to a crawl as the ambient ether they depended on was violently suppressed.

It wouldn’t last long, given how much more powerful the monster was, but it was young and had probably never encountered anything like this before.

"Gaelen, now!" Nick shouted, holding the suppression with pure willpower.

Gaelen didn't hesitate to jump from the tree and abandon all restraint. He poured his mana into the cursed blade, accepting the toxic recoil, and the dark mist surrounding the steel burst into a roaring torrent of energy.

As he landed, he pushed off the ground, leaving a crater in his wake, and closed the distance to the monster in an instant. He danced through the suppressed roots, carving deep, festering wounds into the beast's armored hide. The decay countered the monster's regeneration, turning the newly grown wood into brittle ash as soon as it formed.

However, the monster was a Prestige entity. It possessed a raw depth of power that simple suppression could not contain indefinitely, and even Nick couldn’t hold it down forever.

The beast tore an entire tree from the ground, grinding it into its central maw and swallowing the raw mana. The surge of power broke Nick's lock, allowing it to swing its whole body around and sending a broad wave of crystal shrapnel flying toward Gaelen.

"No!" Elia cried out. A towering wall of holy fire roared to life, catching the crystalline projectiles and melting the quartz into harmless slag, but the recoil from fighting such magic forced the Miko to her knees, gasping in pain.

Gaelen used the brief cover to retreat, coughing as the cursed energy from his blade stained his aura with darkness. His face was pale, and it was obvious he was unsure how to damage the monster.

Their efforts, however, had given Nick enough time.