The moment Adrien pointed to the barren heart of the forest, the Thrall reacted like a beast scalded.
A screech, high, agonized, enraged, tore through the canopy, rattling their bones and the very air around them. It didn't sound like a tree groaning or wind howling. It was sentient. It was furious.
The forest exploded around them. vines whipping about in a frenzy, unhinged.
A horde, grotesque and endless, surged from all directions. The creatures moved with reckless abandon, no coordination, no tactics.
Just raw, desperate aggression. As if the Thrall had stopped thinking and started panicking.
Adrien's blade lashed forward, cleaving through the throat of a charging wolf-like beast with eyes that glowed like molten gold.
It didn't even cry out, just collapsed, twitching, its blood hissing as it soaked into the living moss beneath.
His mastery over the movement technique was only getting better. And so, his movements became more fluid, unpredictable, and ethereal. To Han and Ria, it was simply beautiful, graceful and breathtaking.
But that didn't stop them from moving as well.
Han's shield pulsed brighter now, Aether sizzling across its surface as another spiked creature slammed into it. Bones cracked. The shield held, but Han staggered, teeth gritted, sweat streaming down his neck.
"We're thinning them," Ria gasped, palms erupting in a torrent of heat that turned a winged abomination into a molten carcass mid-air. "It's throwing everything at us without thinking."
During the day, she could manifest deadly hot flames, powered by the sun above. They were quite effective.
Adrien didn't respond right away. His blade moved like instinct, fluid and brutal. Every strike was economy, calculated, and efficient, not a movement wasted. Every dodge was necessity.
But his eyes were locked ahead, on that shimmering core at the forest's heart. The translucent shell pulsed erratically now, like it couldn't maintain rhythm. Like it was afraid.
And the air around it, he could feel it.
Fear.
Unwillingness.
Disbelief.
'Emotions.'
It stopped him for half a second too long.
Adrien blinked. A vine lashed at his chest, caught only at the last second by Han's backhand slash.
"Don't zone out now!" Han barked, voice hoarse. "We're knee-deep in hell!!!"
Adrien nodded, snapping out of it. 'It's feeling emotions… How?'
He hacked through another charging beast, a twisted stag with eight eyes and antlers of bone, and exhaled as it fell.
The air thrummed with another screech. Not a command. Not a signal.
A scream.
A scream of panic.
Adrien ducked under a mutated crow's dive, his blade rising to meet it in a spray of feathers and corrupted blood.
'It enthrals minds', he thought, panting, 'of course it has to understand them—to a degree. Maybe it mimics what it sees in its victims. Maybe it learned from the creatures it controlled. Adapted…'
He could feel its fear as clearly as the heat of battle.
Ria's fire hissed behind him again, less forceful this time. He turned briefly, her shoulders were slumped, arms trembling, sweat pouring down her forehead in sheets.
She had burns along one sleeve. Not from enemies. From overuse.
Han was limping slightly, his leg dragging as he smashed aside a pair of loping beasts that looked like skeletal gorillas covered in fungal growths.
Adrien himself felt the weight now. Every swing was slower than the last. Every beast they felled seemed to take just a little bit more from them.
Their muscles ached. Their wounds piled up. Their breaths came in gasps and wheezes.
The Thrall had stopped playing chess.
Now, it was just flipping the board and throwing pieces.
Another screech, this one longer, deeper, vibrating through the trees like a tremor. More beasts spilled forth, and Adrien felt the command behind it. There was no strategy. Just that sounded something like.
"STOP THEM!"
Creatures clawed over each other in a frenzy, fangs and talons snapping at air. Some were trampled by their own allies, mindlessly obeying that singular urge. To destroy. To consume.
Adrien, Han, and Ria were swallowed in it.
They fought like soldiers at the edge of collapse.
Ria fell once, brought to her knees by a hammer-blow from a hulking beast with limbs like cracked obsidian.
Han intercepted the killing strike with his shield, but it shattered under the pressure, fragments bursting like sparks.
"DOWN!" Adrien shouted, pivoting, slicing the creature's spine in a clean motion, flipping Ria onto her feet with his shoulder.
"Still good?" he asked between gasps.
"I'm alive," she panted, lips cracked, voice raw. "Don't know how much longer."
Han's sword arm was shaking now. The glow of Aether around him flickered like a candle in wind.
"We're close," Adrien growled. "It's right there."
And it was.
Only a few dozen meters away now, the clearing where the core pulsed. But between them and that fragile heart stood a wall of bodies. Dozens. No, hundreds.
Adrien gritted his teeth.
The Thrall had sent its final army. No more tactics. No more illusions.
This was the last stand.
"Stay strong," Adrien said, adjusting his grip. "One push. Burn everything."
The three of them locked in formation. Ria at the center, hands raised.
A breath.
Another screech rang out. This one shrill. Desperate. And filled with… pain?
Adrien felt it, down to his bones.
The Thrall knew what was coming.
Ria's hands trembled, her breath hitching, but she raised her arms all the same. Heat began to bleed from her core.
Raw, unstable, nearly uncontainable. Her flames were no longer the elegant, shaped torrents she conjured when rested. These were wildfires. Writhing, angry, starving.
With a strained scream, she unleashed it.
A wave of fire swept forward, engulfing the first wave of beasts in a tsunami of molten fury. Wood shrieked as it turned to ash, fur curled black, muscle and bone split open under the unbearable heat.
Adrien and Han didn't wait for the smoke to settle.
They charged.
Through the fire. Through the confusion. Straight into the chaos.
Adrien's blade gleamed red-hot from proximity to Ria's magic, and when he brought it down, it cut through flesh like it was slicing through water.
A two-headed panther-beast lunged, he pivoted mid-step and let momentum carry his sword through its chest.
Blood sprayed. Roars drowned in gurgles.
Han slammed into a cluster of insectoid creatures, shoulder-first, his remaining energy flaring to shove them back.
Then his blade sang through the air, cleaving one in half, catching another mid-pounce.
Behind them, Ria staggered forward. Her reserves were nearly gone, but she dragged one hand up and detonated a smaller burst of flame into a charging beast's skull, reducing it to a flaming smear on the forest floor.
Adrien fought like a possessed man.
Each breath burned in his lungs, and his vision was starting to blur at the edges. His arms screamed for relief, but he couldn't stop. Not now. Not when he could see it.
The core.
It pulsed erratically now, flashing like a beacon in a storm. And around it, the last line of defenders came.
A tide of malformed horrors, stitched together from the forest's nightmares, some with bark for bones, others with wings that shouldn't lift, with claws that shimmered like glass.
They screamed as they charged.
So did the Thrall.
That same ear-splitting, soul-raking shriek of despair and hatred, blasting through the trees like a sonic wave.
Adrien nearly stumbled.
He felt it.
Why won't you stop…?
Why won't you DIE!?
That voice wasn't words.
It wasn't language.
It was emotion, raw and pure, bleeding into the air and pressing against their minds. A drowning wave of disbelief, rage, fear.
Adrien gritted his teeth, pushing through it.
'You're afraid', he thought. 'You're really afraid.'
And he felt something else in that moment.
Recognition.
The Thrall knew what they were. What they could do. And in all short time in existence, of instant dominance over everything in this forest it had yet to face something it could not break.
A life it could not dominate, a life it could not take control of.
Until now.
The trio reached the outer ring of the final wave, and the slaughter began again.
Claws tore toward Adrien, he ducked low, sweeping his blade up and splitting a creature from jaw to skull. His boots slipped in gore, but he kept moving.
Han was surrounded, a writhing cluster of limbs and fangs pressing in. But with a roar, he spun, swinging in wide arcs, dropping beast after beast, his Aether flaring dangerously close to depletion.
One claw got through, dragged down his back, and Han screamed, falling to one knee.
"Han!" Ria shouted, voice hoarse.
She launched herself forward, her last bit of flame curling into a spear of fire. It burned as it left her hand, tore through the air like a comet and slammed into the beast that had wounded him, blowing its chest open in a mess of charred bone and fluid.
Han breathed, ragged and shallow, but nodded. "Still… alive," he rasped, dragging himself upright.
The world had gone red now.
The scent of blood, scorched flesh, and rotting spores filled every breath.
And still, they pushed.
Every footstep forward was a battle. Every enemy that fell was replaced by two more. But the numbers were dropping. The forest's endless tide was no longer endless.
The Thrall's screeches were no longer screams of defiance.
They were sobs.
Panicked. Childlike. As if it couldn't comprehend why its ecosystem was falling apart.
Han felt something deep and instinctual stir in him, sympathy? Pity?
Adrien picked up on its vain attempts to influence their minds, he could feel the same thing Han did, most probably the same with Ria too.
He crushed it.
If the Thrall had won, it would have fed on their minds, their bodies. It would've broken them, buried them, and enthralled every ounce of who they were.
It had done so to the thousands living beings in this forest.
And now it couldn't understand why these living beings were different. It was far too young to understand. From its birth since the ascension, all it had done was follow its instincts, 'Enthral, control, expand influence'.
"We're almost there!" Adrien shouted, voice cutting through the howling and the screeches.
He could see the ground changing beneath the core, it was no longer green, but blackened. Dead.
It pulsed not with strength, but with instability. Every throb of the heart was slower, every screech more strained.
Ria was staggering now. Han was leaving a blood trail behind him. Adrien had lost track of his own wounds. But the final line was breaking.
Another beast lunged, Adrien caught it mid-air and hurled it sideways into a tree.
Then another came.
Then two more.
He grunted, too slow to dodge both.
One claw raked across his ribs. Another struck his shoulder, nearly spinning him around. He dropped to one knee.
And still, he rose again. already healing, sending two strikes in quick succession, quickly taking care of the assailants.
But the blood still ran down his chest.
Breath heaving.
Vision pulsing.
But his blade was steady.
His gaze fixed on that vulnerable, glimmering heart.
"It's time," he whispered.
The Thrall's final scream tore through the air, filled with terror and defiance all at once. Like the cries of a dying horse.
It knew.
It knew what came next.