Chương 411: Chapter 400 - When the Curtain Parts

Branches from the oak twisted and shrieked as they snapped forward at supersonic speed, the air cracking around them as if torn by whips of living wood. Imani stepped into the slope and anchored. The pull of the Guardian Star flared. Gravity thickened around him, bending the incoming storm toward his shield. The first impact detonated against his guard. BOOM! Shockwaves split the grass in a ring around his boots. Dirt blasted outward.

The hill buckled beneath him as bark the size of spears crashed into his shield and shoulders. His boots carved trenches through the earth. Muscles screamed. Bones vibrated under the strain. He held. Lightning flashed across the right flank as Leonie surged past his shoulder, sword cutting in a clean diagonal arc. White-blue current trailed the blade, severing wood mid-flight, branches exploding into splinters that burned as they fell. On the left Ayu was already moving. Her rhythm rose. Step. Pivot. Spin.

She flowed through the next wave with impossible elasticity, her body folding and unfolding through gaps that barely existed. Tendrils skimmed her skin, drawing thin red lines across her ribs and thigh, but she did not slow. She smiled. She closed. As she neared the trunk, the Bride's head tilted with a slow, unnatural grace. Hollow eyes locked onto her. An unseen force clenched. The air compacted around Ayu's torso. Her feet left the ground.

It felt like a giant hand had seized her spine and ribs, compressing her lungs, squeezing breath from her chest as sharp tendrils adjusted mid-flight to skewer her suspended body. Before they struck, the space ahead ruptured. BOOM! A focused burst of pressure tore outward from Chiara's position. The ground peeled back in a shallow arc. Branches disintegrated into shrapnel, bark vaporising in a crackling surge of coherent force. The invisible grip faltered.

Ayu roared and ripped free with pure Will, muscles snapping into motion as she twisted mid-air and landed in a crouch, blood sliding down her side. Then Leonie's pulse hit her." Press in now." Ayu didn't hesitate. Her heel drove into the soil hard enough to crater it. She launched. Leonie moved with her, wings flaring brighter as stormlight flooded the clearing, both of them cutting through smoke and sap mist toward the Bride's exposed core. The wail came without warning.

HNNNNNGGGHHH— A raw, layered shriek tore from the Bride's throat, a sound warped by grief and rot, neither fully human nor wholly beast. It rose and fractured mid-air, splitting into overlapping tones that scraped against bone. The oak convulsed. Red leaves burst from the canopy in violent spirals. Bark split along the trunk and blood-dark sap sprayed outward in hot arcs, hissing where it struck Leonie's stormlight.

The scream pressed through the clearing like a physical force, rattling armour, shaking lungs, turning the hill into a resonating altar of sound. They were thrown backward. Bodies skidded across churned earth as the shockwave ploughed through them, armor scraping stone, lungs emptied by force alone. Silence followed for half a breath. When the dust thinned, the oak still stood. The Bride's torso protruded from the trunk, dress fluttering in wind that had no source. More tendrils unfurled. Faster. Sharper. Hungrier.

Leonie and Ayu braced to evade. Then it came again. The lock. Pressure slammed down from above and the sides at once. Two invisible titanic hands crushed inward. Leonie's armor groaned as metal bent against her ribs. Bone creaked. Her vision flashed white at the edges as her knees buckled into the soil. Ayu's teeth bared as the constriction squeezed her chest, veins standing out across her neck while her rhythm fought to keep tempo under compression. Leonie's Will flared.

The Valkyrie burned brighter, feathers igniting in white-blue fire as she forced space around her lungs to exist. The crushing lessened, barely enough to keep her spine intact, nowhere near enough to break free. The next wave of tendrils screamed toward them. Imani moved. Guardian Star erupted to full gravity. BOOM! The impact was catastrophic. Wood slammed into him like falling towers. The ground beneath his feet fractured in spiderweb patterns. A rib cracked under the recoil.

Blood filled his mouth and spilled down his chin as he spat red into the dirt. His shield arm trembled. His legs sank deeper into the torn earth. He did not fall. The layered forces began to converge. Guardian Star pulling. Valkyrie amplifying. Ayu's rhythm accelerating. The pressure field warped under their combined coherence. The invisible grip around Leonie and Ayu shuddered as they finally broke free. Air rushed back into their lungs. Muscles uncoiled. But the Bride did not allow relief.

Every severed branch regrew in a violent surge, bark knitting over fresh wood, red sap spraying as the oak rebuilt itself in a heartbeat. Tendrils thickened, multiplied, sharpened. They converged. All of them on Imani. He had barely straightened from the previous impact. Blood still clung to his lips. His ribs screamed with each breath. That was when a crimson orb arced through the chaos.

It shifted mid-air and from its core a golem erupted into being, stone and iron plates locking together in a single fluid motion just as the forest's spears descended. The impact obliterated it. Wood punched through granite. Stone shattered into shrapnel. The construct lasted less than a heartbeat. It was enough.

The collision deflected the trajectory just enough for Imani to roll with the force, Guardian Star dragging the redirected mass sideways as he skidded back in a trench of torn soil, coughing blood but still upright. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Leonie's eyes hardened as she assessed the situation. They couldn't hold back anymore. They— The ground beneath her exploded.

Roots burst upward in a spiralling cage where she had stood a heartbeat earlier. They twisted tight and slammed shut with a concussive BAM that shook the hill, splinters and clods of earth spraying outward. Had she delayed a fraction longer, her armour would have folded inward like crushed tin. She landed several meters away, boots grinding through broken earth. Then she saw it. Every one of them was under assault.

Roots lashed around Imani's legs, anchoring him to the ground as tendrils hammered his shield in relentless succession, each strike sending shockwaves through his frame, each vibration threatening to liquefy his insides from sheer transmitted force. His arm trembled. Blood seeped through the seams of his gauntlet. Ayu slipped free of the first wave with feral grace, the roots closing on empty air where she had been.

She pivoted, spun, ducked low, but the Bride's spectral arm formed above her, a translucent limb of condensed Will descending with crushing intent. It grasped. The pressure bent the grass flat around her as if the sky itself were pushing down. Further back, the earth split open beneath Pablo. Massive roots surged toward him from every angle. He reacted on instinct, sending an electromagnetic pulse through the metal woven into his gear.

The field yanked him sideways mid-motion, armour pieces clanging as he was flung clear. His summon lunged to intercept. Too slow. The roots were already there. Too thick. Too sudden. They closed like jaws. SLSH Everything stopped. Every root surrounding Pablo severed cleanly in the same instant. The upper halves slid free and thudded into the ground, sap gushing in dark streams. Pablo blinked. He had not seen a strike. He turned. Alonso stood a few meters away, posture calm. Their eyes met for the briefest moment.

A small nod. Then Alonso's gaze returned to the Bride. Pablo's pulse hammered. After all… Alonso's blades were still sheathed. How was he that fast? Leonie had seen it more clearly, as she had been prepared to assist Pablo herself. Alonso had taken two steps. That was all. No swing. No flash. Yet the cut had come. Her mind registered the anomaly and discarded it just as quickly. Analysis could wait. Survival came first.

She linked with the others as her commands flared, synchronising their actions and tightening the field to keep the pressure on the Bride. At the vanguard, Imani absorbed another sequence of impacts. Tendrils struck in layered rhythm, each one driving him deeper into fractured soil. His vision blurred at the edges. He forced his knees straight through sheer refusal to fall. Then space ruptured again. BOOM! Chiara's second discharge tore across the field.

The explosion tore outward in a concussive sphere, earth buckling, soil blasting skyward in a crown of debris. Branches disintegrated mid-flight, splintering into burning fragments. Roots snapped and cartwheeled through the air. The oak's outer bark peeled away in violent strips, ripped free to expose pulsing, dark tissue beneath that quivered under the trauma. The Bride screamed as the spectral hand gripping Ayu vanished.

HNNNNNGGGHHH— A raw, rupturing shriek dragged from deep within the trunk, thick with fury and hatred. The canopy bent under the pressure wave. Red leaves ignited and spiralled downward in flaming arcs. Blood-dark sap erupted from fresh fractures, spraying in heavy streams. The shockwave rolled across the hill and into them. Armour rang. Teeth clashed. Lungs crushed under the sudden compression as the blast swallowed the clearing in heat, dust, and the stench of scorched wood and iron-thick sap.

Then the air shifted. Dozens of branches surged forward like whips, fury driving them wild and unpatterned. They tore through what remained of the hill, smashing stone, uprooting earth, shredding the red canopy as they aimed to pulverise anything in their path. Ayu slipped between the strikes in a blur. She bent backward beneath one, rolled under another, her heel snapping upward to redirect a splintering limb before it caved in her shoulder.

Bark tore across her side and drew blood, but she kept tempo, breath sharp and steady. Leonie stepped into it. Her shield rang with each impact, shock rippling through her arm. Her sword carved precise arcs through incoming wood, lightning tracing each cut as severed branches crashed in smoking halves around her boots. To the right, Pablo's new summon braced beside Imani, absorbing a descending barrage.

Wood hammered stone in explosive bursts while Imani pulled the force into himself through Guardian Star, the ground cracking beneath his boots as he bore the pressure. Still, something felt wrong. The rhythm of the battlefield had shifted. The spectral hand didn't reform. Roots no longer erupted beneath the vanguard. Unease tightened in Leonie's chest as she followed the Bride's gaze. It had moved." Chiara!" The warning pulsed outward. Too late. The ground behind them detonated upward.

Dark roots burst from the earth in a tightening spiral, thick as torsos and moving with unnatural speed. The Bride's Will saturated them, compression coiled inside each fibre as they lunged toward Chiara. She pivoted to adjust vectors. The first root struck where she had stood. The second followed a heartbeat later. The third wrapped around her waist and shoulders as the spiral completed. They slammed shut in unison. Air compacted with a resonant CRACK. Soil lifted in a ring as the ground cratered inward.

Wood groaned and twisted against wood as the roots tightened, coiling over themselves in a suffocating embrace, crushing the space at the centre of the spiral. Dust billowed upward. For a fraction of a second, it looked absolute. Then— Silver cut across the field. Cards flashed through the converging mass in straight, intersecting lines, carving clean paths through living wood. Severed roots crashed to the ground. The centre of the spiral was empty.

A controlled gust swept the dust aside and revealed Chiara several meters away, steadied lightly in the arm of a neatly dressed man whose coat lay perfectly against him despite the torn ground and falling debris. Silver-edged cards revolved around him in a slow, effortless orbit, their surfaces etched with shifting sigils that caught the stormlight and bent it into pale halos.

Currents of distorted air and layered waves flowed between the cards in quiet geometries before drawing inward and aligning into a precise stack in his hand, leaving a single card suspended at his side. Its face revealed a figure poised between heaven and earth, one hand lifted toward the unseen sky, the other lowered in composed dominion, an unbroken loop hovering above its crown.

The same silhouette shimmered faintly behind Lukas, larger and translucent, mirroring his posture as if reality had decided to frame him in its likeness. Will Manifest— —The Magician Lukas' smile widened slightly, amused and utterly at ease, as though the crushing spiral had been nothing more than a cue for him to enter the stage. Leonie stared at him as relief loosened her breath.

Unlike the others, who at least shared the essence of their Manifestations, her brother had kept his concealed behind layers of mystery, even from her. Yet, watching him now, she began to wonder whether the concealment itself was part of its design." Finally decided to move your lazy ass, brother," she sent him in a private pulse. Lukas inclined his head slightly." Timing is everything if the trick is to land, sister," he replied, glancing at her with a faint, knowing smile." Brings back memories, doesn't it?

Last time we seriously teamed up, you said it was unfair for the rest." The memory surfaced instantly, vivid and sharp, and a warm smile touched her lips." And you said it was boring."" It was," he replied calmly." In any case, let us grant this poor bride the rest she seems to crave." The private exchange lasted no more than a heartbeat. Lukas set Chiara gently on her feet. She stared at him, eyes wide, her mind racing. She had sensed the shift. Understood fragments of it. Yet the execution eluded her.

A displacement constructed from layered nodes, silver cards anchoring positions across space, Will threading between them to redirect perception and presence. The concept lay within reach.

The control required felt immeasurable." What did you do?

"she asked, unable to restrain herself." What is your Manifestation?"" Manifestation?

"Lukas tilted his head slightly, clearly amused." Which one?" Two more cards slipped from the deck and hovered beside him. The first turned. It revealed a woman gently holding open the jaws of a great lion, calm gaze meeting primal ferocity without strain. Will Manifest— —Strength Behind Imani, a towering image formed just beyond his Guardian Star. Serene yet immense, one hand rested upon a phantom beast of power, mirroring the figure in the card. As it manifested, a surge of raw power travelled through him.

Muscles thickened. Bones felt reinforced from within. The next barrage of tendrils struck, yet the shock that travelled through his frame dulled, absorbed by a body that now carried deeper reserves. Then the next card rotated into view. Upon it stood a commanding figure seated upon a stone throne, crowned and armoured, a sceptre held firm in one hand, a world resting steady in the other.

The throne was carved with rams' heads, symbols of force and dominion, and the mountains behind it rose in sharp, immovable lines. The air around the image grew heavier, structured by authority, balance, and command. Will Manifest— —The Emperor Power surged through Leonie. Her posture straightened instinctively, her presence expanding across the field. Strength consolidated instead of merely amplifying, her aura pressing outward with sovereign weight.

The battlefield itself seemed to acknowledge her claim, lines of engagement tightening under her command as if drawn into ordered formation. She understood it then, as that power coursed through her and she saw the same shift in Imani. The battlefield… had tilted. Lukas grinned.

"Time for the second act."