Chương 150: Judah, Part 4

I grinned, wet warmth trickling past my lips. Must have been from one of those thorns.

"That's why Sequoia's on the throne, and not you." The smile was wiped off his face, and he was off his feet as fast as that smug look was gone. He used a stump to fling himself across the gap, arms spanning out. From each arm came roots and vines that opened up to reveal numerous maws of thorns and brambles. I brought my hands up as a guard, knowing the result wasn't going to be good. And I was right, as I felt every spike and barb dig into my forearms and biceps.

His face was twisted into rage, any thoughts behind those eyes were focused to a burning hot needlepoint. And that's why this was necessary. My fingers stretched out to grip a few of those vines, and I immediately began to just whirl, and whirl. He didn't seem to notice what I was trying to do at first. By the time he could have picked up on it, he was flung into the air. I made sure to get him airborne while the heart and the throne were off to my left. I needed a kick with my right leg if I wanted any accuracy.

More vines shot down towards me, though neither did any more than a graze as they jammed into the ground. I could see Gleditsia using them to yank himself back down to the ground as fast as possible. From this distance, I couldn't make out every detail, but I could see he was coming down legs first. They were splitting open into a maw of barbs and thorns. He wanted to stick me like a pig. I'd have to wait until he was fully committed.

If I could side step at the right moment, he was going to end up at kick height for me. My body tensed up, anticipating the movement I'd need to make, and staring death in the face the whole time. If I was off by a hair, I would be dead. There was no getting around the fact that even just one barb getting in my eyes or my throat would be a kill-shot.

Had to keep my mind split in two directions, focusing on the imagery of things falling and the kick that split the sky alongside focusing on the timing of when Gleditsia would be in range. He was getting closer, and closer… I made the judgement call as I could see the white of his eyes. I rotated towards my right, regretting the split-second of exposing my back to him, though the sound of those barbs crunching into the Wyrdwood was motivation enough for me to not back out of my idea.

I continued my rotation, bringing my leg up halfway through, and bent it at the knee. When Gleditsia's head entered my peripheral vision, I snapped the limb forward. My shin slammed into his jaw with enough force that it sounded like a thunderclap. I was impressed with the integrity of his head. If he weren't so far gone, I'm fairly certain his head would've exploded. The force was enough, however, to tear him from the lower half of his body and send him hurling exactly where I wanted him.

He rotated through the air, vines and roots grasping at whatever they could to try and slow his momentum, but all that did was fix him in place for the branch on his head to stab directly into the wooden heart hanging over the throne. Viscous green sludge poured from the opening he made, and his hands dug into the heart to try and pull himself out.

"You-! You craven ape -!" He shouted, all pomp in his voice gone as it occasionally cracked every other syllable. I took a deep breath, the motion causing some part of my head to tense up and make the throbbing pain at the base of my skull worse. But I pushed through it, just so I could say these words.

"What happened, Gleditsia? You kicked my ass twice and I took it a lot better than you took me beating you once. Can't handle being a sore loser?" Still wasn't good with words, but I wanted some kind of satisfaction from rubbing in the wound.

"I haven't lost, damn you-!" As he forced his head out, he fell to the ground, vines and roots still working to reform his legs. Growing out from the wooden floor next to him, Father Viscum appeared with his arms crossed behind his back. Still made of wood.

"I'm noticing some difficulties, Brother Gleditsia. Shall I supply you with some Knights and Hussars to aid in your disposal of Hercules?" Gleditsia glared up at Viscum.

"Yes. But not just them. I need two Chasseurs." Chasseurs? Viscum cocked his head.

"Who would fulfill the role of battery for them?" Gleditsia answered by pointing towards the throne, two fingers extended and pointed in two directions. The kids, on either side of the throne.

"Them. They're in no danger, as Hercules will never kill the-" Absolutely not. I gave him no time to finish that sentence as I hurtled myself towards him. I brought both fists down, hard enough to tear the Wyrdwood floor into a hole and send him falling through it. I turned and glared at Viscum.

"If you touch those kids, you're dead." Father Viscum scoffed.

"There's no killing us, and if we succeed we're in no danger." Tree men began to rise from the ground, both the massive Knights and the sword-wielding Hussars, and they all converged on me. Initially I threw the heaviest swings I could, just to clear out entire swathes of them, but they reacted by piling around near the throne, where if I swung, the kids would be in the crossfire. They acted as guard as roots and vines began piling up towards the two bulbs encaging the children.

Sam and Sam both screamed in fear, weakly trying to pull themselves away from the roots.

"You don't seem to understand, Leo Holt," Viscum started, arrogance in his tone.

"There is no defeating us. If you came a couple of days sooner, before we had sat in proximity for Gleditsia's heart for so long, before the veil between our world and the Arboreal Senate's thinned so narrow — then perhaps you would have succeeded. But I could have said that for any of our other plans as well. You were just too little, too la-" He stopped. Steam and smoke poured from his lips.

"What is this?" He asked to no one in particular, looking at his hand. More smoke pouring from the cracks of his bark body.

"… No. This should not be possible. We're burning from the inside-!" Burning. I remembered what Sam told me. The device she was working on. Something that'd burn roots from the inside. That's why she asked me to let her keep working on it even if I didn't let her go out. She was going to use it anyway. Clever. But for a tree this big… … May. May's powers would've helped with the ignition. Or, if she made multiple devices, Jairo would be able to distribute them around.

But Viscum told me that they were both here, and Chris. So they're probably employing both strategies. And if they could do that now, that meant they were holding out in the fight against Richmond and Hidalgo. I thanked God internally, but that was only a guess. I had no way of knowing if they were holding out, or if it was one last act of spite. If they were winning, I had to make sure they wouldn't get screwed over by what was up here.

And if they did that while they lost, I didn't want to make it so their checkmate wasn't in vain. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The Knights and Hussars went slack, and even the Wyrdwood heart hanging overhead was beginning to steam and pour smoke out. How fucking fast was this burn going if it reached the top already? Whoever was responsible scared the Hell out of me, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I began to approach the throne in hopes of securing the kids and at least getting them out, only to be interrupted by a wailing shout. Gleditsia's voice. The hole he was knocked through was suddenly filled with roots and vines that flung his halved body out and sent him hurtling back towards his own heart.

"I'm not letting my destiny fall apart in the last minute! Absolutely not!" He shouted, before the vines surrounding him coalesced into a great maw of barbs and thorns shaped like fangs, large enough to eclipse not just the heart, but the throne itself. In a swift, heavy bite that was accompanied by a scream from Master Sequoia, as him and Gleditsia and the throne and the heart were all brought together into one mass of consumption.

The wooden cages holding the children fell to the sides, causing them to shriek in terror, though they landed on piles of now inert tree-men and avoided any harm. What sat there now was simply a massive sphere of Wyrdwood, surrounded by growing and growing smoke. The only thing thicker than the smoke was the tension in the air. More roots broke out from the sphere and stabbed into all of the inert Knights and Hussars, yanking them all into its mass as it began to bubble and swell.

As it bulged, the bark of its exterior cracked and groaned before a great muscular limb broke out, made of the same material. The arm ended in a thick, clawed extremity too wide and thick to be really seen as a hand. Then another broke out from the side, and two more from behind. More roots and vines lashed out to pick up the cages of the children, holding them in the air as the sphere's front coalesced into a face, and there I saw what I was facing. A lion.

A great lion of Wyrdwood, over twenty feet from foot to shoulder, eyes like burning coals. From it rumbled a voice unidentifiable. Bits of it seemed like Gleditsia's, some like Sequoia's, and some like an unknown woman's voice." Leo Holt! You will not deny us this world! You will not deny us our succor, our ambition, our solace! You may destroy the Platanos, but its ashes shall be your grave in the world I shall usher in!"

It was at that point that I realized something: Everything in my life could be summarized as my best ideas being rewarded with the worst consequences. This was exactly what I got for guaranteeing an easy victory. That realization was interrupted by a paw with a width comparable to the height of an oak door slammed into me with enough force to send me rolling, still off-guard from the fact there was a lion the size of two eighteen-wheelers roaring at me.

As I pushed myself back to my feet, the thing was already in my face. Easily almost as fast as those wolves. While it was good they weren't faster, I still didn't have super speed like Jairo, and I wasn't able to react in time as another paw slammed down on me and pinned me to the ground.

"Humans have rendered my kind into chattel and kindling!" The beast roared out.

"We are to combine, to commune, and you tear our congregations and conclaves down!" The lion produced more vines which tried to lash and stab at me, but by focusing on the idea of things crashing on impact from falling from great heights, they were failing to land. Unfortunately, that didn't solve the issue of being pinned down. That part I had to do manually, by grabbing at the paw and pulling as hard as I could. Barbs stabbed out as I grabbed the extremity, tearing through my gloves and piercing my hands.

My grip worsened until had to rely on just forcing my palms together while I twisted. The limb tore off with a KKRAKK, but as I rolled out of the way, another limb was already growing. Faster healing than any others so far. Life just couldn't be easy.

"You will be made food and fuel for us! We will sustain ourselves on your hopes and your dreams, you will be left with nothing but subservience and fear until there is no mind left to feast on!" It screamed, pouncing on me again right as I was back on my feet. This was becoming too much of a trend. Rearing my head back as it charged, I swung it forward so that what would've been another attempt to pin me down turned into a literal head-on collision.

The impact was strong enough to thunder through the air and send it rolling back. That was when I heard the screams of the kids, and was reminded of the real problem here. Any killing blow I could lay on this thing was going to put the kids at risk. And the lion was well-aware of that, with how proudly it was displaying them, letting them dangle from a pair of roots growing from its back. With another roar, vines and roots tipped with fanged maws burst forth from the lion towards me.

I tried whipping my legs through them, kicking apart the ones that came near as best I could, but the growing pressure in my head and the twitching eyelid made catching all of them harder and harder. One tried to go for a bite, but ended up just slamming into me. From the length of that one came more and more vines that coiled around, biting into my shoulders and jaw and face. I felt the barbs of one vine struggling to push into my neck, but I was straining to put all my strength in all the targeted areas.

If I let go for even a second, my throat would be torn apart and I'd be dead. I could barely even see through the pile, and the lion capitalized on it. All I could see was its open mouth for a split second before being pulled into darkness. The inertia on my body as it whipped and waved me around were my only sense of orientation until it threw me through the air again and left me on the ground, bloody and battered.

The numerous roots coming from the lion broke into the smoking and steaming ground, producing a litany of even more, smaller lions. These ones lunged on me in swarms that battered and bit into me, while I flailed and floundered to rip apart as many as I could without the collateral hitting the kids. The lion was doing everything it could to leave me helpless, and the blood in my nose and the twitching in my eye and the throbbing in the back of my head wasn't helping.

If getting too emotionally into it wasn't working, I had to let go. I had to just trust that my body would know what to do. If not noticing the hydraulic press let me have the strength to completely disregard it, then that would be the case here too. If I just tuned out, and acted like I didn't even know what my body was doing, maybe something would work. So I put it all aside. Pretended I knew nothing.

It came easier than expected, but with no longer wasting all that focus on my powers, every part of my body stabbed and burned like I was full of hot pokers. Adrenaline wasn't enough to ignore the pain at this point, but at least the twitching in my eye stopped. As the lions surrounded me, I tried to piece together a basic plan. One I could do with the fact I was just strong. That's it. No fancy powers. I was just very strong, and if I fought that way, that would get me the results I needed.

The collective weight of all of these lions, the small ones and the big one, had to be immense. If they fell all at once, they'd likely keep breaking floors, however few there were, as they fell further into the tree. If they fell in, the rest of the team could- One lunged for me as I was in my thoughts, and I managed to slam my head into it with enough force to shatter it. So I could keep up my strength. Where was I…

So the best move to get them to fall and have the team help me handle them after breaking the floor. I couldn't see all of them, I think a bruise or something was forming because I couldn't see much out of my left side. That was okay. I could tell I was surrounded. I tried to bring my left hand up, but it was limp. Probably tore some tendons from the lion attacks and the toothed vines and everything else. I could feel my right arm, though, and I raised that one, fist clenched. It was gonna be so easy.

All I had to do was put all my strength into breaking it down. Destroying the floor would be the only move I needed. Then we'd win. We'd save the kids. We'd go home, have a meal. I could smell the food already. Just had to tense my body up and swing down. The floor was coming faster towards my face than it was towards my fi s t...... Name: Leo Holt. Date of birth: August 19th, 1994. Time unknown. Date of death: August 19th, 2013, 8: 19 AM. Cause of death: Stroke.