Chương 66: 66 Loop 2, Part 20

I turned around to check on Finn. I could tell he was in bad shape through [Wideview]. But I wasn't going to let things get worse. A fist had come out of the tree-lined wall behind Finn and caught him across the back, flattening him to the ground. But Finn was no slouch. He rolled up in a single moment, magic on his wand tip, and he cast his spell." [Ward]." The spell covered the three of us, ensuring we'd be safe for now.

"Finn, are you okay?"

"I'm fine. We need to get through this thing quickly." Another fist came down. And got pushed back by the ward. Bark flew away like splinters from the attack, but Finn's ward held.

"Can you heal yourself?"

"Not while I'm keeping this active." He gestured with his free hand. So I did what I did best. I made something weak into something powerful. I created a wind tunnel, hopefully to keep the hands and fists away, by casting [Gust] and [Enlarge]. The wind rushed down the hallway, lifting my robe over my head. And it hit about forty treants at once. But, of course, it was to no avail. Most trees were used to wind. I really needed a good night's sleep.

I'd been burning my candle at both ends, and it never had much of a wick to begin with.

"That didn't do anything."

"I noticed." I ran through a list of my spells and tricks. Oh, there were some expensive things I could try. But I didn't want to use those and fall on my face, unable to defend myself later. And then I realized something. It was right there in front of me, staring me down. What had Axe said?

'Trees are my natural prey.' And what was a treant but a walking, moving tree?

"Axe," I said quickly.

"I am listening."

"How would you like to be bigger?"

"I have never felt inadequate about my size, if that is what you are insinuating. I am a respectable bearded axe. However, I would not say no to such an opportunity." I'd never cast an enlarging spell on a person. Well, golem. And honestly, I wasn't quite sure if it would work, but I had to try. The name of the spell didn't quite make sense, other than the fact that it had the word "big" in it. But I was sure it would work out just fine." [Embiggen]." [Embiggen - Soul] Cost: 58 mana. Varies.

Embiggens the size of a body part or parts attached to a targeted soul. Variable scale. Duration: 3 hours. The thing about casting on souls was that it was just like enchantment. You had to convince the object that it needed to do what you wanted it to. And things got a bit weird when you started dealing with souls. Magic never quite reacted the way it should've. Back when I'd cast on Flag the first time, I really shouldn't have cast an enchantment, because… well, he was a soul. I didn't quite understand that then.

But thankfully, the enchantment still worked, because Flag had wanted it to. Otherwise, well, I shuddered at the wasted effort. The spell connected. And Axe grew. Not just his axe-head and his handle, but the entire golem body, his painted rock stretching out and pulling in odd directions. And then the axe-head grew. First he got larger than Finn, and then he got larger than the smallest of the treants. I stopped the spell before he got too big for the hallway. He was still floating in the air.

A sort of manic joy radiated off of him.

"Yes. Yes. Yes. This is my correct size. Behold my power." As soon as the spell was done, he just started swinging.

"Trees are my natural prey," he said as he moved to split the first tree in half. He repeated this for the next six minutes. Like someone had cast a spell and put his voice on a loop. The first treant—the tree putting a fist through Finn's ward—met with the bladed end, and the arm fell to the ground with a thunk. And then he kept swinging. Well, it was more like a spin, but the point is, the axe-head met tree after tree at chest height, and they were no more. But everything wasn't sunshine and napping.

Especially because it was still pitch-fucking-black. My marble lit about twenty feet in the hallway. And with more than a thousand feet to go, Axe was swinging his blade in a corridor he couldn't see the end of. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. But he didn't slow down just for my light. In fact, he didn't slow down for anything. He just kept spinning into the black, hitting whatever was in his way.

And who knew when, instead of a fragile tree to chop down, he'd run into stone, or solid steel, or something worse.

"Axe, wait up." I floated faster, trying to keep up with his pace.

"No." If anything, he sped up. Which I guess wasn't too much of a problem. We needed to clear the things, after all. Thankfully, we hit a part of the hallway where it widened out. But the amount of treants increased. There had to be dozens of them now. And for all the hallway's widening, there was honestly less space to maneuver. I caught up and floated with my hand out, my marble hovering just behind him. This was my kind of work. And it was perhaps the most important of all.

"Finn, are you seeing this? I'm carrying this entire operation with my spells. What are you bringing?"

"Dude. You're holding a marble. Your contribution to this battle is almost zero." An unearthly scream sounded down the hall. Every treant made the same sound as its reign of evil came to a sudden, violent end. But he didn't stop. The tree nearest us was cut apart at chest height. The top of it went over sideways and hit the far wall, and the fists just vanished into nothingness. Around the second or third wave of trees, they started figuring out that their piddly little fists weren't working at all.

So they changed tactics. Roots came up through the stone ground, thick as my legs, and they started trying to drag us down. I dodged into the air and watched Axe do the same. It was almost sad that their last ditch attempt to beat us was so easily handled by just floating above the fray.

"They have learned," he said.

"But it will not help. It is only a matter of time before they flee." And then, right on cue, a few of the trees did. They jumped out of the edge of my light and then bolted into the stone tile, like a puddle down a drain. I wasn't quite sure what I was actually seeing. Axe moved up the hallway. More trees came out of the woodwork—heh—and kept trying to attack us, but every time a new one appeared, Axe got there first. The fist or root would try to wrap around him, and he'd just spin and cut it in half.

"Death. Mayhem. Splinters. I am the bane of arboreal kind." And then he took it a step further. I want to be specific about this, because I still don't believe it happened. He climbed up onto a pile of tree stumps with his arms straight up over him, sap forming a crown around his axe-head. And he cackled. Or at least he was trying to cackle. It worked, because [Subtitle] picked it up as actual laughter. (Maniacal laughter) "Die, trees. Die."

"You don't have to narrate," Finn said.

"Why? I want to narrate. Die, trees. Die." He continued trying to laugh.

"Dude, they're dead."

"Yes. I am happy. Dead, dead, dead." Finn dropped his ward now that the trees around us were all gone. He started casting his own healing magic on himself.

"I want it on the record that this was my idea," I said. Neither of them rose to my bait. We followed Axe up the rest of the hallway at what I would've considered a safe distance. When we reached the end, he went up and down the whole hallway twice, double checking that there weren't any more trees for him to slaughter. Despite my nap, recasting [Float], [Embiggen], [Gust], and [Enlarge] had eaten a little bit away from my mana. I could feel my channels practically screaming out for a break.

I had no idea how any mage managed to stay in the green throughout an entire dungeon, especially with the high-cost spells most mages threw around. I was going to need another nap. By the time we came out onto the balcony, there was a river of sap running the whole way back to the first room.

"I have chopped 217 trees," Axe said.

"But there were 240. I don't know where the cowards be.""'Where the cowards be'?" I asked Axe, but he didn't respond. Finn though gave me an odd look.

"Why the fuck is he talking like that?" I shrugged at his question, but he kept on.

"I'm so tired of this, man. Why is my golem so weird?"

"Aww, let him be," I said.

"He saved us a lot of work, Finn. You'd think you'd be more appreciative."

"He counted them."

"So what? He counts things. This isn't exactly new behavior."

"Laz. He counted 240 trees on the way in, and he killed 217 of them. And the only thing he has said since is that he's upset about the 21 he missed."

"23. I would like to find them." I was beginning to think I had made a terrible mistake. Defending Axe was starting to be actual work. But I didn't make mistakes. Just happy accidents. And I was very happy with this one, despite his rather questionable moments on occasion. I closed the door behind us and looked out onto the balcony. From below, it had seemed like a canopy built out of trees. But now I could see it was a real balcony, complete with a stone rail camouflaged to look like a treetop. And then I saw it.

My beautiful, wonderful chair. I practically ran through the air, jumping for joy.

"My chair. My chair. Oh, how I missed you." I grabbed the top of it in a bear hug. I'd only been without it for at most thirty minutes, and, well, I never wanted to experience that again. It had been the worst thirty minutes of my life. I was so happy to see my chair. I canceled [Float] on my robes and settled comfortably into the chair. I leaned back and sighed contentedly.

"You know, the doors up here are going to be locked. Both of them," I said as Finn started to get serious about investigating the canopy.

"That's how this room's gonna work. They gave us one path, we cleared it, and now they get to charge us for arriving. I'd bet my entire mana pool on it." Finn had mostly ignored me, and instead went straight for the next balcony door. But as his hand touched it, chains descended from the doorframe and locked the door.

"What the fuck?" Through [Wideview], I saw the exact same thing happen on the other side, and we were now locked upstairs. And what did I want to bet that the barrier was still on the balcony? Only one way to find out. I floated in my chair towards the balcony and put my hand through the space. But the damn thing was gone. That was when I also noticed the chains were now on the two doors downstairs as well.

"Well, that's new," I said.

"What's new?" Finn replied.

"Oh, the downstairs doors are locked, too. I'm sure it's just another puzzle designed to waste our time. And effort." And then it happened. A rumbling noise sounded off in the distance, as if a drumline had struck up a beat. When the drums built to a crescendo, a trap door opened in the poisoned sky. A monster literally descended from the heavens. We had our first boss fight.

"What the fuck is that thing?" Finn yelled.