Chương 488: Chapter 489: The Root of the Problem (3)

Another week passed by, as we continued to travel towards the gap in reality. Things remained disturbingly quiet and easy for us. We didn't encounter any new threats or dangers, and even the rat nests that had previously dotted our path forward started to disappear. That, more than anything else, set alarm bells ringing inside of my head.

Based on our understanding of the rats, they were meant to serve as a plague that destroyed everything in their path, before self-destructing due to lack of resources - but it shouldn't take a matter of weeks for them to finish razing everything to the ground. Furthemore, the places we travelled through still had signs of interference from the rats, such as depleted resources, abandoned rat nests, and large patches of ruined land where the rats had clearly overforaged and decimated the environment.

However, there were no rats. My friends and I suspected that this was because the universal tree was preparing something big. Perhaps the rats were all being used as sacrificial fuel for some kind of magic ritual, or perhaps they were conserving their strength for one massive battle near the roots of the universal tree - or perhaps the rats were absent for some other reason.

The Universal Tree could very well have decided that the rats weren't inflicting enough casualties on our side to bother sending them, and thus removed them from our path to avoid feeding us any free levels. That would be even more catastrophic, since I was very close to my fourth spark, but the universal tree was now actively denying me the chance to get my last few levels in a timely manner and get my compound spark.

Regardless of the reason the universal tree had removed the rats from our path, something had clearly changed. When an enemy took actions we didn't understand, it was typically because they had a grand plan that we had failed to uncover. That was never a good thing. Still, there wasn't much we could do but keep moving forward. Now that things had come down to this, even if we weren't sure what would happen once the universal tree's roots finished invading our world, we were all sure it would be bad.

Halfway through our third week of travelling through enemy territory, my worst fears came true. In the distance, I suddenly noticed a group of powerful souls appear, right at the edge of my vision. Each one had life force nearly comparable to one of the giant moths - and each moth had required multiple minutes of concentrated spells from an entire village-bearing beast to bring down.

There had been four of them, and if things had gone slightly differently during that battle, our entire alliance might have been wiped out. The group of souls at the edge of my vision was far larger than four. There were at least twenty, and probably more than thirty. Worse, they were moving fast - so fast that I had a hard time counting them, because they were zipping towards us at such high speeds. They clearly already knew where we were - and they were coming for us.

By the time they reached the halfway mark, I felt my stomach lurch as something broke space. To our south, a massive portal suddenly opened, before rats started pouring out of it. Several of the rats had some kind of unusual characteristic to their souls. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them - they didn't look like they had more life force than usual.

However, if regular souls looked like little colored balls of light, the souls of these unusual rats seemed more erratic - almost like they were candles flickering in the wind, instead of little glowing balls of incandescence. After seeing the two groups of enemies charging towards us, I immediately blasted the loudest warning I could into my friend's minds through the communication bracelet, along with shared images of what I was seeing.

At the same time, I dashed towards the [Sound Mage], while screaming "Enemy attack! Coming from the north and south!" at the top of my lungs. The [Sound Mage] dashed out of his house with a grave expression as I got closer. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"How many? How dangerous?"

"There are somewhere between twenty and forty enemies coming from the north. Each of them should be as strong as the wooden butterflies we fought over a week ago. Coming from the south is a giant horde of rats - there are hundreds of them, and more are coming out of the portal every second. Some of them seem weird, as well - but I don't know what's wrong with them. The enemy must have done something to them."

"Got it. I'll send messages to the other towns immediately. Stay nearby and alert me if you see anything else," said the [Sound Mage].

"Do you have any ideas what their abilities might -" I never got to figure out what the rest of the [Sound Mage]'s sentence was, because a moment later, I felt a ripple in space, before a golden beam of light tore through reality and punched through the man's head, before it also tore through my own chest and left a fist-sized hole where my lungs were. I tried to take in a panicked gasp of air, but my nonexistent lungs failed to cooperate.

I immediately slammed a burst of healing magic into my body and forced my lungs to regrow, before I sucked in a greedy gulp of air. Then, I stared at the corpse in front of me. His soul was already completely untethered from his body. There was nothing I could do to help him now. And with him dead, there was no way to contact our allies from the other towns, either - communication had nearly instantly broken down.

I turned behind me, and realized that the beam of light that had nearly killed me hadn't just targeted me - there was also a conspicuous hole in the village-bearing beast, although it had survived the blast and was still running, albeit at a slower pace than before. I narrowed my eyes at the dozens of powerful souls running towards us. How had they known which Mage was responsible for maintaining communications between our village-bearing beasts? It didn't matter. Either way, communication had already broken down.

The ripples of essence in our surroundings let me confirm the one who had killed the communications mage - a man that had basalt-grey skin, orange eyes, and teeth that were as sharp as the fangs of a wolf. It seemed as if he knew that I was looking at him - the moment my eyes settled on him, he looked in my direction and smiled. his eyes gleamed with predatory light, and a moment later, he pointed at me.

I threw myself to the ground right before another beam of light tore through the spot my head had been a moment ago. I shivered. If that beam of light had hit me, I would have needed to rely on my eldritch concept of hope to rebuild a new physical body. Nothing less than that would have allowed me to survive such a direct attack. The man didn't seem to notice my survival, or perhaps he simply didn't care. Instead, he turned to one of the other village-bearing beasts, and fired another beam of light at it.

I glanced at the man's life force, and felt my stomach churn with despair. He had nearly grade 35 life force. There was no way I could take him down alone - a single mage's mana pool probably wouldn't even make a big dent in his life force. Before I could even decide on a plan of action, I saw a row of shields lock in place between the man and our village bearing beasts. I experimentally probed at it, and then realized that the space inside of those barriers had become incredibly solid.

It was like trying to tunnel through steel - my attempt to open a portal and sneak in a few icicles amounted to nothing, because I couldn't even open a portal inside of that barrier. A moment later, the horde of rats from our south finally arrived. I watched in horror as one of the 'strange' rats reached a village-bearing-beast, and then burst into a pustule of rotting essence the moment it touched the massive mount.

The burst of rotten, disgusting essence wormed its way into the village-bearing-beast's body like a parasite, constantly tunneling towards the beast's heart as it staggered and groaned in pain. I used a burst of healing magic to keep that village-bearing-beast alive, but while I could keep one village bearing beast alive, nearly a dozen more plague rats were already nearly upon us.

Meanwhile, from the group of high life force enemies, a wave of fireballs, lightning bolts, and waves of violent, twisting vines and plants shot out. In moments, they began crashing against the village bearing beasts and towns of our village, wreaking destruction and havoc on a scale that even the previous wooden butterflies hadn't managed. As I saw the wave of magical and monstrous attacks, I realized that this fight wasn't a probing attack, or a manageable battle. The enemy meant for us to stay here permanently.