The sky darkened from the immense shadow of roots hurtling down at her.
Elyonari's eyes widened. There was no time to breathe.
With a gasp that seemed to stretch across the atmosphere, her body erupted into light.
From the core of her chest, glowing emerald spirals surged outward, coiling like helixes up her arms and legs. Her staff shuddered in her grasp and reshaped. The white bark cracked, its long shaft stretched and bent until it became a long, elegant bow.
"Natura Converta."
Her voice was soft and the world answered.
Suddenly, every form of mystic energy around her converged toward her. It was as if the battlefield bowed in her presence and the very laws of energy yielded to her will.
She pulled the bowstring.
There was no arrow, not at first.
But the longer she drew it back, the more the surrounding energy swirled into a single point. Green light twisted inward, forming a radiant arrow of pure green Nature Energy, trembling with power so intense the air around it started to vibrate.
She loosed it. The explosion was instant.
A piercing screech ripped across the land as the arrow tore through the massive roots, incinerating them from the inside. The explosion cracked through the vines and sent shockwaves that carved trenches into the ground below.
The Verdarite howled, shielding his chest with colossal bark-like arms as shrapnel of nature-purified light struck him. But Elyonari was already moving.
And this time, she wasn't gliding through the air. She was running, her feet tapping across summoned vines that carried her forward with momentum, never letting her stop.
Because if she stopped, she would die.
And not even her Boon of Luck would save her this time. It was already doing more than it should; guiding her steps perfectly, curving her arrows slightly and nudging her timing just enough to escape the impossible.
But this wasn't luck alone. This was skill and precision. She unleashed arrows. One, two, six, nine... then a hundred.
A new one formed every fraction of a second, each formed from the purified corrupted energy around her. The Verdarite's own power was being weaponized against him. His own crimson miasma was now the fuel for his own destruction.
That was her Ascender Form, Natura Converta. It converted any energy form, including her essence into Nature Energy on her bow for her to form arrows that cause great cataclysmic damage when released. And depending on the element she thinks of, it will be unleashed in extremely massive amounts.
She focused on Nature Energy, the strongest form she could use at the moment.
She didn't even flinch anymore.
Every time she rolled, her vines followed. Every time she leapt, her feet found purchase on leaves midair, summoned only for her to step off them. The peonies around them burned green, catching the stray wind from her attacks, the entire forest twisted in the storm of her arrows.
Still, the Verdarite endured. And now, he was bleeding.
Crimson sap dripped from his shoulder, his regenerating bark struggling to keep up with the constant barrage of arrows that she never stopped producing. She wasn't even dipping into her converted Nature Essence yet. This was just her external absorbance.
But now the Verdarite screamed.
He slammed his hands into the earth again and the entire landscape responded into spires of bark and poisoned roots exploded upward in every direction, forming a maze of death.
Elyonari dove into it without hesitation and fired, causing an extremely massive explosion.
Each time the Verdarite tried to corner her, she left behind a massive explosion of nature, purging the tainted vines with her arrows as she spun in midair, drawing again. The sky above them began to crackle with energy. The fight was warping the very environment.
Her bow shimmered as she landed briefly on the ground, taking a wide stance. Her aura flared.
The Crimson Verdarite, now desperate, hurled roots toward her faster than the eye could follow but she darted through them like a thought. Normally, not even a Third Phase Ascender, or Vastarael himself could have dodged them like she did.
Elyonari was the most agile of the Seventh Enlightenment. This was a feat that was only available to her. Unless any of the Seventh Enlightenment Students were Divine, none of them would dodge this.
And yet, even with all this, the Verdarite did not fall because he regenerated.
But something was changing. His movements were getting slower. His vines were less violent. The regeneration was delayed.
He was weakening and Elyonari knew.
One more push.
She clenched her fist and began drawing in her converted Nature Energy.
She leapt. The force of her launch shattered the branches below, ripping through the forest. The massive form of the Crimson Verdarite growled from below, his glowing red eyes narrowing as they tracked her upward, watching as her silhouette passed the canopy ceiling and shot skyward, above the trees and into open air.
And in that moment, he laughed.
"You can't dodge in midair!"
He snarled as hundreds of massive, coiling roots snapped free from the ground and surged toward her. Each one was the size of buildings moving with impossible precision
Elyonari hovered at the apex of her jump. She didn't scream. She didn't flinch. She merely sighed and poured everything she had.
Her emerald eyes glowed as she stretched her bowstring, trembling not from fear but strain. Her Nature Energy was compressed into a single, radiant point.
Her last arrow.
The energy around her surged like a broken dam. Wind twisted tighter than glass, wrapping around the arrow's growing form to carve air resistance to near zero.
Water condensed, swirling into the shaft and binding the structure. Emerald lightning crackled with divine voltage, warping the atmosphere as it bled from the nocked arrowhead. And then green fire, danced at its edge, giving the arrow its wrath and destruction.
She released it and the world was torn asunder.
A soundless shockwave exploded outward in a dome of emerald devastation, consuming the entirety of the island. The trees were annihilated and turned into nothing but spiraling motes of emerald light from purification. The arrow pierced through roots and ground, erupting at the core of the Grove's heart, the main body of the enemy.
And with it, the Island of Peony was scarred forever.
A crater was formed where the grove once stood, kilometers wide, its edges burning with green energy and glassed earth. Shockwaves traveled for miles, toppling trees, shattering distant cliffs and sending birds fleeing and clouds spiraling unnaturally above.
Elyonari, still suspended by momentum alone, coughed out blood. Her glow faded. Her essence was depleted.
She fell.
She hit the ground hard a few meters from the edge of the crater, her body rolling across blackened bark and shattered peony petals. Her hand still held her white bow, though it too had dimmed. It turned to a staff.
Groaning, she tried to stand using it, her knees buckling beneath her weight, her lips slick with red. She managed to lift herself with her staff and gasped when she looked across the ruined battlefield.
There, standing amid the fractured grove, his form half torn apart, a large chunk of his chest missing. Was the Crimson Verdarite. He still lived.
He was laughing.
"You thought you could kill me by destroying the tree? That was merely my root, girl. Since I gained this body, all my power has been inside me. I don't need the Grove anymore. I am the Grove now."
And he began to regenerate. The holes in his chest began to seal. The shattered wood of his limbs began to knit. Vines shot out, stabbing into the ground for nourishment. His power surged again.
Elyonari scoffed, forcing herself upright, even as blood trickled from her lips. Her legs shook. Her vision blurred. She couldn't summon another arrow. But still, she grinned.
"You talk too much..." she said softly.
The Verdarite narrowed his eyes.
"...because all I had to do was buy enough time."
And at that moment, the ground behind her quaked.
A burst of mixed golden and sapphire light illuminated the shattered grove.
The Crimson Verdarite was punched.
The force of the impact was so cataclysmic that it didn't just throw him across the crater. It carved a new trench, hundreds of meters long, splitting the earth as he slammed into the far wall of the destroyed forest, buried under rock and pure force.
The wind howled from the vacuum the punch left. Dust exploded outward. And there, floating above the smoldering soil, was him.
Vastarael Blossom Richinaria was a Divine now.