The deeper they traveled into the Grove, the more the world seemed to conspire in their favor. It was a deeply unsettling kindness. The grasping, thorny vines that had choked the periphery began to recede, revealing a path that was unnaturally clear.
The air, still thick with its aphrodisiacal poison, was no longer just an irritant; it was a soft, cloying fog that seemed to dull the edges of their perception, making the world feel hazy and dreamlike. The scent of honey and nectar grew stronger, a sweet, promising aroma that suggested life and sanctuary ahead.
Kestrel's earlier words echoed in their minds. A day, maybe two, to the fort. This clear path felt like a blessing, a sign that they were making good time. Even Damask, his tactical mind fighting against the gentle, magical stupor, allowed himself a flicker of hope. They were on track. They would make it.
The trail opened into a hidden valley, and the pride's collective breath caught in their throats. The dreamlike haze shattered, replaced by a cold, stark reality. This was not the path to the fort. The Grove's illusion had parted for them, revealing a place that should not exist, a place that no patrol from the nearby fort had ever seen. They were hopelessly, terrifyingly lost.
Before them stood a massive, ruined pleasure temple, its marble columns choked with blood-red flowers, its shattered mosaics depicting scenes of ecstatic, forgotten rituals. The air here was thickest, almost liquid with the scent of corruption and ecstasy. And in the center of the ruins, she sat upon a throne of petrified wood and bone.
The Grove Mother.
She was a tragic, monstrous figure, a being of immense power and profound sadness. Her body was a mountain of corrupted flesh and bark, her multiple, weaponized phalluses lying dormant at her sides. And around her, her court of Hollowed drifted with a silent, boneless grace, their vacant eyes fixed on their queen.
Then, the Grove Mother locked eyes with Damask and Petunia.
A low, mournful rumble echoed from its core, but the sound was a psychic shockwave, a wave of pure information that washed over the pride. In that instant, every member felt the Grove Mother's power. They didn't just see a monster; they experienced its very essence—a vast, ancient, and impossibly complex consciousness. They felt the fluid, alchemical nature of its mana, and Kestrel and Milky exchanged a look of pure, cold horror. Refined Liquid, the thought passed between them, a silent admission that they were utterly, hopelessly outclassed.
But the wave carried a second, more intimate message, aimed only at Damask. He felt the Grove Mother's consciousness "taste" his own nascent power, and the classification came back with a cold, cosmic amusement that echoed in the depths of his soul: Crescent-Stage Raw Solid. Tier 2. Then, he felt her power wash over him, a psychic declaration of its own immense stature: Full-Stage Refined Liquid. Tier 25. The psychic image was not of a battle, but of his small, solid shard sinking into that endless, gentle ocean, with the clear, terrifying promise that he would not be broken, but lovingly, completely, dissolved.
"Kestrel, Lyra, front line!" Damask's voice was a raw bark, stripped of its mana but sharp with desperation. "Sows, defensive formation! Petunia, to me!"
The Hollowed swarmed them.
The battle was a slaughter from the first moment. The sound of Kestrel's blades hitting the Hollowed wasn't the clean ring of steel on flesh, but a sickening, wet crunch, like hacking through a petrified log that was still weeping sap. Lyra's hand-to-hand combat was a fool's errand; every joint lock risked a touch from the viscous, corrupting slime that coated their bodies.
Milky's shimmering green barrier, a respectable Raw Solid-grade spell, shattered into a million pieces against the passive Liquid-mana aura of the Hollowed before it had even fully formed. "I can't hold it!" she screamed in shock. Marigold's vines erupted from the temple floor, but they were weak and brittle, torn apart by the Hollowed with contemptuous ease.
Damask could only watch, a frantic tactician whose every command was a desperate attempt to plug the holes in a rapidly sinking ship. He saw Lyra's flank begin to buckle, saw Marigold's face pale with the effort of her failing magic. He was a general with no army, his voice the only weapon he had, and it was not enough.
Seeing her "children" toying with the intruders, the Grove Mother attacked directly. One of its massive phalluses whipped out like a battering ram, not even aimed at a person, but at the ground nearby. The shockwave alone sent the entire pride flying. Another phallus sprayed a jet of corrosive, acidic seed. Lyra, reacting on pure instinct, shoved Kestrel out of the way, but took a glancing hit on her arm. The Refined Liquid-grade attack sizzled and burned through her armor, and she let out a sharp cry of pain as her flesh dissolved beneath it, a grievous injury far beyond what a Sow at their level could heal.
The pride's formation was completely broken. They were scattered, wounded, and demoralized.
Then, the Grove Mother focused its attention. It saw Damask, the potential new Dom, and Petunia, the perfect new Fem. It unleashed its most devastating attack: a single, massive, barbed phallus plunged from its core, aimed directly at Damask and Petunia. Kestrel and Lyra were pinned, occupied fending off two other phallic appendages, unable to intercept.
Time seemed to slow. The barbed cock descended, a promise of certain, agonizing death.
"NO!" Milky screamed, a sound of pure, primal fury. In a single, desperate motion, she crushed the Ashford Seal she had kept hidden. The artifact exploded in a blinding flash of jade light. A wave of pure, defensive energy erupted from her, slamming into the descending phallus with a deafening crack. The Grove Mother's attack was deflected, carving a massive trench in the temple floor just inches from where Damask and Petunia stood.
The air crackled with the after-effects of the artifact's power. For a precious second, the Grove Mother was stunned, its attack thwarted. The defensive energy, its first purpose served, did not dissipate. Instead, the residual jade light began to coalesce, twisting the air into a shimmering, unstable portal of escape. The Grove Mother began to stir, preparing a second, equally fatal strike.
Damask watched in horror, his mind fracturing. He saw Milky, her face a mask of desperate sacrifice, now drained and vulnerable. He saw his Bitches, still pinned and about to be overwhelmed. His flawed, desperate instinct took over. He grabbed Petunia, his only thought to shove the Fem through the portal, to save the one piece of his pride he could still protect.
But as he moved, a sharp, kinetic force slammed into his back—not an attack, but a hard, deliberate shove that sent them both stumbling towards the light. It was Kestrel. Even pinned, her eyes locked with his, her expression a mask of grim, tactical fury. Her final act as First Blade was not just to save her Dom, but to preserve the very heart of the pride. A Dom without his Fem was a king without a kingdom, an engine without its core. To send Petunia alone was a death sentence; to keep Damask without him was to cripple any chance of their future. With that single, desperate shove, Kestrel made the only choice that mattered, ensuring that wherever they went, they went together.
The Grove Mother roared in fury, its primary targets stolen away. The sudden void where Damask and Petunia had been was a gaping wound in the heart of the pride. For a single, stunned moment, the four remaining members felt a complex wave of emotions wash over them. There was the raw terror of being left to face this monster alone, a sharp, metallic tang of agitation in the air. But beneath it, there was a deep, grim, and unifying sense of relief. Milky's artifact had worked. Their Dom was safe. Their purpose, however suicidal, was now brutally simple: survive.
The Grove Mother's rage was not just that of a thwarted predator, but of a mother whose potential children have been ripped from her grasp. Robbed of its prize, its rage turned its attack from physical to psychological. It unleashed its ultimate weapon.
The air itself seemed to swell and then release in a single, massive, wet exhalation. The sound was obscene, a psychic rupture that was both intimate and terrifying, the sound of a million souls climaxing and dying in the same instant. A Psychic Spore Burst.
A massive, invisible wave of pure, chaotic, carnal mana washed over the remaining four pridemates.
The spore burst found the seed of ambition in Milky's soul and twisted it into a possessive, hostile paranoia. Her eyes began to glow with a corrupted, alien light. Her nurturing instincts were perverted into a desire to "protect" the pride's remaining assets by subduing them. She turned, not with a conscious betrayal, but as a puppet of the Grove Mother, and unleashed a blast of raw mana at the Bitches.
Kestrel's mind, already reeling from the psychic assault, was flooded with a white-hot rage. Treachery. The thought was a razor blade in her skull. Her body moved on pure instinct, her blades coming up to parry Milky's attack in a shower of green and silver sparks. But as their mana clashed, her sharp, tactical mind registered the alien signature woven into the attack. This wasn't Milky's ambition; it was a violation. It was mind control. "She's compromised!" Kestrel roared, her voice cutting through the chaos. "Marigold, get her out of here! That's an order!"
Marigold was frozen, her mind a battleground of conflicting duties. Her every instinct as a Sow screamed at her to stay, to heal. But the hard, unyielding command of her First Blade was a physical force. Torn between her nature and her duty, she obeyed. The raw emotion of the moment triggered something deep within her. A power that was not the gentle nurturing of the Ivy Court, but something darker, thornier, more possessive. The power of Belladonna's gift. My birthright, a voice whispered in her soul, the voice of the Nightshade clan. It felt terrifying. It felt right. A massive eruption of grasping, thorny vines exploded from the ground, not just to create a path, but to physically ensnare the still-struggling, mind-controlled Milky, cocooning her in a cage of living thorns and dragging them both into a dark, maze-like corridor of the temple ruins.
At the same time, the Grove Mother, sensing the escape, brought another massive phallus crashing down, aimed directly at the now-exposed Kestrel. Lyra saw it coming. Her own mind was a storm of feral rage from the spore burst, but seeing her First Blade, her rival, about to be annihilated, her latent SteelClaw power flared to life. Her "witch-sight" ignited, the world dissolving into a tapestry of flowing mana.
"Kestrel, move!" she screamed, but Kestrel was already bracing for the impact, ready to sell her life to buy the Sows a few more seconds. It was a First Blade's sacrifice. And Lyra would not allow it.
Moving with a new, terrifying speed, she didn't tackle Kestrel. She moved like a bodyguard, a blur of motion that threw her own body in front of her First Blade, a living shield against the coming blow. She met the descending phallus not with a weapon, but with her own ruined arm—the one already dissolving from the Grove Mother's seed. In a moment of pure, feral calculus, she chose to sacrifice the part to save the whole.
There was a wet, sickening sound as the massive appendage connected. The arm, already ravaged, was violently ripped from its socket, a spray of black ichor and corrupted blood marking the point of impact. But the Grove Mother's attack did not end there.
Lyra didn't scream. She didn't have time. Even as she was thrown back by the force of the blow, her eyes burned with a cold, furious light. She snarled a single, guttural word in the SteelClaw tongue—a command. A final act of defiance.
The severed arm, still airborne, began to glow with a furious, unstable light. The nascent Solid Mana within it, the last dregs of Lyra's power, went critical. With a deafening crack, the limb detonated, a concussive blast of pure kinetic force and blinding light that tore through the temple. The explosion threw the Grove Mother back, momentarily stunning it, and provided the perfect, chaotic cover for their escape.
Lyra, one-armed and bleeding profusely, used her remaining good arm to grab her stunned First Blade. "Come on!" she roared, dragging her still-protesting rival down a different, collapsing hallway as the temple began to crumble around them.
The pride was shattered. The four remaining members were violently separated into their caste-pairings, thrown into the treacherous, maze-like ruins of the temple. They were lost, isolated, and their deepest instincts and conflicts have been amplified to a dangerous degree. Their exile had truly begun.