Like glass, the barrier shattered.
Ezra and Asheras weren't shaken by the fact itself, but by the way it had splintered, like something inside had pushed outward, hastening the collapse.
The ents surged forward, slamming against the ruins of the shield, trunks pounding the earth in brutal cadence. Each one looked larger than those they had faced before: bodies more twisted, bark blacker, and veins glowing with hues of violet and blue, as though corrupted blood ran beneath the living wood.
"How...?" Ezra muttered, struggling to his feet.
He grabbed the satchel Asheras had prepared and, in one quick motion, slid the pistol into the makeshift holster at his waist. His fingers trembled, though he fought to steady them.
"Look up." Mazzareth's voice was low, but weighty, his hand rising to point toward the upper reach of the dome, toward the trunk of a colossal tree.
Ezra followed the gesture. His heart nearly stopped.
High above, One-Eye stood unmoving, and beside him rested an ent no taller than a man's arm, a sapling, a spawn. But it wasn't like the others. Its bark was pale, almost white, and the leaves sprouting from its branches burned in shades of crimson, like flames caught in living wood.
"Insane..." Ezra could barely think, the words breaking loose between clenched teeth, his mind stumbling to grasp what he was seeing. "They've lost their minds... Who in their right mind would dare lay hands on the spawn of a Natural Disaster?"
The sound came again—DOOON! DOOON!—louder now, harsher, like the very heart of the forest was beating against them. The earth trembled, cracking with hairline fissures. Then came silence. A dreadful, suffocating pause before the next impact.
TAP!
The sting of the slap burned hot across Ezra's pale cheek, a red mark blooming where Asheras's hand had struck. He blinked, dazed, his gaze momentarily lost.
"FOCUS!" Her voice cut the air like a blade. Her eyes flashed, her short, uneven breath betraying fear smothered by sheer stubbornness. "Screw whatever they did, worry about staying alive first!"
She spun on her heel without waiting for a reply, sprinting in the opposite direction of the ents' charge. The hook at her belt clattered with every step, jangling like broken bells. Without looking back, she shouted: "Don't ruin the plan!"
For a moment, Ezra stood frozen, as though the slap had pinned his very soul in place. Sweat ran down his temple, mingling with the dust shaken loose by the trembling earth. Then, drawing a sharp breath, he clenched his jaw and turned, running the opposite way from Asheras.
His hand dove into the satchel. Fingers closed around a rounded object, smooth and cold, bound in ribbons that writhed like serpents around it. A small cavity at the top seemed to call to him, like the breath of a weapon waiting to be fired.
"I know... I know..." he murmured, lips dry and barely moving.
He dashed toward the section of the barrier where the ents' assault was most violent. "I'm an expert at surv—"
THUD... THUD... SHRRRHHHHK…
The sound of massive, root-dragging steps rumbled through the air, heavy and uneven, mixed with a harsh scraping, like branches grinding against stone. Each reverberation pressed harder on the chest, as though the whole forest breathed in unison, panting, hostile. The air grew thick, suffocating, heavy with pollen and the crushing sense that unseen eyes were watching from every angle.
"How about staying quiet?" Mazzareth's voice slid into his mind, not spoken aloud, but cold, detached, a whisper of thought.
Ezra kept running. His eyes were fixed, pupils narrowed, shoulders taut as bowstrings. A faint, almost mocking smile flickered on his lips as his hand tightened around the object inside the satchel.
"Agreed."
✦ ✦ ✦
While Ezra and Asheras sprinted in opposite directions, above them, standing over the shards of the barrier breaking apart like glass under storm, One-Eye watched.
Beside him, the fragile, high-pitched whimper of the forest mingled with the wind, not from the woods as a whole, but from the sapling ent he had bound in living cords, twisted and writhing, held like a grotesque trophy.
"Boss..." he sighed, laughing nervously, "I really do deserve a raise, don't I?"
In his younger days, when he still dreamed of becoming a bounty hunter, he had never imagined ending like this: a hired mercenary, boots caked with the blood of monsters and men alike, serving someone whose name he dared not even whisper.
And now… having as hostage the spawn of a creature not even the Archons, the closest men had ever come to gods, had managed to defeat.
The absurdity of it made him tremble. Yet that was exactly what separated them from common fools: the courage to stand against the impossible.
✦ ✦ ✦
Among humans, power was never measured solely by counting swords or calculating armies. True power was gauged by how far each individual could bend a Law of Reality itself. This bond channeled trough Vis, was called their Codex.And, as with all things, humanity had classified Codex wielders according to their mastery.
From lowest to highest:
Scribes: copiers of existence, repeating reality as it was written, never daring to add even a comma.
Arbiters: cautious readers, searching for loopholes, twisting words wherever cracks appeared.
Theurges: bold enough to scrawl notes in the margins, change an adjective or two, small shifts that made reality shiver.
Judges: reading not only lines but contexts; they marked boundaries, shaping Domains.
Legislators: rewriting their own Codex, sacrificing fragments of themselves for the audacity to alter reality's skeleton.
Archons: the apex. The greatest of Legislators, men and women who sealed eternal Domains. At the cost of their very souls, they raised the Safe Zones and founded the great nations, taming volatile Laws and allowing life to flourish again.
But monsters, ah, monsters did not follow such logic. They had no human symmetry, only bottomless abysses. Even so, scholars had dared to classify them. Their work became known as the Bestiary.
By Origin:
Naturae: born of earth, beasts and flora corrupted.
Visborne: spawn of raw energy, molded by Vis.
Artificialia: products of human hands—machines or alchemies gone astray.
Anómali: aberrations born of flaws in the Laws.
Outerkind: intruders from alien worlds and realities.
By Function in Combat:
Predators: hunt specific prey.
Swarms: multiply until cities are consumed.
Colossus: titanic forces that crush all before them.
Manipulators: warp environment and perception.
Ethereals: intangible, nearly impossible to harm.
Anomalous: break every category, walking paradoxes.
By Threat Level:
F: nearly harmless, mere nuisances.
E: able to kill careless men.
D: dangerous to groups, require strategy.
C: local calamities.
B: forces that scour entire regions.
A: continental cataclysms.
S: Supremes, living terrors, beyond scale.
Animus Rank – classification of monsters by sentience:
Bestial: driven by instinct, minimal reason.
Periculus: cunning, territorial rulers.
Fatalis: strategic, capable of destruction on a grand scale.
Cataclysmus: dominion over continents, rulers of species.
Apocalypsis: able to reshape ecosystems, nations, even Laws.
Primordialis: mythical singularities, eternal, capable of things deemed impossible to human's standards
Even so, it was still an incomplete map. A bestiary scribbled by men who stared into the abyss with nothing but ink and charcoal. Yet one truth was universally known: to tamper with the spawn of a Regent was to awaken something far more terrifying than a natural disaster.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Insane…" Ezra muttered in the distance, voice hoarse and trembling as he dashed between roots writhing like serpents beneath his feet. He needed no mental lists, no cold classifications. The mere sight of that pale sapling, crowned with crimson leaves, was enough to tell him the weight of the doom descending upon them.
Its silhouette alone crushed his chest with foreboding. And the pressure in the air kept growing heavier, second by second.
The One-Eyed and the others, however, remained oblivious to the curses Ezra spat out between ragged breaths. And even if they had heard, they wouldn't have cared. They had reaped so many lives that death's repetition had become as ordinary to them as chewing their daily bread. Each new victim was nothing more than another grain of sand in the hourglass they smashed without a thought.
On the flanks, Karmen and Stitch advanced in rhythm, each with a small metal communicator clamped to the ear, technocratic relics, able to filter even the faintest human whisper from the ceaseless drone of the living forest. Their eyes met in fleeting, nervous glances, while their fingers clenched tight around their weapons, waiting for the signal, for the exact heartbeat when their charge would stop being coordinated advance and turn into sheer survival.
"I should've turned this job down when I had the chance…" Stitch growled, his gaze sliding toward Asheras, who ran steadily eastward, each step calculated, like she was dancing with death itself.
"And miss all the fun?" Karmen shot back, his tone brushing the edge of mockery, eyes fixed on Ezra, who darted among the ents without ever running straight, as if hunting something unseen ahead. His movements betrayed his unease: head constantly swiveling, eyes ravenous, tracking, measuring.
Karmen's smile unfurled in a slow, almost lazy arc, and his split tongue slithered across his lips in a studied, reptilian motion, leaving them wet in deliberate provocation."Everything, Stitch… everything tastes richer when it's properly seasoned."