The air in the clearing grew thick with the guttural chorus of the corrupted pack. They were no longer individual creatures but extensions of the pulsating violet crystal, their yellow eyes fixed on Kaito with a single, unified purpose: annihilation. The lead wolf, its body a grotesque fusion of flesh and jagged, petrified wood, let out a roar that was less sound and more a wave of pure malice.
They charged as one. A tide of claw, fang, and twisted nature.
Kaito did not meet their charge. He stood his ground, a calm center in the storm of feral energy. He raised the Leviathan Staff, not as a weapon to strike, but as a conductor for his will. He would not destroy these creatures; they were victims. He would perform an amputation.
He focused his Terrakinesis with a precision that would have been impossible before refining the hive's data. The ground in front of the charging horde did not erupt. Instead, it flowed. A trench three feet deep and ten feet wide opened up in the earth with a sound like a tearing canvas, swallowing the front line of beasts. They tumbled into the pit, snarling and scrambling, momentarily neutralized.
The flying creatures—stone-beaked birds and bat-like things with wings of brittle crystal—dove for him. Kaito didn't look up. He simply siphoned the corrupt energy that gave them flight. The chaotic violet mana streamed from their bodies into him. The crystals powering their wings turned to dull, grey rock mid-flight. They fell from the air like stones, hitting the soft, damp earth with a series of dull thuds, dazed but alive.
He was a whirlwind of quiet, absolute control. A boar with crystalline tusks lunged; he sidestepped and placed a hand on its flank, pulling the corruption out in a single, clean draw. The tusks shattered, and the boar stumbled away, confused. A wolf made of thorns and rage leaped for his throat; he willed the vines entangling a nearby tree to lash out, entangling the beast mid-air and pulling it safely to the ground.
He was not fighting them. He was disarming them. Pacifying them.
Step by step, he advanced through the chaotic defense, each movement a calculated act of healing through negation. He left a trail of confused, de-powered, but living creatures in his wake. Their connection to the blight was severed, the feral light in their eyes extinguished.
Finally, he stood before the corrupted oak. The violet crystal pulsed angrily, as if sensing its end. The remaining corrupted creatures, now few in number, circled warily, their coordinated assault broken.
Kaito ignored them. He placed the tip of the Leviathan Staff against the base of the pulsating crystal. He did not strike. He initiated a Targeted Assimilation. He wasn't absorbing the tree or its life force. He was absorbing only the conceptual structure of the corruption itself—the specific, chaotic pattern of mana that defined the blight.
The violet light in the crystal flared violently, then began to dim. The tendrils of energy retracted from the soil, withering to dust. The pulsations slowed, then stopped. With a sound like a sigh, the entire crystalline structure dissolved into a fine, inert powder that drifted to the forest floor.
Silence returned to the clearing. A true, natural silence, broken only by the drip of water and the tentative rustle of leaves. The oppressive weight in the air vanished. The corrupted creatures still present shook their heads, the last dregs of rage leaving them, and they melted back into the woods, no longer twisted, simply animals again.
Kaito stood alone, the surgeon after a successful operation. The heart of the blight was gone. He had cleansed the Murkwood. He had completed the Castellan's task and his own secret mission in one stroke. He took a deep breath of the now-clean air, turned, and began the long walk back to Whitepeak, the silent warden leaving a healed forest in his wake.