When the Shadow took its first step with the rusty sword now cloaked in pitch-black, the cave floor groaned under the weight of this intense darkness.
It was no longer the one on the defensive.
The instant it moved, a black bolt of lightning flashed inside the cave. The small and medium-sized trees tried to fall upon it with cries of vengeance, but the Shadow's sword dance had now become a massacre.
Every swing of the black sword, together with the black smoke seeping into the air, mowed down dozens of trees before it in a single strike.
Every trunk the sword touched, as if fed on by an ancient poison seeping into it, instantly rotted and crumbled to dust. Crimson essence, dust hanging in the air, and black blood spun through the cave like a chaotic storm.
Realizing their attacks were futile, the trees began to gather at a single point. They drew their branches close to one another, joined them. They leaned their trunks against each other.
They formed a wall of wood.
It was as if they were imitating the scene they'd witnessed the night before.
When the Shadow saw the defense before it, it didn't hesitate.
The instant it moved, the black sword advanced, tearing through the air like paper. The Shadow's sword dance whispered absolute destruction to every single fiber of this wall woven of wood.
Unlike the impenetrable metal wall Sedef had created with her Sezi energy and tın, this wall was only a feeble imitation born of fear.
The Shadow gripped the sword with both hands and threw itself forward with a terrible momentum.
The instant the tip of the black sword touched the wooden wall, a crack like a thousand bones breaking at once split the cave's damp silence.
The medium-sized trees forming the wall tried to resist, locking their trunks more tightly together. When the Shadow swung its sword in a horizontal arc, an enormous gash opened in the middle of the wooden barricade.
The crimson essence spurting from the wounded trees struck the Shadow's dark armor and evaporated with a sizzle.
The small trees, to close the gaps in the wall, flung aggressive roots from below toward the Shadow's missing leg and its wounded side.
With an agility that defied gravity, the Shadow sprang into the air and, spinning around itself in midair, brought down a vertical strike. This blow split the wooden wall in two from its foundation.
The trees were no longer a single line; the wall had unraveled, giving way to heaps of dying wood.
The Shadow plunged into the middle of the scattering group like an executioner. Every swing of the sword tore a tree up by the root and rent it to pieces in the air.
The cave floor was now completely covered with that ominous mire where wine, crimson essence, and black blood ran together.
When the Shadow had turned a few hundred more trees to dust with its pitch-black sword and stopped, the cries inside the cave cut off like a knife.
For a brief moment only the sizzle of the smoke could be heard. But this silence was the eerie void before a storm.
The trees had stopped; they weren't crying out, weren't groaning, weren't screaming.
Most importantly, they weren't moving…
"ROOOAARRRR!"
Just then, that enormous roar coming from seven layers beneath the earth, shaking the glowing stones on the cave's ceiling loose, echoed out.
From the cave's countless arms, from the depths, the true nightmare of the Ruined Lands began to slither forth.
The Shadow stood with its pitch-black sword driven into the soil, looking at the thing that was coming, amid the smoke seeping from the emptiness in its leg.
This was an enormous tree at least twenty meters tall, beside which even the earlier eight-meter tree would have looked like a sapling.
Its trunk was covered with pitch-black bark, hardened like armor by the pain of centuries. Its branches reached all the way to the cave's ceiling; from the tip of each branch hung enormous heaps of rotted flesh.
This was not just a plant; it was a twenty-meter Corebearer giant rising from the depths of the Ruined Lands, fed on corpses for years.
"ROOOAARRRR!"
The colossus roared again, but this time more briefly.
"SHADOW THAT DOESN'T BELONG TO THIS WORLD! YOU… YOU! WHYYY? WE HAD AN AGREEMENT!"
The Shadow didn't speak. Not because it was mute, but because it chose not to.
Beneath the Shadow's armor there was a tangible mouth. A motionless, dull mouth that sat like a metallic slit.
But in the face of the Corebearer giant's shattering accusations, that mouth didn't budge a single millimeter.
It only waited, amid the black smoke seeping from the hole in its leg and the cracks in its body, driving its pitch-black sword deeper into the soil.
Its silence was enough to drive the Corebearer giant mad.
"ANSWER ME!" the giant roared once more.
Each crack in its twenty-meter trunk opened and closed like a secondary mouth as it spoke, spreading a heavy smell of rotted flesh through the cave's damp air.
"YOU… YOU! YOU SWORE ON YOUR HONOR THAT YOU WOULD NEVER SET FOOT IN THE CENTER OF THE RUINED LANDS AND NEVER ATTACK US!"
The giant went on shouting, but the anger in its voice had now given way to sorrow.
"SPEAK! SPEAK! WHY? WHY DID YOU COME HERE AND ATTACK MY CHILDREN? WHY DID YOU HARVEST THE CROP THAT WAS WAITING TO RIPEN? SAY SOMETHING! WHYYY? OR ELSE—?"
The Shadow wrenched its pitch-black sword from the soil in a single fluid motion. The giant's sentence, beginning with "Or else—?", hung in the cave's damp air.
The instant the giant grasped that terrible truth, the Shadow had already begun to glide through the air like a black arrow.
The Shadow didn't speak. Because no excuse could soothe the cold fury born of the spilled black blood and the shattered armor.
"THIS TASK YOU'VE WAITED ALL THESE YEARS FOR…" the Corebearer tree roared.
Its twenty-meter trunk shook with dread.
"WHAT IS THIS TASK YOU'VE WAITED ALL THESE YEARS FOR, THAT NOW DRIVES YOU TO ACT!"
The Shadow gave no answer.
That dull mouth beneath its armor stayed shut like a seal guarding a secret.
But it gave its answer not with words, but with deeds. The Shadow sprang into the air while the tree was still speaking.
"ANSWEEERRR!"
The Corebearer tree brought its enormous clawed arms down on the Shadow like siege towers. The wind of the blow flung the corpse-trees on the ground away as heaps of splinters.
In the air the Shadow turned into a streak of shadow; with its pitch-black sword it slipped through the giant's branches like a needle.
The black sword cut the first group of branches coming at the giant like paper. As the hundred-kilo masses of wood, severed, sank into the mire below, the cave shook.
The instant the Shadow's feet touched the giant's armored bark, the Corebearer giant shook with its whole trunk. This wasn't a tremor, it was an explosion of hatred.
"WRETCH!"
Thousands of small branches, sharp as needles, burst from the tree's trunk.
To escape this trap springing all at once from the bark it had climbed, the Shadow held its sword before it like a shield.
The sound of the branches striking the metal filled the cave like a hailstorm pounding on tin.
The Shadow drove its sword into the tree's trunk and, sliding down, tried to open a pitch-black gash. But the tree was not like its previous opponents; when the thick bark met the black sword it caused nothing more than a small spark.
"BOOM!"
As the Shadow tried to recover in the air, the giant's twenty-meter branch came down on it like a whip. The Shadow slipped aside in midair, but the tip of the branch grazed its left shoulder.
"CRACK!"
The fourth fissure in its armor stretched like lightning from its left shoulder toward its chest.
This time a muffled, metallic rasp escaped the Shadow's mouth.
The enormous bulk and power of one side clashed in a merciless balance with the absolute darkness and speed of the other.
The giant, roaring in fury, reached up to the cave's ceiling. It tore loose one of the enormous stalactites hanging there and hurled it at the Shadow like a spear.
The Shadow gripped its sword with both hands and, spinning in the air, split the rock down the middle; but when the golden stones flung from the shattered rock struck the Shadow's armor, they shrank the Shadow as if poisoned.
"AHHHHH!"
For the first time the Shadow made such a clear sound of pain.
The light touching the "soft" body beneath the armor caused the black blood to flow even faster. When the Shadow fell to the ground, the mire on the floor began to boil at once with its black blood.
To deliver the finishing blow, the tree threw its whole weight upon the Shadow. Dozens of enormous branches wrapped around the Shadow like a cage and pressed it toward the swamp on the floor.
"NOW DIE, SLAVE OF YOUR TASK!"
As the Shadow was crushed under the pressure of the branches, the Erk in its core flared one last time.
The black smoke bursting from every crack in its armor—from its belly, its arm, its shoulder, and the newly opened gash in its chest—turned into an enormous explosion.
It shattered the branches and shot toward the giant's trunk. This was not an attack but a suicidal dive.
To drive its sword into the inner core beneath the giant's hard bark, it advanced, tearing through every resistance in the air with its darkness.
The giant's claws seized the Shadow's legs and waist, shattering its armor further, but it didn't stop.
The tip of the sword reached first the giant's hardest bark, then its most intimate, most defenseless place.
With the pain of the fifth and deepest fissure in its armor, the Shadow buried the sword into the core with all its strength. The cave shook with a crack as violent as the dying of a sun.
The enormous tree, with one last cry of "WHY?", went rigid and slowly, piece by piece, crumbled and collapsed into that ominous swamp.
The Shadow stood there atop the dying, drying crown of the giant, with its shattered armor and the smoke seeping from its five deep fissures.
It had won, but the price was that its armor could now barely hold together.