From the throne of wooden roots, the puppet made of wooden roots rose to its feet.
It turned toward Rei, who stood before it, and swung its right arm down.
That arm, woven from roots, lashed at him with the supple motion of a whip.
But the strike was by no means too fast for Rei to react to. If anything, it was slow enough that he could easily counter.
He avoided the overhead blow by shifting his weight back half a step. In the same motion, he stomped on the arm as it struck the ground and swung his Death Scythe.
Normally, the Death Scythe would slice through with almost no resistance. But the moment it bit into the arm, he felt a faint pushback.
A hint of surprise crossed Rei's face as he followed through with the blade.
(Does it possess strong magical power?)
He hadn't infused much of his own magical power into the Death Scythe for that strike. Even so, between the weapon's inherent sharpness, its weight of roughly a hundred kilograms, and the sheer force behind his swing, it should have cut through effortlessly. The only explanation for even slight resistance was magical power.
There had been several instances before where his Death Scythe strikes were blocked by weapons imbued with magic. Given that, it made sense that any defense against his attacks would stem from magical power.
"Even so, it shouldn't be able to block—What!?"
Rei had been swinging the Death Scythe in the same motion to cleave through the puppet's torso, but the sudden whistle of cutting air made him leap from the spot.
Something tore through the space where he had been standing a heartbeat ago and shattered the ground.
Another whistle of wind followed immediately. Without even a moment to identify the source, Rei jumped clear once more.
Kicking off the air with his Sleipnir boots, he turned his gaze toward where the sound had come from—and his eyes widened.
Multiple root puppets stood in his line of sight, the very kind he had been trying to destroy.
They were fundamentally the same shape, though the finer details varied. That was only natural—even among wooden roots, no two were exactly alike. Still, from a distance, the similarities were close enough that mistaking them for identical copies was easy.
"Right. Since the puppet itself is just a terminal, there's nothing strange about it making several more...!"
Still airborne, he channeled magical power into the Twilight Spear and hurled it using only the torque of his upper body.
The throw carried even less force than the one he had launched at the giant flower while riding Set. On Set's back, he could brace himself to some degree. Floating in midair with the Sleipnir boots, even if he could momentarily kick off the air, the stability was nowhere near what he got from a grounded position.
Even so, the released Twilight Spear pierced cleanly through several root puppets at once, destroying them.
In the next instant, the spear returned to Rei's hand.
(The Death Scythe felt resistance when cutting through... but this didn't.)
One could chalk it up to the difference in infused magical power, but even so, from Rei's perspective, the root puppets that appeared later seemed weaker than the first one.
(Mass-produced? It's possible.)
The root puppet that had been waiting here until Rei's group arrived, versus the root puppets hastily created once the battle began. Even if they looked identical on the outside, Rei seriously doubted they shared the same capabilities.
If that was the case, these were still easy opponents.
With that thought, Rei cast a brief glance at his surroundings.
There, exactly as expected, Vihera and Set were battling giant Treants.
Even if these Treants were larger than the others, a Treant was still a Treant—or so Rei had thought. In reality, the Treants Vihera and Set faced were different from the ones they had fought so far.
Strikes from branch-hands, volleys of nuts hurled from those branches, lashes from vines coiled around their trunks... the attack methods themselves were no different from an ordinary Treant's, but their larger bodies made each blow several times more powerful.
...However, that did not mean they could fight Vihera and Set on even terms.
These Treants, larger than normal ones, also had higher defensive power.
But for Vihera, an opponent with high defensive power was nothing but easy prey.
She possessed Magic Impact Palm—a skill that delivered a shock directly into the enemy's body, a shock charged with magical power. Against her, high defensive power was entirely meaningless.
"Hah!"
With a light touch of her palm, she drove a shockwave into the Treant's body. The magic-laden strike unleashed its full force inside, and in the next instant, the Treant burst apart as if detonated from within.
The Treant probably never understood what happened. It froze for a moment in confusion... then crumbled to the ground.
"Grrrrrrrl!"
While Vihera used a technique—a skill—to defeat her Treants, Set was overwhelming his giant opponents using nothing but his raw physical abilities as a gryphon, augmented by the Bracelet of Herculean Strength.
Gryphons and Treants weren't even in the same class as monsters. And Set, enhanced further by Beast Magic, was several ranks above an ordinary gryphon. Against a creature like him, a mere Treant had no hope of resisting no matter what it tried.
A single swing of his foreleg, accompanied by a roar, effortlessly shattered a Treant's trunk. The Treants fought back with branches, vines, and nuts, but with Set's physical abilities, evading every attack was trivial.
He wove through their strikes with graceful footwork, closed the distance, and delivered fatal blows. Without employing a single Beast Magic skill, Set was thoroughly dominating the Treants.
The fact that he could devastate them so effortlessly was a testament to who he was.
"Whoa!"
As if to exploit the split second Rei spent glancing at Vihera and Set, a root puppet whipped its arm like a flail.
Rei activated the Sleipnir boots, kicking off the air to dodge the sideways sweep—
"Whoa!"
—only to see a tree erupt from the ground right where he landed. He swung the Death Scythe on instinct, cleaving through the trunk before it could reach him.
After touching down, Rei spotted a root puppet some distance away, its hand buried in the earth.
Something about it felt off. Judging by what he had just seen, the root puppet had grown a tree from the ground to attack him. But the root puppet itself was merely a terminal for the entity that was this Treant Forest. Given that, it should have been able to attack him directly without routing through a terminal.
(Then why? Why go out of its way to attack through a terminal? ...Tch!)
As if to deny him time to think, the other root puppets pressed their attacks. Wherever they were drawing new material from, the whips they wielded had already grown past five meters in length. Yet the puppets themselves hadn't changed size—clear evidence that roots were being supplied from somewhere external.
Worse, as the battle dragged on, the root puppets began coordinating with one another. It was far from brilliant teamwork; "clumsy" would have been a more accurate description. But coordination was coordination, and they launched their strikes to match their allies' timing.
"Out of my way!"
Rei kicked off the ground and, as he swept past a root puppet, bisected its torso with the Death Scythe.
True to form, there was no resistance when the blade bit through. What amounted to a mass-produced version of the first root puppet he had spoken with split cleanly into upper and lower halves, each crumpling to the ground—only for both halves to sprout new roots from their severed ends in the very next moment, intertwine, and reform into a single puppet once more.
Rei watched with an openly displeased expression.
"Cutting them won't work. I need to annihilate them completely. ...Fortunately, this clearing is wide open. With this much space, the fire shouldn't spread."
The root puppets gave him no respite. Weaving through the relentless barrage of root-whips, Rei began chanting.
「O flame, obey my will and burn my enemy.」
A fireball roughly thirty centimeters in diameter formed at the tip of the Death Scythe.
「Fireball.」
He closed the distance with a root puppet and triggered the spell as he swept past its flank.
The fireball slammed into the puppet, and in an instant, it was engulfed in flames.
Given the nighttime darkness, the blaze was blindingly bright. The trees of the Treant Forest possessed some degree of magical defense, but a paltry amount like that could never withstand Rei's magic.
The root puppet, swallowed whole by fire, carbonized in seconds and scattered into the night wind.
"...Phew. Looks like burning them completely in one go keeps the fire from spreading. I was worried since there's grass on the ground."
At the edge of his vision, every root puppet had stopped moving.
Had they never encountered fire before? Rei considered that possibility, but he recalled Thresha mentioning they had lit a campfire here at night. If so, it was unlikely the Treant Forest knew nothing about fire.
(Then why?)
Still puzzled, Rei turned his gaze toward Vihera and Set.
There, the one woman and one beast were still locked in combat with the Treants.
...No. At this point, it wasn't a battle. It was a rout.
Whenever Vihera's palm touched a Treant's trunk, the creature's body ruptured from within in the next instant. Set was swinging his forelegs almost playfully, smashing Treants to pieces.
(Hmm? Vihera's Magic Impact Palm sends a shock through the body, but I don't think it was supposed to cause an internal explosion like that.)
As far as Rei knew, the skill shouldn't have possessed such a destructive effect.
(Come to think of it, when I saw her earlier, it looked like she was exploding the Treants from inside too... Was it strengthened?)
Rei mulled this over while keeping watch on the root puppets, and his guess was not wrong.
Through the fusion with Unbris—no, through absorption—Vihera's abilities had been significantly enhanced. One result of that was the attack she was currently using: detonating Treants from within.
(She's ruthless.)
Watching yet another Treant blow apart from the inside, Rei felt that thought settle deeply.
The skill already possessed vicious power, ignoring armor, skin, fur, and all other forms of high defensive power to slam a shockwave directly into the body. Now, an explosive element had been layered on top.
It had evolved into something more aggressive—no, more vicious. Rei certainly did not want to fight someone wielding such a skill.
...The problem was that Vihera, who possessed it, frequently expressed a desire to fight him.
While Rei was wrestling with that thought, something shifted. Perhaps one of their own being destroyed had served as a trigger, but every root puppet had stopped attacking and was now staring directly at him.
"...What is it?"
The battle against the Treants was still raging. Yet the root puppets had ceased all aggression and were simply watching him in silence.
Rei found their stillness unsettling, but reducing their numbers was still the priority. He was about to chant another spell when, without warning, the roots comprising every root puppet's body began to unravel.
It was as if tightly bound threads were coming undone, untouched by any hand.
(What's going on? I mean, I'm glad the enemies are disappearing, but... something's definitely up.)
Before his eyes, the root puppets dissolved one after another. The fallen roots then burrowed into the ground, each one slithering into the earth like a snake.
Rei could only watch in silence.
And in the next moment, after every last root had vanished underground... the Treant Forest itself began to shake.