I do not recommend visiting Hallitheen. Yes, it has the rough outlines of an extremely well-planned city. Past tense being the key there. No clue how it got this way, but shit’s a mess. People ran outta room or something and just started filling all those neat streets and alleys with tiny apartments.

  A tip to add to the first non-recommendation: don’t visit Hallitheen with an idiot friend who wanders off. Even if you have a tracker, you’ll drop every penny you have paying for someone to give you directions around an unplanned new neighborhood. Or buying your way past the local gang. People are too bored or something. So they make a sport of changing around their local layout to screw with anyone not familiar with their part of town.

  I spent a whole night trying to find one old guy I literally had a tracker on. Hallitheen is a shithole. Stay home, it isn’t worth it.

  -Words of a pissed off soldier, Marcus Vilke

  Anise:

  By the time the girls were in position, Anise was encased down to her stomach in the growing fruit. It was extra gross. And it was trying to suck the mana out of her in the process, though without much success. Being a powerful cultivator meant that less intelligent creatures had a hard time getting a grasp on the qi inside the body. The fruit felt a little like a hose trying to suck up the energy inside her, and she was able to fight it.

  That was getting harder, though.

  The fight began with little fanfare. Kris, kneeling on the upper level of the mall’s central area, fired a single silent gravity impact from Requiem. The roots at the end of the tree opposite the lab crunched under invisible force.

  Eyes opened all around the area. Each one looked disgustingly human, and the discolored green hues where whites belonged gave them an extra nope factor.

  Anise held still, watching as Kris fired a footstep pattern along the roots towards a far hallway. Then the roots all around the affected areas began to flail, tracing irregular paths that searched as much as they attacked anything they could find.

  Kris ducked into cover, hiding as more eyes popped open.

  Then, Anise’s communications buzzed.

  “Hyello?” she chirped.

  “Hey there. The other two didn’t answer. We’re coming up on the location of Kris’ ACV. What’s going on?” Vilke asked, sounding exhausted.

  Somewhere in the mall, a metal table was flattened by a root, producing a nasty shearing sound. Then Kris began shooting from a different vantage, tracing another invisible path.

  “Yeah, uhh. Don’t go past the ACV. The mana density just beyond that point will instantly kill you. We’ll come fetch you guys. Once I’m not being turned into plant food. Good? Good, great.” Anise cut the call and turned her eyes towards Mari’s position.

  The raven-haired lesbian had started off standing over a small pile of ammunition for her different weapons. About forty percent affliction’s worth, according to the woman herself.

  The girl was crouched before a section of window, her face covered by a mask as she slowly injected some kind of paste from a device that looked like a fancy caulk gun. Wherever the paste touched, the glass warped and began to melt. Why a window? Because of the roots that covered the door into the lab.

  The roots closest to melting glass, though…

  The moment they began to move and twist away from the heat, Anise joined the distraction team.

  Her fruit laden legs popped free in an explosion of sticky juices, like she’d kicked her way out of a giant apple.

  Then the room was filled with an angry sort of groaning as branches, roots and a hundred eyes all opened up, looking straight at her.

  Anise grinned, flipping over and mulching the first root to interpose itself between herself and the floor. She waved at the eyes along the trunk of the tree, blew a raspberry for the heck of it, then began dancing in martial fury.

  Kicks, elbow strikes, and snap punches all rained out as roots tried to lash at her. The moment she’d started resisting, it stopped trying to collect her alive and started aiming to smear her across the ground.

  Five different smaller vines from the canopy speared towards her, and Anise shifted her art from giving herself extra weight to making herself impossibly light, emulating a shifting tide. The root she had been about to stomp became a springboard as she somersaulted into the air and away from the vermillion rot labs. Vines followed, but their reach was more limited than the roots.

  Then her miniature whirlwind of destruction began anew.

  Somewhere, she could hear Kris having switched to a louder weapon—the sound of the gravity wells made by Aria compressing wood joined the chaos.

  The treant was very, very pissed off.

  Kris:

  She hated their plan. It wasn’t really even much of one. Just ‘hope the big tree doesn’t freak out so bad that it destroys everything and turns into an Afflicted Tree Monster’ and keep their fingers crossed.

  Kris wasn’t sure when, but somehow she was being molded into a stealth specialist. Her first gun had been silent, and her last two made noise at the point of impact, not at her location. She wished she’d come up with an invisibility suit.

  She added that project to her mental list, because Mari would be extra impressed if Kris made one.

  In her left hand was Aria. In her right hand was the melee variation of the Magball glove her mother had given her. Chunks of tree roots were packed down into inert wooden masses. The metal ball orbiting her right hand was back up to speed just in time for her to backhand an incoming root that thought it was being sneaky.

  The backstabbing tendril exploded into splinters and tree sap.

  Then she found a moment to eject the core from Aria and let the internal mechanism push the next one into place.

  Their fight was a mess.

  She cast her eyes towards Mari’s end of things, saw a hole in the glass of the lab, then grunted as she stepped on a root that was still moving. Which she severed with a shot between herself and the tree.

  The only reason she wasn’t as screwed as Anise was that she’d been aiming for eyes. Mari had been right. It felt by sensing mana. To the tree, she was a ghost so long as it didn’t lay eyes on her.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  And so, she’d shot the eyes. It was gross. When the sequence for her catalyst entered the impact point she aimed for, there were gaps. Rather than compressing a spherical space, it compressed a three dimensional star pattern. So yeah, eye gunk got everywhere.

  Kris was so glad she’d put on a breathing mask to prevent any airborne poisons. If she’d gotten any in her mouth, she’d never feel clean ever again.

  The end result, thankfully, was that she didn’t have to fight a storm of wooden tentacles. That didn’t mean none, though.

  The windows of the vermillion rot lab had been an opaque, frosted style. Despite that, Kris could clearly see the thick red haze that filled the air beyond it.

  “Finally. I think these situations are why soldiers swear so much,” Kris grumbled as she smashed the closest few roots. Then she raised Symphony.

  A quick gesture dropped the metal ball from the glove into a sleeve hanging off her belt, then with both hands, she aimed for the upper branches of the treant.

  One, two, three.

  Kris pulled the trigger in succession while spreading out the cluster of shots.

  The whole tree shook in rage as leaves and branches fell. Fruits splattered disgustingly against the ground. Huge chunks of the canopy turned into tiny balls of packed plant-matter.

  Then she took a few shots at the base of the trunk.

  That set off explosions.

  The roots all around the facility—in every direction for hundreds of meters—apparently responded to her violence, and they weren’t happy. Machinery that had somehow kept running, like the generators shielding the lab? They were sheared into as the roots cringed and tightened on whatever they were grown around. Some rooms collapsed as the supporting structures had been grown into. Suddenly, there was a lot of dust in the air.

  And the storm of tentacles only got worse.

  Thankfully, that was when Mari’s head of raven-black hair came into view as Kris switched back to Aria for more close-up roots, and then a crossbow twanged.

  The entire left side of the treant erupted into flames. One of Mari’s ‘Greek Fire’ bolts spread with a vengeance.

  Immediately, every one of the roots lost all cohesion. They just started flailing without a target. If Kris hadn’t been standing in an area she’d already cleared out, she wasn’t sure she could’ve defended herself.

  As if calling for the coup de gras, the air was filled with a sudden clack-SNAP!

  It was a familiar sound. One that came from a certain weapon Kris had designed being expanded from the folded travel configuration.

  Kris turned towards the trunk again, just in time to see Mari lifting Stinger, which had been on her hip. The railgun hummed, letting off jets of heat just as the trigger was pulled.

  Karrrackkkk!!

  The projectile wasn’t the only thing that made that terribly satisfying sound. The heat that had come off the gun as it was fired instantly vanished as mana turned the surrounding thermal energy into more power. Mari almost slipped as stray splatter from fruits instantly froze under her feet. A three meter area around Mari had frozen solid as Stinger recycled the energy it needed.

  Then, the sound came again as the gun released a second wave of heat alongside another projectile.

  Kris finally glanced at the treant.

  Fascinatingly, the fire wasn’t affected by the sudden frost at all. The chemicals used in Mari’s bolts clearly didn’t care.

  The entire tree was leaning away from Mari. Huge holes had been ripped through it, and greek fire continued to burn all over the trunk, unaffected by Stinger’s less than scientific power source.

  The roots went still. Eyes all along the trunk were losing their life.

  Mari circled the tree, putting more shots into the fruits that remained while standing close enough that the heat was ripped right out of the monster itself. Anise joined a few minutes later, smashing through roots and pointing out any of the creatures that were still alive inside the fruits that had fallen.

  Kris joined in a moment later, using Requiem to finish off anything Anise pointed to.

  “That was less of a handful than I thought it would be,” Anise jinxed, a few minutes after they’d finished their work.

  Mari smirked. “We really rooted that one out.”

  Kris groaned, then perked up at a sudden notification.

  It was official: Anise’s system had the most childish naming sense ever.

  Kris frowned at the box that appeared in her vision. It wasn’t like her HUD, where she felt like there was a screen over her eyes. The system window hovered in the air in a more surreal way.

  “Status.”

  Name: Krisanine

  Affinity: Catalytic Arcanist

  Health Status: 84/100

  Interference Potential: 97/100

  Cultivation Lv: 100 (Breakthrough Available)

  She mentally commanded the interface to check the option tied to her level.

  “Anise? Breakthrough?” Kris probed.

  The girl glanced towards her, then shrugged. “If you wanna, find someplace to sit down and go for it.”

  That wasn’t what she was after, but the response implied that they wouldn’t be in danger if she tried. Mari looked concerned, though.

  “Those take time. It’s super early for you to do something like that, but I did choose to give you all my experience from this. Before you ask, it’s because of my messed up level balance. If we find Marielle, I’m hoping to fix things then.”

  Kris sidled up to Mari and gave her a reassuring hug. “It’s alright, we’ll find her and you’ll catch up. Anything happen in the lab, though?”

  “Not really. A couple of people looked like they died of dehydration. I’m guessing the mana levels in the area had a slow and steady increase over time, not a sudden eruption.” Mari led them away from the mess.

  “I see. Well, keep an eye on me, okay? Keep me safe, Miss Hero?” Kris poked her lover in the side gently with a gentle smile.

  Mari leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, bringing a little color to Kris’ face. It let her relax just a tiny bit.

  They’d made it through. One more step forward.

  Kris sat down and closed her eyes, focusing inward. Her once-dormant qi pathways were abuzz with activity. All the main routes through her body were smooth and stable, though the wealth of energy was entirely foreign to her. The system had handled the complex part of drinking in mana and converting it into something useful without her even noticing it.

  With a mental command, Kris confirmed the option for her breakthrough.

  Anise:

  “Why’d you give up your experience for Kris?” Anise asked, studying the swirling energies within Kris’ body.

  “I’ll sort out my cultivation after we find Marielle. I’m in no position to be ascending to the second realm, anyway. Better that she confront things now while she has a bit of time.”

  Anise shrugged. When it came to cultivation, the two girls weren’t using their ki to empower their weapons yet. In her opinion, the sooner they both reached the second realm, the better. Then again, even with Kris’ elevation to the second realm, it would take a bit of practice before she pulled off any major externalization. Mari delaying wouldn’t change too much.

  Mari leaned against a nearby table as she studied her own hand. “This is the first time I’ve ever been free of this illness. I thought I’d feel more different, but it’s just… normal. I had to be careful of putting others at risk before, but that was all. The strain I was created with probably wasn’t very severe, I guess.”

  Mari shook her head, clearly casting off the brief introspection.

  “Anyway, we secure the area, maybe figure out what happened here, then push on to look for clues about Marielle.”

  Anise gave a sloppy salute. “Your friends arrived. You never told them about the mana density being dangerous?”

  Mari froze, then tapped a few things in the air that only she could see.

  “I’m an idiot. Sorry. Glad you told them in time.”

  Anise shook her head in disappointment. “Stay here, keep her safe. I’m off to collect the rest of the team.”

  With that, she flew off the way they’d come, with a single brief stop to shuck her sticky outer robes. They were really gross, and Anise burned them, knowing that even if she cleaned them, she’d always feel sticky when they were on.

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