Morn turned his gaze toward the young magis, a silent inquiry in his eyes.
"Lord Seraph..."
"NO!" Seraph interjected, his tone sharp as he coiled his strength. "It's a lure; they likely have a fresh snare waiting. I'll run the creature to ground myself. Finish the cull here."
"Hold, Lord Seraph! What of these remains? I've recovered over a hundred energia cores from the husks of the Jackblooms and Nightshades..." another Ranger inquired, gesturing to the gleaming crystalline spoils.
"Keep half of those energia cores for my account... distribute the rest amongst yourselves," Seraph declared as his form began to ascend. "We have no inkling of the trials the subsequent ranks of this mission will demand. Secure these resources; they will serve as your capital for the hardships to come."
The young magis surged into the void, vanishing above the timber alongside his legion of a hundred blades—a loyal, bristling escort.
✧ . ✶ . ❂ . ✶ . ✧
The violet firmament and the onyx silhouettes of the Greatwoods blurred past Seraph at a velocity that defied the naked eye. Shrouded by his orbiting knives, he no longer bore the aspect of a traditional magis; he resembled a phantom executioner, capable of unleashing silent, lethal steel to cull the demonic horde.
After a pursuit lasting mere seconds, he discerned the Nightshade from afar. The creature was fleeing in visible terror, its frame shuddering with a frantic, restless energy. Its jagged movements as it scanned the forest shadows betrayed the depths of its paranoia.
Though they lacked eyes, every member of the floral host possessed a thermographic sensitivity so precise it could render a mental simulacrum indistinguishable from true sight.
The young magis came to a halt upon a distant crown, choosing to maintain a calculated distance rather than close in for a premature kill.
"Argovas!" Seraph whispered.
The incantation for the third eye was unleashed, granting him a crystalline view of the Nightshade despite the vast arboreal expanse between them. He watched with clinical detachment as the demon navigated the desolation, weaving through the toxic sloughs with practiced agility.
The Darkwood was modest in scale, its breadth comparable to that of a mid-sized city. To a predator of Seraph's current celerity, there was nowhere left for the quarry to hide.
The Nightshade maintained its desperate sprint for several minutes before halting at the precipice of a low-lying ridge. It scanned the periphery with exhaustive scrutiny before committing to the leap.
At the basin of the ravine lay a shallow depression, its expanse almost entirely submerged in toxic sloughs. The creature paused once more, testing the air and the gloom with heightened vigilance. Sensing no intruder, it vanished into the murky, clay-green vapours.
Seraph glided to a silent halt atop a desiccated Greatwood, keeping a calculated distance from the hollow. He gazed into the venomous mires with frigid detachment; his white-and-gold mageia cloak emitted a faint, hallowed luminescence, refusing to permit either the nocturnal shadows or the encroaching chill to breach his domain.
The legion of hovering blades hung motionless in the firmament, their keen tips angled toward the subterranean hive as if awaiting a singular mandate to commence the slaughter.
"Daemonvisura!" Seraph incanted in a hushed tone.
The investigative eye of the demon-seeker manifested, and the secrets beneath the toxic slough were instantly laid bare.
"Hmph. A sizeable hive... more than two hundred Raffblooms lurking beneath this ridge," Seraph murmured. "And this clandestine nest serves as a node within a Necro Synapse network. Razing this stronghold will undoubtedly incite the fury of the Demon Legion beyond the woods."
The Daemonvisura permitted him to discern truths far beyond what the Raffblooms intended to reveal—specifically, the demonic artefacts resembling a vast, interconnected web of Mortis Roots that riddled the subterranean depths of the Darkwood.
"Marvellous... I have only just grasped that I am contending with a foe possessed of its own private Necro Synapse, while Arkflame still relies on couriers and horseflesh to deliver a bloody letter. The Goddess of Fortune must be jesting," Seraph muttered, unable to suppress his acerbic wit. "These demons aren't merely hunting for sustenance; they are weaving the cadavers of mankind into a Mortis Root to strangle the whole of Laurasia. I'm beginning to take a distinct dislike to treading upon this soil."
Though the Raffbloom lineage had drawn its first breath a scant few months prior, their rate of evolution and the sheer variety of their sub-species were unnervingly aberrant. The secret to their rapid expansion and sophisticated communal intelligence lay buried beneath the loam: the Necro Synapse hidden within the earth.
Currently, the subsoil of the Darkwood was choked with the Mortis Roots of the Raffblooms, proliferating across the forest floor. These roots possessed no true life of their own; rather, they functioned as demonic artefacts, engineered by the host through their sinister evolutionary processes.
A Mortis Root was a grotesque facsimile of an ancient tree's limb, erupting from a human corpse. The Raffblooms seldom consumed the entirety of their human prey; instead, they interred the remains in precise subterranean rows. By exerting their demonic fel, they coerced the cadavers to sprout these fibrous conduits, weaving them together to facilitate communication and command.
With human remains arrayed in clandestine hollows throughout the Darkwood, a vast multitude of these roots lanced through the darkness, entangling and binding with one another. This created the Raffblooms' private Necro Synapse.
The utility of such a network was manifold: it bolstered the collective strength of the swarm, accelerated their forced evolution, and served as a telepathic tether, allowing high-tier entities to direct their minions from a vast distance.
The Necro Synapse was a demonic artefact typically reserved for middle-tier swarms and above. Yet Seraph had unearthed it within a lineage that had only just drawn its nascent breath. This implied a potential within the Raffblooms far more formidable—and terrifying—than anything Arkflame's intelligence had dared to forecast.
The young man's gaze pierced the miasma and the toxic sloughs, revealing a slaughterhouse of villagers and hunters. Some women still clutched their infants in a skeletal embrace—a final, futile defiance against the dark.
"Abominable... wretched curs," he hissed, his fury reaching its zenith.
"Ventus Galeblade!"
"Flamus Blaszblade!"
The young magis incanted, weaving the two lethal spells into a single, devastating composite.
[Whomp—!]
As if the stagnant world beneath the ravine had suddenly lurched into motion, the air was violently wrenched upward. A searing gale began to coalesce above the toxic fumes. The atmosphere churned with such velocity that the friction birthed an incandescent heat. Sparks spiralled toward the firmament, feeding the swelling clouds above.
Beneath the toxic mire, only a few boiling bubbles rose to the surface; yet overhead, an orange-red pyre-cloud was manifesting. The shriek of the wind gradually deepened into a subterranean roar—a herald of a truly catastrophic power.
The first spark ignited with the report of a thunderclap. The very air detonated. The feral, swirling winds began to transmute into a pillar of absolute flame.
Driven by a cold, righteous wrath, Seraph watched the unfolding of his mageia with a frigid stare. Ordinarily, he would have to expend a staggering toll of mana to fuse such complex incantations. His chronic lack of reserves was the very reason he had refined his command of the flying knives—a tactical economy designed to mitigate the constant burning of his internal well.