Global Gods : Skill-Resonance Awakened

Chapter 312: Ch 312 : Heart of The Forest

Tower of Eternity, Floor 70: The Forest of Ancient Grudges.

The air crackled with the sound of violent suction.

Lux moved like a blur of violet light through the dense undergrowth.

Around him, the Converter Dome acted as both his shield and his maw.

THWACK. CRACK. HISS.

Thick, wooden roots lashed out from the shadows like the tentacles of a kraken. They struck the dome with enough force to shatter diamond, but the moment they made contact, they were consumed.

The violet energy of the dome latched onto the roots, draining the mana instantly.

The roots turned gray, withered, and crumbled into dust before they could even retract.

"I need to keep moving," Lux hissed, his eyes darting around the woodland. "If I stop, I will get buried."

He cast a high-tier speed spell on himself. The world blurred. He sprinted forward, leaving a trail of desiccated wood in his wake.

He wasn’t fighting to win right now; he was fighting to map. He needed to find the Boss Room. He needed the Portal.

Wherever he went, the forest reacted. It didn’t behave like a collection of plants; it behaved like an immune system attacking a virus.

Just as Lux was beginning to feel a rhythm: dodge, drain, run, repeat, the pattern changed.

He skidded to a halt as the massive redwood tree directly in front of him began to shudder. It wasn’t the wind. The vibration started at the trunk and violently ascended to the canopy.

RUSTLE.

Thousands of leaves detached simultaneously. But they didn’t drift down gently. They stiffened, their edges glowing with a razor-sharp green aura.

"Projectiles?" Lux narrowed his eyes.

WHOOSH.

The leaves shot toward him like a swarm of angry hornets. It was a green blizzard of death.

"Too many to dodge," Lux calculated instantly.

He flared his aura, expanding the Converter Dome. The swarm collided with his defense.

Pft. Pft. Pft. Pft.

It sounded like heavy rain hitting a tin roof. Every leaf that touched the violet barrier was instantly vaporized, its mana fed directly into Lux’s reserves.

"That was unexpected," Lux whispered, checking his mana levels. Which was always overflowing, but his mental fatigue was rising.

"If those leaves had touched me... death by a thousand paper cuts."

He didn’t have time to celebrate his defense. The forest was escalating.

First roots. Then vines. Now weaponized leaves.

"What’s next?" Lux muttered, a grim smile playing on his lips. "I wouldn’t be surprised if the damn things started walking."

As if the Goddess of Truth herself were listening to his sarcasm and decided to play a prank, the ground beneath him groaned.

RUMBLE.

It wasn’t just a tremor; it was an earthquake. Which shook the ground around the tree in front of him.

CRACK-BOOM!

The soil exploded upward. Thick roots tore themselves free from the earth, not to attack, but to support.

They curled underneath the trunk, forming crude, massive legs. The tree groaned, wood grinding against wood, as it pulled itself upright.

It stood forty meters tall, a wooden titan with hatred in its non-existent eyes.

"You have got to be kidding me," Lux sighed, cracking his knuckles. "Walking trees. How original."

The Treant let out a soundless roar and lunged. It thrust its branches like spears, aiming to skewer him.

Lux didn’t dodge this time. He shaped his mana into a blade.

"Devouring Slash."

He swung his arm in a horizontal arc.

The technique was something Lux had developed during his ascension to Demigod status.

He had studied the Dimensional Slash of the Space Mages, which cracked space to sever matter. He had studied the Void Slash, which erased existence.

Lux’s technique was cruder, but viciously effective. It didn’t cut; it ate. The edge of the mana blade consumed the atomic bonds of whatever it touched.

SHING.

The violet arc passed through the thick trunk of the Treant.

There was no sound of impact. The blade simply existed where the wood used to be. A split second later, the massive tree split in half. The upper torso slid off the makeshift legs, crashing to the ground.

As it fell, the wood turned gray and disintegrated into ash, its energy already digested by Lux’s slash.

"I can do this," Lux whispered, his confidence surging. "They are big, but they are slow."

He moved to the next tree. Slash.

Then the next. Slash.

He was a whirlwind of destruction, carving a path through the living blockade.

But as he fought, his warrior’s instinct noticed a pattern.

Every time a tree uprooted itself to fight him, it uprooted all of its roots, except for one.

There was always One Thick Root that remained buried deep in the earth, acting like a tether. It stretched and pulsed, even as the tree moved around.

"An anchor?" Lux theorized, dodging a massive branch. "Or a energy line?"

He watched closely. The mana flowing through that specific root was different. it was flowing from the ground into the tree.

"It’s like an umbilical cord supporting the child" Lux realized.

He changed his target. Instead of aiming for the trunk, he aimed for the tether.

"Sever!"

Lux dashed low, his hand wreathed in fire, and sliced through the pulsing root connecting the Treant to the earth.

SCREECH!

The tree let out a sound like snapping timber. It convulsed violently, thrashing its limbs in panic. And then... silence.

The green glow in its bark faded instantly. It collapsed, lifeless wood once more.

"Got you," Lux grinned. "Cut the supply, kill the soldier."

Five Days Later.

The forest was a graveyard.

"Aghh... I am exhausted..."

Lux leaned against a rock, his chest heaving. His skin was pale, and the Converter Dome flickered weakly around him.

For five days straight, he had fought without any rest. He had destroyed over a hundred thousand trees. He had carved a highway of destruction ten kilometers long.

But the forest was endless. For every tree he killed, two more seemed to shift into place to block his path.

He looked back at the carnage he had wrought.

Miles of gray ash and shattered timber lay behind him. But something caught his eye. Something that didn’t make sense.

The trunks of the trees he had killed were dead. They were rotting.

But the Roots, the ones he had severed to kill them were still there.

They poked out of the ground like severed cables. And unlike the trees, the roots were not gray. They were brown, vibrant, and pulsing with mana.

"Why didn’t the roots wither?" Lux whispered, dragging himself upright. If the tree died, the roots should be affected by it too. Unless...

"Are they still sucking energy from the ground?"

Lux knelt, placing his hand on the soil. He extended his senses deep into the earth.

What he found made his blood run cold.

The mana in the soil wasn’t ambient. It was miniscule.

"It’s not coming from the earth," Lux realized. "It’s coming from somewhere else."

He focused on one of the severed roots. He traced its end. He watched through his senses as the root went deep, twisting and turning, until it merged with another root. And that root merged with a thicker one.

And that thicker one connected to the tree next to it. And the tree a mile away.

Lux pulled his hand back as if burned.

"They are connected," he gasped.

He looked at the millions of trees surrounding him. He looked at the canopy that stretched for infinity.

It wasn’t a forest of individual Demigod trees.

"It’s a single organism," Lux whispered, the horror of the realization settling in. "The entire jungle... Floor 70... it’s all just one entity."

He looked at the massive Treant he had just killed.

"I wasn’t fighting a soldier. I was fighting a hair. I’ve spent five days fighting the hairs of a giant forest."

He laughed, "No wonder Thalorax was so smug. No wonder he wouldn’t share the secret."

If you fight the trees, you fight forever. You cannot kill an organism by trimming its nails.

"The source," Lux muttered, his eyes hardening with new resolve. "I need to find the Heart."

He looked at the pulsating roots underground. They were flowing like mana. And mana always leads to the heart.

"I don’t need to chop wood anymore," Lux declared, standing up and dusting off his hands. "I need to follow the flow."

"The ’Solution’ isn’t strength," Lux realized. "It’s navigation."

He closed his eyes, focusing purely on the underground network. He found the thickest artery of mana and turned his body to face where it originated.

"Found you," he growled.

Lux took a step, ignoring the trees that roared at him. He wasn’t a lumberjack anymore. He was an assassin. And he was going to cut out the heart of this forest.