Chương 86: Wrath of Nature

Just as I was preparing to sprint into the jaws of certain doom like a heavily armed lemming, I spotted a familiar, beautifully tragic silhouette aggressively barreling through the thick purple smoke. It was none other than Aiko, our resident hyper-anxious berserker, who was currently radiating a baseline frequency of absolute, bone-deep terror for her own mortal survival but was somehow forcing her legs to move forward anyway.

The poor girl was a walking medical advertisement, covered in a spectacular assortment of fresh cuts and ugly bruises from her previous unscripted flight through the forest canopy, yet she was literally dragging her battered self back into the meat grinder through sheer, stubborn willpower. She raised her massive black-iron greatsword with two trembling hands and unleashed a desperate, screaming horizontal strike right across Kullervo's twitchy, prehensile vine fingers.

While her matte step-blade didn't possess quite enough raw physical oomph to completely sever the giant's wooden digits from his hand, the heavy impact was perfectly timed, causing his iron-hard grip on Fiona's head to significantly loosen up. Seeing the literal split-second window of opportunity burst wide open, I immediately kicked my boots into maximum overdrive and rushed right into the immediate danger zone like a hyperactive squirrel chasing a falling nut.

I successfully managed to close the distance before our giant wooden landlord could re-tighten his fingers, sliding deep into his personal space bubble until I was practically standing right under his chin. I hoisted the rugged, iron-reinforced barrel of my Deck Sweeper blunderbuss, aimed the short-ranged muzzle directly at the blank, faceless space where his eye cavity theoretically should have been, and forcefully pulled the smooth trigger to unleash a basic attack point-blank into his wooden skull.

The resulting blast was an absolute masterpiece of close-quarters violence, releasing a chaotic spread of magic that aggressively tore right through his petrified oak armor plating with a sickening crunch. The explosive kinetic impact delivered a massive, highly satisfying chunk of damage directly to his upper structure, overloading his tactical awareness just enough to force him to completely release his hold on Fiona.

Apparently, my point-blank facial reconstruction surgery only made our fifteen-foot wooden landlord exceptionally angry. Kullervo immediately pivoted his massive upper torso and swung his oversized, club-like arm straight into Fiona with the terrifying momentum of a professional golfer clearing a fairway.

The heavy wooden weapon connected with a sickening thud, sending our poor, multi-ton resident apex predator spinning wildly across the clearing until she rolled across the muddy, polluted ground like a giant, discarded fuzzy rug. Before Fiona could even attempt to find her footing, the giant bipedal fortress slammed his fists down to initiate a second helping of Root Grave directly underneath her heavy frame. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

A chaotic swarm of thick, jagged briars violently erupted from the purple sludge, wrapping around her torso like a pack of highly aggressive wooden anacondas trying to claim an early dinner. Fiona roared in pure defiance, desperately trying to resist the crushing magical pull by digging her massive claws deep into the dirt, but the downward gravity of the spell was simply too high-spec, relentlessly dragging her body down into the living, suffocating tomb.

Seeing our star druid getting actively swallowed by the earth, I scrambled to raise the rugged, iron-reinforced barrel of my Deck Sweeper blunderbuss, intent on throwing another blast of close-quarters violence straight into his blank wooden face. Unfortunately, Kullervo's twitchy, prehensile vine fingers shot out like weaponized garden hoses, tightly wrapping themselves around my wrist with the grip strength of a hydraulic press.

With a brutal flick of his wrist, the giant forcefully yanked my arm to the side, completely redirecting my weapon's trajectory until the muzzle was pointing directly at a highly panicked Aiko. Realizing that pulling the smooth trigger right now would turn my favorite anxious berserker into immediate, unscripted meat helper, I didn't waste a single millisecond.

Before my finger could make contact, I sent a sharp mental command to my inventory, causing the entire blunderbuss to instantly dissolve out of my hand into a harmless cloud of glowing blue mana particles. Defusal successful, right? Wrong. Because the exact microsecond my hands were empty, Kullervo decided to reward my quick tactical thinking by driving his colossal club arm straight into my jaw with the force of an oncoming freight train.

The impact was so phenomenally, brutally powerful that it felt like my brain cells were temporarily ejected from my skull, and I could literally see four of my own pearly white teeth casually flying through the toxic purple fog in slow motion as I violently crashed flat onto the bubbling sludge below. Just as I was mentally preparing to calculate the astronomical financial cost of magical dental implants, Dimitri staged the most beautifully timed comeback in the history of localized turf wars.

Having successfully wrestled his massive frame out of that dirt tomb, our favorite smiling Russian powerhouse sprinted forward like an angry freight train and slammed the weathered wood of his Rotting Barrel Lid shield straight into Kullervo's petrified flank with a glorious, muffled thud.

The heavy impact actually managed to rattle the fifteen-foot bipedal colossus, forcing the giant wooden mountain to gracefully leap backward into the toxic purple fog to put some immediate distance between himself and Dimitri's makeshift dumpster-dive loadout. Of course, because our giant wooden landlord is a deeply vindictive piece of kindling, he instantly locked his joints the second his roots touched the mud, loading up a second catastrophic helping of his signature Thorn-Burst Pulse right out of the gate.

Dimitri didn't even flinch at the sight of the glowing briars cracking across the monster's shell, immediately planting his heavy boots right in front of my face and bracing his arms behind his splintering shield to absorb the entire brunt of the impending organic shrapnel blast.

"Arthur-san, p-please save me!" Aiko shrieked at the absolute top of her lungs, her signature low volume completely shattering as she sprinted out of the smoke toward our position like a highly panicked citizen fleeing a localized meteor strike. Her desperate scream acted like a giant bucket of ice water poured directly onto my rattling brain cells, instantly dragging me right back to my senses as the lingering dizziness from losing four teeth finally evaporated.

I pushed myself up from the bubbling sludge and aggressively extended my open hand toward our favorite hyper-anxious berserker, who was currently barreling directly into the blast radius in a frantic bid for survival.

"Aiko!" I bellowed into the pollution, my hand desperately straining to bridge the remaining gap between us. The exact microsecond her name cleared my lips, the universe decided that our time for dramatic hand-holding was officially up, and the cataclysmic, deafening explosion of hundreds of high-velocity wooden shrapnel splinters violently erupted through the clearing.