Chapter 599: Cressida... The Heart of the Tree

Fear.

That was the only thought inhating Cressida’s mind.

Her thoughts spiraled into chaos as she watched her roots destroyed again and again.

No matter how many she created, the undead kept cutting them apart.

No matter how quickly they regenerated, another undead was already waiting to destroy the next one.

Her eyes darted from one part of the battlefield to another, and the more she watched, the less any of it made sense.

How could this be?

How can he have so many powerful undead under his control?

This should be impossible!

The questions kept surfacing with no answers.

Everything unfolding before her had already gone far past what she’d expected.

When Thoren first entered the chamber, she hadn’t taken him seriously. She’d believed her regenerating roots would be enough to overwhelm him.

Even when several of his undead had managed to destroy her roots early on, she was confident.

She watched them recover within seconds, watched them grow stronger with every cycle. And then, she watch as Thoren undead struggle to keep up with her pace.

At that point she’d believed she finally the battle was already in the bag.

But now nearly a hundred powerful undead had poured out of his undead space, all of them fighting like war machines.

Perhaps they were war machines.

It was then the realization hit her.

While she had revealed all her card, her opponent was merely testing the water and now, he was showing her his true strenght.

Wtih that realization, the confidence she’d built began collapsing piece by piece as the battlefield played out in front of her.

The undead General’s saber cleaved through another group of roots. The undead Scorpion Men commanders tore through everything in their path behind him.

The undead Scorpion Men advanced in a dense wave.

The undead Horn Lizard King drew closer.

Her breathing grew heavier, her thoughts increasingly chaotic.

No. This isn’t right. There should be a limit.

There had to be some weakness.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t find it. And the harder she searched, the more her mind slid toward the edge of collapse.

Everything she’d calculated before the fight overturned in front of her eyes. The enemy she thought she understood had become something else entirely.

Thoren Starfall.

The name kept repeating in her mind.

She’d underestimated him, not once, not twice, but again and again, and now that mistake threatened to cost her everything she’d worked toward.

Her concentration began to slip.

The roots that had moved with such frightening speed grew slightly slower. Not obviously at first, one moving a fraction behind pace and another shifting direction.

Against an ordinary opponent, those small lapses might have meant nothing.

Against Thoren, they were openings.

He noticed immediately and his eyes narrowing as he tracked the battlefield through his perception.

With that opening, he had no intention of letting them close again.

’Push deeper.’

The command traveled through the mental link, and the undead responded at once.

The undead General picked up his pace.

The three undead commanders matched its pace.

The undead Scorpion Men surged forward in a dense wave, cutting through anything that tried to stop them.

And the undead Horn Lizard King raised its cudgel.

Thoren’s focus stayed locked on the massive heart beating at the center of Cressida’s tree body.

The Vorlath Blood Compass had already told him what he needed to know.

Destroy the heart, and everything would end immediately.

He didn’t know whether it was her actual core or simply the source powering the tree, but that was his concern right now.

Cressida was still trapped in her own spiraling thoughts, barely able to process what she was seeing.

Then she felt it, a growing sense of danger spreading through her entire body, her instincts screaming that something was closing in.

Her eyes snapped wide as she finally broke free of her own panic and looked toward the battlefield.

Her expression changed instantly.

The undead Horn Lizard King stood right in front of her, only a couple of feet from the enormous tree trunk.

Its cudgel already raised for another strike.

Instantly, her pupils contracted and for the first time, she knew was close to losing.

Fury and hatred burned through her.

She had been so close.

Everything had gone according to plan before Thoren showed up. She had been on the verge of success, ready to reduce the inhabitant of the Suncrest City to her nourishment.

And now she was about to fail, at the hands of the very person she had underestimated over and over.

"NO!"

Her voice tore through the chamber, the massive tree body shaking violently as every root suddenly stirred at once.

She tried to summon everything the tree had left as she wanted every root to attack.

To force the undead back, wanting to stop the undead Horn Lizard King before it reached the heart.

But to her dismay, nothing happened.

Hmm?!

She froze.

"What?"

Unwilling to accept the reality, despereately, she tried again. She reached for the vitality flowing through the tree but the result was the same.

Still nothing.

Instantly, her expression twisted.

What?!

A sense of dread washed over her, and only then did the truth land. She was out of energy.

The regeneration of her roots had never come from nowhere.

Every time one was destroyed and regrew, it burned through an enormous amount of the tree heart’s vitality.

The faster the roots regenerated, the more it cost. The stronger they came back, the more energy it demanded.

She had known this.

Of course she had known. But she had never expected to burn through so much.

She had been too confident, too eager to end the fight quickly. Too determined to crush Thoren’s undead quickly, to show him the vast chasm between them.

So she had forced the tree to regenerate its roots at an incredible pace, again and again and again, and that consumed the heart’s vitality far faster than she’d ever accounted for.

Now there was nothing left.

Her face went pale.

No... How could I have used this much?

She tried once more.

Still nothing.

The roots around the chamber slowed further, some stopping entirely, others crawling weakly across the ground.

Against an ordinary opponent, her plan might have worked.

Facing regular awakeners, the endless regeneration would have ground them down into despair, exhausted them, left them unable to keep fighting until they were finally overwhelmed.

But her opponent was Thoren, and he had never feared a battle of attrition.

If anything, he thrived on it.

As a Necromancer, he held one of the greatest advantages a war of endurance could offer.

His undead would keep fighting as long as they remained under his control. Damaged, they wouldn’t complain.

Torn apart, they wouldn’t retreat.

"No..." Her voice trembled.

She watched as the roots could no longer hold the undead back.

She could only watch, helpless, as the undead tore through the last of her roots, her once-terrifying regeneration gone, nothing left to recover before the next blow landed.

The undead Horn Lizard King slowly raised its massive cudgel as it approach the tree trunk.

Cressida stared at it and her face twisted with rage, hatred burning in her eyes.

She knew what was coming and turned to looked at the Silver Hair young man.

"This isn’t over..." she muttered. Her voice thick with fury and hatred.

But what answered her was...

Boom!