Chapter 91: The Face Within

Chapter 91: The Face Within

Crazy Hope immediately understood.

The dark-haired vanguard warrior gripped his heavy weapon tightly, his sharp eyes darting between Chloe’s flickering holographic display and the pulsing behemoth of white wood dominating the center of the cavern. The tactical projection painted a stark, unforgiving picture of their objective.

"If we destroy that..."

"The entire tree should collapse," Chloe confirmed, her voice cutting through the mechanical hum of her armor’s cooling fans. She adjusted a setting on her wrist console, causing the dense, blackened node at the absolute center of the schematic to glow with a sharp, warning crimson. "The surrounding network of lesser roots and satellite trees is entirely dependent on the continuous, high-frequency spiritual output of this central hub. Break the hub, and the ecosystem loses its structural integrity."

Sky looked toward the enormous trunk. The pale bark seemed to ripple under the intense light of Vesper’s fading holy energy, looking less like timber and more like a mass of pale, tightly coiled muscles.

"Where is it?"

Chloe’s expression changed. Her jaw tightened behind her visor as she checked the depth readings on her environmental sensors.

"Deep inside."

Sky sighed. A bitter, humorless smile touched his lips for a fraction of a second.

"Of course."

It was never going to be easy. A monster that had fed on centuries of dungeon delvers wasn’t about to leave its primary life source exposed to a simple frontal assault. It was buried behind meters of living, self-healing armor.

The roots suddenly slammed into the ground.

BOOM!

The entire chamber shook. The concussive impact tore up new fissures across the flagstones, sending a violent vibration directly up through Sky’s boots. The surrounding pale trees flexed their branches, their dry wood scraping together in a deafening chorus that sounded like low, mocking laughter.

Sky looked at his Blood Blade. The crimson edge hummed with a restless, vibrant energy, eager to cut through the oppressive chill that hung thick over the grove.

Then at the massive tree.

"How deep?"

Chloe hesitated. She pulled up a cross-sectional analysis, her fingers trembling slightly as the scale of the entity’s density became clear.

"Very."

"Can my Soul Clone reach it?"

Chloe looked at him. Her eyes were wide with a mixture of technical concern and genuine dread for what she was about to ask him to do.

"...Probably."

Sky’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t like the sound of that word. In a high-tier dungeon environment, "probably" was just another way of saying "prepare to die."

"Probably?"

"I can’t guarantee the tree won’t interfere with the connection again," she explained quickly, gesturing to the fluctuating mana waves on her display. "The moment your clone enters the internal mass, you’ll be swimming in the entity’s primary digestive zone. The spiritual pressure alone could tear your awareness apart before you even find the core."

Sky remembered the sensation. The cold pressure. The hunger. The feeling of something trying to pull him apart from the inside.

It had been an invasive, terrifying violation of his consciousness. The memory of that icy hook dragging against his soul core was still fresh, making the skin on the back of his neck prickle with instinctual fear.

He wasn’t eager to experience it again.

But there was no other choice. They were completely sealed in. The corridor behind them was a solid wall of pale wood, and the roots were closing in from every angle, narrowing their battlefield with every passing second. If they didn’t act now, they would be compressed and crushed into fertilizer.

Vesper stepped beside him. Her Holy Scepter Blade flared to life once more, the brilliant white and gold aura casting a radiant shield around the three of them. Her stance was iron-clad, her expression devoid of any hesitation.

"I’ll keep it occupied."

Sky looked at her. The sheer volume of roots currently tunneling through the soil was enough to overwhelm a small army, yet she stood there like an unbreakable fortress.

"You sure?"

She raised her blade, the tip pointing directly at the heart of the grove.

"I didn’t come this far to run."

Chloe adjusted her visor, locking her positioning systems onto Sky’s spiritual signature to ensure she could track his movements through the dense timber.

"And I’ll guide you."

Sky took a deep breath. He forced the cold dread out of his lungs, replacing it with the sharp, focused calm of a predator.

"Fine."

He closed his eyes. He blocked out the chaotic sounds of crumbling stone, the whistling wind of swinging roots, and the blinding flashes of Vesper’s holy light. He turned his awareness inward, focusing entirely on the dark, empty reservoir of power within his own center. Darkness gathered around his body. The shadowy, ethereal smoke coiled around his limbs, coalescing into a perfect, mirror-image silhouette of himself.

His Soul Clone emerged.

This time, Sky didn’t send it toward the tree. He didn’t try to skim the surface or engage the flailing roots in a battle of attrition.

He sent it into the tree.

The clone surged forward, a streak of midnight-black energy that ignored the physical bark entirely. It phased through the enormous trunk, diving straight into the solid, pulsing mass of white wood.

The moment it entered— Sky’s entire body went rigid. His eyes snapped open, but they saw nothing of the outer chamber. His consciousness was violently dragged into the perspective of his copy.

His soul screamed.

FEED.

The tree had noticed him. It hadn’t just noticed; it reacted with a terrifying, instantaneous ferocity. The ambient environment inside the wood was a dense, suffocating soup of pure, unadulterated malice.

Hundreds of invisible tendrils immediately reached toward the Soul Clone. They were ghostly, translucent fibers that shot out from the internal rings of the trunk, wrapping around the clone’s limbs like spiritual barbed wire, trying to sap its energy and trace the connection back to Sky’s physical body.

Sky forced it deeper. He ignored the burning agony in his mind, gritting his teeth so hard he could taste copper. He pushed the clone forward through sheer, stubborn force of will.

Past the roots.

Past layers of ancient wood that felt like thick, frozen sludge.

Past countless trapped fragments of souls.

He could see them. Inside the pale timber, embedded within the very grain of the monster’s flesh, were the remnants of the harvested.

Faces.

Hands.

Eyes.

Souls trapped inside the tree. They were frozen in various states of perpetual, silent agony, their features twisted into expressions of eternal terror. They were being slowly digested, their memories and identities parsed out to feed the hunger of the grove.

Sky’s breathing became ragged. His physical body back in the chamber was trembling violently, blood beginning to trickle from his nose.

How many people died here? The sheer scale of the slaughter was unfathomable. This grove wasn’t a dungeon floor; it was a mass grave.

"Sky!"

Chloe’s voice snapped him back to reality. It was a faint, distorted radio signal cutting through the spiritual static of his mind.

"Thirty meters ahead!"

His Soul Clone moved. It tore through a cluster of screaming soul fragments, its dark form flickering wildly as the pressure increased.

Twenty meters.

Fifteen.

Ten.

The pressure became unbearable. It felt as though a mountain were being pressed directly onto his cerebral cortex. The tree was actively squeezing his clone, trying to compress it into nothingness. The tree was fighting him now. It realized the danger, abandoning its slow digestion to focus its entire psychic weight on the intruder.

The entire chamber erupted into chaos.

Outside, the roots went completely wild, thrashing with a mindless, destructive frenzy that threatened to bring the roof down.

Vesper’s Holy Scepter Blade flashed repeatedly, cutting through roots as they attacked her. She moved like a whirlwind of golden fire, her shield shattering beneath the weight of successive strikes, but she refused to yield an inch of ground protecting Sky’s catatonic form.

Chloe shouted directions. Her eyes were locked onto her data streams, calculating the safest pathways through the shifting internal chambers of the tree.

"Left!"

Sky moved. The clone veered to the side, narrowly avoiding a massive internal node that flared with defensive energy.

"Down!"

The Soul Clone phased through another layer of dense, hardened pulp that tasted like old copper and dead ash.

"Straight ahead!"

Sky suddenly saw it.

A massive black sphere buried deep within the tree. It was a perfect, smooth orb of absolute darkness, completely devoid of the pale coloration that defined the rest of the organism.

It pulsed slowly.

THUM.

THUM.

THUM.

Sky stared at it. The sheer density of the object was staggering; it felt like a black hole, drawing the surrounding spiritual energy into its core with an inescapable gravitational pull.

The Soul Core. But just as his Soul Clone approached— The black sphere opened. A horizontal slit tore across the center of the smooth, dark surface, parting like a heavy, leathery eyelid.

Something inside looked back at him. Sky froze. The breath completely left his physical body as an icy spike of pure, unmitigated terror pierced his mind.

Because the thing inside the core... had a face.