The air inside the longhouse turned scorching as Blaze stepped forward, his fists wreathed in white-hot flames.

The mutated villagers didn't flinch; their bark-like skin creaked as they adjusted their elongated limbs, their violet eyes glowing with a mindless, parasitic hunger.

"I'll ask one more time, you overgrown pile of kindling," Blaze spat, his aura flaring. "Where did you take the girls?"

Chief Olden, his jaw unhinging to reveal rows of jagged wooden teeth, let out a wet, clicking laugh. "To the Heart. The girls are the ultimate fertilizer. Thirt blood will wake master from his slumber!"

"Enough talk!" Solmon bellowed.

The massive disciple of Hamdal slammed his gauntlets together, a shockwave of kinetic energy shattering the furniture around them.

He charged like a juggernaut, his heavy boots splintering the floorboards. One mutated villager lunged with a needle-like wooden arm, but Solmon caught the limb mid-air and snapped it like a dry twig before delivering a thunderous punch to the creature's chest.

CRACK!

The mutant was sent flying through the longhouse wall, but as it landed, vines from the floorboards immediately began stitching its chest back together.

"They regenerate!" Aeron shouted, drawing his twin shortswords. "Zenon, watch the rafters!"

Zenon looked up just in time to see three more mutants dropping from the ceiling, their fingers extended into foot-long claws. He spun, his blade whistling through the air in a defensive arc. "They're not just mutants—they're connected to this land itself!"

The fight turned into a chaotic swirl of fire and steel.

Blaze became a whirlwind of destruction, his Incinerating Palms turning any mutant he touched into a living torch.

However, the cloying fog outside seemed to feed the creatures, the dampness dampening his flames.

Solmon acted as the anchor, using his Gravity Press technique to pin three mutants to the ground simultaneously, allowing Zenon to decapitate them.

Aeron moved with surgical precision, noticing that each mutant had a glowing violet pulse point at the base of their neck—the "seed" of the parasite. "Aim for the nape! That's where the root connects!"

"Talk, old man!" Blaze roared, grabbing Olden by his mossy throat and slamming him into the hearth. "How do we break the binding? How do we save the girls?"

Olden laughed even as his skin began to char. "You don't! The village is the stomach, and you are already being digested! The fog... it doesn't just hallucinate... it dissolves!"

Blaze looked down at his own arms and realized with horror that the fine gray dust he saw earlier was beginning to form on his sleeves.

The "fog" was actually a cloud of microscopic fungal spores that were slowly eating through their mana shields.

"Solmon! We're running out of time!" Blaze yelled. "We need to collapse this place and get to Grey!"

Solmon gritted his teeth, his gauntlets glowing with a blinding golden light. "Aeron, Zenon! Get behind me! I'm taking the whole damn house down!"

Solmon's eyes glowed with a fierce, golden light. He planted his feet so firmly that the shattered floorboards groaned under the pressure.

His massive gauntlets didn't just hum anymore; they vibrated with the frequency of a tectonic shift.

"Everyone! SHIELD UP!" Solmon bellowed.

Blaze, Aeron, and Zenon dove behind the largest stone hearth, pouring every ounce of their mana into a combined elemental barrier.

Golden aura covered his gauntlets as it started turning solid crystals. He raised both fists high above his head, the air around him distorting from the sheer density of his kinetic aura.

"MOUNTAIN BREAKER!"

He slammed his fists into the central foundation as the golden crystal shards broke and turned into dust upon hitting the floor.

For a heartbeat, there was absolute silence—the "white out" before the storm.

Then, a titanic shockwave erupted from the point of impact. The longhouse didn't just collapse; it exploded outward.

Stone, heavy timber, and mutated flesh were shredded into splinters as the very ground buckled, creating a twenty-foot crater where the village center once stood.

The dust cloud was thick, tasting of old wood and iron. Blaze coughed, waving his hand to clear the air as he stood up from the wreckage.

Around them, the village was silent. The longhouse was a pile of jagged debris. What once stood, was nowhere to be seen now, except the night sky.

"Did... did we get them?" Aeron whispered, his swords trembling in his hands.

A sickening, wet slurp answered him.

From beneath a massive fallen beam, a gray, bark-like hand twitched. Then another.

Slowly, the "villagers" began to crawl out of the rubble. Their bodies had been mangled by the blast—limbs were torn, chests were caved in, and heads were hanging by mere threads of mossy fiber.

But they weren't dying.

As the boys watched in horror, thick, violet-veined vines erupted from the ground beneath the mutants.

Like surgical needles made of wood, the vines threaded through the broken limbs, pulling them back into place.

Ribcages snapped shut, skin fused back together with a sound like wet leather being stretched, and the violet glow in their eyes flared brighter than ever.

"It's not working," Zenon choked out, pointing at Chief Olden. The old man's head had been nearly severed, but now it sat straight again, held in place by a collar of writhing roots.

"They are not alive anymore, they are dead puppets with a master!" Solmon realized, his breath coming in heavy gasps.

"We're just pruning the branches. As long as that master is alive in the forest, these things have infinite life. We're fighting the entire forest at once!"

Chief Olden's jaw unhinged, and he let out a discordant, multi-tonal screech. The mutated villagers didn't just stand; they began to merge, their limbs intertwining to form larger, more grotesque abominations of wood and bone.

"The Master is calling," Olden rasped. "The Moon-child's heart has begun to beat for us."

"Remove these obsene hindrances. It's time for master to feed. He will surely awaken today!" Olden said with a maniacal smile.

The ground beneath the boys began to turn soft—the soil itself was becoming a mouth as everything started being sucked in like a whirlpool.

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