Chapter 255: Chapter 255 – Sometimes It Takes One Beyond The Fate to Save It!!

The battlefield burned red beneath the fractured moon.

Luca’s twin sabers sliced through the chaos like streaks of light, their edges singing with mana as they tore through one cultist after another. Each movement was instinct — duck, parry, cut, twist — the rhythm of death echoing in every breath he took.

All around him, the cries of elves mixed with the guttural laughter of cultists. The air was thick with blood and ash, every gust of wind carrying the scent of smoke and decay. Luca’s boots skidded across scorched soil as he cut down another enemy lunging for a wounded elf, dragging the survivor back before diving forward again.

“Get back!” he barked, parrying a crimson-tinted blade before countering with a slash that sent sparks flying.

He could feel it — the weakness in the elves’ defense. Their movements sluggish, their mana flow unstable. Something’s wrong… why are they weakening so fast?

A spear of corrupted mana shot past him, grazing his arm. He hissed, spinning, and slashed through the cultist who fired it. His heart pounded — not from exhaustion, but from the gnawing dread that something deeper was at play.

And then—

“LUCAAAAAAAAAA!”

The voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silence.

He froze mid-swing, eyes snapping toward the source. Elowen’s voice — desperate, trembling, echoing over the battlefield.

Senior Elowen?

He turned just in time to see her — kneeling beside the fallen Elf Queen amid the chaos, her green aura flickering weakly. His pulse quickened. The Queen—damn it.

Without another thought, Luca dashed forward, his body blurring through the smoke and fire. His twin sabers slashed open a path, leaving trails of silver mana in the air. “Move!” he shouted, shoulder-checking a cultist aside before breaking into a sprint toward the Queen’s position.

If the Elf Queen collapses now… the elves’ morale will crumble. She has to stand back to fight otherwise…. The entire forest could fall in minutes.

He shook the thought away. No. Not yet.

Sliding to his knees beside Elowen, Luca’s sabers dug into the ground beside him. “What happened?!” he demanded, his tone sharp but not unkind.

Elowen looked up, her face streaked with blood and tears. “It’s the Mother Tree,” she gasped, her voice trembling. “Something is corrupting it from within. The elves’ power—our mana—it’s fading because of that.”

“The Mother Tree?” Luca echoed, brows furrowing. “You’re saying… it’s the source?”

Elowen nodded frantically. “Yes. The Queen believes if we don’t stop it now, everyone here will die. The forest, the elves, all of it—”

Luca’s jaw tightened as he looked between the two. “Then you should go,” he said quickly. “You’re the High elf, right? The Mother Tree’s your connection, not mine.”

Elowen’s eyes widened, then softened with quiet resolve. “I can’t. I have to stay and heal Her Majesty. If she dies, the hearts of our people will break.”

Luca hesitated, the chaos of the battlefield roaring in his ears. He looked toward the Queen — her breaths shallow, her golden eyes faintly open, yet still glowing with ancient wisdom. She met his gaze, and even in her frailty, her voice carried authority.

“Go,” the Elf Queen said, her words strained but firm. “The forest recognizes you, outsider. The Mother Tree allowed you entry once… it will again.”

Luca’s expression hardened. “Why me?”

“Because,” she said with a faint smile, “sometimes it takes one beyond the forest to save it.”

For a heartbeat, Luca didn’t respond. His gaze drifted across the burning battlefield — fallen elves, shattered arrows, the unrelenting waves of cultists still pushing forward.

Then, with a sharp exhale, he stood. The moonlight gleamed against the blood on his sabers as he looked ahead, the reflection of flames dancing in his eyes.

“Fine,” he muttered. “I’ll go. Make sure you’re both alive when I get back.”

Without another word, he turned and sprinted toward the deeper forest — toward the Mother Tree’s heart.

Behind him, Elowen’s trembling hands pressed harder against the Queen’s chest, tears still falling. She looked up just long enough to see his fading silhouette vanish into the smoke.

The Elf Queen exhaled weakly, her gaze never leaving the direction he went. “Let’s hope,” she whispered, “our gamble pays off.”

Elowen’s fists clenched against the blood-soaked earth, her voice barely above a whisper — trembling with faith and fear alike.

“It has to… otherwise…”

The flames crackled around them.

And deep within the forest — the Mother Tree’s faint, dying pulse called out.

Luca became a blade in the dark.

He ran like a storm tearing through the cultists’ ranks—two saber-arcs carving silver moons through the night. Each step was practiced violence: slide, pivot, riposte, advance. He moved between trees and smoking roots with a dancer’s footwork, sabers flashing in counterpoint. The cultists came at him in waves—wild, screaming, faces masked with zeal—only to find themselves met by cold, efficient steel. Limbs folded, stances collapsed, and the air filled with the metallic song of clashing blades and the dull thud of men falling to earth.

He didn’t slow to watch. He struck to create paths: a clean downward sweep to split a charging shield, a short, brutal slash to sever a wrist that would have gripped a dagger, a backhand rip that sent an attacker pitching into the ash. He caught one cultist’s spear with the flat of his saber, twisted, and sent the man cartwheeling into a ruined root. He ducked under a wild overhand, rolled through the mist, and sprang up to finish the attacker before he could recover.

Everything narrowed into momentum and necessity. The battlefield’s cacophony blurred into a single beat—the beat of his heart, the beat of his blades. Every motion opened the next. Every parry birthed another angle. He felt the rhythm of the forest itself, the living pulse of sap and root and the dying gasps of poisoned wood, and he matched it with edge and will.

Farther up the ridge—above the scarred clearing where the World Tree’s light thinned—a figure watched.

The leader stood with the casual arrogance of someone who believes he has already won. Gray tattoos snaked across his face like veins; his grin was a slow thing, lips parting as ash drifted through the air. Behind him the cultist tide spread, a living black river swallowing the light. He let the destruction unfurl before him with the ease of a spectator, tasting the chaos like a savory thing.

“Look, leader,” a cultist at his elbow hissed, pointing down the path. His voice shook with a greedy glee. “That ant—he’s cutting through them straight for the World Tree. Shall we stop him?”

The leader’s eyes didn’t twitch. He watched Luca drive forward, watching each small eruption of violence with the bored amusement of someone contemplating the inevitable. He licked his lips slowly, savoring the distant cries.

“Let it be,” he said finally, voice low and dry. “He cannot do anything alone. He cannot break what we have already devoured.” His words were not a threat; they were a certainty. “In the end he will also end up in our hands just like those fool bitches”

A ripple of cruel laughter ran along the leader’s shoulders. The cultist who had pointed clapped his palms together, a high, manic sound, and added in a sing-song cadence, “Hehehe—those foolish bitches trusted us. And now, they are ours to toy with. Jiejeiejeie—playthings and prizes!”

Around them, the cultist flock answered in a rising, ragged chorus that tasted of triumph and madness. Their laughter wove into the night like a dark tide, an unholy accompaniment to Luca’s solitary advance.

But Luca did not hear their taunts. He heard only the breath in his lungs and the whisper of steel through air. With each step he closed the distance between himself and the heart of the forest. Around him cultists fell; behind him, the line of elves still staggered, still bled, but still clung to existence. The path ahead tightened, a funnel of scorched earth and low-hanging branches. Beyond it, where the trees leaned inward like a great cathedral, the Mother Tree waited—wounded, pulsing faintly, and at the center of everything the answer to whether the forest would live.

He tightened his grip, sabers humming in his hands. The leader’s voice oozed confidence up the ridge, but Luca’s calves burned and his breath came clean and hard. The world pared down to the next strike, the next step, the next enemy between him and the Tree.

The forest’s chaos dimmed the deeper Luca ran, replaced by a strange, eerie stillness — as though the air itself held its breath in reverence. The ground beneath his boots turned from scorched soil to shimmering roots that pulsed faintly with silver-green light. And then — he saw it.

The World Tree.

Even amid the ruin, it stood eternal.

Its colossal trunk rose into the heavens like a divine pillar, bark of silver and jade interwoven in living veins of light. Its branches spread outward, endless, like the arms of a goddess embracing the world. The leaves shimmered with their own inner luminescence, falling gently like fragments of stars. Around its roots, mana flowed in streams visible to the naked eye — rivers of life still glowing despite the taint in the air.

It was beautiful. Divine. Untouchable.

And yet… wrong.

Luca slowed to a halt, his sabers dripping with blood as his gaze lifted toward the colossal being of light and life. “How… is it corrupted?” he murmured, eyes narrowing. “Something this pure shouldn’t even be capable of—” He stopped mid-sentence as a faint tremor ran through the ground, and the glow of the roots flickered — just slightly, but enough for him to feel it.

He exhaled sharply, muttering under his breath, “Holy shit…”

Because now he saw it.

Encircling the base of the sacred trunk — dozens, no, hundreds of hooded figures stood in a circular formation, their cloaks blacker than shadow, their faces hidden behind twisted masks of bone and iron. They chanted in guttural unison, each syllable a knife of sound tearing through the night. Their voices rose and fell in a rhythmic, maddened pulse, resonating with the tree’s fading heartbeat.

Symbols — warped and pulsating — were etched into the ground around them, drawn in blood and ash. Each circle connected to the next, layered upon layer like the rings of an infernal ritual, all feeding into the heart of the Tree itself. From above, it would have looked like a spiral of madness, closing in on the divine.

Luca felt the pressure of it — a suffocating, oppressive wave of corrupted mana that clawed at his skin. His instincts screamed danger, his very soul recoiling from the blasphemy before him.

But there, at the Tree’s roots — something else caught his eye.

A small group of elves stood between the cultists and the sacred trunk. But unlike the fair-skinned elves he’d seen before, these had skin dark as midnight and hair of muted silver-gray that shimmered faintly under the moonlight. Their armor was cracked, their blades dulled, their bodies stained with blood — yet their eyes still burned with defiance.

Dark elves.

They were battered, trembling, clearly exhausted — but not one of them stepped back. Their weapons, though heavy with fatigue, were still raised high.

The cultists hissed and sneered, circling like predators, but the dark elves stood their ground — protecting the Tree even as its light dimmed.

And then Luca’s gaze stopped.

At the center of the defenders — near the great root that curved upward like a cradle of divine wood — a single figure knelt. Her hair shone brighter than moonlight, cascading like liquid silver down her back. The faint glow from the Tree illuminated her form, revealing delicate armor shattered in places, a trickle of blood at her lip, and her hand resting upon the glowing bark — as though trying to soothe the great being’s pain.

Luca’s breath caught.

His eyes widened.

“…Is… is it her?”

For a brief moment, time itself seemed to hold still — the flames, the chanting, the wind — everything silenced beneath the weight of recognition.

The moon hung above, its cold light reflecting off her silver hair.

And Luca stood frozen, staring toward the one figure he least expected to see here —

the dark elf from before.

Just what the hell happened here?

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