Chapter 757 Found Them First
Phoenix did one last quick flight over their general location; her eyes peeled for anything abnormal. But she couldn't find anything.
Landing next to Astaroth, she could see he was on edge, and instead of cancelling her Avatar of Flames form, she left it active and walked to his side.
"Did you see something?" she asked him hushedly.
"No. But I can sense we are being observed. I think the Zone Boss is finally aware that we're stomping in his territory. But I can't sense it anywhere."
Phoenix nodded, craning her neck and putting Astaroth at her back.
This part of the forest was so quiet; it was eerie. And right now, it had fallen even more silent.
Usually, one would hear the wind whistling through branches and leaves in a forest like this one. But there was no such thing here.
The air was stale, and the ground was covered in moss that absorbed most of the vibrations from their footsteps.
Astaroth focused on his mana senses alone, his vision obsolete at this point, given how static everything in this forest was. At least, until it wasn't.
He extended his mana sense as far as he could, which now reached almost a mile out, but still couldn't feel the slightest presence of mana or mana particles.
In his mind, picturing his surroundings in mana signatures, Astaroth was getting nothing. Not even the trees or the earth.
It was like a vast black room, with darkness staring at him.
Phoenix could also stretch her mana senses, but hers functioned differently. Instead of giving her a clear outline of mana signatures and what they belonged to, it was a much more vague feeling.
But her senses reached much farther than Astaroth's.
Ever since that stint in the unique dungeon, the Time Capsule, her ability to stretch out her mana senses had more than quintupled in size.
Extending out her senses, Astaroth felt the brush of her mana pulse against his, reaching past his limit, and he grinned for a moment before going back to a stoic face.
'She's already surpassed me with that skill. How frightful…'
Phoenix's senses stopped expanding after two miles, not because she couldn't reach further but because the environment was sapping away the mana of her pulse, making it stop short.
The two of them were expecting an attack at any second now.
In Astaroth's mind, his hyper-focus allowed him to catch what sounded like a crackling of branches in his mana sense. The ping in his mind gave him a location not too far away, and his head snapped toward it.
Opening his eyes, he saw Phoenix's head was also turned toward the mana ping.
"You felt it, too?" he asked.
"Barely. Like a rustling of leaves. But it came from that direction," she answered, raising her arm to point northeast.
Astaroth grinned. He had an idea of what that could be and hoped he was right.
They had just found the Zone Boss' hiding place if he was. The spot from which he controlled the treants' attacks.
"Let's go," he said.
But he kept his mana senses stretched out, since that mana signature was already gone. And it could have been anything.
Phoenix nodded, and they dashed toward the location of their feeling.
As soon as they started moving toward it, another ping of mana echoed in his senses, this one more potent, and right after, eight mana signatures flared to life in their vicinity.
"Treants," Phoenix warned as she sensed them come to life.
"Ignore them," Astaroth replied.
"We have a lock on the Zone Boss. We can deal with them all simultaneously once we force him out of hiding."
She silently agreed, and they rushed past a barrage of roots, branches, and clumps of mud as the treants locked onto them.
The treants were slow, by any measure, and as soon as they passed their position, they quickly lost them in the forest. But more of them kept appearing, the trees all around them unearthing themselves from the wet ground and attacking them on sight.
But the distance between the original mana signature and them was shortening at an incredible pace.
The ground started rumbling under their feet, forcing them to take to the skies, lest they trip and become treant bait. And from there, they saw what caused all this rumbling and vibration.
In the middle of where Phoenix had passed earlier, a large swath of trees started rising from the mud, and they realized why they couldn't find the Zone Boss earlier.
"That's how he hid. Ingenious," Astaroth mumbled, his face stretching into a smile.
A group of thirty-odd trees, all varying in size, emerged from the ground, connecting into a much larger trunk that had been submerged. Now that they saw the main body, calling them trees was an inaccurate name.
They looked more like branches, pointed straight up, forming a patch of what looked like spiky hair on the head of the massive treant. His face was contorted in a mask of pain and anger, its eyes leaking in black and red miasma.
"I don't think we would have noticed it if we stepped on it. And that would have been a terrible mistake; I reckon," Astaroth said, half-jokingly.
Phoenix wasn't in a joking mood, though. She had flown over that patch of trees a few times during the day, always finding them odd at how close they were to each other.
But since she relied on her mana senses to determine if something was wrong and couldn't read anything from them, she had ignored her gut feeling.
And now that she saw what they were up against, she realized she had made a mistake.
*Forest Father Gordonan (Corrupted)*
Race: Ent
Grade: Legendary (Zone Boss)
Level: 75
Hp: ???
Mp: ???
**
Astaroth and Phoenix scanned it simultaneously, and their faces became serious.
"Well, shit. Talk about a load of fun…" Astaroth said.
His face was calm, but his heart was already thumping inside his chest. He felt excited, even though this enemy was too much for them to handle alone.
He couldn't help himself. This was what gaming was all about.
Finding your limit and shattering it.
"No use in holding back. Let's have at it!" he shouted, summoning all his soul companions.
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