Chapter 234: They Were Winning?
"Meilan!!!"
Lin Cheng’s voice cracked through the yard causing everything to grind to a halt for just a second. It was louder than the screaming, it was louder than the chaos... but it wasn’t louder than what came next.
He was staring at the ground, screaming her name for a second time, and for half a second, I thought he had spotted another flower.
That would have been reasonable, considering the yard was currently producing them like the apocalypse had decided to become a nightmare garden. Then I followed his gaze and saw the vine wrapped around his ankle.
The vine wasn’t thick enough to do much damage to him. It was just a thin green thing that had crept out from beneath a layer of ash and curled around him while he was busy watching Guo Renwang rip apart everything that came near him.
But Lin Cheng reacted immediately.
The ground under his foot rose and crushed the vine before it could tighten around him. That should have been enough to ended it. But it wasn’t.
Another vine slid over his other boot, causing an even bigger reaction.
Lin Cheng drove a spike of stone through it, then sent a wave of dirt and broken concrete outward to clear the space around him. For several seconds, the ground obeyed him. Stone lifted high up as the ash that covered every surface scattered into the air.
The flowers that were nearest to him were buried beneath a hard shell of packed earth.
The problem was that he clearly wasn’t thinking past the need to crush the flower into oblivion.
For example, he forgot the whole plants grew out of the earth thing. Putting more dirt on top of them wasn’t going to actually accomplish what he wanted, it was just going to make them have better roots.
A crack appeared in the dirt wall that he had just erected. Then another. Then another.
And, as if the world was trying to say that I told you so, plants started to come out of the dirt.
Sure, it wasn’t all at once.
First, the roots pushed through the first opening before a flower followed, its petals unfolding as if it had been planted there on purpose. I held back a smile as Lin Cheng’s jaw tightened, and he slammed both hands down again, forcing the earth to close around it.
The flower vanished beneath the pressure, but the wall bulged a second later as something underneath continued pushing.
I shook my head, unable to hide the smile on my face. "Well, that was rude," I muttered under my breath. Commander Li looked at me like he couldn’t quite understand what I was talking about. So, I pointed toward the wall.
"He built them a planter," I explained as Lin Cheng tried to smash yet another flower. "And now he is cranky that they like what he built them."
Lingyun laughed out loud as he looked up at me in Yuche’s arms. Lin Cheng, on the other hand. did not.
Instead, he tore the entire wall apart and sent the pieces flying outward like that would fix everything.
And... surprise, surprise... it actually worked.
Three flowers were crushed under the impact, two vines snapped, and a root thicker than my wrist split in half and leaked something bright green across the ash.
For the first time since the jungle started moving, one of Meilan’s men looked like he might actually be useful.... it actually looked like they might be winning.
And that, that was annoying.
Guo Renwang apparently agreed with me, because he let out a roar and charged straight into the thickest patch of moving vines in a way that screamed he had a death wish.
He grabbed one in each hand and pulled them apart with the kind of strength that made it very clear why people had respected him in the first timeline. Vines snapped under his hands as flowers burst beneath his boots. Roots tore out of the ground as he dragged them behind him like ropes.
Meilan’s expression changed... I saw it happen in real time.
The panic didn’t disappear completely, but hope and superiority crawled back onto her face like an infection. She straightened, lifted her chin, and suddenly looked like a woman who had decided the universe was correcting itself.
Of course she did.
"Break through!" she shouted. "They’re just plants!"
The jungle heard her.
I knew it did.
Not because I understood how plants heard anything, and not because I wanted to think too hard about the logistics of that sentence, but because the yard shifted the second those words left her mouth.
The flowers closest to Guo Renwang retreated.
The vines pulled back.
Even the ash seemed to settle.
Guo Renwang laughed... and I let out a long sigh. That was unfortunate.
Anytime a person laughed like that in the apocalypse, it usually meant something terrible was about to happen next.
He took another step forward, ripping apart a vine that tried to coil around his arm.
Lin Cheng used the opening to raise two walls of earth on either side of him, creating a path through the burned yard. Shen Kaiyang moved along that path so quickly that my eyes had trouble following him. His blade flashed again and again, cutting away any vine that tried to close the space behind them.
For a moment, they looked good.
Really good.
The kind of good that explained why they had survived long enough to become names in the first timeline.
They were pushing the jungle back.
They were clearing space.
They were making progress.
Meilan smiled wider even as her eyes got bigger and brighter.
I hated that smile more than the pain in my ribs.
"See?" she shouted, looking toward me like she wanted me to appreciate the show. "You really thought some weeds were going to stop them? We are gods among men"
I didn’t answer. Mostly because there was something about the leaves that had caught my attention.
They were moving wrong.
The vines weren’t retreating randomly. They were clearing space around Guo Renwang, but not around everyone else. The flowers were pulling away from him, but the leaves above him were folding inward.
And amongst all that movement... something dark shifted under one of the larger leaves near the edge of the path Lin Cheng had made.
My stomach turned.
Not from pain this time, but from absolute, blood freezing, bone curdling fear.
I was terrified in a way that I hadn’t been for a long, long time.
"You have to be fucking kidding me."
