Chapter 424: Bloodline Part 4
"GET OFF ME!"
She tore several parts.
Then the bark opened and the roots absorbed her
Her body disappeared into the wooden surface.
"ASHMAY!" Ashley’s roar tore across the battlefield.
He rushed toward her immediately.
A wall of roots erupted between them.
The impact sent him flying backward.
Arken clenched his fists.
Magic circles spun violently around him.
"Spatial Collapse."
The space around several roots suddenly twisted inward.
Entire sections of the Queen’s expanding body folded into compressed distortions before violently imploding.
The attack finally destroyed a large section permanently.
But the Queen barely reacted.
Instead, her roots began spreading across the moon even faster.
Entire forests started growing from the lunar surface.
Trees taller than mountains erupted from the ground.
Wooden vines spread like rivers.
The moon itself was being transformed.
Ashley landed beside Arken.
His breathing had grown heavier.
"We can’t win this," he said.
Arken glared at the expanding forest around them.
He hated admitting it.
But he was right.
Their attacks were strong enough to destroy cities.
Yet against this creature, they felt meaningless.
The Vedant Queen slowly lowered her face closer to the moon.
Her enormous green eyes focused directly on them.
"Call him," she said.
"Bring him to me."
"Go to hell." Arken spat blood to the side.
The Queen’s expression remained calm.
Then more roots emerged.
The others fought desperately.
One of them created thousands of crystal spears that rained across the battlefield.
Another unleashed a black storm that erased matter on contact.
The moon’s dark side became a battlefield of monsters.
But the roots kept advancing.
One by one, they were overwhelmed.
A demi dragon crashed through several forests before roots burst from beneath the ground and wrapped around his wings.
He released flames hot enough to melt mountains.
The roots burned.
Then regenerated.
They dragged him downward.
The ground opened.
A giant tree swallowed him alive.
Another female attempted to teleport away.
The moment space opened around her, roots appeared from inside the distortion itself.
They wrapped around her body mid-teleport.
Her scream cut off as wood closed over her.
Soon silhouettes began appearing everywhere beneath the bark.
Shapes trapped inside giant trees.
Unable to escape.
Ash gritted his teeth.
"This monster..."
The Queen finally answered.
"Monster?"
The forests across the moon trembled.
"Your father killed my child."
A deep pressure spread through space.
"Then he killed my husband when grief drove him to revenge."
Her giant eyes narrowed.
"And still you call me the monster."
No one answered.
Because there was nothing to say.
.
.
.
Silence settled across the moon.
Or what had been the moon.
Every surface was bark and vine and living wood. Shapes pressed against the inside of the great trees — silhouettes frozen mid-struggle, visible through the grain like insects.
The Vedant Queen turned her gaze slowly toward the planet below.
Her green eyes reflected its continents, its oceans, its clouds.
She was still staring at it when a voice came from behind her.
"I’ll give you a choice."
She stopped moving.
Every root. Every vine. Every branch across the entire moon went still at once.
"Release my children."
A pause.
"Or die."
She turned.
He stood on nothing.
There was no surface beneath his feet. No support. Just open space above the ruined lunar landscape. Around him, space itself seemed to bend and distort, as though it could barely withstand his presence.
White hair drifted without wind.
Golden eyes surveyed the battlefield — the broken moon, the dying roots, the children scattered across the bark — and held no particular expression.
Not anger. Not urgency. The look of a man who already decided how this would end before he arrived.
The robe he wore was white and gold, and it moved the way fire moves. Answering to nothing but itself.
And in his right hand —
A greatsword. Enormous. The kind of weapon that shouldn’t exist outside of myth, too large for any one arm to carry, too heavy for any one body to wield.
The blade caught no light because there was no light left near it — it seemed to consume what surrounded it, gold and dark energy coiling at its edge like two ancient things that had long since made peace with each other.
He held it at his side.
Like it weighed nothing.
Like everything else did.
Her eyes widened slightly.
"You—"
Golden chains erupted before she could finished her words.
They didn’t wrap around her. They emerged through her — through bark and root and ancient wood — and locked into place before she could process what was happening.
Her roots trembled to break free. The chains didn’t even strain.
She could not move.
For the first time in millions of years, the Vedant Queen found herself unable to move.
Asher looked at her for a moment.
Then he exhaled through his nose.
"Forget it."
He raised Pantheon.
Golden energy gathered at the blade’s tip. Then dark energy curled around it — not opposing the gold but threading through it, two forces that should have been incompatible moving together like they had always belonged to each other.
The space around the sword bent further.
"I’ll just take them myself."
He brought it down slowly, as if it didn’t take any effort at all. The attack landed without a sound—and the Vedant Queen was cut cleanly from top to bottom, as if the world itself had split in half with her.
She waited for the feeling she had known thousands of times across millions of years. The pulling-back-together. The roots reconnecting. The ancient wood knitting itself closed.
It didn’t come.
She looked down at the cut.
It wasn’t healing.
Whatever had been cut through, it was something deeper than bark, deeper than wood. Deeper than herself. Something she hadn’t known could even be touched.
The great trees across the moon shuddered. The vines loosened. Bark cracked along the length of every trunk, splitting open from the inside as if exhaling after holding a breath for too long.
Light spilled through the cracks.
Then the trees opened.
One by one, the prisoners fell free.
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