I let it go.

  The curse didn’t fly like my darts.

  It didn’t surge or scream or leave a trail of light through the air. It simply… wasn’t in my hand anymore.

  My senses followed it anyway.

  The thing moved like greased lightning. Without impact. It seeped into the maroon glow at the core of the root-giant as if it had always belonged there, like water finding a crack it had been waiting for.

  For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

  The monster straightened.

  Its roots tightened, cords of dark wood flexing as it drew itself taller, trying to assert shape and dominance. The maroon light flared brighter, swelling as it pulled harder on whatever scraps of life still clung to it. I could feel it reaching, grasping at the forest, at the dead soil, at the echoes of the things it had already consumed.

  And then the life it pulled in… turned.

  The maroon light stuttered, its rhythm breaking like a heart skipping a beat. Veins of darker colour crept through it, spreading outward from where my curse had sunk in. The roots nearest the core began to shudder, not violently, but with an uneven tremor.

  A sound came from the root giant.

  Not a roar, but a wet, strangled groan.

  I frowned, my arcane sense sharpening, peeling layers away.

  Every channel. Every conduit. Every stolen thread of life force that ran through that thing was still there. The curse hadn’t severed them.

  It had redefined them.

  The next pull of energy it made didn’t strengthen it. I watched the stolen lifeforce enter the core and rot it on contact, breaking down into useless, corrosive residue that ate at the bindings holding the monster together. Roots near the chest cavity blackened, then split, leaking dull, ashen light instead of maroon.

  The giant staggered.

  One massive leg buckled, slamming into the dead earth hard enough to shake the ground. Smaller roots spasmed and tore free, whipping around uselessly as the monster tried to compensate, trying to redirect the flow like it had done with my hexes before.

  It couldn’t.

  The curse followed the paths it knew better than the monster ever had. Each attempt to draw strength fed it more poison. Each instinctive response only spread the effect further.

  I felt it then, clear as anything I’d ever sensed.

  Fear.

  The maroon core pulsed erratically now, its light flickering as chunks of stolen vitality collapsed in on themselves. The blossoms embedded in its body shrivelled, petals curling inward, turning brittle and grey as the life they depended on betrayed them.

  The giant tried to roar again.

  The sound came out fractured, collapsing halfway through as its chest caved inward, roots snapping and recoiling like burned nerves. A cascade of internal ruptures followed, one after another, as life force continued to corrode it.

  It was killing itself.

  I stepped forward, my boots crunching on dead ground.

  “Sorry,” I said calmly, my voice carrying in the sudden quiet, “I didn’t even give you the opportunity to beg...”

  The giant swayed, its towering form listing as its own weight became too much to bear. More roots tore free, sloughing off in chunks that hit the ground already lifeless, useless.

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  “But you need to understand that nobody threatens me or mine without retribution.”

  The core flared one last time, a desperate surge, trying to pull everything it had left into itself at once.

  The curse welcomed it.

  “Malign intensification.” I cast the spell one last time.

  The maroon light imploded inward, folding in on itself like a dying star, and the root giant let out a final roar as its body began to collapse from the inside out.

  I stood there, watching, Arcane Sense wide open, making sure of the monster's demise.

  The roots collapsed, folding and tearing themselves apart. What had once been a towering and aggressive monster sank into a heap of dark, steaming plant matter, the last echoes of maroon light guttering out like embers drowned in mud. When it was finally over, the forest went quiet again, nearly unsettling after the battle.

  For a few seconds, no one spoke.

  Then Mary exhaled, a sharp, shaky sound, like she’d been holding her breath for minutes without realising it. She leant on her spear, knuckles white, eyes fixed on the remains as if they might suddenly decide to stand back up.

  “It’s… it’s dead,” she said, not quite convincing herself.

  Melissa lowered her hands slowly, the last of her barriers dissolving into faint motes of light. She stared at me, then at the ruin of the monster, then back at me again, blinking hard. “How did you do that?” she said. “You basically unmade it.”

  Rhea stood up, bloodied fingers still covered in the dirt from the half-finished ritual circles she’d drawn. Her eyes were wide and glowing dimly. They were focused, tracking something only she could see. “The flow,” she murmured. “It collapsed inward, then inverted.”

  Jerome just stood there.

  His big stick hung at his side, forgotten. His mouth was slightly open, his only good eye locked on the corpse as if he blinked it might undo what he’d just witnessed.

  “I thought…” he swallowed. “When it started absorbing the others, I thought that was it. I thought we were done.”

  I rolled my shoulders, finally letting some of the tension drain out of me. My head still throbbed, a dull, persistent ache from all the spellwork I did, but it was manageable.

  “I didn’t overpower it,” I said. “That would’ve been stupid. So I made something it couldn’t exist alongside.”

  They all looked at me.

  I continued. “Built specifically for it. Rhea is right; I made something that made what it stole work against it. A curse.”

  Jerome let out a weak, incredulous laugh. “You made that? On the spot?”

  I shrugged. “I just modified a spell, infusing it with a tonne of life force and well… intent.”

  That wasn’t the whole truth, but it was close enough.

  “Whatever it was, this battle had been insane.” Melissa was still short of breath but was clearly excited about something. “I went straight to level 10! I have another class evolution available, I got new skills to choose from, and I got an achievement to boot! Holy hell, I don’t know where to start!”

  “I’d advise taking it slow. I got the same problems, and I think something here is not fine. I suspect the tutorial is making us advance at an accelerated pace, but rushing without solidifying our foundation, I think, will cripple us long term.”

  “What?” Jerome now was looking at me with incredulity. “You mean we shouldn’t level up?”

  “Not quite, I think before starting to evolve classes and skills we should master what we have. I already confirmed that our skills evolution can change by just improving said skill. If you focus on an aspect of it, you can modify the skill and gain an evolution more in line with what you want. I suppose it will work for classes too.”

  Everybody was silent at that, mulling it over. “It makes sense, but we still need power if we are to proceed forward.” Said Rhea in the end.

  “I agree, but we can talk about that later; for now, we are managing quite well. Especially thanks to the achievements that make us hit above our weight.” I told them, but we’ll have to discuss this in the near future anyway, with the main camp too.

  Something tugged at my attention then.

  “Give me a moment.”

  I turned back towards the remains and walked closer, boots sinking slightly into the decaying mass. Up close, the smell was worse. Wet earth, rot, and something acrid underneath, like burnt plastic.

  I grabbed a stick from the ground and started prodding.

  Mary tensed behind me. “Elias?”

  “I need to check something.”

  I pushed aside clumps of blackened roots, levering them away from where the core had been. The curse tugged at my senses like a thread tied around my finger, guiding me. After a minute of rummaging, the stick touched something solid.

  There it was.

  A core, about the size of a walnut. Bright maroon, veined with black lines that pulsed faintly, slowly. I crouched and picked it up.

  It was warm.

  Not alive, exactly. But not dead either.

  I could feel it clearly now. My curse was inside it, settled, folded in on itself like it had found a home. The other presence that had once dominated the core was… fading. Being eaten from the inside out until there was barely anything left to sense at all.

  After a minute, even that was gone.

  The core changed subtly in my hand, its appearance changing; the dark veins took on the maroon hue of the light. They basically invaded the whole core, which now looked like a knot of roots. The light dimmed, leaking only faintly through some of the veins.

  I turned it over once, then slipped it into my pocket, next to the other one I’d taken from the gorg chieftain.

  “Another one for the collection,” Rhea said.

  “Yes,” I replied with a smile. “I hope we’ll find a use for these things, or at least we can sell them later on.”

  Jerome looked like he wanted to ask a dozen questions and didn’t know where to start. Mary just watched me quietly, her grip on her spear loosening at last.

  I straightened and finally let myself breathe properly.

  Then I opened my notifications.