Anything ~ 57!

- Andre -

“You what?” Andre’s eyes welled up as Taylor went limp in his arms with a soft exhalation. “Taylor? Taylor!”

He let go of her, and she continued to float in place, connected to the Earthen Node via a tether of brown energy. He held the satchel in his hand. He looked at it, and it took everything he had not to slap it closed and throw himself into the maw of the Teeth that were closing in. He wouldn’t let Taylor’s final act be wasted like that.

There was plenty of time to join her when he was done.

“Andre! What’s happening? Taylor isn’t responding!” Zed’s frantic words hit Andre like a hammer blow, and he glanced back at the final members of his team who were rushing toward him. Luke had thrown him after Taylor as soon as the Druid realized what was happening, but they all knew that Zed wouldn’t survive on his own if he overshot and landed amongst the Teeth.

“She died, Zed,” Andre managed to say it out loud, though he couldn’t keep his voice from breaking. As inside, so outside, he supposed. He watched the corpse of his oldest friend hanging in the air… and closed his eyes. “Take care of each other.”

“No! Andr-” Zed’s shout was cut off as the Druid got a firm foothold and forced himself inside the Earthen Node. Into enough energy that there was no surviving it. He knew he only had minutes to live, so he got to work.

On the plus side, he knew that entering concentrated power like this was a quick death. He had warned his friends about it, but he also knew it was most likely the best option for healing the Node. It wasn’t something he had planned to do, but at this point, he’d do anything to succeed… and then he would be done.

Tri-colored light slammed into him, and he didn’t try to resist. Instead, he used the extra power to capture the nearby stone and form a bubble of dense rock around himself, the Node… and Taylor. They’d all stay here together. Forever. As more power flowed into him, he used his Capacity to the fullest, and released the power in any way possible. Plants erupted into the open air outside the stone bubble, almost reaching the floating eye that was still sending blistering bolts of pure tribulation at the Teeth.

He took another step and was suddenly the first human to view the core of an Earthen Node with his bare eyes. Andre reached forward, but even with all his strength, he was unable to touch the core itself. That was okay with him. He didn’t need to touch it. He dropped his hand down, and reached into the satchel.

Pulling out the largest packet of Powdered Unicorn Horn, he shoved it at the core. The gossamer packaging vanished as if it had never existed, leaving only an eruption of potent catalyst that hung in the air, thanks to the low gravity. It sank into the area around the core, stopping just as his hand had a solid inch from the surface. “No! Come on! This can heal you!”

QUERY.

The exultant emotion, the tacit understanding, the mind-breaking fact that nature itself had just spoken to him… it filled a hole in Andre that he had never realized was empty.

Ability gained!

Andre ignored everything besides that fact that the earth had asked him a question, and he needed to answer it. “This catalyst might be able to uncorrupt this Earthen Node! Please, please take it!”

DOUBT.

Images of another Druid making promises to the earth. Hard facts that those the world had trusted in ages past had not only failed it, they had betrayed that selfsame sacred trust. A Dragon and a Node were corrupted and went insane in a single instant. The world dyed green as sustainers-turned-devourers were unleashed and began following their instincts. A human standing closer to it than any before had done, and asking for trust while attempting to imbue it with something? It could be anything!

Andre knew that words meant nothing to the Plane. Actions were the only thing that might sway it. “I’m spending my life on this. If you die, so will I.”

He dumped the entire contents of the satchel onto the core, then tossed it aside as the mass of powder settled in a perfect sphere around the Earthen Node. Not even pausing to take a deep breath, Andre reached inside himself and felt his current connection to the stone bubble he had created. He pulled on it, offering that bond to the Node.

The world accepted the bond with the faintest feeling of confusion. It seemed to realize what that tether meant a moment later: there was no escape for the Druid. With a shiver of fear, or perhaps anticipation, the barrier around the core of pure energy vanished. The powder collapsed inward.

The world went white.

***

- Luke -

“I… I can’t reach either of them, Luke.” Zed’s voice quivered as they watched stone and plants erupt from around the Node, sealing two of their friends within. “Luke… he said Taylor died. I think they both did.”

A resounding *crack* caused the air to tremble, and the stone around the Node was replaced with perfectly transparent crystal. Luke’s eyes locked onto two silhouettes revolving slowly around the Earthen Node within, and he closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. He opened them a moment later, watching as crystalline structures raced out from the translucent shell and began following along the ley lines.

A slight curl of disgust touched his lips when he noted that it spiraled exactly like the unicorn’s horns had, but he let it go when it began changing further. Faint runes started to appear in the crystal, becoming more complex as the seconds passed. He could have happily watched the transformation all day, but a furious detonation of a scream reverberated through the overhead tunnel.

The Dragon.

“Well, here comes Mr. Grumpy!” Zed laughed as though his mind had failed. “I don’t suppose he was supposed to just go with the flow and become uncorrupted, was he?”

“I have my doubts,” Luke agreed with the Bard’s assessment. “Pretty sure it’s gonna come down here and try to break what we just fixed.”

“How… what can we do about it?” Zed half-sobbed as the air trembled. The Dragon was moving fast. Fast enough to cause a downdraft that they could both feel. The Bard went stiff, and his voice lowered to a whisper. “Luke… Luke, I think I’m about to have a moment of being useful to the team. We’ll probably die, but I think we can win. I just don’t want to do it. I’ll die in the way I fear most.”

“How about you just say what you wanna say, and stop telling us what the end result is gonna be?” Luke growled at the Bard, already limbering up in preparation of fighting the Dragon head-on. “Not gonna lie, I’m looking forward to this. I wonder how hard I need to hit nature in the face before it begs for mercy? If only I had a whole bunch of trash I could throw in water or something. I bet that would make it weaker.”

“Luke! The downdraft! Air!” Zed shouted over his friend’s inane rambling. “Your bottle weapon! Can it hold anything?”

Luke materialized the ‘Mountaindale’ bottle and held it up. “I can put stuff in it, yeah. What are you thinking?”

“Take this and pour it in! Spoiled moonshine from the capital!” Zed pulled out a distended wineskin and handed it over. Luke shrugged and popped the top off. There was a sharp retort as the pressure equalized, then he poured the pungent liquid into the bonded container. Zed handed over his prized firestone next. “Drop that in there, and you have an instant-”

Item upgraded! Mana-made Bottle has turned into ‘Bottled Fireball’! Note: this item will revert to a standard bottle after 1 use(s).

“Celestial feces. It worked. I got it, Zed. Get on my back right now.” The Bard didn’t need to be told twice, and in the next moment, the two of them had reached the edge of the tunnel leading to the surface. Luke was actually thankful that the Dragon had taken the lazy route and gone directly up through a smallish tunnel.

Putting all the strength he could muster into the act, he jumped up and away, twisting and throwing the bottle into the tunnel as hard as he could once he was directly over the center. They continued traveling toward the ground as the bottle went off course and hit the wall.

There was a small flare of light, which turned into a conflagration that filled the tunnel with a roar. The pressure rising from below was still stronger than what was coming down, so the flames raced upward as a continuous blowtorch. Luke watched as the perfectly-straight tunnel filled with fire, and his enhanced senses allowed him to see the moment the blast hit the Dragon.

“Abyss… not like this.” Zed sobbed with the conflagration reflecting off his wide-open eyes. “I don’t want to burn. Not again.”

He watched the unholy beast fighting through the flames, attempting to control the natural power and failing, since it had lost the connection to the Node, then trying to escape through the wall. That was the moment it realized that it had done too good of a job creating the tunnel it was descending through. The walls had been reinforced, and all exits had been closed off. There was nowhere for the fire to go, except up past the Dragon itself. The seemingly unending blaze pounded against the Dragon’s metal hide, and it began to glow cherry-red.

At that moment, the colors of the Earthen Node shifted subtly toward red and blue, and the flames the creature was bathing in intensified. Each second that passed increased the depth of the blaze until the flames were white-hot and impossible to look at.

The Dragon opened its mouth to howl in fury, and the Earthen Node shifted slightly toward green. Gravity reasserted itself in the chamber just as Luke and Zed plunged into the muck that had been slowly rising toward the surface. They were only submerged in it for a few seconds, until their momentum carried them through and their exit closed behind them. For the Corrupt Dragon, gravity was not so kind. ‘Down’ appeared to be a fluid concept, though the beast always seemed to be ‘falling’ faster no matter which direction it was moving.

Both of the humans were wiping the filth off their faces as they rocketed toward the ground, managing to peel their eyes open just before they made it to the hard stone below. That was when the colors above flashed to pure red, and the runaway reaction of the superheated, compressed gas failed to keep the flames moving upward. The blowback reached the open chamber, and by then, there was enough oxygen that all of the chamber lit up - naturally, it was unnaturally concentrated upon the falling beast that had so utterly ticked off this Plane of existence.

Even so, the explosion filled the massive cavern, the air converting from stable gas to pure heat in an instant. The floating muck partially contained the blast at first, but the explosion slammed it down like a wall, the substance nearly solidified from the force that propelled it. Luke managed to guide their descent, and - strangely coated by a glimmer of green light - they slammed into the huge gourd that Andre had used to bring them to the dangling roots of the Corrupted Nature Dragon in the first place.

The force of landing caused them to bounce and rolled the pumpkin over, dropping them unceremoniously inside Andre’s fallout shelter. The gourd then became a plug, a rounded shield against the incoming refuse an instant before it impacted.

The detonation of natural gasses instantaneously baked the sludge into stone throughout the cavern, creating a vacuum that sucked the flailing remnant of the Corrupted Nature Dragon down into the chamber. The earth split from the concussive waves, and a bolt of green light from the Earthen Node signaled the first of dozens of rockslides that sent multi-ton boulders bouncing off the beast with impeccable aim.

Red flames, blue-tinged air, and green shifting gravity and stone… each of the forces at work had a turn at the abomination, alternating between tossing it into walls, tossing walls at it, and throwing what remained into the ceiling, all while explosions continuously shook the space; sending shaped flame and shrapnel to deadly effect.

After what seemed an eternity, the light of the Earthen Node settled into a comfortable tri-colored glow. The gasses were gone, the rocks began to settle with impacts that shook even more rocks loose, and the heat-vacuum sucked fresh air down the massive vent that had been created. The Draconic corpse was allowed to fall to the ground, bouncing off the filth that had turned into heat-dried, packed earth by the flames and pressure.

Smoke and steam rose continuously from the corpse, as well as the still-shifting ground. Any connection the creature had once held to the Earthen Node had been broken. There was no more power sustaining it. As a fabricated creature, it had no way to generate its own life energy. The last bit of its tail gently landed on the ground, a falling flag signalling absolute surrender. The creature had been burned, battered, and destroyed - all by simple, natural forces.

Nature had been tricked into corruption, but even if it had taken centuries…

The World had taken its revenge.