Chapter 112
The clash shook the swamp with every blow.
Daniel stood firm, ankle-deep in blackened water that writhed as if alive. Around him, the foul miasma thickened, curling through the air in sinister tendrils. The once murky and damp swamp had transformed into something far more malignant—a place saturated with rot, viruses, and ancient corruption.
Before him loomed the creature.
The treant was no longer a tree in any true sense. It had mutated beyond its original form. Once bark and vine, it now throbbed with grotesque veins of muscle and raw sinew. The creature had absorbed countless smaller swamp creatures, snakes, insects, and even larger predators, each contributing to its horrific evolution.
Limbs that had once been branches were now slick with flesh, sprouting malformed eyes and twitching digits. Where leaves had once flourished, now only fibrous tendrils flailed like whips in the air.
It had become a living abomination: the Hallowtree function was to be a sentient tree that attacks when it gets provoked by anybody that doesn't respect its domain and just conducts themselves with reverence. The Hallowtree's roots reached deep into the murky waters of the swamp, drawing strength from the ancient, primordial energy that permeated the land.
It's not supposed to be a monster but a guardian of the swamp, protecting its delicate ecosystem from those who would seek to exploit or harm it. The Hallowtree's twisted form belied its true purpose, a misunderstood entity that only sought to preserve the balance of nature in its domain.
Daniel's boots squelched in the tainted soil as he stepped forward, his formless armor shifting across his body with a will of its own. A scent so vile it defied description rolled over him like a toxic wave, the odor of decay, of corpses whose souls had been sucked dry but whose cores still pulsed with faint energy.
He gagged.
But the formless armor reacted.
A faceplate unfolded in an instant, slipping into place and filtering the air he breathed. It didn't just protect, it adapted, just like he did.
He narrowed his eyes as he watched the Treant's swollen mass throb. Root-like tendrils emerged from the bodies of the fallen—those unfortunate creatures that had perished earlier in the swamp. Their skin had dried and stretched thin like papyrus, their forms mummified. But inside their hollow husks, the roots of the Hallowtree grew, burrowing through flesh like parasites.
Daniel activated his assessment skill.
Target: Hallowtree (Mutated Treant)
State: Unstable
Core Mind Integrity: 18% and falling…
Genetic Mutation Status: Stage 4 – Flesh Convergence
Miasmic Contamination Level: 92%
Weakness: Overload of consumed biological signals / Core Disruption
His eyes flicked across the glowing symbols. The sentient mind that once guided the Treant was deteriorating rapidly—fading under the weight of thousands of minds it had consumed. Each absorbed creature carried its own instincts, functions, and primitive memories. The Hallowtree's consciousness was now a battlefield of identities, a chaotic swirl of incompatible commands.
It was eating itself from the inside.
Daniel gritted his teeth. The thing was more dangerous than ever. It lashed out mindlessly—three massive limbs of vine-flesh cracked through the air, but each blow shattered against his formless armor, which reacted before he even saw the attacks. He felt a strange awareness growing between him and the armor, an almost symbiotic understanding.
He crouched low, eyes still locked on the abomination.
"There's too much inside you," he muttered. "You're unstable… You're overloaded."
Another scan confirmed his theory. The Treant wasn't evolving anymore—it was mutating beyond structure, beyond balance.
The virus that transformed the swamp had broken the natural order. The Hallowtree no longer grew; it devoured, consumed, and multiplied without restraint.
But Daniel noticed something more.
Every absorbed creature added noise to the core. Each function it inherited, flight, digestion, camouflage, and sonar was stacked on top of each other like mismatched code. And deep in its core was a pulsing beacon of power, the heart-root, where the original Treant's soul and virus fusion had begun.
That was the source of the madness.
Daniel's solution clicked into place. If he couldn't kill the creature by force…
He'd break it from within.
He extended his palm. Tendrils of electricity danced along his fingers, arcing through the air and into the dark waters at his feet. But this time, he didn't just release energy; he manipulated it.
The swamp water carried more than just miasma; it carried organic memory, the viral remnants of everything the Hallowtree had absorbed.
With a surge of will, Daniel redirected his electrical current into the miasmic field, syncing with the fragmented signals of the consumed lifeforms. The feedback loop began resonance growing, warping, and becoming a scream inside the monster's mind.
The Hallowtree convulsed violently.
Its entire body pulsed as the roots inside its victims began to twitch, writhing unnaturally. The overloaded bio-signals amplified by Daniel's electrical manipulation were scrambling the Treant's thoughts even further.
It let out a deafening roar, a sound like splintered wood screaming through torn lungs.
Daniel advanced, electricity crackling in a controlled field around him.
"This is your end," he said quietly. "Choke on the lives you stole."
He hurled a spear of lightning directly into the base of the Hallowtree's trunk. But this wasn't just an elemental strike—it was a tactical override packet, disguised as raw energy. The voltage spike acted as a disruptor payload, engineered to exploit the Hallowtree's neuro-synthetic framework, a hybrid mesh of biological instinct and legacy game code.
Over time, this world had rewritten itself, evolving beyond the original servers and digital firewalls. But Daniel knew one truth: the foundation was still code glitched, mutated, buried beneath layers of pseudo-organic logic, but code nonetheless.
The surge was modeled after a neural pattern injection, echoing the data behavior of every creature the Hallowtree had absorbed. By mimicking their instinctual pathways, Daniel created a buffer overflow—tricking the system into thinking the input was native, not hostile. This was the same principle used by hackers in the old world. Now, it was weaponized through his mastery of elemental manipulation, acting as both energy and executable script.
But the real trick came from what he had embedded in the Lightning's carrier signal, a modified version of a USB Killer protocol. He had once salvaged a corrupted admin device from an abandoned control hub, hidden deep in the ruins of an old event server. With it, he had re-engineered a voltage-based injection method, allowing him to bypass the normal authentication routines of the interface core. It wasn't perfect. The connection was analog, brute-forced, and unpredictable. But the moment the surge hit the root core, he felt it:
The world flickered.
Lines of old, familiar code began to scroll like static across the corners of his vision. [SYSTEM INTERFACE DETECTED] pulsed faintly in his mind, like a half-dead echo of the original developer environment. It wasn't a full console, but it was enough.
Daniel took a breath, focusing. He activated the old dev-tool command phrases, not with a keyboard, but with trained thought pulses tied to his nervous system.
"Run sandbox-mode.kernel_isolate _force_recover_protocol."
The command pushed through.
In a world where logic had been rewritten into instinct and instinct into logic, Daniel had found a blind spot a backdoor left by the Damon Lazarus who was his older self . As he never dreamed their creation would evolve into flesh and bone.
The Hallowtree spasmed, its tendrils twitching as internal processes rebooted one by one. He didn't need to destroy it just isolate the primary runtime kernel long enough to inject his custom repair patch.
He had written the patch many years ago—back when the world was still nothing more than lines of code and dreams strung together across glowing monitors at the Nexus Corporate Center, humanity's last and greatest leap into full-immersion reality design.
Back then, Daniel wasn't a survivor or a fighter. He was a worldsmith—one of the few original architects behind the core infrastructure of the game-turned-reality. His work had always gone deeper than gameplay mechanics or visual design. He wove behavioral systems, dynamic AIs, emergent terrain logic. He understood the language of creation, and more importantly, he understood its flaws.
It was during that fragile early phase of development—when the boundaries between code and consciousness began to blur—that Daniel had a creeping realization: this world might one day outgrow its creators. So, he prepared.
He wrote a patch, not just a fix, but a failsafe system, a compact, stand-alone recovery protocol encoded with root-level permissions. Unlike normal updates that were uploaded to the Nexus cloud and shared across developer instances, this one was never uploaded. Instead, Daniel encoded it into himself literally.
Using neural linking tech still experimental at the time, he embedded the entire script into a subconscious memory vault: an encrypted mental library accessible only through deep cognitive triggers. It was a perfect hiding place. No server breach could reach it. No AI could find it. Only Daniel's conscious awakening under the right stress conditions could unlock it—a key that only his older self would be able to turn.
He remembered the process: lying in a Nexus brain-interface chair, letting his consciousness drift while the neural sync system encoded his thoughts. The script had been compacted, split into memory packets, and stored not as text, but as layered instinct—like learning to ride a bike or speak a forgotten language in dreams. It became a part of him, indistinguishable from muscle memory, until now.
Now, years later, standing before the corrupted nightmare that was once a mere environmental asset, the Hallowtree, Daniel felt the ancient gate inside his mind unlock.
The knowledge didn't rush back like a flood. It unfolded, graceful, precise, like lines of clean code compiling in his vision. Bit by bit, the patch rebuilt itself in his mind, pulling from stored heuristics and mnemonic indexes. Functions. Variables. Safeguards. Debug tools.
He saw it all.
A complete system restoration module designed to run in hostile environments. It could:
Detect corrupted logic trees.
Reinforce behavioral parameters.
Re-link decoupled authority nodes to their original hierarchy.
This wasn't just a band-aid. It was the blueprint for order.
The patch hadn't just been meant for the Hallowtree. It was a master key for any structure built within the original engine, a last resort tool meant to bring stability in the face of systemic collapse.
And now, with the spear of lightning as the vector and the bio-digital interface exposed, he had a window.
Daniel closed his eyes.
"Execute: root.inject.protocol://DAN-PATCH-ZERO"
He whispered the command, not aloud, but in thought—his neural pathways serving as both terminal and transmitter. The spear lit up from the inside, not with lightning, but with logic. The patch had begun its work.
The tree howled once more, a guttural bellow that tore through the swamp, shaking birds from distant trees.
Then silence.
Although Daniel had more than enough power to destroy the Hallowtree outright, something held him back.
Confusion.
Not fear. Not hesitation. But the kind of frustration only a creator could feel—when his own work begins to behave in ways it never should.
The Hallowtree was never meant to be like this.
The miasma, that black, swirling fog leaking from its roots and choking the air—was originally a magical element, carefully designed by Daniel and his team back in the early development years. It wasn't just poison. It was tied to the world's mana system, acting as a form of magical decay.
It could weaken players, alter the terrain, and even affect spell structures, but it always followed rules. It was coded to respond to magic resistance stats, counterbalanced by purifying abilities or divine light. It was elegant. Controlled. Predictable.
But this miasma was wrong.
It didn't behave like magic at all. It wasn't bound to any stat, spell, or class. It spread like a virus, attacking the structural framework of entities in the tower and warping their behavior at a root level. Not just AI logic or personality traits—it corrupted source code, breaking every safeguard Daniel had personally built to prevent things from spiraling out of control.
And that pissed him off more than anything else.
"This isn't how we designed it..." he muttered to himself, fingers clenching at his side. His voice trembled with a mixture of anger and disbelief.
Whoever had injected this anomaly into the system had no idea what they were doing.
Daniel could see it—sloppy code signatures, brute-force corruption, no hierarchy logic, and no version control. It wasn't designed with balance in mind. It didn't enhance the world's immersion or story. It didn't even try to fit into the magic-based ecosystem he and his team had crafted with such care.
No, this was the work of a newbie. An amateur modder or rogue AI with zero understanding of system integrity. Someone who didn't care about design, lore, or structure—just chaos.
They had taken something beautiful, something meaningful, and injected it with a crude line of malicious junk code. Like spray-painting a masterpiece with neon insults. No respect. No vision. Just destruction for the sake of destruction.
Daniel felt his jaw tighten as the memories came rushing back: the long nights at Nexus Corporate Center, debugging elemental AI patterns, designing dynamic ecosystems, and building entire biomes from scratch with his teammates. They weren't just coding a game; they were crafting a legacy. A new world. A world people could live in, escape to, and grow in.
The Tower wasn't just a product; it was his life's work. His pride.
And now, some idiot, some faceless saboteur, was treating it like a sandbox to break.
That was the true reason he hesitated to destroy the Hallowtree. Not because he was afraid of what it had become, but because he needed to understand why. Why it had shifted so far off-script. Why the virus had gone undetected. Why the core logic had allowed this level of mutation without collapsing completely.
Because if this thing had been corrupted… then what else had been tampered with?
And if the tower was truly starting to rot from the inside, Damon Lazarus, who was reborn as Dane, aka Daniel, one of its original architects, was going to find out who was responsible.
And he was going to rewrite their error line by line, starting with the virus.
It wasn't the central core.
Daniel had already ruled that out.
The real problem was deeper, stranger, buried not in lines of code or server banks, but in something far more ancient, more twisted.
One of the original hardware nodes, once just a physical machine housing a piece of the game's engine, had somehow survived the collapse of the virtual world. Back in the early years, he and eleven other senior designers had created the Nexus Engine together, a fully modular world-building system capable of generating self-evolving environments. It had been a passion project. A miracle of engineering and design.
Each module they built was carefully coded, tested, and interlocked like a living puzzle.
But when the end came, when the Old Gods descended and shattered the boundaries between the virtual and the real, something terrible happened.
They copied it.
Not just the world—but the hardware, the logic, and even the memories.
The Old Gods, in their cruel sense of irony, preserved one of the original Nexus devices—not as a machine, but as a punishment. They folded it into another plane, sealed it in a space outside of time, and let it live. Over decades, it grew—fed by the corrupted dreams of players, forgotten code fragments, and the chaos of the new world.
It became a living entity, a sentient echo of the original game—but distorted.
Breathing.
Hungry.
Unstable.
It called itself many things, none of which Daniel had written.
And yet… as Daniel approached the anomaly—deep in the belly of the Tower where light flickered in unnatural patterns and the walls pulsed with a heartbeat he didn't remember coding—he recognized it.
Not by sight. Not even by logic.
But by pattern.
Lines of code still etched themselves into the muscle and bone of the thing. Faint, glowing strings of old syntax, variable calls, and debug markers. Ghosts of a time when this was still a world made of scripts and scripts alone.
They were buried deep beneath organic tissue, mutated and half-erased—but Daniel could still feel them.
The key to accessing them, however, required something no developer had ever intended: chaos mana.
Pure, volatile, unstable energy pulled from the cracks in reality itself. In this new world, Daniel had learned how to channel it—not just as magic, but as a compiler. A translator between instinct and interface. It wasn't safe. Even for him. But it was the only way to force the old logic to reveal itself.
He raised his hand.
Raw chaos mana surged around him like a spiraling black storm, distorting space, twisting code, and bending light. It wasn't like normal spellcasting—it was more like editing reality in real time. And it responded to thought, to intention, to source authority.
Which he still had.
"/system.unearth.hidden:legacy_node…"
His voice echoed, both spoken and injected through the chaos channel.
The creature recoiled, not in pain, but in awareness. Its flesh rippled as if remembering what it once was. Parts of its body broke apart into fragments of code—blue-light scripts flickering in its veins like forgotten bloodlines.
There it was.
The access point.
A remnant of the original game engine, buried in its neural spine. A forgotten module, ARCHIVE-ZETA, designed by his teammate Aya during the third year of development. They had used it to store concept-level decisions before the main kernel went live.
And now, it was pulsing again.
Alive.
Waiting for the hand that once made it.
Daniel stepped forward, chaos mana still pouring from his body like living fire, eyes locked on the code spiraling through the creature's form. It trembled as more fragments reassembled—lines of logic, error markers, old commit messages…
And at the center, one line of text glowed brighter than the rest:
// LAST AUTHORIZED EDIT: DANIEL LAZARUS, SYSTEM DESIGN LEAD
A chill ran through him. The game may have changed. The world may have mutated.
But his code? But His legacy was still in there.
The world around Daniel dissolved.
As the chaos mana bridged the gap between flesh and code, the fragments of ARCHIVE-ZETA activated, like a rusted terminal that still remembered how to dream.
His vision flooded with static at first, and then clarity.
He was no longer standing in the twisted chamber at the base of the Tower. Instead, he found himself in a familiar place: a white box room lined with floating panels of code and wireframe constructs. The Devspace Sandbox, a digital archive environment his team had built during the earliest days of testing. It wasn't just a storage module—it was a living logbook of decisions, scrapped systems, experimental AI behaviors, and uncompiled dreams. It was where their best and worst ideas were kept.
But this version was different.
Cracked. Dimmed. Old UI elements blinked erratically. Fonts mismatched. Half-rendered geometry flickered in and out of view. Something had tampered with this, too.
Still, Daniel moved forward.
A floating window pulsed in front of him.
[ZETA ARCHIVE SYSTEM STATUS]
Integrity: 31%
Corruption Detected: Yes
Last Accessed By: [UNKNOWN]
Authorized Developer: D. Lazarus
Open logs? [Y/N]
He didn't hesitate.
Y.
The archive responded sluggishly. Windows opened, stream after stream of old dev logs, update notes, memory caches, and voice memos. Some of them were his. Others belonged to his teammates. He heard Jewel Adkins's voice. Derick Collins's laughter. Choe Hyun-Jae is arguing about balancing the AI affinity scaling system. Names long gone. People long scattered. A digital museum of the world before everything went wrong.
And then…
A voice spoke directly from the system, crisp and familiar.
"Daniel? Is that you…? Oh my god. It's real. You're here."
He froze.
That voice.
Jewel.
But she had vanished years ago. She had been one of the first to disappear after the Nexus breach, when the world began falling apart. No logout trace, nobody, just gone. Rumors whispered that the Old Gods had taken her, digitized her consciousness, and buried it.
And now she was speaking through Archive-Zeta?
He stepped forward as a translucent image slowly rendered—Aya's avatar, fragmented and incomplete, like a memory struggling to rebuild itself.
"They copied us, Daniel," she said. "Not just our work. Us. They couldn't understand what made the world special, so they stole the parts they could mimic… and threw the rest away."
Daniel clenched his fists. "Who? Who did this?"
"A glitch in the punishment algorithm. A seed from someone who didn't belong. A user with no understanding of the architecture, someone who forced code to evolve by breaking rules instead of learning them."
The virus. The miasma. It all made sense.
Someone had hijacked a backup copy of the Nexus Engine and tried to mod reality like it was still just a game. Except they didn't understand the balance, the layers, or the neural-spiritual harmony Daniel and his team had carefully crafted over years. Instead of a world... They made a cancer.
Aya looked at him, eyes flickering.
"I tried to stop it. I failed. The moment they injected the false mana protocol—chaos without direction—it began corrupting the entire simulation layer. It reached the biological layer. The Tower itself began to rewrite its laws. That's when I knew… this wasn't a game anymore."
Daniel swallowed hard. He felt anger. Grief. Guilt. He had left too much behind.
But not anymore.
"I need access to the original compiler," he said. "The one buried in Zeta. If I can rewrite the host parameters, I can reboot the logic tree and contain the corruption before it spreads deeper into the tower's root."
Aya nodded weakly.
"It's risky. You'll need more than chaos mana. You'll need a clean runtime space. And… you'll need to face the one who wrote the infection."
Daniel narrowed his eyes.
"Who was it?"
Her avatar flickered.
"We don't know his name, just his tag… User_Zero. A blank profile. No development history. But something about him—he moves like he knows the system, yet builds like someone who's never touched real code."
A silent pause.
Daniel turned toward the pulsing exit gate at the edge of the archive.
"I built this world with pride," he said. "I watched it get stolen, twisted, and broken. But if there's even one line of truth left inside this system—Aya, I'm taking it back."
"Then go, Daniel," she said. "Zeta will remain open. I'll do what I can from here. Just… come back when it's done."
The archive shimmered, its remaining memory banks opening like blooming flowers of forgotten logic. Daniel gathered the restoration keys, encoded tools, and sequence frameworks—then stepped through the gate.
He was going to find User_Zero.
And this time, he would be the bug in their system.
Daniel emerged from Archive-Zeta into the runtime void, a sterile, silent space of blank code. Here, reality hadn't yet rendered. It was pure structure—no miasma, no monsters, no decay. Just white light and the hum of raw logic waiting to be written.
He moved fast.
Using the tools from Zeta, he deployed the restoration keys, isolating the Hallowtree's infection path. Patches ran like glowing threads across the ground, rewriting corrupted logic, sealing memory leaks, and re-establishing the magic-based behavior layers.
The Tower's base code responded.
Old systems pulsed back to life. The miasma flickered. For a moment—just a moment—it looked like the world remembered what it once was.
[SYSTEM RESTORATION: 82% COMPLETE]
Daniel raised his hand for the final command.
"Inject root authority and lock User_Zero out of—"
Everything stopped.
Not crashed. Not frozen.
Stopped.
The light vanished. The code panels blinked out. The runtime space shattered like glass.
From the void, a shadow stepped forward—tall, featureless, with a blank developer ID hovering over its head:
USER_0000
A cold, synthetic voice echoed.
"You weren't supposed to remember."
Then came a single line of code Daniel couldn't override:
/force.terminate[scenario.daniel_access.ZETA]
Daniel's body flickered—pulled back from the system like a puppet with its strings cut.
And just like that—
The scenario ended.
Darkness.
Silence.
When Daniel opened his eyes, the chaos was gone.
The swamp, still cloaked in its eternal gloom, stood still, as if holding its breath. The thick miasma that once choked the air and poisoned the waters had vanished, leaving behind only the damp scent of earth and decay. The water, once black and bubbling with corruption, had calmed. It no longer hissed with unnatural energy.
In the distance, a thunderous crack echoed, a sound that seemed to split the sky itself.
The Hallowtree had exploded.
Its massive, twisted trunk had been torn apart in a final burst of power, scattering bark and blackened limbs across the mire like shattered bones. And yet, amidst the wreckage, Daniel stood unmoved, eyes locked on a single, impossible sight.
Hope.
From the smoldering remains, a sapling had emerged—small, fragile, yet unmistakably alive. It glowed faintly with a soft green light, untouched by the corruption that had once controlled its predecessor. It pulsed, faint but steady, like a heartbeat.
The nightmare was not undone.
But it was no longer winning.
The swamp remained dark, its trees gaunt and twisted, its soil thick with rot. But the crushing dread, the invisible weight that had made men lose their minds and beasts turn savage—was gone.
Something had changed.
And Daniel knew, as he looked at that tiny sprout defying the grave it was born from, that his actions had not been in vain.
Daniel turned his back to the dying embers of the Hallowtree, its shattered husk now nothing more than memory and mulch. The air no longer shimmered with corruption. The swamp was still unnaturally so, but in that stillness, there was no longer terror. Only aftermath.
As he made his way through the softened terrain toward the slope where the battle wagon waited, he heard footsteps, rapid, uneven, and desperate.
"Daniel!"
A voice broke through the haze.
Melgil.
She sprinted toward him, her cloak torn, boots soaked in swamp water, and hair plastered to her face by mist and sweat. Her expression, usually so calm and composed, was contorted by something raw and human: fear.
He barely had time to brace before she crashed into him, arms locking tightly around his chest. She didn't speak at first, only held him, like she was grounding herself in the certainty that he was still alive. That he had made it back.
"I saw the light," she whispered against him. "I thought of you when the Hallowtree exploded. I thought it took you with it."
Daniel exhaled slowly, placing a hand gently on the back of her head.
"I'm here," he said. "It's over."
Behind her, more figures emerged from the edge of the trees, all moving with cautious urgency: Thalen Merrow, armored in ceremonial bronze, gripping his halberd like a lifeline. Ysil Thorne, eyes sharp beneath her hood, scanning for lingering threats. Galen Althus, war-scarred and grim, yet his pace quickened at the sight of Daniel. Lora Sithe and Ormin Vos Sithe, siblings whose magic had held the battlefront together, stood side by side—silent witnesses to the miracle.
They had all seen it.
The pillar of light, the blast, the vanishing dread.
And now, they saw the man who had walked through it.
Melgil pulled back slightly, just enough to look him in the eyes. There was anger in her voice now, but it trembled beneath the surface.
"You weren't supposed to go in alone."
"I know."
"You nearly died."
"I know," he repeated, quieter. "But the Hallowtree wasn't just a threat. It was a question—and someone had to answer it."
Melgil's eyes glistened, but she nodded. She understood, even if she hated it.
Behind them, the others approached slowly, reverently, as though stepping into sacred ground. The Land of the Weeping Vines, once cursed and crawling with abominations, now stood cleansed. The vines no longer moved with predatory hunger. The air no longer wept. The miasma had lifted.
The quest was complete.
[QUEST COMPLETE: The Weeping Vines
Objective: Eliminate the Hallowtree Threat ✔
Rewards Pending…
A quiet chime echoed through the minds of the group. The system still responded. The Tower still recognized their efforts.
But Thalen Merrow, Ysil Thorne, Galen Althus, Lora Sithe, and Ormin Vos Sithe didn't celebrate. The reason was obvious.
They had never truly expected to witness a quest clearing, not in the literal, system-recognized sense. In this twisted world where the lines between game and reality had long blurred, "quests" had become myths, broken mechanics buried under chaos. Victory, for them, had always meant survival, never resolution..
And though Daniel had succeeded, he didn't gloat. He didn't revel in the achievement or bask in their stunned silence. If anything, his expression held a quiet frustration.
He had hoped, perhaps even expected, that they would face the danger with him.
That they would choose to stand their ground when the Hallowtree pulsed with death and madness.
But instead, they had waited.
They had watched from afar, unsure if the scenario was even real, unsure if it was worth the cost.
Daniel didn't blame them, not entirely.
But he wished they had shown more resolve.
Because this world wasn't going to be saved by spectators.