After another full day of travel, the Sekigaharan column finally began to leave the familiar parts of the dungeon behind.
The farther inward they went, the less the Serevian Dungeon resembled an ordinary jungle. Massive roots split the earth beneath their feet, strange vibrations hummed through the stone, and every path seemed to twist around trunks so large that they looked more like walls than trees. Even the wildlife had grown denser and more aggressive, forcing the weaker support personnel to remain tightly surrounded by Martial Apprentices as the convoy pushed deeper toward the center.
The beasts were coming in greater numbers too. Entire packs and swarms seemed to be migrating toward the same destination, drawn inward by something none of them could explain. More than a few officers suspected it was another part of the dungeon's self-defense, flooding the routes to the core with everything it could pull from the surrounding jungle.
For a normal expedition, it would have been disastrous.
This was not a normal expedition.
Only the strongest and most reliable Martial Apprentices had been permitted to join the final push. Beasts that would have torn through ordinary squads were cut down before they could even slow the column, leaving bloodied carcasses scattered behind them as Sekigahara continued forward.
Then the land rose.
Ahead of them stood an enormous elevated mass of earth, lifted dozens of meters above the surrounding jungle as though some impossible tectonic plate had been forced upward from below.
The closer they came, the clearer the truth became. The cliffs were threaded through with roots thicker than buildings, great subterranean limbs that had expanded with such force that they had cracked the bedrock and physically raised the land above the forest floor.
The army entered through one of the cavernous openings torn into its side.
From there, the journey became stranger still.
They climbed through dark natural tunnels before eventually emerging onto the elevated surface, where what appeared to be an endless forest stretched ahead of them. Yet everyone who had studied the reports knew the truth by now.
It was not a forest.
It was one humongous tree!
The countless trunks surrounding them were merely descending branches that had rooted themselves back into the soil, while the canopy above formed an unbroken ceiling of wood and leaves. Beneath their feet, more roots filled the earth, creating tunnels and hollow spaces that turned the entire region into a three-dimensional maze.
For hours, the Sekigaharan force advanced through that living structure.
By then, the anticipation among the Martial Apprentices had become impossible to hide.
The unexplored territory of the dungeon had been shrinking for weeks as all four super-nations pushed closer to the same destination. Every conquered route, every fortified camp, and every bloody territorial clash had narrowed the distance until only the heart remained.
The core.
Some Martial Apprentices had already accumulated enough merit to return home as heroes. Others had not, and those men and women were especially restless. They checked their weapons constantly, adjusted their armor, and spoke in low voices about the battle ahead.
Many felt their contributions during the campaign had been too small, while others had watched clanmates rise in reputation as their own names remained buried in reports nobody important would ever read.
Mikan noticed more than a few of them glancing her way.
Some were simply wary of her now. After everything she had done during the campaign, nobody with functioning eyes could still dismiss her as some lucky peasant girl who had stumbled into recognition.
Others kept looking past her instead, scanning the column and the surrounding forest as though expecting a massive armored figure to appear at any moment.
Lord Guts.
That name had become its own source of anxiety whenever merit was involved. A single appearance from him could turn an entire operation into his victory before anyone else had the chance to distinguish themselves. Fortunately for the more ambitious Martial Apprentices, rumors said he had been recalled to Sekigahara for some separate mission after the Britannian siege. Nobody had seen him since.
That left the core.
Their final chance.
If Sekigahara took it, whoever distinguished themselves there would be remembered. That thought alone was enough to make blood run hot.
Eventually, the endless wall of timber began to thin.
The canopy opened.
The trunks fell away.
And the Sekigaharan column finally emerged into the heart of the Serevian Dungeon.
The basin surrounding the core looked nothing like the claustrophobic forest they had just crossed.
There were no dense jungles nearby, no broken cliffs to hide behind, and no maze of roots or stone formations cutting the battlefield into smaller sections. The earth around the core had been stripped almost completely bare, leaving behind an enormous gray basin surrounded at a distance by ancient banyan trees and roots thick enough to resemble walls.
Every super-nation had come prepared for war.
Sekigahara occupied the northern sector with rows of Martial Apprentices, support personnel, settlement convoys, and heavy siege equipment positioned behind the main line. Britannia had established itself farther west with disciplined armored formations and machinery, while the Republic of Gorteau gathered to the south with its own mechanized forces and potion-enhanced troops.
Kandria held the east.
Or at least, they were supposed to.
That absence had turned the entire battlefield into an uncomfortable standoff.
Sekigaharan Martial Apprentices watched Britannia. Britannian Knights watched Gorteau. Gorteau's forces watched both of them in return. Weapons remained drawn and formations ready, but nobody wanted to commit first while one of the four super-nations was still missing.
Fighting now would be stupid.
If Sekigahara and Britannia tore into each other, Kandria could arrive halfway through and attack both weakened armies. If Gorteau joined the fighting, the same problem only became worse. Nobody knew whether Kandria was delayed, hiding nearby, or deliberately waiting for the other three nations to exhaust themselves before entering the core.
So everyone waited.
Mikan remained near the Sekigaharan convoy instead of standing with the fighters at the front. She had argued against it at first, but Mindow and the other officers refused to budge. With so many of Sekigahara's strongest Martial Apprentices gathered near the center, they weren't willing to leave their supplies and settlement equipment vulnerable in case Britannia or even Gorteau suddenly decided to take advantage.
Mikan didn't like it, but she understood.
They had actually left her with a massive responsibility and trusted her enough to protect the entirety of Sekigahara's supplies on her own.
Three daggers rested at her waist while Portia strings spread discreetly through the convoy behind her, anchored to wagons, defensive positions, and several sections of ground. If anyone tried to rush the rear while the others were occupied, she would know immediately.
Then movement finally appeared in the eastern sector.
The mood across the basin changed at once.
Mikan looked up with everyone else, expecting Kandrian forces to pour through the entrance.
Instead, one person stepped out.
"...Seriously?"
The figure wore black-and-gold Kandrian martial robes and moved across the barren ground at an easy pace. No soldiers followed him. No siege engines rolled behind him. He carried no visible weapon and made no effort to conceal himself.
He was alone.
Although masked, Mikan knew who this man was.
The Abyss.
Rui Quarrier.
She had never fought him personally, but she had heard enough about him by now. Everyone in Sekigahara had. He and Ghost were two of Sekigahara's biggest foes. Bolexeuen Hills alone had turned his name into something Martial Apprentices feared whenever a Kandrian force appeared on the horizon.
A ripple of anger spread through the front lines as more people recognized him. Some took his lone approach as arrogance. Others assumed he was scouting the battlefield before Kandria's real force arrived.
Mikan simply watched as Merun's warning surfaced in her head.
Don't fight him. You'll 100% die.
Her brows pulled together.
That had been weeks ago.
Her little brother had no idea how much stronger she'd become since then.
Her Ki control had improved enormously. Her Portia strings could endure far more punishment than before, and her daggers hit with enough force to threaten even the most powerful Martial Apprentices. She could now reinforce all three daggers and her strings at once without sacrificing control.
Rui was strong.
But was he really strong enough to deal with everything she could do now?
Mikan folded her arms.
If Kane Arrancar had been with him, she might have been more cautious. Fighting both the Abyss and the Ghost together sounded like the kind of headache Merun had probably been warning her about.
But Rui had come alone.
She could take him!
Still, she stayed where she was. She planned to follow orders and do her duty… after all, she came here representing the Iaiashin House. She couldn't do anything rash that could tarnish the house's name.
Rui continued lightly jogging toward the center of the basin while officers from all three nations began shouting orders. But he wasn't approaching like a scout nor was he circling the armies or testing their positions either.
He was simply jogging through the battlefield, irritating people very quickly.
A Britannian officer shouted something across the open ground. One of Sekigahara's strike captains answered with an order of his own, and almost immediately several figures broke away from the surrounding armies.
Mikan leaned forward slightly as nine high-grade Martial Apprentices moved against Rui.
They came from Sekigahara, Britannia, and Gorteau.
There had been no formal cooperation between the three nations, but none seemed necessary. For the moment, they had all reached the same conclusion.
Get rid of him.
Three close-range fighters rushed him first while six others spread outward, taking elevated or distant positions where they could bombard him without getting in one another's way.
Mikan's eyes sharpened, observing each individual's combat strength.
It wasn't bad.
Actually, considering they had never fought together before, it was surprisingly good.
Rui immediately found himself pressured from several directions. A spear drove toward his chest while ranged techniques struck the ground around him, limiting where he could move. Another Martial Apprentice waited nearby, ready to punish whatever direction he chose.
Rui slipped past the spear.
A compressed projectile came from his blind side but he ducked beneath it before it reached him.
Another fighter attacked during the transition, expecting Rui to be off balance.
Rui redirected his arm and sent him stumbling straight into an incoming Britannian technique.
Mikan's brows slowly drew together.
"Huh."
Rui wasn't faster than everyone attacking him.
He wasn't simply overpowering them either.
Yet every strike seemed to arrive where he had been a moment earlier.
He moved before the attack fully developed... almost as though he already knew where it was going.
The nine continued pressing him as Rui continued moving as he weaved through attacks.
That was when Mikan noticed something else.
He was slowly going... somewhere.
Her gaze followed the path of his movement.
The center?
The exact center of the basin.
Mikan's fingers twitched against her arms.
Something about it gave her a bad feeling.
One of the Sekigaharan attackers went down after a compact strike beneath the chin. Another had his momentum redirected into an attack from one of the Britannians, collapsing their formation for only a moment.
Rui immediately exploited it.
A third fighter fell.
Then another.
Mikan slowly uncrossed her arms.
Maybe the nine weren't enough after all.
Fine.
If they lost, she would step in herself.
Merun could complain later.
She couldn't wait to see the look on his face after she defeated the Abyss herself.
The remaining attackers tried to regroup, but Rui had already reached the middle of the basin. One by one, the others followed their fallen allies until the last of the nine hit the ground.
Then everything stopped.
Rui stood alone at the center with the nine high-grade Martial Apprentices lay scattered around him.
The battlefield fell quiet.
Thousands of soldiers, Martial Artists, officers, and support personnel stared toward the same lone figure.
Mikan's hand drifted toward one of her daggers.
"All right, my turn..."
She took a step forward, but froze.
Her knees buckled involuntarily, slamming into the gravel. The hair on her arms stood straight up; her stomach violently churned as every primal instinct hardwired into human DNA screeched a single, hysterical command: RUN.
Pressure. Bloodlust. Dominance.
Rui remained still as that suffocating presence crashed over the battlefield.
It was a huge, suffocating pressure so intense that weaker soldiers stumbled where they stood.
The full, unfiltered pressure of a Martial Squire.
Martial Apprentices froze, unable to understand what or why this was happening.
Several immediately turned toward Rui.
"THE PACT!" a Britannian knight screamed, his voice cracking into sheer, pathetic hysteria as he dropped his broadsword. "THEY BROUGHT A SQUIRE! KANDRIA VIOLATED THE PACT—!"
Panic spread almost instantly as they couldn't believe Kandria would break the Severian Pact so openly!
The earth groaned.
Mikan's head snapped toward the outer forest.
The enormous banyanified trees and roots surrounding the basin had begun to move. Entire trunks started twisting and warping, their canopy blacking out the subterranean sky.
Branches thicker than buildings bent toward the center as ancient roots strained beneath the earth. The sound rolled through the basin like timber being torn apart under impossible pressure.
Mikan's blood ran completely cold as a terrible, forgotten warning surfaced.
The dungeon's automated defense mechanism...
It ignores Apprentices... but it purges Squires.
She had forgotten as the encounter with Britannia's Griflet and their own Yujin didn't trigger the self-defense mechanism then... but here? In the core of the Severian dungeon?
It was at its most alert state.
The heart of the Serevian Dungeon was not level with the surrounding jungle. The entire basin had been lifted hundreds of feet into the air over centuries by the banyanified roots beneath it, their enormous bodies layering and tangling together until they raised the landmass itself above the forest below. What looked like solid ground beneath the armies was really a platform sitting atop a living network of roots thicker than buildings.
Now that entire network was moving. The Squire-level pressure radiating from Rui had awakened the dungeon's defensive mechanism, and all around the elevated core, those gigantic roots flexed before surging upward.
Hundreds of thousands of hardened roots tore free from the jungle and the mass beneath the basin, all accelerating toward the same point at terrifying speed.
Toward Rui.
Toward the Squire-level threat.
Mikan's stomach dropped as she finally saw the trap for what it was.
Sekigahara, Britannia, and Gorteau had all gathered their armies inside the core, packed between the outer root network and the lone figure standing at its center.
Every formation, siege engine, convoy, and Martial Apprentice was directly in the path of the dungeon's defenses.
The roots were not attacking the armies.
They were simply going through them to reach Rui.
Before she could even try to understand how Rui created that Squire-level aura, the dungeon surged.
The roots unleashed itself in absolute straight lines.
The branches did not lash like whips or sweep like vines. They shot forward like a continent-wide volley of railgun spikes, tearing through the air with a deafening shriek as they raced from every direction toward the center. Thick roots burst up through the raised earth.
Titanic boughs punched across the basin. Entire lanes of death carved through the armies of Sekigahara, Britannia, and Gorteau alike, all of it directed at the boy standing at the heart of the clearing.
Mikan's eyes widened as the first wave tore across the basin, and then she felt it through her fingers. Her Portia strings, the reinforced threads she had spread throughout the Sekigaharan rear, snapped almost all at once. There was no drawn-out strain, no moment where the threads fought against the incoming force. They simply broke, dozens of connections vanishing in less than a heartbeat.
Three of those threads she had even strengthened with Ki, threads tough enough to restrain monsters at the peak of the Apprentice Realm, yet against the charging roots they might as well have been ordinary silk.
Mikan's stomach dropped.
Each branch carried the force of a Martial Squire.
And there were hundreds of thousands of them.
Her body locked in place. She couldn't move. She couldn't think.
All she could see was the wall of wood racing toward them as an apocalyptic roar of splintering metal and tearing flesh swallowed the basin.
The first wave hit the armored line like a tidal wave of siege spears. Mikan watched in paralyzing horror as a five-meter-wide wooden trunk impaled the Sekigaharan supply vehicle beside her, punch-cleaving through an entire meter of esoteric metal as though it were wet paper.
The vehicle's engine ruptured in a flash of oily flame, and the three civilian operators inside were instantly pulverized into crimson paste.
All around her, high-grade Apprentices—men and women who had spent a decade mastering collision optimization, damage mitigation, and impenetrable stances—shrieked as the timber tsunami blew through them.
A Britannian shield-master threw up an absolute iron guard; three jagged branches punched clean through his forearms, chest, and spine, pinning him to the earth in a spray of gore.
Gorteau Potion-troopers, their boosted reflexes firing on maximum, tried to leap, only to be sliced in half midair by cross-cutting stems moving faster than sound.
Mikan saw hundreds of roots headed her way as she quickly mustered up all her Ki, remembering the body strengthening technique Yujin shared with her.
But she was no genius of Ki. There was no way she could replicate the same thing instantaneously.
As the roots were only inches away from goring her, hundreds of incoming roots suddenly exploded into splinters.
Mikan's eyes widened as her head snapped sideways.
Merun stood there in his armored Guts form, his massive greatsword already in motion.
Crimson flowers bloomed.
"Blossoming Blade: Garden"
.
.
.
.
Next chapter maybe next week. I have a ton of work to catch up on lol.