Under the renewed force coursing through his body, Imani held the vanguard.
Supersonic branches hammered down in relentless succession, each strike detonating against his guard with thunderous force.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The ground split and cratered beneath his boots, fractures racing outward in jagged veins as the hill absorbed the transferred violence. The whiplash of each impact tore at the air, pressure waves rippling past him in violent pulses.
He did not yield.
He stood like a bastion before a storm tide.
Guardian Star burned brighter around him, gravity thickening, anchoring him to the torn earth.
Behind that pull, the towering image of Strength loomed, one hand resting upon its phantom beast as raw power reinforced muscle and bone.
Tendrils struck his shield, driving in with crushing force, and the recoil that once threatened to shatter him now dulled against a body forged anew.
As one crushing wave of tendrils broke against him and splintered outward, Leonie seized the opening.
A streak of white feathers and crackling sparks marked her advance as she carved through the chaos.
The Emperor’s sovereign weight and the Valkyrie’s stormlight flared behind her in layered silhouettes, authority and martial fury driving a succession of precise, punishing slashes.
Her blade cut a blazing corridor through the whipping branches, severed limbs exploding into splinters and embers around her.
She closed to striking distance before the Bride.
The edge descended—
A spectral force slammed into her from the side.
Invisible pressure wrapped around her limbs and torso, halting her momentum mid-stride. The Bride’s fury thickened into a crushing field, hatred coiling tight as roots erupted around Leonie’s position, twisting upward in a cage meant to pulverise.
The trap began to close—
BOOM!
A searing explosion tore through the opening Leonie had forced, detonating directly against the Bride and the trunk that held her.
Flame burst outward in a concussive bloom, bark shredding under the impact. Leaves ignited in violent spirals, and blood-dark sap sprayed into the air in thick arcs as splintered wood cartwheeled across the battlefield.
Leonie rode the aftershock, twisting free as the pressure field fractured, boots carving a line through scorched earth as she disengaged and regained footing.
Smoke rolled across the hill.
Burning fragments rained down.
As the dust began to settle, her eyes narrowed.
Before the Gallows Bride, a wall of charred and twisted branches stood fused together, blackened and smoking. They curved inward around her in layered arcs, forming a cocoon of dark, knotted wood.
The structure shifted.
Cracked.
Slowly, like the legs of a massive spider unfolding, the branches peeled apart.
The Bride’s upper body emerged from within.
Her wedding dress hung in tatters. Pale flesh had split along jagged seams, portions of it sloughed away to reveal darkened bone beneath. Thick red fluid oozed from the fractures, too viscous to be blood, trailing down the trunk in slow, heavy strands.
Her head tilted toward them.
And she screamed.
The sound tore through the clearing, deeper and harsher than before, threaded with rage that no longer carried grief but pure, unfiltered hatred.
The remaining strips of flesh cracked open along her frame as the scream rose, splitting further until bone dominated her form.
Her dress blackened.
White lace soaked through with shadow, spreading like rot through cloth until it clung to her skeletal frame in shredded layers. What remained of her face hollowed inward, cheekbones sharpening, jaw elongating into a deathly grin as her empty eyes pressed on the world around her.
A malevolent aura burst outward.
The oak behind her convulsed as the spectral image of a vast Hanging Tree flared above it, its branches drooping like gallows ropes, its silhouette merging with the trunk in a violent overlap of spirit and wood.
The hill split apart from crown to base. Cracks raced through the earth in widening fractures as roots the size of trunks burst free.
The clearing ceased to be ground.
It became a rising mass of wood and sinew.
Hundreds of wooden appendages unfurled in every direction, each one veined with dark sap that sprayed and rained like blood.
The landscape twisted into an amalgamation of writhing limbs, the hill uprooted and reshaped into a monstrous body anchored around the skeletal Bride.
She stood at its centre.
Hollow-eyed.
Skeletal arms raised toward the bleeding sky.
Her Will flared in a black-red corona that swallowed the stormlight, swallowing even the glow of the Valkyrie and the steady pull of Guardian Star.
The entire clearing answered her call.
The colossal mass of roots and tendrils surged forward at once, blotting out space itself as they descended like the limbs of a world-ending god, intent on grinding the hill and everyone upon it into splinters and dust.
The sky vanished behind wood and shadow.
The air thickened with the stench of sap and rot.
Yet, before anyone could react—
Something shifted.
Just the faintest displacement in the air.
A whispering series of cuts passed through the descending mass.
Several slashes traced invisible lines across the void, so clean and so precise that the wind barely acknowledged them.
The pressure of the incoming apocalypse fractured along those lines before it could complete its descent.
Then the world exhaled.
The entire vanguard of tendrils separated at once.
Hundreds of wooden limbs halted mid-fall, suspended for a fraction of a breath before sliding apart in synchronized collapse. Segments crashed into the hill in a rain of shattered bark and spurting red sap, the impact shaking the clearing but never reaching those behind him.
He stood there.
At the very front.
Dual blades lowered loosely at his sides.
Coat and dark hair flickered in the turbulence of falling debris. Red sap splashed across the scorched earth before him, severed tendrils piling at his boots in heaps of twitching wood.
His presence felt almost absent.
The air around him carried no roar, no storm, no violent aura.
It felt… quiet.
A stillness that settled with absolute certainty, as though the outcome had been decided the moment he chose to step forward.
Behind him, the faint outline of a human silhouette rose into view, formed from shifting currents of light and darkness that filled its frame like a boundless void carved in his likeness.
Alonso grinned and tilted his head slightly, the Bride’s shrieks crashing against him without disturbing his composure.
“I guess it’s my turn to show off now, ain’t it?”
Ayu’s smile widened. Imani gave a firm nod, weight settling deeper into his stance. Lukas watched with an amused glint in his eyes, as though he had anticipated this exact moment.
Each reaction differed, yet the shift in morale was undeniable.
Leonie felt it clearly. Alonso’s influence spread across them, not through overwhelming pressure or explosive aura, but through what he embodied. A certainty that steadied the field.
Humanity’s strongest Climber.
Their ace had stepped forward.
At the rear, Chiara observed with a different kind of interest. She understood his strength well enough. What drew her attention was the current state of his Manifestation.
Compared to the last time she had witnessed it, during his clash with Jack, it appeared quieter. Smaller. The silhouette behind him seemed almost subdued.
To others, that impression might suggest decline.
She recognised the opposite.
When Will pressed upon reality, the world resisted. That resistance generated distortion—warped air, visuals, sound. The greater the imposed change, the more violent the clash, the louder the manifestation.
Yet now the distortion had diminished.
Which could only mean one thing.
His Will no longer forced reality into submission.
It aligned with it.
The friction had thinned because the world itself yielded to his intent as something already decided.
Alonso no longer needed to roar for the world to listen. He only needed to whisper.
Chiara allowed herself a quiet chuckle.
While they had all begun their journeys along their respective paths… Alonso had already reached the edge of the next horizon.
Even as she observed, he turned slightly toward them, smiling over his shoulder.
The next wave descended.
The Bride’s amalgamation convulsed and dozens of tendrils lashed toward him from every direction, tearing furrows through the air at impossible speeds, each one saturated with her Will and thirsting for annihilation.
He did not move.
The others tensed.
The barrage closed in, a collapsing cage of splintered death.
Then his eyes narrowed by the slightest fraction.
The world answered.
The entire mass sheared apart mid-flight.
The descending catastrophe parted before him as if the field itself had recognised an unseen edge and yielded to it.
Faint silver distortions lingered where the cuts had traced their path before dissolving into the charged air.
Wood crashed around him in thunderous impacts. Red sap burst and steamed across the fractured hill, splattering against scorched earth and shattered stone.
He remained standing at the centre of it.
Calm.
Untouched.
“Come on, guys,” he called over his shoulder, a grin tugging at his lips. “Don’t leave me hanging.”
“Ayu, where’s the music? Leonie, the Will boost from the Valkyrie is great—don’t let the Oak’s presence gain ground on you, yeah? And Lukas… got any more of those cool card boosts I can borrow for a bit?”
Despite the skeletal, wooden horror towering before them, smiles surfaced.
Alonso’s presence reframed the danger. The apocalypse felt contained within his stride.
Ayu stepped forward first, her tempo flaring into the air like a rising drumbeat, pushing back against the suffocating Will of the Hanging Oak.
Imani advanced to stand beside Alonso, shield raised, Guardian Star deepening its gravitational pull into the torn earth.
Leonie steadied her stance, Valkyrie stormlight expanding once more as spectral feathers and crows wheeled through the air, reclaiming lost ground.
Pablo’s new metallic summon lurched forward, its reinforced vines grinding into position, ready to intercept.
Chiara inhaled slowly as luminous symbols rotated around her, merging into a tighter configuration as she prepared her next attack.
Lukas’ grin widened.
“I had one waiting just for you.”
The Magician slipped back into the deck. The towering silhouette behind him dissolved into drifting motes as the cards shuffled themselves in a fluid cascade.
A new card rose and hovered at his side, its surface gleaming with austere symmetry.
“Have fun,” Lukas added softly.
A blindfolded figure stood upright upon the card, scales balanced perfectly in one hand, a blade held steady in the other.
Behind Alonso, the same image formed in towering proportion, poised and unwavering, its presence imposing invisible lines across the battlefield as though every motion had been weighed and measured.
Will Manifest—
—Justice
Alonso felt it instantly.
His senses sharpened.
The world deepened in contrast.
Every motion around him seemed fractionally delayed, every vector clearer, every imbalance revealed. It resembled Lukas’ usual Fusion link in structure, yet this carried an additional edge.
The manifestation fed into his own Will, amplifying it while thinning the oppressive pressure radiating from the Bride.
Stacked with Leonie’s aura and reinforced by his own titles, the synergy settled into something deeper.
This power…
A faint smile touched his lips as it flowed through him, strong and steady.
“I’ll engage,” he said, voice calm and confident. “Back me up.”
Leonie gave a firm nod. The formation tightened as the neural link re-established under her command.
Before the next wave could descend, Alonso’s figure flickered.
And vanished.
He reappeared within the storm of wood and sap, already moving.
The amalgamation convulsed around him. Thick tendrils lashed inward from every direction, converging to crush the space he occupied. He shifted through them in flowing arcs, boots barely touching unstable surfaces before pushing off again.
Invisible lines traced through the air.
Sections of wood separated cleanly without the swing of steel. Tendrils collapsed in staggered cascades, sheared apart by Will alone.
His blades moved sparingly, flashing only when a mass grew too dense, carving through reinforced cores that resisted the subtler edge of his intent.
The abomination pressed harder.
As he drove deeper, the aura thickened. The air felt viscous, saturated with death. Each step dragged as though he waded into unseen marshland. A crushing force settled over his shoulders and limbs, invisible pressure seeking to bind him mid-motion.
He pushed through it.
His Will intensified, tightening around him like a second skin. The oppressive field buckled fractionally where he advanced, resistance thinning under the certainty of his presence.
Then the ground around the Bride ruptured.
Blood-dark sap surged upward in thick geysers, pooling in mid-air before shaping itself into forms.
Dozens of figures rose from the liquid mass, humanoid and distorted, their bodies composed of viscous red fluid hardened into muscle and armour-like plates.
Spectral nooses hung from each of their necks.
The cords stretched upward and backward, merging into the looming spectral Hanging Oak, binding every warrior to the Bride’s Will.
They screamed without mouths.
And charged.
Some wielded blades forged from congealed sap. Others carried axes, spears, broken halberds formed from twisted wood and bone-like growths. They moved with unnatural speed, darting across tendrils and through falling debris, reforming even as limbs were severed, the liquid mass reconstituting itself under the pull of the nooses.
One lunged.
Alonso pivoted, allowing its blade to graze past his coat. A subtle shift of intent passed through him and the warrior split along a vertical line, collapsing into red slurry before its upper half could complete the swing.
Another struck from above. Alonso raised one blade this time, parrying a hardened sap spear with ringing steel before driving a short, controlled slash through its core. The body burst apart, only to begin knitting itself together from scattered droplets.
They swarmed him.
The aura of death intensified, each movement carrying the weight of the Hanging Oak’s dominion. Tendrils coiled and struck from below while the sap-born warriors advanced in layered waves, blades and axes carving through the air with feral precision.
Then the ground trembled.
A hammer crashed into the edge of the field with almighty force.
Imani’s blow sent a violent tremor through the entire amalgamation. Roots splintered at the base as Guardian Star flared, dragging the massive structure toward him.
The pattern of the tendrils fractured under the pull, their synchronized assault breaking into jagged, unstable arcs.
Ayu burst through it, as she reached a cluster of warriors, her rhythm igniting into visible pulses that rippled outward.
Each kick shattered torsos into exploding crimson spray. Each elbow strike detonated a sap body mid-lunge, fragments scattering before reconstituting under the strain of their nooses.
Leonie carved upward in sweeping, coordinated arcs. Stormlight trailed behind her blade as it sliced through spectral cords, severing warriors from their source.
For brief moments they faltered, collapsing into lifeless red mass before the Hanging Oak pulled fresh sap upward to replace them.
The pressure around Alonso flickered.
The Bride’s focus split.
He used the opening.
Driving forward in a straight line through converging tendrils, his Will carved ahead of him in precise vectors.
The cocoon encasing the skeletal Bride fractured under successive unseen strikes, layers of wood splitting and peeling away, unable to halt his advance.
His blades flashed once, twice, finishing what the unseen edge had begun.
He broke through.
The skeletal Bride loomed before him, hollow eyes staring straight into his soul as the red fluid around her churned violently.
Then the air shifted.
A blade of condensed sap and jagged bone formed in an instant and flashed toward his throat, sudden and close.
Alonso moved.
His Will and microcapacitors flared as he rotated mid-air, coat snapping in a tight arc. His blades flashed toward the sudden strike, intercepting it mid-motion in a violent clash that sent sparks spiralling through the smoke.
The force recoiled across the clearing.
Amid the exchange, three more blades condensed from the blood-dark mist around him, forming in an instant and driving toward his flanks with ruthless speed.
In that breath, Alonso steadied himself and drew in a controlled inhale, his Manifestation tightening close to his frame.
He saw the vectors form.
The trajectories.
The angles.
And then his blades shifted.
One sword intercepted the first incoming edge. He rode the momentum of the impact, pivoting through it as his second blade accelerated under his Will and waves to catch the next strike. The third—
Was severed.
A precise cut of Will cleaved through the conjured weapon, shattering it into fragments that dissolved before they struck the ground.
Alonso did not pause.
His gaze locked onto the skeletal Bride’s hollow eyes for a single breath.
Then her head split cleanly down the centre.
A silent line traced from crown to jaw.
His second Will strike landed.
Two blades in the light.
Two blades in the darkness.
Four cuts converged.
Will Manifest—
—No-Strike