Stella awoke to the night sky and a cold breeze. Her neck felt stiff from the wooden bench's arm she used as a pillow, and her mind felt fuzzy as she let out a long yawn. Sitting up and rubbing the back of her neck, Stella looked down at her body and noticed two things. First, her favorite clothes were ruined with them being singed and torn in places, and secondly, there was a strange white glow wreathing her form, and she could see in real-time her severe burns receding as if they were being erased by the glow and replaced with her usual flawless skin.
Looking to her side in confusion, Stella faced the source of the strange white glow: an even stranger Ent. Stella could instantly tell it was one of Ash's abominations by its bizarre, inhuman wooden form that towered over the bench. Seven of its arms seemed to hold up a floating sun of white light; meanwhile, one was extended out toward her as if asking for a handshake.
"A light affinity Ent? That means..." Stella's brain kicked into gear as the memory of her final moments of consciousness came flooding back. She had been engaged in an intense fight with Nox and using the full power of her bloodline that she still didn't fully understand when a sudden wave of superheated ash and light smashed into her, sending her hurtling through a wall and knocking her out cold.
"Tree, is this thing Lucius? Did we really kill that lunatic?" Stella asked aloud as she placed her hand on Ash's trunk that was beside her. However, his attention was elsewhere.
What could he be focused on right now? Stella wondered but saw a massive portal suddenly materialize on the mountain peak, and Titus promptly stepped through.
Stella leaped up from the bench and peered through the unstable rift, and her heart sunk in her chest as she saw Nox quickly chop Titus down within seconds while wielding a giant two-handed battle axe made from shadows.
Digging into her spatial ring, Stella replaced her burnt clothes with baggy drawstring trousers, a shirt, and a black cloak. The sword Ash had gifted her from the Voidmind Elder's belongings appeared in her hand, and she was about to step through the portal to confront Nox again when Ash spoke in her mind.
"What are you doing?"
Stella tilted her head, "What does it look like I am doing?" She lifted her sword and pointed it at Nox through the portal, "To confront Nox and get back my earrings, obviously."
"Are you crazy? How could you even defeat her? Did you not just see how she handled Titus, who is a few stages above you?"
Stella gripped the handle of her sword tightly as she came up with a refute, "I was able to handle her just fine before with my bloodline! Didn't you see me effortlessly matching her attacks at the White Stone Palace?"
"You mean back when Lucius illuminated the room with his light techniques so Nox couldn't unleash her full potential?" Ashlock replied dryly.
Stella winced as she popped a Mind Fortress pill that helped numb the lingering headache from overusing her bloodline powers and Ash's voice. "Look, just trust me, okay?" Stella turned to face the giant demonic tree and pleaded, "With your assistance and my bloodline powers, we can defeat her and get my earrings back! Just think about how tasty Nox's corpse will be and all the things we can loot from her spatial rings!"
Ash went silent momentarily, so Stella added, "Don't forget Nox is also poisoned. I really think I have a chance here."
"Can you even activate your bloodline on demand?"
Stella glanced away, "Errr, not exactly, but I think it activates when I am in danger. So it should work. Look. If I get out there and my bloodline stays dormant, I will teleport out immediately. I promise—"
"Fine," Ashlock replied, "But I will lend you a helping hand. Give me a moment."
There was the sound of splintering wood as Ashlock's colossal trunk cracked open, and Stella quickly turned on her heel to face the other way. Yet even with her back turned to Ash, she could still feel the unsettling gaze of his strange eye on her back.
Stella looked through the rift that Titus had jumped through, which gave her a birds-eye view of Nox, who was turning to leave but froze. A rift had appeared before her, and even Stella shivered slightly as the demonic eye glared at Nox.
Multiple other rifts manifested just above the grass around Nox, and Stella heard the sound of vines exploding from the ground behind her. Then she saw how the vines shot through the rifts, wrapped around the enthralled Nox, and began to melt her shadow armor. Vines holding swords also went through, but tendrils of shadow lashed out from Nox's armor and slapped them away.
"I can't seem to stab her due to the armor," Ash's voice, which sounded like a thousand cries overlapping, echoed in her mind, "So I need you to kill Nox while she is still stunned. I will try and wear down the armor with the vines to give you an opening."
Stella stepped through the rift and felt her confidence die in her chest as she dropped down and landed on the grass beside Nox. Despite being distracted and held down by Ash's vines, the sheer presence the woman commanded over her surroundings was incomparable to before Stella was knocked out by Lucius. It was literally like comparing night and day.
There was this awful feeling as if all the shadows lurking nearby were eyeing her up like a pack of hungry wolves and would devour her at a simple order from their mistress. It was comparable to standing on a small raft adrift out at sea and seeing nothing but monster-infested waters in all directions until the horizon.
Stella gulped as she tightened her grip on the sword and went for a two-handed swing, aiming for Nox's neck. The hit landed true, but the armor of shifting darkness that shrouded Nox's body ate the attack like it was nothing. Nox didn't even lose her footing or show any signs of noticing Stella's attack. The woman's attention was entirely on Ash's eye through the rift.
"The difference from before can't be this extreme," Stella couldn't believe it. As if to test if this was real life, she pulled back the sword again to strike, this time with all the strength she could muster, but the result was the same. Even with the blade coated in her lilac flames, the shadow armor simply ate her attack and then mended itself by pulling in the nearby shadows.
Come on, bloodline, do something. Stella gritted her teeth as she saw Nox raise her hand toward the eye and seemingly break from her trance. Nox then looked down at the vines coiling around her body and effortlessly reached down and ripped them apart.
Now free from Ashlock's vines, Nox turned slowly and faced Stella. The two engaged in a staring contest for a moment, although Stella could not see Nox's expression as it was obscured by the helmet of shadows.
Nox tilted her head and seemed to scrutinize her, "The look in your eyes isn't the same," Nox said in a muffled voice, "Instead of focus and tranquility, all I see is fear and indecisiveness. A scared child that shouldn't be here."
Stella barely raised her sword in time to meet Nox's blade as she reappeared right before her.
"Your strength is lacking," Nox pushed Stella back, causing her to stumble. Stella quickly regained her footing and prepared to defend against another attack, but Nox had again vanished into the shadows.
Stella's breathing was erratic as her eyes darted around the dark meadow. All she could hear in the stifling silence was the blood rushing around her ears and the distant howls of wolves that seemed to be hunting something past the wall. Every little sound or shifting shadow drew her focus as she turned in circles.
If only my stupid bloodline would activate, I could quickly react to any attack. Stella cursed as she desperately tried to activate it on command, but nothing happened. In fact, a better way to put it was she had no idea how to activate her bloodline in the first place. In the past, it just sort of activated on its own, and she let it happen.
"Tell me, Stella, what happened to Lucius?" Nox's voice tickled her ear, making her heart almost leap out her chest as she spun round to nothing but the nightly wind that swayed the lush grass of an endless meadow bathed in starlight.
"Stop lurking in the shadows and come fight me," Stella shouted into the night, trying to stop her voice from shaking. With no response from Nox, Stella closed her eyes and entered the spatial plane, which turned her surrounding reality into clearly defined grids and purged all illusions.
Glancing around, she soon found Nox lurking a distance away below the surface within a shadow. It was as if there was an underground reality that she could easily move through so long as there were shadows.
"Stella, you promised you would teleport away if your bloodline didn't activate," Ashlock whispered in her mind, "All of my Ents are out of Qi, and Larry is currently being healed, so you are on your own against a far superior foe. She is practically toying with you. Leave now as you promised."
"I just need her to pressure me so my bloodline activates." Stella mentally replied to Ash, "Create a portal nearby, and I will pretend to be trying to escape through it. That should draw her out." Stella suggested as she kept checking her surroundings.
Ashlock complied with her request, and a rift rippled into existence a few meters to her left. Almost immediately, Nox began surging toward her like a predator through the shadows, and due to the spatial plane, Stella could fend off the attack in time.
The clang of their swords echoed through the land, and the flying sparks illuminated Stella's determined and frustrated face. Nox pulled back and then ruthlessly continued the assault. Stella tried her best to match the attack pattern as she had before, and if not for the phantom muscle memory from their earlier fight, she would have lost within three hits.
"Your technique is an amateurish replica of mine, full of openings," Nox sneered behind her helmet of shadows, "I thought I had come across someone from the same teacher as I, but you are nothing but a fraud. A confused child waving around a sword."
Stella felt her breath leave her lungs as a Qi-empowered kick from Nox found its way into her stomach, sending her flying back. There was a ripple of spatial Qi as a rift opened up right behind her, and Stella felt her ears pop as the air pressure changed, and she tumbled a few meters.
Gasping violently as she tried to regain air in her lungs, Stella found herself on Red Vine Peak, staring at Nox through a rift. The woman of shadows returned the gaze from behind her helmet and began to walk toward Stella, but all the rifts still open on the mountain peak snapped closed all at once.
"No..." Stella croaked as she collapsed onto her back in intense pain. That one kick had broken many bones and crushed her organs. If not for Ash creating a portal for her at the last second to take her out of the fight, she might have lost her head.
As Stella stared at the cosmos that filled the night sky, wheezing and groaning from the agony, her vision became consumed by a blinding white light. A wooden hand pressed her forehead, making all the pain disappear.
The blinding white light then began to dim like a dying star, and moments later, it completely snuffed out, engulfing the mountain peak in darkness. The Ent's many arms collapsed downward with the palms facing outward, and it stood there motionlessly like a small tree.
With a vacant expression, Stella sat back up and stared at where Nox had been through the rift.
Why hadn't my bloodline activated? I felt very much in danger and threatened. Is that not how my bloodline works? Or was it because I already used it earlier today?
That idea didn't hold up under scrutiny as the headache from earlier had mostly gone away thanks to the light Ent's healing, so what would be holding her back from using it again?
"Why am I so pathetic without my bloodline," Stella muttered defeatedly, reaching up and feeling her empty earlobes. Having the earrings she had worn since childhood ripped right from her ears in a meeting she was running by another spatial cultivator was humiliating, "If only I was stronger, I wouldn't have lost everything..."
"What's this then?" Ash said in her mind, and she felt something nudge her cheek. Confused, Stella looked to the side to see a single red maple leaf earring floating in the air, "I would argue they lost far more than we did. Sure, Nox might have escaped with a few of our pills and one of your earrings, but we gained so much more. Like Sol the Ent here or me going up a stage in cultivation from eating Hammond's corpse."
Stella's eyes widened as she reached up and plucked the earring from the air. It was real. "How did you get this?!" she blurted out, only half listening to what Ashlock had to say.
"Nabbed it during the initial fight before I got locked out by that weird bubble," Ash explained, "Sadly, I couldn't grab the other one before Nox got her grubby hands on it, but it's going to be fine. She is poisoned, thanks to your foresight. So assuming the pill works, she either returns here begging for a cure, or we just need to be on the lookout for a demonic tree somewhere out there."
Stella chuckled at the funny thought of Nox turning into a tree as she fiddled with her earlobe to reattach her earring. After a brief struggle, she got it in, and to her surprise, she felt what could only be described as a pull.
Compelled to stand up, she followed the pull, and it led her to the mountain peak edge, where a wall of mist swirled around, forming a sort of wall to maintain privacy. Stella poked her head through the mist, looked out at the rolling meadows, and noted that if she squinted at the wall in the distance, there was the hole Nox had made to get through right in front of her.
"What are you doing?" Ashlock asked sluggishly in her mind as if he were half yawning. It seemed sleep was about to claim his consciousness as it did every night.
"I felt a pull on my body after putting on the earring, and when I followed it, I was led here," Stella tapped her chin, "That's the way Nox fled, right? Is the earring trying to lead me to the other one?"
"Honestly, I have no idea if that's a feature of the earrings," Ashlock admitted with another yawn, "Let's talk about this tomorrow. I'm about to fall asleep."
"So... we are just going to let her escape then?" Stella pursed her lips, "With this earring, I can track her down... We could kill her at sunrise!"
"Stella, I am only powerful within my realm of influence," Ashlock yawned, "By sunrise, she should be well out of my roots range, and at that point, all I can do is send one of you lot after her."
"So!"
"And that's exactly the problem. You're all too weak!" Ash grumbled, "We already threw everything we had at the Merchants while within my realm of influence, and Nox still got away. You saw how she chopped Titus down like he was nothing but a glorified tree."
"But... but... what about Zeus or Khaos? Heck, we even have Sol now! That should be enough, right?" Stella was itching to get back out there and fight—
"Stella, stop. You are getting overconfident and wanting to risk everything for half of an artifact. Let her come to us, or we can always track down the earrings in the future when we are stronger." Ashlock lectured sluggishly, "See you in the morning, and stay put."
"Fine," Stella grumbled as she trudged over to the wooden bench under Ashlock's canopy and then paused when she noticed two pairs of hands lying on the floor in dried blood. Bending down, she picked them up, and if the many silver spatial rings on their hands weren't a dead giveaway, she recognized them both as hands belonging to Hammond and Lucius.
A small smile appeared on Stella's face, "I'm surprised you remembered to not eat the spatial rings—oh, you're asleep." Shrugging, she sat down, pulled all the rings free from their fingers, and then chuckled when Larry and Kaida came over, clearly looking for late-night snacks.
"Glad to see you two are okay," Stella sighed as Kaida swallowed one of the hands whole. Larry finished his meal as well and then crawled off.
"Where are you going?" Stella asked.
"To hunt some wolves that have forgotten who is king around here," Larry replied as he vanished into the mist.
