No matter how strong its healing, could it regenerate forever? Even if it injured a few students, it shouldn’t have killed that many.
Xiliya glanced at Melrose nearby. Though she hated to admit it, current Melrose was stronger than her. If Melrose went all out with the other students’ support, even without hitting all three heads at once, they could wear it down.
Xiliya was also concerned about the sudden failure of the Academy’s Magitools and Student Terminals. It didn’t feel that simple, and why had her Barrier Magic failed to activate earlier…
“Miss, what’s wrong? Isn’t it settled?”
Ximo sidled up. Xiliya was still frowning at the Chimera’s corpse on the ground.
“No, I’m just thinking about one thing… Chimeras aren’t pack hunters. That’s strange.”
“Hm?”
“I was drawn here by the Forest Fox. This kind of hunting pattern isn’t uncommon among magic beast packs, where weaker members act as bait to lure prey while the strong ones hunt. But Forest Foxes and Chimeras aren’t even remotely related species.”
“And this Chimera’s state earlier was very off…”
Melrose had already gone to help tend the wounded. Other students tried contacting teachers. Xiliya crouched down to inspect the Chimera’s corpse more closely.
Well, this monster still looked pretty scary… Ximo glanced at the magic beast’s body too, but suddenly yanked Xiliya aside.
“Miss, watch out!”
With no magical fluctuations, a thick vine whipped out from the swamp, splashing mud. Like a flexible tentacle, it wrapped around the Chimera’s corpse and yanked it into the swamp with a whoosh.
The massive noise drew everyone’s eyes. The Swamp Land fell quiet for a moment, but then a chilling… chewing sound? rose from the depths.
Oh no… Xiliya’s heart sank. She turned and shouted to the crowd, “Get out of here, now!”
But it was too late. The entire forest seemed to come alive. Vines coiled around the trees writhed, and countless vines burst from the soil, intertwining into the air. They formed a prison-like cage enclosing the Swamp Land where everyone stood.
Xiliya’s pupils shrank. As expected, she hadn’t been wrong. The Forest Fox had lured them here as bait, but the Chimera wasn’t the hunter—it was bait too!
Confused students panicked en masse. The thick, towering vines formed a semicircular cage, trapping them as prey inside!
Melrose reacted swiftly, pointing her rapier at the vine “wall” to unleash a fire Elemental Magic spell and burn it away. But after a moment, nothing happened.
“Huh? My—my magic?”
A panicked voice came from nearby. The student healing the wounded stared in horror as their magic suddenly failed to activate.
Chaos erupted. Xiliya calmly tested her own magic and said in a low voice, “My magic won’t work either. I can’t sense the mana in my body at all. It’s like something’s suppressing it.”
Of everyone present, only Ximo looked baffled and unaffected—she didn’t use magic anyway.
“This means… there’s something even more terrifying than the Chimera in this Swamp Land.”
The next second, as if to confirm Xiliya’s words, the entire Swamp Land trembled faintly. Accompanied by a massive boom, a colossal entity emerged from the bottomless swamp.
It was a flower roughly three or four stories tall…? Its purple-black body and serrated petals inexplicably reminded Ximo of the chomper from Plants vs. Zombies, except this one was surrounded by so many vines!
The moment this giant monster appeared, Xiliya felt her internal mana suppressed even deeper. As expected, the prior Magitool and Student Terminal failures were likely due to this thing.
“W-What is that?”
“Where are the teachers? Why hasn’t the Academy sent help?”
The students devolved into chaos, their primal fear triggered by the overwhelming size difference. Only Melrose, though shocked, quickly regained her composure.
“This is… the Forest Lord?”
Melrose recognized the magic beast’s species, but she’d only seen descriptions of it in the royal library.
The Forest Lord was a parasitic magic beast. It typically disguised itself as deceptive plants, like oversized pitcher plants, to devour small magic beasts. It also parasitized fragments onto other beasts, using them to bring more prey.
In theory, through devouring, a Forest Lord’s body could grow indefinitely. Its roots and vine-like tendrils would eventually root into every corner of a forest, dominating the entire ecosystem and turning all creatures within into puppets—hence its name, Forest Lord.
Even rarer than Chimeras, this was Melrose’s first time seeing one in person, and one grown to such a massive size!
“Bad news, Senior Melrose—magic beasts are surrounding us!”
They were in the largest clearing in the Swamp Land, with a huge swamp pool at the center—now occupied by the Forest Lord’s enormous body. Dense jungle ringed the clearing, vines dangling from trees to block sightlines. Now, dozens of magic beasts of various species and levels emerged from the woods, shambling toward them.
Ximo, with her sharp eyes, quickly noticed something wriggling in the beasts’ facial orifices—thin little vines?
Ximo felt a wave of nausea in her heart. She suddenly realized that those vines were the means by which the Forest Lord parasitized other magic beasts. Moreover, the vines in the swamp forest earlier weren’t vines at all—they were all tentacles of this monster!
“How, how could this be?” A student was terrified. “For a magic beast of this level, how did the Academy fail to detect it in advance?”
Melrose had no mood to explain to the students, but she already had an answer in her heart.
The royal library’s records were more comprehensive than anywhere else. Melrose had once read in a book about a unique ability of the Forest Lord.
As long as it devoured enough other magic beasts, the Forest Lord could mutate and gain those magic beasts’ abilities. Of course, the probability of this happening was as low as one in a thousand.
Though she didn’t know where the Forest Lord had obtained this ability to shield magic fluctuations over a wide area, it seemed… they were really quite unlucky.
