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53. Sacrifice to Duty
🕑 Added 2025-04-29 16:03:34 +0000 UTCMy claws tapped the brilliant stolon, and a grimace formed on my blood-drenched muzzle.
I had felt it when my mind shortly connected to Undrassil; the nature of the drainage was simple. Unmaking it wasn't quite the opposite.
I had felt the vast quantity of energy when I dived into Undrassil. There were reasons I avoided this root. Oh, one scratch and the likes wouldn't do much.
It was a World Tree, after all, not some wee sensible flower. Still, it couldn't be harmed under any circumstances.
I couldn't take the risk, and the kaldorei acted similarly—they avoided harming it at any cost.
The closest comparison for this elven-guided root would be one of the arteries near the heart.
It was a flawed imagery. But if it were as simple as cutting the root to stop the drain, the result would be equivalent to a quick, highly fatal hemorrhage.
And at best, it would be an explosive chain reaction crippling the World Tree and ending with death at worst.
"When I get my claws on him…" I growled; it was on purpose as well. It was premeditated and done with the sign of great skill.
Yet it was something I should have seen, but I didn't, and the shame and guilt didn't improve my mood.
It would be a big thing without artificial manipulation, but it was a different beast here. And that made my displeasure greater.
Without the life force blotting it like a tsunami, I could sever the connection and seal the wound, if with immense effort and a sizeable chance of catastrophic failure.
And it was a far slower onslaught than it should have been with Hollowmaw's population fighting it.
But no, it wasn't a regular connection, and this wasn't a run-of-the-mill plant. World Trees were different; they worked in a way vastly outside the norm for vegetal.
They were both infinitely more fragile and resilient as they existed in two dimensions, Azeroth and the Emerald Dream.
It wasn't unique, but they did so more deeply than anything else.
The current event was fit for such a life form.
This wasn't just a bunch of traitorous madmen sucking off Undrassil from somewhere else.
It wouldn't have been such a massive crisis if it were the case, Staghelm or not.
He wasn't that strong, but he was an intelligent man. My loathing of his entire being didn't blind me to that. Or so I had believed. I had been a fool, very evidently so.
With his ass lickers, they tricked the World Tree I had grown to do that to itself. It was as disgusting as it was clever.
It went even deeper than that. It was Undrassil trying to move itself there, rebirthing itself in the process.
It was why the draining couldn't just be stopped. It was momentum and the World Tree's 'will' ending this eventuality. A World Tree wasn't a thing you wielded like a mace.
It was why I couldn't do as I pleased without days of preparation and time.
I lacked both aspects in droves if I wanted to save the heart of the den capital through this reasoning.
The irony that it was a virtually identical process used to make it didn't go unnoticed.
Because, of course, it would have been too fucking easy!
I breathed deeply, silently praying the ancestors preserved my sanity… speaking of which, I made them leave, and my perception shifted to normal, and my mana stopped ticking down.
It would be an unneeded distraction; the skills necessary here were seldom in the ancestral spirits' vast library.
What they knew, I had already in my mind and expanded upon it.
At their departure, I felt every last bit of their collective wrath; it mirrored my own. And it told me Ursol would be very pissed soon enough if Ursoc forced early rebirth didn't do the trick.
I didn't want to use force to guide the Wild.
The Bear of Might would have opened the gate to Cenarius, whose cells had been ready to be cultivated for some time, and no blood would have been shed. But nothing could fucking go right.
Regardless, this was for the future, and the present required my full attention. I was highly uncertain if what I had in mind would work.
But I had to try; I had no choice.
I began, but first, I set things up.
Groot's body coiled stronger against mine, roots drilling in my flesh, primary roots becoming secondary, then tertiary, until only root hairs remained.
My muscles tensed, and I exhaled.
Magic followed, ruby and emerald mana working in tandem through us two, and then it was done just as I did when I worked on the Mighty Bear.
It was hazardous, unrefined, and very much brute-forcing things; it was a shadow of what it could be once I rounded the edges.
It messed with the nervous system by its very nature, even if it didn't directly touch the brain. But it might as well be, even if there was little to no risk of brain damage.
And it was more magic than purely biological. Immaculate trust between the parties and understanding was an absolute necessity.
Mana could get very volatile, very fast, very violently. With a floral womb, it was safe, and the environment was stable, but here, it was the extreme opposite.
But it worked and certainly was dangerous; the word didn't even begin to describe how risky it was.
It was why, in any other circumstance, I wouldn't have done it. It was profoundly idiotic.
But did I and Groot have a choice? Yes, we did, but what a shitty pair of choices they were.
And we made the right one, the moral and rational one.
My buddy and I were in tune beyond anything we usually were; our thoughts, senses, and bodies shared, almost melding.
Well, more so the first two, with the first, but he had access to surface-level stuff for the third.
Regardless, the differences were imperceptible at first glance, but there was no latency. And it changed everything.
There wasn't this fraction of a second where we needed to exchange complex strategies or communicate abstractly within an instant.
And we did, concepts and thoughts flying as we began.
The Goldilocks shimmered by its telltale colors, grew over our armored form, and connected as thousands of mycelia pierced animal and plant cells.
It was a pricking sensation soon drowned by the golden mycelium as I commanded it. Enumerable scintillating hair-thin threads defied gravity as they grasped the World Tree's iridescent stolon.
It was hauntingly beautiful, but my mind was too preoccupied for nonsensical artistry.
And through my bond with Groot and thereby the Goldilocks, whose mycelia precision and deftness were amplified to unprecedented levels, my work began.
Even with that, I couldn't go against the flow of energies, but I needed to. However, I didn't have to do it all at once.
Digging my back paw into the mossy ground as if bracing myself for impact, bones, roots, and mycelium, I meticulously parted the first layer of bark.
Dead cells of the periderm gave way without much effort, not that I wasn't going in between them as well.
And the living part of the bark made itself known by a burst of raw life force that became a constant stream. Thick, crystal clear sap barely thanks to our precision.
In an instant, the Goldilocks of the entire cavern from my position began to grow brighter and brighter in waves.
It only increased as I guided the golden mycelium deeper, and the energies were diverted to the surrounding flora, a fraction of it passing through me and Groot.
It invigorated me, unlike anything else. It was borderline euphoric.
My mind snapped awake as if I had been in a dream until now. My fears slipped away, my fury quieted down, and my worries vanished. It was peace in the truest sense.
Any wounds that lingered from the battles stirred, and muscles twitched as flesh and skin mended far faster than they had been.
My left shredded eyeball, in particular, though, unlike the other injuries, didn't heal. No matter how much energy suffused my cells.
The organ was too complex, and it showed. The tissues were regrowing over, sealing the wound shut and nothing more. It was something to fix later.
But that last part kept me from getting lulled into the false comfort to be then drowned in the current of unfettered Nature and Life. It felt good, better than good.
It wasn't a trap, but it might as well be. And I endured. Such a thing wouldn't stop me, nor would Groot, even if he didn't take it as well.
We couldn't relent, so we didn't, and we dug deeper, the flow increasing and the Goldilocks outputting most of it.
Then work truly began, the wild hyper-dense magic twirling in the air as a daughter root was born from the stolon. A second followed, a third didn't wait long to come after, and dozens grew in quick succession.
They were almost blinding, their light undiminished as I guided them back into this and nearby roots, the Goldilocks serving as a framework.
But then the flow violently picked up while I was two-way through unweaving the stolon into a self-contained root system, alimenting both sides.
It was a temporary fix until I could find a solution.
It hadn't been much of a significant increase, but it caught us off guard. It was more powerful than we could realistically handle.
I huffed loudly, in agony, yet not. My every cell and that of Groot groaned like old wood as Undrassil bled into us.
We couldn't redirect it like we just did a moment prior. I snarled, my toe claws digging into the ground and my muscles bulging.
The Goldilocks in the following kilometers was at its utmost capacity, coming faster than it could move around. The input was above the output by a lot.
It left us to face the full brunt of it, to contain it as it had nowhere else to go. We weren't a conduit anymore.
We were the vessel, trying as we might to expel, increasing our speed of work.
Worse, the grasp on our magic began to flicker from the overwhelming mana coursing through us.
We didn't resist; we couldn't, but the only way out was relenting.
Alas, the mere idea of abandoning was unacceptable; by the ancestors, we would succeed no matter what.
I felt my tattoos squirm, burn, and heal in an endless cycle while the distinction between my armor–Groot–and body–I–was slowly unmade. It felt viscerally wrong and orgasmically right.
Bark, bone, skin, and fur bulged as tumorous outgrowths appeared across them without patterns or definite shapes, consistencies, or colors. Organs and other internals fared no better, mutating, merging, and dividing.
It was what Life and Nature let loose that resulted in this.
But we couldn't focus on any of that. We couldn't focus on the consequences of the chaotic life force we couldn't resist.
Only my heart and brain had a little free amount of my concentration to limit the havoc there; nearly all efforts were in vain, but it was vital. They were the only thing keeping me grounded.
Even then, it bled through my defense, little by little.
The ever-present blessings of the Bear Lords and ancestors placed upon me hummed with latent power as if awakened.
My heart boomed in my chest as I felt them progressively wash, melting inside my bone and blood… and bark and sap—the last of which was concerning.
Yet it alleviated the torrent bearing down on us, but it could only do so much. We used it to its full extent, choices were limited, and every help was necessary.
No true resistance was, as such, made, not that we had the capacity without compromising our struggling hold on the root.
The barrier separating us was warping and chipping away as animals, plants, and fungi changed and became anew.
The sensation was indescribable, agony and its opposite, with fear, excitement, and calm. It crashed down on us, forcing itself down in us with gleeful abandon.
I felt my counterpart waver. It was almost enough to make me stop it all. I wasn't, however, and Groot would have none of it.
Saving the World Tree and Hollowmaw with everyone inside was what we needed to do at all costs.
So we endured, our body entirely on the task. Anything but that goal was unimportant, secondary, and discardable.
And work we did, in a dizzying array of colors, roots bloomed to dance in the choking, dense air from mana that liquefied and crystallized.
They intertwined together, like neurons forming and changing connections through themselves into knots.
The Goldilocks amplified that imitation of a brain, even if, in truth, it was more of a heart.
Under our wills, these new pathways progressively guided the sea of untameable energies.
With a last effort, we took more energy than ever, and a scream tore itself from us. From my treant, it was a rumbling crackling of wood splitting, and me a thunderous roar that seemed to shake the ground.
Only my voice remained at some point, yet the sound akin to a falling tree stood until I ceased. It was only then that I realized it was mine alone, but I didn't compute its meaning right off the bat.
My tongue was out, my breath was labored, and one good eye studied what we had done.
It was the World Trees' heart, the Twins' Heart, sharing all, life and death.
It was very crude, but it redirected the sap and controlled the flow of life energies like piping with pumps and valves.
It wasn't solely taking resources from Undrassil now.
"We… succeeded…" I rasped out, and there was relief, a lot of it. However, the absence of an answer in any way, shape, or form confused me.
Then, it became a pit in my stomach, my mind churning in denial.
A pit and denial that died young and quickly devolved into grief, rage, loathing, regret, shame, and hate came all at once.
He was gone, Groot was gone. I didn't care about its highly probable temporary state. I didn't know if it was permanent; this wasn't merely bodily destruction.
He was gone.
My first friend, a confidant, a student, almost a son and brother in one. A treant I created, tended to, and had always stuck with me, loyal to a fault, grumpy at times, with a bit of a trickster streak.
Nineteen years. It was how long I knew him, the nigh-entirety of this life. But he wasn't there anymore, leaving a gaping hole behind.
He was swept in the current, his mind and soul vanishing with no remnants of either. There was nothing left. It wasn't him hugging me.
I stood to my full height, beating the exhaustion with sheer rage. The malformed growths in and out of me were absorbed and remade into the right shape.
From one moment to the next, I didn't appear as a cancer-ridden beast, a mad experiment gone wrong, or a Void abomination look-alike.
It was trivial to fix and took only around half a minute.
What wasn't was my life force. It was… changed, for lack of a better term; it wasn't fundamentally different but irrevocably altered.
And it made my fury grow. Oh, it wasn't the mutations themselves, not that I was all too happy about them right now.
It was how they came to be, and it was quite literally Groot becoming a part of me or what remained of him.
It was as if the world taunted me for my failures.
The armor was now just as a part of me as my paws were. It wasn't armor anymore. I didn't wear it like I wouldn't wear my fur. I didn't wear it at all.
It became very much akin to a second skin, though it was more, far more.
The first few scans revealed that multiple organs were born from the neural convergence and were intrinsic to this forced change.
It altered many biological functions as well. Many were surface-level, and some weren't, such as my nervous and vascular systems.
They were fitted with all others to this 'exoskeleton' as if they evolved for that purpose. It was as if it had been the case for millennia.
I didn't understand how this came to be. It went against several tendencies of life force and evolution. I couldn't make heads or tails of it using that view; it wasn't regular or normal.
It was unorthodox in its reach and complexity. Yet it wasn't wholly unfamiliar, but it wasn't quite that either. It was close, however
It wasn't like the tumors I rid myself of when those plethoras of changes shouldn't meaningfully differ.
It was too biologically sound, functionally ordered, and perfectly fitting, but it was here.
It was part of me, the last remnant of my dear friend, a gift or a curse, I couldn't tell. But it was to stay. It wasn't a typical result of biokinesis to modify stuff. It was me.
Moving felt natural, more integrated, and complete than before when I had the entire living armor on me.
I could feel the Goldilocks clearer, like a limb I could flex if connected to me, which took a simple touch. Some of it was now part of me, one of the links between blood and sap.
A part of me was utterly fascinated, and I promised to study these changes in depth later. I wasn't unaware of the potential complications.
But it wasn't for now. And my eye landed on the bitch mauled corpse. The daughter-in-law of the hated kaldorei, the mastermind of this crime against the Wild, against the furbolgs, and me.
She wasn't entirely dead, like a surprising amount of her ilk, but she might as well be for what it was worth.
The amount of Life and Nature magic around was above the Emerald Dream's upper average first layers by a lot.
Though it wasn't a good thing for any of them, it slowed down cellular death to a snail's pace.
Leyara was going to be the star of this next show. First was to stabilize her and her underlings' vitals, any that still had an intact skull at the very least.
I wouldn't want anyone to suffer cognitive loss. It would be a mercy they didn't deserve.
"Need to go fast though." I snarled. The sense of touch from the bark of my knuckles on the ground was another reminder.
It wasn't muted. It was distinct, new, and bordering on the overwhelming.
There were nerves there–three kingdoms forged into one, yet not–it was of a novel, homogeneous nature.
It was the moisture, nutrients, light, and air composition. Things I never experienced myself properly.
It also led me to spot the night elf blood on me getting sipped in, turned into nutrients… right, the seeds on me. Fuck, too much to focus on.
I instinctively did an internal mana pulse, and the lack of a response hammered me with what was taken.
Vines grew from my back, the bones serving as support, and they dragged the kaldorei to me. I needed to be swift. Interrogation was for the future me's enjoyment.
My people needed me. I had individuals to contact and an announcement to make.
Comments
TITOO
Perhaps.
Jeremy
Actually re-reading the chapter I remember Malfurion's statement where he put Ohto in the same sentence as the Twin Bears. Is Ohto on his way to becoming something akin to a Wild God / Loa in his own right?
Asura
Thanks for the chapter.👋🔥 Not Groot.😭
Gal Anonim
If something happened to his siblings or/and parents Ohto's mind could crack after loss of his friend. I Hope they're alright.
TITOO
That part (two World Trees) wasn't unplanned for by Fandral, well maybe not as fast. It's not the best result, but the ritual can be redone later. The problem is that he didn't know about the extent of the Goldilocks' abilities, and well... Ursoc is here. There are reasons why he chose to orchestrate everything when Ursol wasn't there.
Jeremy
So... suspect Fandral is going to be less than pleased. The plan to 'steal' (?) the World Tree might not have worked perfectly if I understand correctly and instead created two instances of the Tree? Oh it also potentially increased the power and prestige of Ohto and since Night Elves lived failed to make him appear an uncontrollable beast.
