CHAPTER 197: STONE MANTIS

The gray streak vanished from sight. Adam’s eyes scanned the chaotic tangle of the forest, and he spotted it. The Stone Mantis was a blur of motion, leaping from one distant tree to another with a speed that was simply astounding for its size. A faint smile touched Adam’s lips. He had been getting bored.

"It seems this won’t be so easy after all," he murmured to the silent woods.

In the next instant, he was gone. Adam unleashed his own speed, becoming a shadow that flowed through the forest. He pushed off the ground, his body light, and began his own deadly dance across the treetops.

He leaped from one thick branch to the next, his movements fluid and precise, a stark contrast to the Mantis’s frantic, desperate flight. The forest became a three-dimensional chessboard, and he was closing the distance with every powerful stride.

Despite its small size, the creature’s stamina was incredible. But Adam’s was limitless. He landed silently on a branch directly behind the Mantis, his presence a sudden, suffocating pressure.

The creature sensed him. It reacted not with another burst of speed, but with an act of sheer, desperate aggression. It leaped onto the trunk of a massive tree directly ahead, its six sharp legs digging deep into the bark like pitons.

With a guttural, grinding sound, it twisted its entire body, using its anchored position to wrench the colossal tree straight from the earth.

Adam was already in mid-air, leaping from the branch he had just landed on, his trajectory aimed for where the Mantis had been. He watched, suspended in the air for a fraction of a second, as the creature held the tree aloft.

He was shocked. The raw, impossible strength was breathtaking. But the Mantis wasn’t finished. With a violent heave, it flung the tree at him.

The world seemed to slow down. The spinning missile of wood, roots, and leaves filled his vision, hurtling towards him with terrifying velocity. Adam reacted with pure instinct.

His hand snapped to his sword. The blade left its sheath with a whisper of steel, and in the same fluid motion, he swung it in a clean arc. A brilliant white flash erupted from the blade, a crescent of pure energy that shot forward. It struck the tree trunk dead center, and with a sound like a thunderclap, sliced it perfectly in two.

Adam’s feet touched down on one of the falling halves. He used its momentum as a springboard, launching himself towards the next tree and landing with perfect balance. He looked up, his eyes narrowing, searching for his target. His jaw tightened. The Mantis had used the brief moment to create more weapons. Three, no, four more trees were already airborne, tumbling through the air towards him.

He was momentarily stunned by the creature’s tenacity. Then, the smile returned to his face, wider this time. It was a cold, predatory grin. He remained perfectly still on the branch, watching the arboreal barrage approach. He raised his sword again, not in a defensive posture, but an offensive one.

As the trees drew near, he swung his blade in a great, sweeping circle. Another white flash, this one a complete ring of light, shot outwards. It expanded rapidly, passing through all four of the incoming trees at once.

They didn’t explode. They simply fell apart in the air, their trunks severed in multiple places, collapsing into a rain of harmless logs and branches.

He leaped from his perch, pushing off just as the branch beneath him groaned and snapped. He landed on the forest floor, expecting the fight to be over. He was wrong. When he looked up, his eyes widened in genuine disbelief.

The forest ahead of him was a storm of motion. The Mantis was in a frenzy, and a wall of timber was flying towards him. It wasn’t three or four trees this time. It was dozens. A seemingly endless supply, a double-digit assault meant to crush him through sheer, overwhelming numbers.

The smile vanished from Adam’s face. It was replaced by a mask of cold annoyance.

"I don’t have time to waste on a single mission," he growled, his voice laced with a dangerous fury.

He sheathed his sword with a sharp, definitive click. He stood his ground as the first of the trees loomed over him, and as he landed on the ground, he brought one hand forward, palm open. His eyes narrowed to slits.

"Lightning Strike," he whispered.

The air itself seemed to curdle. An immense amount of magical energy gathered in front of his palm, condensing into a blinding point of white light. Then, it erupted. Not as a single bolt, but as a storm.

Thick, powerful lances of pure white lightning shot from his hand, moving with the speed of light itself. They were not rigid; they twisted and flexed, like living tendrils of energy seeking out their targets.

The first strike hit an incoming tree and the result was absolute obliteration. The wood and bark vaporized into nothingness. The lightning did not stop. Four main strikes branched out, each one a torrent of destructive power. They slammed into the airborne trees, turning them into clouds of superheated ash and splinters.

The lightning was a hungry, ravenous force. It not only destroyed the projectiles but continued on, striking the still-standing trees in the surrounding area. The forest erupted in fire and explosions as the lightning tore through it, leaving a burning, smoking wasteland in its wake.

The storm of lightning converged, its path now clear. It shot forward, crossing the distance in less than a blink. It seemed to teleport, appearing directly above the Stone Mantis, which was still tearing at another tree, oblivious to its doom. The thickest of the lightning lances descended.

It slammed into the creature’s back. Its stone-like carapace, which had seemed so formidable, shattered like glass.

Its skin flash-burned, and the sheer force of the impact drove it through the tree it was attacking, embedding its charred body deep into the wood before it fell, lifeless, to the scorched ground.

The light faded. The roar of thunder and crackling fire died down, leaving an echoing silence. Adam stood in the center of the devastation, his hand still outstretched. He slowly lowered it. He looked at the path of utter destruction he had carved through the living forest and felt nothing.

With a flicker of movement, he vanished from his spot and reappeared beside the dead Mantis. He looked down at the small, blackened corpse and a faint, humorless smile returned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the smooth, red crystal from the mission building. He held it over the Mantis’s body.

The crystal pulsed with a soft light, and the creature’s remains dissolved into glowing red particles that flowed into the stone, leaving nothing behind.

"First mission complete," he said. "Now for the second."

He reached into his coat again, his movements efficient and unhurried. He pulled out the next mission slip. It was another D-rank quest. The target: Red Flame Flower.

He scanned the details. The flower was a key ingredient in an elixir used to treat Frozen Heart Disease, a rare but deadly affliction common in the frigid northern kingdoms.

The Empire controlled its cultivation and development. He looked at the drawing on the slip. It depicted a flower with vibrant, burning petals of red and orange surrounding a core of bright yellow pollen.

The description carried a stark warning. The flower’s flame was a parasitic fire. If touched by a creature with mana, the flame would ignite and could not be extinguished.

It would use the victim’s own magical energy as fuel, burning them from the inside out until their mana was completely gone.

The Academy, and the kingdoms that purchased the flower, used special gloves woven with mana-blocking fibers to handle it safely. Adam had no such gloves. He had his own methods.

He put the slip away. He didn’t need to search. During his chase of the Stone Mantis, his senses had picked up another anomaly in the forest—a distant, pulsing heat signature, a point of intense, burning energy. He already knew where to go.

He began to run, his feet silent on the scorched earth. He moved through the forest for several minutes before the scenery began to change. He entered an area where the trees were different.

They were unnaturally tall, larger than any he had seen before, with wide, flat canopies that seemed to drink in the sunlight. He approached one and, without breaking stride, began to climb.

His agility was superhuman. He needed no handholds, his feet and hands finding purchase on the sheer bark as he scaled the massive trunk with ease.

He didn’t go all the way to the top. He stopped about three-quarters of the way up, where he noticed a strange, subtle bulge in the trunk. He smiled. He placed both hands on the rough bark and pulled. With a sound of tearing wood and snapping fibers, he ripped the trunk open.

Nestled inside, coiled up like a sleeping serpent, was the Red Flame Flower. Its petals were closed, but they still pulsed with a soft, inner fire. Adam understood immediately.

It was a nocturnal flower, hiding from the sun and waiting for the night to bloom.

It didn’t matter. The mission slip specified the collection of one flower. He had no interest in its biology and no desire to waste another second. He reached into the hollow he had created and carefully, with a technique known only to him, plucked the dormant flower from its hiding place.