Chapter 155: The Burned Garden (Patreon)

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Fire bloomed before Erthrix’s blade finished its rise.

The first volley climbed in bright arcs. Fireballs rolled through the pastel mist, leaving clean orange trails. Incendiary arrows followed, their shafts wrapped in quick rune-glow.

Kage watched the trajectories from the terrace edge.

They were good shots. Controlled spread. Layered impact. The mages had divided the valley into burn sectors, and the rangers had stitched the high beds with flame paths. The whole attack showed exactly why Greenlanders weren't a D-tier guild.

The first fireballs struck the lower bloombeds.

Purple-gold petals flashed white, then gray. The archive flowers folded inward, tried to seal, and burst into fine ash. Sap-rich soil blackened. Ancient root troughs cracked as heat bit into them. A thin mineral smell rose through the mist, sharp as overheated glass.

Then the whole valley began to burn.

Dozens of beds collapsed under the volley. Some withered into pale dust. Others fused into brittle slag where starlight sap had once pooled. The phantom elven railings above the beds flickered, their ghost-lines shaking as violence rolled through the grove.

Below, Greenlander voices rose in quick, bright bursts.

“There we go.”

“Fuck around and find out, as they say. And that's supposed to be the guy everyone's yapping about?”

“I mean, he did waste a lot of our time and killed some of us. Should have stayed off the rotation, though.”

“His quest prolly broke. Watch him log out crying lol.”

Someone laughed near the well basin. The sound carried through the mist with the ease of open guild comms.

Kage remained still.

His gaze moved across the burning beds. The flowers had been archives. Memory grown into petals. A history that had survived conquest, silence, and centuries of twilight. The Greenlanders saw an asset to deny.

One player, he thought, hearing the certainty in their voices. That is the number they trust.

The heat rose along his face. The silver filigree at the edge of his vision trembled as the System parsed the destruction. A faint pressure gathered behind his sternum, tight and hot. He tried to file it under loss.

The feeling had teeth, strangely. It wanted a line, a shape, an answer.

Kage made a small smile, dry and dangerous, and it sat strangely on his tired face.

“Burn a library,” he said quietly, “and you get to find out what the ashes remember.”

He lifted his free hand.

The First Maker’s Quill appeared between his fingers. Its surface looked dormant, plain to the point of insult, yet the moment it settled into his grip the terrace under his boots gave a low, resonant hum. The silver script in his vision leaned toward the quill, eager.

Below, the laughter sharpened.

“Is that a pen?”

“He pulled a pen.”

“Did he come to write us a complaint?”

“Maybe he wants to sign the surrender.”

Saph’s voice carried from somewhere near the inner shield line. “He's gone insane?”

Erthrix stared upward. His expression hardened. “Focus. He isn't dead yet.”

Rangers adjusted their aim. A mage began a fast cast, ember-light coiling around his staff.

Kage glanced at the nearest incendiary shaft climbing toward the terrace.

Title: Incendiary Shaft.

Poem: [Weaken].

[-50 AWN]

[Weaken applied. Spell cohesion reduced.]

The arrow reached the upper air and fell apart into a scatter of dull sparks. The mage’s bolt lost half its shape and burst against a phantom railing.

[Anya’s Distilled Clarity consumed.]

[+350 Awen over 10 seconds.]

He let the potion work while his fingers found the ink slot beside the quill. He considered the common inks for half a breath.

Then he chose the sun.

[Ink: Sun-Stamped Gold equipped.]

[Automatic Coating enabled.]

[Ink consumed: 1/1.]

[Radiant Syntax active.]

The quill’s tip took on a deep, heavy gold. The color looked like afternoon light trapped in honey. The moment the ink touched the quill, the burning valley seemed to inhale.

Kage stepped to the terrace edge.

Around fifty players filled the basin below. Shields braced. Mages cycled. Rangers tracked him. Erthrix stood at the heart of the formation with his blade raised, still certain that numbers and schedule could discipline the world.

Kage began to write.

The quill moved through the air, leaving golden script suspended over the terrace. Each stroke carried weight. Each curve pressed into the dream of the forest and demanded recognition. The System’s silver filigree surged around the letters, parsing, testing, grading.

Title: The Burned Garden.

Poem: “Ash is [Memory]. / Flame forgets [Rest] in the sun. / [Growth] claims noon again.”

[-520 AWN]

[Radiant Syntax: Solar glare triggered.]

[Jisei Threshold: Verse Potency +22%.]

[AWN: 119/1690]

The golden script snapped into a single blazing line.

For one heartbeat, the Verdant Reach went silent.

Then the fire changed.

The orange flames bleached from their centers outward. Ember trails turned pale, then white, then a blinding solar gold. The heat lost its greedy crackle and became a broad, vertical pressure, the kind of noon heat that made shadows shrink under roots and stone remember the day it had been quarried.

The burning beds erupted.

Gray ash lifted from the scorched troughs in fine ribbons. Petrified slag cracked open. From every ruined bloombed within a hundred meters, violet-gold blossoms surged upward with violent speed. Petals unfolded in layers, each one edged with sunlight. The flowers opened wide, and their glow struck back against the mist.

A blast of radiance rolled outward from the restored garden.

The Greenlander formation caught it full on.

Mages threw arms across their faces. Rangers staggered, bows dipping. Shield-bearers turned their slabs upward, trying to block light that passed around the wood and into their eyes. The basin filled with shouts, clipped curses, and the sudden loss of clean targeting.

[Solar Glare applied.]

[Vision suppressed.]

[Passive auras suppressed.]

The messages flickered across the Greenlander ranks in quick succession. Kage saw them in the way players faltered, in the way healers reached for allies a half-second too late.

The forest was next.

The Glimmer-Bark Treants stopped following the kill-box rhythm. Five towering sentinels turned their hollow, star-fire cores toward the basin. Their glass-chime foliage rang with a harsh, broken sound. The fire had touched the garden. The fire had violated the archive. The sentinels had a new priority.

One treant ripped itself free of the assigned pull path.

Then the next.

Then all five.

On the outer lanes, the Mist-Veil Stags lifted their silver heads. Their glowing lily-pad ripples darkened into sharp rings. The drowsy chime of their pulse changed into a high, ringing warning. The herd broke leash as one body and charged straight toward the source of the burning.

The Greenlander tanks activated their shield taunts. The pulses rolled outward, practiced.

The stags phased through the shield line.

Silver mist passed around bark-plate and steel. The beasts flowed through the frontline and struck the backline with the full force of dream-beasts who had just been shown an offense against the forest itself. A mage flew backward with a stag’s antler mark burning across his chest. Two rangers scattered as a herd body swept through their casting lane. A healer tried to brace, and a stag’s hoof passed through his raised staff, leaving the staff intact while the player folded.

The treants came slower and hit harder.

The first one reached the burn team and brought a wooden limb down across a mage circle. Glass leaves shattered from the impact. Star-fire spilled across the moss. The second treant swept a shield line aside as if the players were loose branches. The third opened its hollow chest and released a resonant chime that cracked the remaining incendiary arrows in the rangers’ hands.

Erthrix’s voice cut through the chaos.

“Cancel the burn!”

The order came a breath too late.

“Pull off the beds! Tanks, reset the well line! Healers, stabilize the back ranks!”

The formation shattered.

AOE timers collapsed. Pullers dragged aggro into empty lanes. Mages tried to counter the glare and found their passive auras smothered under solar pressure. The central rotation around the Translite Well buckled as five treants and a herd of enraged stags turned the guild’s own factory floor into a stampede lane.

Kage watched the machine fall apart. He moved.

The upper terrace still held the largest surviving growth. The haiku’s domain had awakened the noble floor of the old sanctuary. Balconies glowed with full baskets. Hanging troughs spilled violet-gold light. Branch shelves that had been dormant for centuries opened their petals to the artificial noon.

Kage sheathed the quill and drew Mumyo.

The blade pulsed against his palm, bright and awake. Its crimson vein beat once, eager. Kage kept the edge angled low. He had barely any Awen left, so the sword would serve as a tool, a key, and a warning.

He jumped to the nearest branch.

The wood bent under his boots, springy with renewed sap. His longcoat snapped behind him. The burgundy plume of his beret caught the golden wind. Below, a Greenlander rogue tried to climb after him. A treant’s shadow passed over the rogue, and the man changed his mind with admirable speed.

Kage reached a hanging basket the size of a small carriage.

The blooms inside had opened fully, packed petal over petal. He swept his hand through them.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x42]

[Progress: 804/1000]

A branch cracked to his left. Mumyo moved. The blade cleared the broken limb in a short, clean cut.

[Convergence: 2/100]

The balcony held a long trough of supercharged blossoms. Their petals vibrated with stored sunlight. Kage knelt, kept his intent simple, and harvested with both hands.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x39]

[Progress: 843/1000]

Below, the Central Translite Well became a ring of confused light. The guild had turned into a defensive scramble. Players tried to protect the well, the rare timber, and their own backs at the same time. The treants cared about none of those priorities. The stags cared even less.

A ranger on a mid-branch managed to draw a clean shot.

Kage saw the bowstring flash.

He turned his shoulder, let the arrow pass close enough to tug his coat, and flicked Mumyo sideways. The flat of the blade caught the shaft and redirected it into a cluster of pollen pods. The pods burst in a cloud of silver dust. A Gossamer Weaver shrieked from its web, lost its footing, and dropped onto the ranger’s branch. The branch broke. The ranger and the spider vanished into the mist together.

Kage crossed a glass bridge that had become solid under the noon light.

At the far end, a suspended basin hung from living vines. It overflowed with violet-gold blooms, their petals wide and bright enough to hurt the eyes.

He harvested quickly.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x37]

[Progress: 880/1000]

A mage below finally found his range.

Spellfire climbed toward the basin in a tight spear. Kage had no Awen to waste on grand answers. He kicked a broken slab of balcony railing over the edge. The slab intercepted the spear, exploded into mineral shards, and rained dust across the canopy, but the concussive blast caught him.

[-210 HP]

A secondary volley of splintered wood and fire shrapnel peppered his back as he rolled.

[-131 HP]

[HP: 83/760]

[Jisei Threshold active: Physical Damage +44%, Action Speed +44%, Verse Potency +44%]

The mage ducked.

Kage was already moving.

He leapt from the basin to a lower branch, caught a railing with one hand, and swung onto a wide terrace shelf. The shelf had been part of the old court’s walk. Its stone surface held shallow channels where starlight sap had once flowed. The channels now carried noon light, and the blossoms growing along them had clustered into thick, heavy knots.

Mumyo cleared a curtain of vine.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x35]

[Progress: 915/1000]

The guild’s comms had changed tone. The laughter was gone. In its place came sharp calls for healers, warnings about treant paths, and furious questions about why the flowers were glowing brighter the longer they fought.

Erthrix’s voice rose again. “Do not chase him through the beds! Hold the well!”

Good advice. Kage would have given the same.

The problem for the Greenlanders was that the beds had become the high ground, and Kage had already taken it.

He sprinted along the terrace shelf, jumped to a floating gazebo, and rolled across its silver floor. The gazebo’s roof held three baskets woven from old vine.

Kage harvested the last major cluster.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x33]

[Progress: 948/1000]

He paused for half a breath. 52 petals remained.

The forest around him had become a cathedral of gold and violet. The phantom architecture stood solid across the upper Reach, stairs and balconies and archways reclaimed by verse. The mob stampede churned through the guild, dragging fire and chaos away from the blooming beds. Every second the domain held, the sanctuary remembered what it had been.

Kage scanned the valley.

There.

At the foot of the Central Translite Well, half-hidden beneath the basin’s broad wooden lip, stood a ring of ancient altar stones. Their surfaces held worn script, shallow depressions for offerings, and a low platform where the oldest blooms had been kept.

One bed remained there.

It had survived the fire. Its petals were folded tight, violet-gold and full with memory. The bed sat in the middle of the altar stones, small enough to miss from a distance, bright enough to anchor the entire garden.

Erthrix stood directly on top of the bed.

The Greenlander officer had lost his unhurried ease. His bark-plate bore fresh scorch marks. His slab-shield rested low, ready. His blade was drawn, and the pale tree crest of the Greenlanders glowed faintly against the enamel. Around him, fourteen players formed a tight elite guard. Shields braced. Weapons raised. Eyes fixed upward through the falling gold light.

They had seen him work. They had seen the fire invert. They had seen the forest choose sides.

They still meant to hold the last bed.