SSS Frost Sovereign: Rewinding The Apocalypse!-Chapter 75: I got this

"Arrgghhh!!" The survivor’s scream tore through the humid air as a massive, branch-like arm descended toward him and the raid party leader.

The leader moved with seasoned reflexes, snatching the disoriented man by his collar.

"Run!"

The earth groaned as the limb smashed into the loam.

The Treant shifted its weight, the motion sounding like a forest snapping in a gale, and swung its other arm in a blind, sweeping arc.

"Ghhh!" Matt grunted as the impact caught him mid-motion, sending him tumbling yards away through the undergrowth.

"Matt!" Reya yelled, her voice piercing the gloom.

Matt struck one of the massive pillar-like trunks, the wood groaning under the force, but he managed to roll with the hit.

"I’m... I’m alright!" he shouted back, pushing himself up.

At the last microsecond, he had triggered a counter-shredding aura, peeling away layers of the Treant’s wooden "skin" to dampen the kinetic force of the blow.

Icard stood his ground, his eyes narrowing as he took in the full scale of the creature in the ambient, ethereal light filtering from the canopy.

It was a nightmare of ancient timber. A ten-meter-tall giant of knotted trunks.

Its face was a haunting sight, half-buried within the gnarled bark of its torso.

And its branch-arms; they constantly shed a rain of dead leaves and razor-sharp splinters.

Within the hollow cavities of its chest, a faint, rhythmic glow pulsed like a dying ember.

This was an Ancient Treant. An Upper D-grade elite!

They had finally met a monster of this caliber.

The creature didn’t move with agility, but its presence was suffocating.

Every slow, earth-shaking step it took was punctuated by the sound of thick roots dragging behind it like heavy, trailing chains.

It was a living siege engine that demanded the attention of everyone in the grove.

The Treant renewed its assault, stomping the ground with vibrations that rattled everyone’s teeth.

Its massive hands battered the earth, seeking to pulverize anything that moved.

The group scrambled, barely escaping the consecutive shocks as the beast’s sheer mass scattered them further apart.

"Is that the Chieftain?" one of the girls from the other raid party stammered.

She didn’t carry a physical weapon, her hands glowing with a faint, trembling light as she backed away, desperate to put distance between herself and the towering giant.

They were all tense, the air thick with the smell of crushed pine and ozone.

But the rescued man shook his head frantically, his face pale with terror.

"It’s not it. That’s not the Chieftain," he muttered.

"Huh?" the other raid party leader looked down at him.

"What do you mean? You mean this is a different spawn? This isn’t the one that attacked your group?"

"No," the man whispered, his eyes unfocused as he relived the slaughter.

"The one with the sword... the eyes... this isn’t it."

Icard watched the Treant, his mind working through the logic of the encounter.

’The other raid party that broke off from us is still ahead. I thought this guy was one of them, but he came from a different direction entirely’ he thought.

’He must have been circling the deeper trees blindly. Where the hell did he come from that he ran into the Sentinel first and then doubled back into us?’

"Tch." Icard clicked his tongue. The flow of the battle was feeling increasingly off-kilter.

The Treant let out a low, creaking grunt.

Realizing the incarnations had given it too much distance to reach with its arms, it plunged both hands deep into the soil.

Suddenly, the earth beneath their feet heaved.

"Huh?"

With a violent wrenching motion, the Treant tore its hands upward, dragging massive subterranean roots through the surface.

The upheaval was so sudden it threw everyone off balance.

Several incarnations cried out as they were tossed into the air or pinned by the rising timber.

"Yeah. This is definitely not the Chieftain," Katar muttered.

He had managed to avoid the root upheaval with a leap out of its range, landing on a stable branch nearby.

He turned his gaze toward the other raid party leader and their Erwald.

His form was a small, green-scaled creature with a glowing red gem embedded in his forehead.

"Hey, you! Erwald!" Katar barked with nonchalant arrogance.

"Take care of this thing. We have to advance!"

The green-scaled Erwald bristled, the gem on its head flaring with indignation.

"Huh? Are you mad? You stay for it!" yelled back, feeling much offended by Katar’s words there.

"You fool... your incarnations can’t face the Chieftain. You should leave them with something they can actually handle and stop being a dunce!" Katar barked again.

He was completely gnoring the fact that his words were definitely belittling the Erwald and his raid party.

Katar’s loud dismissal irked the other raid party leader as well.

"What the hell is he talking about?" the man muttered under his breath, as Katar’s blabbering was loud enough for everyone to hear.

He clicked his tongue in annoyance.

"Who said this is all we can handle?"

Despite the bickering amongst the incarnations there, the Treant remained a lethal threat.

It continued to tear roots from the ground, tossing the incarnations who had tried to maintain distance off their feet.

"Tch. This thing is a headache," Eric muttered.

He had been trying to follow Albert’s standing orders to conserve energy for the Chieftain, but it was clear they couldn’t ignore this titan.

They couldn’t just keep scurrying about.

His arms suddenly erupted in flames up to the elbows as he activated his spatial ability, stepping into a wide stance.

He began compressing the heat, forcing the flames into a dense, spherical form between his palms.

"Arlon! Hit this thing! Use your flames!" the other raid leader shouted to one of his members.

The young lad was lean and focused.

He looked mostly quiet and his hands were already beginning to shimmer with a hazy, heat-distortion aura.

Arlon took a sharp breath, readying an ability that caused the air around him to ripple.

On a silent count, both Eric and Arlon unleashed their attacks.

Eric fired his compressed fireball while Arlon launched a high-velocity stream of white-hot cinders.

The dual impact hit the Treant squarely in its upper torso.

The giant recoiled, its earth-shaking advance ceasing abruptly as it groaned from the heat and fiery attacks that burst in flames on its ancient timber body.

It instinctively pulled more root-like structures from its own shoulders, coiling them tightly around its hollow chest to protect the faintly glowing core within.

The reaction was instantaneous, and Icard caught it. He remembered immediately.

’That’s it! They’re weak to sustained fire!’ he thought.

In his previous turn, he had encountered these Upper D-grades, but back then, he and Damon’s group had been a little more than bystanders while the elites did the heavy lifting.

Now, he was seeing the mechanics of the fight clearly.

From a safe distance, Damon and his group watched the exchange with wide eyes.

Their faces pale as they realized the sheer output of power required just to make the monster flinch.

Clearly, it was being rubbed on his face again. They were definitely way behind these incarnations here.

"It recoiled to protect its core," Icard said, glancing toward Katar.

"Yeah," Katar replied, his feline eyes narrowed.

Then, he didn’t hesitate to give his final verdict.

"Eric! I’ll leave you to handle this. The rest of you, let’s move on to the chieftain!"

The order was so sudden and absolute that it left the group stunned.

’What? How can he expect Eric to handle an Upper D-grade alone?’

Even Icard felt a flicker of shock. He knew Eric was stronger now, but this was a tier-jump.

However, Eric just breathed out a lungful of heated air, his expression settling into a mask of cold resolve.

"Roger that!" he said. He knew Katar wouldn’t give an impossible order.

"Arlon! You too," the red-gemmed Erwald commanded, not wanting to be outdone.

"Your heat will work well here. Stay and finish it."

"Ha! This fool. Is he copying me now?" Katar growled, casting a sidelong glance at the other Erwald.

Lamar, Arlon’s raid party leader, looked at his subordinate with concern.

"Can you handle this?"

Arlon wiped sweat from his brow and offered a faint, confident but tense smile.

"Yeah... it’s a big challenge, but with the two of us, we can manage, I guess"

"Katar, you can’t just leave him!" Reya protested from several yards away, her eyes darting between Eric and the massive Treant.

"This thing is too strong!"

"He can do it, Reya," Katar replied, his voice uncharacteristically somber.

"Against this specific foe... he could probably do it alone if he had to."

"Don’t worry about me, Reya," Eric added, his eyes locked on the Treant as it began to uncoil its protective roots.

It was almost done recovering from the initial blast, damping off the flames that had been licking on it a while after Eric and Arlon’s attacks.

"I’ve got this."