Outside!
"Why has the Life Tree awakened? Didn't that old thing fall into a deep sleep ages ago?"
"Who knows? Maybe it had a contingency plan ready!"
"Plant life really does know how to survive. It's still not dead!"
"Why worry about it? It won't hurt us anyway!"
"True!"
Intangible messages flowed through the Corrupted Forest, but soon died down. The high-level Corrupted Creatures were quite happy to see things turn out this way.
As the Advanced Corrupted Creatures had said, the low-level Corrupted Creatures surged toward the Life Tree even faster, drawn by the Life Force it released. In the end, though, the Life Tree drained the Life Force from every last one of them.
The night passed quickly. The sun gradually rose, and beside Green's body, the ground was no longer ringed with corpses, but buried beneath countless dry bones.
In the sunlight, the bones of countless Corrupted Creatures lay piled into a mountain. A wisp of Black Smoke curled up from them, then was absorbed by the green leaves in the canopy above.
The bones had been trampled to pieces as other Monsters charged over them, one after another. Those below, drained of their energy, had grown extremely brittle. Unable to bear the weight, the little mountain of bones collapsed with a crash, leaving only the topmost layer intact.
The remaining intact bones all shared one striking feature.
Each skull had a huge, round hole in it, as though something had pierced straight through.
It went without saying that the culprit was the branch Green had extended.
The Flower Fairies who had watched the battle from above all night were already dumbstruck, their faces full of indescribable shock.
Before, the Life Tree had only resisted instinctively, using crude, clumsy methods. With Green in control, the night's