My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 70

Chapter : 139

His fleeting, insane backup plan for the Mire Monster – using the flower as a lightning rod via the steel wire for an internal electrocution surprise – still amused him in a dark, gallows-humor sort of way. Thank the ancestors for giant, territorial guardian snakes, he mused, otherwise I might have actually tried that. And the resulting explosion would probably have taken out half the forest. And us. Still, would have been a heck of a light show. Probably would have confused the System too. 'Task: Retrieve Flower. User: Atomized flower, monster, and self. Reward: ???'

The momentary, almost giddy relief, however, was as fragile and ephemeral as a soap bubble in a hurricane.

A shadow fell.

It wasn’t the dappled gloom of the ancient forest canopy reasserting itself as the sun dipped lower. This was a shadow vast, absolute, and bone-chillingly cold, swallowing the pale, filtered light of the clearing whole, plunging them into an abyssal twilight. The gentle murmur of the stream seemed to curdle, the cheerful chirping of unseen birds choked into terrified silence. The very air grew heavy, pressing down with the weight of a collapsing mountain, thick with the primal scent of deep earth, ancient stone, and something else… something akin to raw, elemental power and the cold, metallic tang of shed reptilian skin on a colossal scale. The distant, muffled rumbles of the titanic battle had ceased entirely.

A winner had been decided.

And it had come back for its prize.

With a slithering, earth-shuddering sound that vibrated up through the soles of their boots and into the very marrow of their bones, the gigantic obsidian serpent flowed back into the clearing. It moved not with the frenetic rage of its earlier battle, but with a slow, deliberate, terrifyingly regal grace, like a river of molten night pouring through the ancient trees, its colossal body displacing tons of earth and undergrowth as if they were mere ripples on water. Its scales, each the size of a feasting platter, shimmered with those disturbing captured starlights and deep amethyst veins, utterly unmarred, seemingly untouched by its monumental struggle with the Mire Monster. That chitinous abomination, that grotesque horror from the swamp, was gone. Vanquished. Consumed. Erased from existence, leaving only the victorious, silent dreadnought of a serpent.

Its enormous, triangular head, a thing of nightmare geometry easily capable of swallowing a small house without unhinging its jaw, rose high above them, swaying gently, a dark mountain peak against the bruised sky. Its forked black tongue, long as a man, flickered out with hypnotic slowness, tasting the air, tasting their fear, which now hung thick and cloying as the forest’s own miasma.

And its eyes…

Those twin pools of molten gold, ancient, cold, and radiating an intelligence that was utterly, terrifyingly alien, were no longer fixed on some distant, vanquished foe. They were fixed, with a chilling, possessive, almost languid intensity, directly, unequivocally, on Lady Faria Kruts.

Or, more precisely, on the Dark Vein flower, pulsating faintly with its cold, dark luminescence, clutched forgotten in her trembling, white-knuckled hands.

The lure. The treasure. The thing it had just waged a battle of seemingly geological proportions to protect, or perhaps, reclaim. And now, these small, soft, insignificant bipedal morsels were holding it.

Oh, for the love of all that is holy, unholy, and vaguely squishy in between! Lloyd’s internal monologue, which had been attempting a brief, celebratory jig over the forty System Coins, tripped, fell flat on its face, and then curled up into a whimpering ball of pure, unadulterated despair. It WON?! The fifty-foot-long, armor-plated, super-snake with eyes like dying suns actually WON?! And now it’s back? For its glowy, probably-cursed, definitely-not-Good-Housekeeping-approved potpourri?! We are SO unbelievably, monumentally, royally, categorically, comprehensively SCREWED! I should have stayed on the damn sofa! Yes, the lumps were atrocious, the potpourri an affront to olfactory sanity, and Rosa’s icy glares could probably freeze hell over, but at least the furniture wasn’t actively trying to DEVOUR ME WITH ITS FLOWER-OBSESSED, MOUNTAIN-SIZED BODY!

Chapter : 140

Faria let out a small, choked sound, a whimper that was swallowed instantly by the heavy, predatory silence. The Dark Vein flower, moments before a symbol of desperate hope, now felt like a burning coal, a cursed artifact, a death sentence clutched in her hand. Her face, already pale from exhaustion and residual terror, drained of all remaining color, becoming a stark, chalky white mask against the crimson-violet chaos of her hair. Her guards, bless their brave, stupid, hopelessly outmatched hearts, instinctively, suicidally, moved to shield her again, their swords – poor, inadequate slivers of steel that looked like children’s toys against the backdrop of the serpent’s colossal scale – raised in a gesture of defiance so futile it was almost heartbreaking. The healer had resumed her prayers, her voice a frantic, desperate litany, barely audible above the frantic thumping of Lloyd’s own heart. The archer, her hands shaking so violently she could barely hold her bow steady, fumbled with another specialized arrow, her eyes wide and glassy with a terror that bordered on catatonia.

"Nope! Absolutely not! No way, José! Not today, Slinky McScaleface!" Lloyd yelled, his voice cracking with a desperation that bordered on the hysterical. Pure, primal survival instinct, honed over three lifetimes of narrowly avoiding becoming footnotes in various historical and/or interdimensional cataclysms, surged through him, momentarily overriding the profound exhaustion, the screaming protest of his abused muscles, and the lingering ache in his very soul. "Not after all that! We are NOT becoming gourmet snake snacks! I refuse! I have soap to make! An empire to build! Questionable life choices to regret at a later, more convenient date! You are NOT on the itinerary, you oversized, flower-fetishizing reptile!"

He was running on fumes, his Spirit Power reserves a pathetic, sputtering candle flame in the face of this elemental hurricane, his Void power scraped nearly dry from the earlier encounters, the desperate wire manipulations, the impromptu bullet-flinging. Fang, a crumpled heap of weary fur beside him, managed a low, exhausted growl, a brave but ultimately symbolic gesture of defiance. The vibrant lightning aura that usually crackled around him was now a mere whisper, a faint, apologetic shimmer.

But doing nothing was not an option. Doing nothing was an engraved invitation to immediate, probably quite messy, reptilian ingestion. His stubborn Ferrum core, the one that refused to yield, the one that had faced down his father's wrath and Rubel's machinations, flared with a last, desperate spark.

"Desperate times call for monumentally stupid, probably completely ineffective, but hey-at-least-we-tried measures!" Lloyd gasped, pushing his aching body, his protesting mind, his utterly depleted reserves, to one final, almost certainly futile, act of glorious, idiotic defiance. He wasn’t afraid, not in the cowering sense. He was terrified, yes, but it was a focused terror, a terror that sharpened the senses and screamed for action, any action, rather than passive annihilation. This wasn't a beast to be reasoned with, or a political opponent to be outmaneuvered. This was a force of nature. And sometimes, the only thing to do when faced with a hurricane is to throw a very small, very shiny rock at it and hope it gets distracted.

"Fang!" he roared, his voice raw, trying to inject a confidence he was several lightyears away from feeling. "Buddy! Pal! My furry, four-legged harbinger of occasional doom! I know you're running on empty, I know you'd rather be chasing squirrels or napping in a sunbeam, but I need everything you've got left! One last Chirp! The biggest, loudest, most annoying Chirp you can muster! Aim for its eyes! Or its… its giant, terrifying, probably very sensitive, definitely unpleasantly moist nose-holes! Anything that looks even remotely like a weak spot! Or just make a really loud noise and hope it has sensitive hearing!"

Simultaneously, with a grunt of sheer, teeth-gritting effort that made spots dance before his eyes, he poured the absolute dregs of his Ferrum power, the last sputtering embers of Steel and Fire, into his outstretched hands. He didn't have the reserves for precise, superheated filaments, nor the energy for dense, kinetic bullets. He needed area denial. He needed a net. A desperate, shimmering, probably entirely useless cage of last resort. A final, defiant gesture before the inevitable.