The Nameless Extra: I Proofread This World-Chapter 92: Bloodvine Strangler

The crimson vines insistently lashed and coiled. Shima was already at the forefront, severing the nearest tendrils before they could coil around her throat or limbs with her falchion.
Yerin moved beside her in measured bursts, a dance of short steps and sharp cuts, her hazel eyes flicking constantly between each sweeping vines.
Behind them, Horren’s bowstring thrummed in steady rhythm, the whistle of his arrows lost in the cacophony of tearing the plant.
Next to him was Ruvian, condensing the wind into blades that slipped between his allies and carved narrow gaps into the advancing wall of greenery.
‘The trouble, of course, isn't killing what is in front of us… it is knowing where to kill.’
Ruvian sighed.
He could have burned through every vine in sight and it would have meant nothing if the heart still pulsed somewhere out of reach.
Ruvian found himself cursing in his head, wondering just how they were supposed to dig a knife into the thing’s life-thread.
Well, in theory, mana resonating techniques could have solved it, finding the faintest harmonic pulse in the surrounding aura and following it to the core, but… that is just theory in the purest, cruelest sense.
‘I am nowhere near that reach yet. None of us.’
The mastery demanded months or years of refinement which Ruvian had yet to earn.
Without that, all they could do was drown in speculation. Still, even speculation could be sharpened into something more.
Ruvian tracked the strangled movements of the Crestbeak Fowl hanging above them, suspended like some grotesque marionette in the Strangler’s grasp.
‘If this thing was using it as bait… won't the heart need to remain close enough to oversee its little theatre?’
‘No, it would not. It probably buried them deep—’
And then the thought came, almost an accident.
“...Buried?’ He quietly echoed the word. Once as an observation and the next one as an answer.
‘I see. That could work.’
Ruvian’s fingers tightened on his wand. He steadied his breathing, drawing the wind into his grasp. The wind gradually began to wrap around him obediently. His mind circled around the grim theory he had formed.
To lift the Strangler into the air would require stronger force of wind. To wrench it free from the earth’s embrace.
But here lay the obstacle that gnawed at the edges of his plan: the creature’s roots were anchored, buried in soil hardened by time and greedily gripped by stone.
‘...A clean pull would be impossible unless that stubborn earth is broken open.’
Without that, his wind would tug at the Strangler in vain. He was still tracing for a solution for that problem in his mind. Then, a voice cut across the field, loud, uninvited, and altogether too pleased with itself.
This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“You lot are having all the fun without me? Really!?”
Arlok came charging toward them, his boots hammering the ground, while his poleaxe slung over one shoulder like a war banner.
Ruvian’s mind sharpened, fastening onto the sight of that raw, reckless strength as if the answer had been running toward him.
'That's it!’
“Arlok!” Ruvian’s voice cut through the din.
“Crack the ground open under the Crestbeak Fowl!”
Arlok skidded to a halt, blinking at him. “Huh?” he said, the syllable booming in the open air. Yerin and Shima, both catching the order from where they stood, glanced toward Ruvian with puzzled wariness for a second before quickly returning to the incoming attack.
“Just do it!” Ruvian said.
Arlok shrugged as if such things required no further justification.
“Ha, sure. Whatever you say.”
And with that, he bent his knees and leapt. The ground beneath him seemed almost grateful to be rid of his weight, carrying him five meters into the air.
For a while he hung there, a dark silhouette framed against the pale, oppressive sky, before he came down like the embodiment of a meteorite. Shima and Yerin immediately evacuated from Arlok’s landing spot.
“Here comes the Stonebreaker’s Kiss!” he roared, the voice lost in the deafening fracture as the ground tore open.
The head of his poleaxe met the ground with a deafening crash. A surge of earth magic splitting the soil violently.
The world shuddered at the impact, soil and stone flinching away from the blow, and in the sudden, splintered earth, Ruvian’s wind found the gap it needed.
The air around Ruvian began to shift long before the first ripple of wind became visible.
Loose dust stirred at his feet, fine grains sliding across fractured earth in spirals, until the motion deepened into a silent, rising column of wind.
It swelled immediately, tendrils of air weaving together into something more tangible, more forceful, until the world seemed to bend inwards toward the point where he stood.
Everyone was shocked at how fast Ruvian casted it. By the time the wind reached its crescendo, it became a tightening gyre of a storm given form without rain or lightning, a small tornado, but it was strong enough to lift the creature.
The Bloodvine Strangler reacted too late. The moment the cyclone’s heart touched the earth, it seized the creature in its grasp.
Soil burst upward in violent bursts, stones and splintered long-roots tearing free from the earth with an ugly, wet and hard sound.
The voidspawn’s writhing form was wrenched from the fractured ground, its tangled length and obscene vines lifted higher and higher—three meters, then four, then five—until the whole of it hung exposed in the cold swirling wind.
Its flailing roots trailing like a nest of serpents ripped from their burrow.
His gaze flicked upward at the writhing mass overhead, the storm straining to keep it aloft.
‘Damn it. That took a lot of my mana…’
“Now, destroy every scrap of earth that is still clinging to those roots! The heart-core should be inside one of them!” Ruvian shouted.
The command was all they needed.
Ruvian’s intent was no longer abstract to them.
They had understood it.
Arlok leaped forward first, slamming his poleaxe into the mass of dangling boulders. Yerin’s blade came next, the flames searing through thick coils of dirt-packed vine, burning away stubborn clumps in showers of embers.
Shima jumped even higher—past them, her falchion charged with crackling arcs of lightning, slashing the stone and root alike with brutality.
Horren, hanging back just far enough to keep his aim, drew the condensed wind arrows and destroyed the boulders cleanly. They worked without pause, without waste, until nothing but stripped roots remained.
Then, Horren's final attack split the last boulder and from within spilled a red light.
It was the creature’s heart.
A crystalline core the size of a clenched fist, its surface like polished glass yet veined with threads of living crimson that pulsed in slow rhythm.
The moment the heart revealed itself, Ruvian did not allow a courtesy of hesitation.
A razor-thin arc of wind tore through the air in an unerring line, aimed to end it immediately before the heart could vanish into the rubble and turn the battle into a drawn-out hunt again.
Then, the heart was torn into pieces. (+300PP)
[You have purged a Wretched-Rank, Bloodvine Strangler from this world!]
[Your Spellcore has resonated!]
[You have gained +2 Mana Resonance!]
PP= 4300
ME= 510