The two, colossal red eyes that opened in the darkness were not the eyes of a beast. They held no malice. No predatory hunger. They were ancient. Weary. Filled with a deep, sorrowful corruption. The air in the chamber grew heavy and cold.

The triumphant shouts of The Unchained died. The sudden, oppressive silence was a physical weight. The rhythmic, ground-shaking heartbeat grew louder. A slow, inexorable drumbeat of impending doom.

From the absolute darkness, a shape began to emerge. Not a creature of flesh or shadow. A tree. Or, what had once been a tree. An Ancient Treant. A being that should have been a guardian of life. A creature of sunlight and green, growing things.

But this one was a perversion. Its bark, thick and gnarled as a dragon's hide, was a sickly, mottled grey. Covered in weeping, black sores that dripped a viscous, tar-like sap.

Its branches were not covered in leaves.

They were twisted, claw-like appendages. They ended in sharpened, thorn-like points. And embedded in its massive trunk, right where its heart should be, was a pulsating, cancerous growth of jagged, black crystal. A Corrupted Dungeon Core. It had taken root and poisoned the ancient being from the inside out.

The Treant took a slow, ponderous step forward. Its massive, root-like feet cracked the stone floor. It let out a sound that was not a roar. A deep, groaning creak. The sound of a thousand-year-old forest dying all at once.

This was not a native inhabitant of the grotto. The Shadow-Panthers had been its natural denizens. This… this was an intruder. A punishment.

This was the system, once again, moving a piece on the board. A direct, brutal response to their relentless, systematic purging of its dungeons.

An A-Rank boss. A creature of immense, regenerative power. Deliberately spawned in a C-Rank zone. It was a trap. A cage. And the door had just been slammed shut behind them.

"Formation Gamma! All units, focus fire on the central mass!" Edward's voice cut through the stunned, terrified silence. A sharp, commanding crack of the whip.

The Unchained, their celebratory mood instantly evaporating, reacted with the disciplined instinct of true veterans. They were no longer a disorganized rabble. They were an army.

The Iron Circle blacksmiths and the beast-kin warriors, led by a roaring Fenris, formed a solid, defensive shield-wall. Their heavy weapons and sheer mass a bulwark against the creature's advance.

The mages of the Conclave unleashed a barrage of their most powerful, corrosive spells. Bolts of crackling, purple-black magic slammed into the Treant's massive trunk.

Selene and her assassins melted into the shadows. They circled the behemoth. Their daggers flashed as they darted in to strike at its root-like legs.

The battle was a symphony of futile, desperate violence.

The mages' spells sizzled and died against the Treant's corrupted, magically resistant bark. The assassins' daggers glanced harmlessly off the ancient, iron-hard wood.

The Treant, with a slow, almost weary movement, swung one of its massive, branch-like arms. Not a fast attack. An unstoppable one. It swept through the front line. The sound of its impact was a sickening, concussive boom.

Half a dozen of the Iron Circle's stoutest warriors were sent flying. Their heavy armor crumpled like tin foil. Their bodies broken and mangled.

This was not a fight they could win with brute force. Edward saw it in an instant. The Treant's sheer scale and its unnatural, corruption-fueled regeneration made it an insurmountable wall.

For every shallow cut they managed to inflict, the weeping, black sap would ooze out. The wound would seal itself in seconds.

They were ants, trying to chew through a mountain.

A new strategy formed in Edward's mind. A plan born of tactical logic and a profound, suicidal desperation. They couldn't go through it. So they had to go up it.

"Fenris! Selene! Kira!" he roared. Kira, a swift, agile leopard-kin, was at Selene's side. Her twin daggers were a blur. "With me! We're climbing it!"

The three women looked at him as if he had lost his mind. But there was no time for questions. No room for doubt. They saw the cold, absolute certainty in his eyes. And they obeyed.

"Everyone else!" Edward commanded. "The roots! It draws its power from the ground! Forget the trunk! Attack the roots! Keep it distracted!"

The focus of The Unchained's assault shifted. They swarmed the base of the Corrupted Treant. Their axes, hammers, and spells now directed at the thick, gnarled roots that anchored the behemoth. A suicidal, desperate task. But a task with a purpose.

While the main force was engaged in the desperate, grinding battle, the elite, four-person strike team began their insane, vertical assault.

The Treant's massive, gnarled trunk was their new battlefield. A vertical, shifting, and utterly hostile landscape. They climbed. Using the creature's own corrupted, thorny branches as handholds. Their movements were a desperate, high-stakes ballet against gravity and a constantly moving opponent.

Kira, the leopard-kin, was in her element. Her natural, feline grace allowing her to move up the trunk with breathtaking speed. Selene was a ghost.

Her movements silent and fluid. Using the deep, shadowy crags in the bark as her personal highway. Fenris was a powerhouse. Her raw, brute strength allowing her to punch her own handholds into the softer, rotten patches of the wood.

Edward was the leader. A blur of motion that was a synthesis of all their styles. He moved with Kira's grace. Selene's silence. And Fenris's raw, explosive power. His goal was the same as theirs. The pulsating, cancerous, black-crystal heart of the Corrupted Core. A hundred feet up in the center of the creature's chest.

The Treant, feeling the gnats crawling on its body, reacted. Smaller, vine-like tendrils, thin and whip-fast, erupted from its trunk. They lashed out at them. The climb became a deadly, three-dimensional game of dodgeball.

A vine whipped past Edward's head. Its thorny tip left a shallow cut on his cheek. Another wrapped around Fenris's ankle. She was forced to let go with one hand. Her axe a blur as she hacked herself free just before she was torn from the trunk.

They were a quarter of the way up. Then halfway. The battle raging below was a distant, chaotic symphony. Up here, it was a quiet, personal, and utterly terrifying war.

They were twenty feet from the Core. It was a hideous, beautiful thing. A pulsating, crystalline cancer that throbbed with a dark, malevolent light.

But the Treant was concentrating its defenses. The area around the Core was a dense, writhing nest of the thorny, whip-like vines. An impenetrable defense. They were so close. But they could not break through.

They clung to the trunk, panting. Their bodies a mess of cuts and bruises. The goal was in sight but impossibly out of reach.

"We can't get through!" Selene hissed. Her voice was tight with a rare frustration.

Edward looked at the writhing, thorny barrier. He looked at the pulsating, black heart of their enemy. And he looked at his own, corrupted, soul-devouring hands. There was only one way. A terrible, reckless, and monstrous choice. But the only one they had left.

"Keep them busy," he said. His voice was a low, grim command.

He took a deep breath. And then he let go.

He didn't try to climb around. Didn't try to cut through. He simply launched himself. A desperate, flying leap. Directly into the heart of the thorny, writhing nest.

The vines were on him in an instant. They wrapped around his arms, his legs, his torso. A hundred thorny, constricting serpents. The thorns, sharp as a razor, dug deep into his flesh.

The pain was an all-consuming, white-hot fire. The vines squeezed. Their pressure threatened to crush his bones. To stop his very heart. He was trapped. Caught.

But he was exactly where he needed to be.

In the center of the nest. His body now just inches from the pulsating, black-crystal Corrupted Core.

He ignored the pain. He ignored the crushing pressure. He focused all of his will. All of his power. All of his monstrous, insatiable hunger. Into his right hand.

And with a final, desperate, and utterly defiant roar, he plunged his hand forward. His fingers phased through the last, desperate defenses of the dying tree.

And he grabbed the living, screaming, A-Rank soul of the Corrupted Ancient Treant.

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