A Trash Novel's Only Reader-Chapter 34: Backfire

A branch punched through the tyrant’s shoulder, while Shu was already tearing another one free before the thing finished roaring. Mana ran through the wood, hardening it in his grip, then he twisted and launched it straight into the monster’s side.

The hit landed deep enough to make the huge body lurch. Bark, blood, and splinters burst out together, which made him let out a short laugh while he sprinted across the ground.

’No way,’ he thought, grabbing a snapped limb off the ground. ’This is actually working.’

The tyrant slammed both arms down where he had been a second earlier, blowing apart the ground, but he was already gone. His body felt too light now and every dodge came so clean that the monster started looking less like a wall and more like a target.

Another branch flew out of his hand and buried itself in the tyrant’s upper arm. Before the thing could rip it out, he cut around a tree, yanked loose a thicker one, and drove that spear through the side of its neck.

The roar that came out of it shook the leaves overhead, and he grinned as he ducked under a wild swing. "Yeah, scream," he muttered. "You were real scary five minutes ago."

He stopped running in a straight line after that and started playing dirty. When the tyrant charged, he baited it into smashing trees for him, then ripped the fresh branches out of the wreckage and fired them back one after another.

Some pierced its chest, others tore into its legs, and one nearly went through its jaw when it opened its mouth to roar again. Every solid hit made his confidence climb higher, and after the seventh or eighth clean spear, even he had to admit it.

’I can win this,’ he thought, breath rough but steady. ’I can actually kill this thing.’

The thought should have sounded insane, but the tyrant was slowing down. Its swings were getting uglier, its footing was slipping over roots, and Shu’s new Sense kept feeding him tiny openings before the monster even finished moving.

He used one of them to step inside a vine lash, plant a foot on a root, and spring sideways. The branch in his hand shot out the next second and sank into the tyrant’s left eye hard enough to make the whole head jerk back, making him stare for half a beat before he barked out a laugh and pointed the bat at it.

"What happened forest tyrant?" he said, already reaching for another branch. "You look kind of washed."

The monster staggered, one hand clawing at its face while the other ripped two spears out of its chest. Blood poured down its front, dark and thick, and Shu’s grin only widened when he saw how sloppy it looked now.

’Calm down, don’t get cocky,’ he thought, then immediately snorted at himself. ’No, get a little cocky, I earned at least that.’

He poured mana into the next branch until it buzzed in his hand, stepped around a fallen trunk, and lined up the throw for the throat. One more clean hit there, maybe two, and this ugly thing was done, but then something strange caught his eye.

The spear lodged in the tyrant’s shoulder moved.

His arm paused for a moment. He had seen monsters twitch, seen muscles spasm, seen bodies keep moving after bad hits, but the branch itself had bent.

Another one shifted next, and the spear in its side gave a dry crack and twisted deeper on its own, not from the monster pulling at it, but from the wood changing shape inside the wound. Thin red shoots pushed out along the shaft, spreading so fast that Shu felt his grin drop before he even understood what he was looking at.

’What the hell...’

All around the tyrant, the branches he had thrown started trembling.

One of them split with a wet crack. Red shoots burst out of the shaft, dug into the tyrant’s flesh, then spread over its arm in a fast, ugly crawl.

Another did the same near its ribs, and then the one in its ruined eye started twitching hard enough to make his stomach turn. The wood was not breaking apart, it was growing.

’No, no, no,’ he thought, taking two quick steps back. ’Don’t start this weird tree nonsense now.’

The tyrant’s body jerked once, then again, and the spears buried in it all sprouted together. Thin roots punched out of the wounds, wrapped around muscle, and sank back in deeper while the monster planted one hand on the ground and forced itself upright.

Blood was still pouring, but not the way it had a second ago. The red shoots drank it as they spread, thickening into dark vines that crawled over its chest and shoulder.

Shu’s grin was long gone by then. He looked at the branch in his hand, then at the thing in front of him, and his face tightened.

’So I stabbed a forest monster with more forest,’ he thought. ’Nice job, idiot.’

He threw the branch away instead of charging mana into it, but that choice almost came a beat too late. Sense screamed through his head, making him throw himself sideways just before a vine ripped out from the tyrant’s shoulder and smashed through the spot where he had been standing.

The ground burst open under the hit. Dirt and roots sprayed across his back while he rolled, shoved himself up, and sprinted before the next one came.

It did not stop at one.

Every branch he had buried in that thing started moving now, bending, growing, and snapping outward into long red lashes that tore through the trees around it. The tyrant dragged one leg forward, then the other, and with each step those new vines whipped wider and faster.

One clipped the bat and nearly tore it out of his hand. Another carved a line across his sleeve, close enough that he felt the sting a second later and realized how bad that would have been if it hit clean.

’Great,’ he thought, cutting around a trunk while three more spears burst into writhing vines behind him. ’I gave the bastard extra weapons.’

The left eye was still ruined, but the vines around it kept moving, twisting over the hole in a knot of wet red wood. It looked wrong enough that he almost glanced away, but Sense kept pulling his eyes back to the parts that mattered.

Shoulder, ribs, eye, every place he had hit was turning. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

He ducked under one lash, stepped over another, and nearly ran straight into a third that burst out of the ground in front of him. He skidded to a stop, changed direction fast, and heard the vine slam into the tree beside his head hard enough to split the trunk.

"Well shit," he muttered, breathing harder now. "This might be a problem."

The tyrant roared and the sound came out rougher than before, half pain and half rage, but its footing was steady again. It was not winning clean, not yet, though the easy part was over.

He backed off another step, bat tight in his hand while his eyes flicked over the moving vines, the distance, the trees, anything he could still use. The next plan had to come fast, because the one he had been enjoying a moment ago was useless now.