I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 200: Millions of Years Old Enemy

He didn’t cry like actors from the movies does. Eren wasn’t that emotional or felt everything was related to him.

It was just a silent tears he’d let slip a few times since coming to this world. It was heavy and too close to his inner soul and whatever was inside his brain or body.

The visions, memories or other feelings from the experience were painful because Emily’s entire life, her pain, her abandonment issues, the mother she’d hated and loved in equal measure, the father figure she’d worried about for months, all of it was because of a plant that had been running experiments on her family for longer than any of them had been alive.

And Emily didn’t know. She was on the farm right now probably yelling at Mel for breaking another training dummy or stealing one of Lyra’s rolls from the cooling rack with that guilty little grin she did when she thought nobody was looking.

Emily was his princess and savior but she didn’t know that her mother hadn’t abandoned her. Or that Henner hadn’t wandered off at all but died alone in the forest. She didn’t know that the tree her village had built its entire spiritual life around was a finger growing out of something that had eaten her ancestors for centuries.

How do you tell someone that?

Fury was circling him with his ears flat and his tail low. [Stand up. The dragon is still breathing and we need to go.]

He stood up. Wiped his face with the back of his hand and it came away red and wet. His shirt was done. Blood and ash and snot had turned the front of it into something that looked like he’d lost a fight with a paint can.

He didn’t go to the portal.

He ran. Not toward the farm because he couldn’t face Emily looking like this and thinking what he was thinking. South and east, into the deep forest, following paths his feet knew even though his brain had never walked them. The Clone’s memory was doing the navigation. Eren’s body moved on muscle memory inherited from a dead copy of himself, ducking under branches and jumping over roots without conscious thought while his actual brain screamed behind his eyes and his vision blurred with tears and blood.

The running helped. Not emotionally but physically, the way exercise sometimes overrides panic by giving the body something mechanical to do. Eren had read somewhere that crying and running at the same time was actually impossible because your body couldn’t maintain both and whoever wrote that had clearly never been chased by their own existential crisis through a magical forest.

The Clone’s tree appeared after twenty minutes.

He saw it from maybe fifty meters away and his chest did something painful because the tree looked exactly the same. The massive rainbow-leaf hardwood with its insane multicolored canopy that Eren’s Clone had called home for thirty-eight days. Nobody had touched it. Nobody had climbed it or stripped its bark or disturbed the platform up top. It was just sitting there in the forest like a monument to a person who never existed except as a copy of Eren that thought it was real.

The Jade Cinder Rooks were in the upper branches. Four thousand tiny rainbow-feathered bodies arranged in clusters across the canopy, glowing faintly in the late afternoon light. Their collective eyes tracked him as he approached the trunk and he could feel their attention the way you feel someone staring at the back of your head in a quiet room.

He climbed.

His Extreme Climbing skill carried him up the trunk without conscious effort, hands finding holds that the Clone’s fingers had worn smooth over weeks of daily use. Twenty meters up, the platform of woven bark and stripped leaves was still there. Weathered and dirty and a little bit sagging on one side but solid enough to hold his weight.

The Clone’s crude bed. Bark strips layered over each other with a depression in the center shaped like a body slightly smaller than Eren’s current size because the Clone had been thinner. The vine ropes tied between branches that the Clone had used to secure himself during storms. Three stone cups on a natural shelf formed by a knot in the trunk, one of them still containing dried rainwater with dead insects floating in it.

The scratch marks on the trunk counting the Clone’s days. Over thirty of them carved into the bark with a sharp stone, each one a morning the Clone had woken up alive and alone and carved another line because there was nobody to talk to and nothing else to mark the passing of time.

Eren lay down on the platform and pressed his face into the rough bark and cried until he couldn’t breathe. Then he breathed and cried some more. The bark scratched his cheek and smelled like wet wood and something sweet that might have been the tree’s sap or might have been the Rooks above him.

He didn’t time it. Long enough that the light changed from afternoon gold to the blue-grey of early evening and the forest sounds shifted around him. Insects replacing birds. Night things waking up.

Fury had followed him to the base of the tree and was waiting below without trying to climb. Just sitting there with his ears pointed up and his nose pointed toward the forest. Loyal. Patient. Probably confused about why the person who fed him was twenty meters up a tree sobbing into bark but willing to wait it out.

Eventually the tears stopped because tears always stop. Your body runs out of water or salt or whatever chemical the brain needs to maintain genuine grief and the crying switches off and something colder switches on.

Eren rolled onto his back and looked up through the rainbow canopy at the darkening sky between the leaves.

Where is it actually hiding.

The dungeon. Below the dungeon. The red crystal that had escaped from the Verdant Hollow dungeon core and phased through the floor into ancient structures below. That thing hadn’t been running from them when Eren’s party destroyed the dungeon core. It had been going home. Straight down into the ruins of the elf kingdom that had once covered this part of the continent, deep underground, all the way to the center of an ancient city where the real body of Nisann had been growing and thinking and planning for longer than most species on this planet had existed.

And his grandfather and his whole family were part of it. The Door Master skill wasn’t a gift. It was a leash designed by Nisann and implanted in a specific bloodline because it needed someone with Earthling DNA, someone the Evon system couldn’t fully categorize, someone it could stack with custom abilities and then take over from the inside.

His whole life. His parents, his dead-end job at the packaging company, that shitty apartment with the water-stained ceiling and the broken intercom. The bathroom door that had started all of this. None of it was random.

"..the Totem isn’t dead," he whispered to the Rooks above him. They watched with their collective unblinking intelligence and didn’t respond. "It’s not sleeping. It’s eating the dragon right now from below. And when it finishes.."

He worked through it out loud because keeping it inside his head was making it worse. Hearing the words come out of his mouth at least made the problem feel like a real thing instead of a nightmare he could wake up from.

Nisann had millions of years of skills. Not the kind you learn by fighting slimes in a forest for six months. The kind you develop when you have an entire planet as your laboratory and geological time as your schedule. It could teleport without mana restrictions. It could clone without limitations. It had mind control that made the Magician of Love class look like a party trick. And once it finished absorbing the dragon it would have a body that could fly and tank hits that would flatten a building and then it would use the Evon level system to make itself immortal on top of everything else.

"..I can’t run from something that can teleport," he said to the canopy. "I can’t fight something that spent millions of years learning how to fight. I can’t trick it because it’s been thinking longer than humans have existed. And I can’t hide because it made the skill that lets me travel between worlds so it knows exactly where the door opens every time I use it."

Fury’s voice came from below. Quiet.

Fury shifted his weight at the base of the tree. [What do we do?]

Eren closed his eyes.

Emily was six months away from giving birth. Two hundred elves were living on a farm in Turkey with zero combat capability on Earth. And somewhere underground in a ruined elf city, the oldest mind on this planet was finishing its work on a dragon-sized body and getting ready to clean up every loose end it had left behind.

That’s what Nisann would do. Eren could feel it in the vision memories. Not anger, not revenge. Just efficiency. A programmer closing background processes. The Totem didn’t hate Eren. It didn’t care about him as a person at all. He was an unresolved variable in a calculation that had gone slightly off track and unresolved variables get deleted.

"..an enemy that can’t be escaped, can’t be killed and can’t be deceived," he said to the forest.

The Jade Cinder Rooks rustled their feathers above him. Evening wind moved through the canopy and the leaves shimmered in colors that didn’t exist on Earth.

Eren lay in the Clone’s bed with his face still sticky with blood and ash and stared at the sky through the branches and tried to think of a single thing he could do against something like that.

He was still trying when the stars came out.