The Extra is a Hero?-Chapter 287: THE HOLLOW TREE
Chapter 283: The Hollow Tree
The stone pillar next to my head dissolved into dust.
Pfft.
There was no bang. No thunderous report of a firearm. Just the terrifying, wet smack of a projectile breaking the sound barrier and the disintegration of granite.
"Down!" I screamed, driving my shoulder into Leon’s chest.
We hit the frozen floor of the outpost ruin together. A split second later, a second shot whizzed through the space where Leon’s head had been, burying itself in the snow with a hiss.
"Sniper!" Leon gasped, scrambling to get his shield up. "Where? I can’t see a flash!"
"Zone of Silence," I gritted out, spitting snow. "No muzzle flash because they aren’t using gunpowder. They’re using magnetic rail-cannons powered by biological batteries. Silent. Smokeless."
I looked at the debris around us. We were pinned in a corner of the roofless guardhouse. The shots were coming from the high ridge to the west—the high ground.
"Ren!" I whispered into the wind.
"Here," a voice drifted from the shadows of a collapsed wall to my left. Ren was pressed flat against the stone, his white camouflage blending perfectly with the drift. "Three shooters. Four hundred meters. High angle. They have thermal."
"Can you take them?"
"With a throwing knife against reinforced carapace armor at four hundred meters in a blizzard?" Ren paused. "No."
"Then we run," I said.
"Run?" Leon looked at the open ground between us and the treeline. "That’s a shooting gallery, Michael."
"It’s an aggro reset," I corrected, my mind racing through the mechanics of the encounter. "They are tracking us by heat. We need to give them a bigger heat source."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a [Flare Stick]. It was a mundane item, usually used for signaling rescue.
"Leon, the hammer," I ordered.
Leon looked confused but hefted the massive [Breaker’s Hammer].
"Throw it?" he asked.
"No. Hit the wall," I pointed to the thickest section of the ruin, a load-bearing wall that was already leaning precariously. "Bring the house down. Create a dust cloud."
Leon grinned. It was a grim, terrified expression, but it was a grin. "That I can do."
"On three. Ren, be ready to sprint for the treeline. The coordinates are five hundred meters in."
"One."
The snipers fired again. Pfft. Pfft. Shards of rock sprayed my coat.
"Two."
I cracked the flare stick, igniting a blinding red phosphorus burn, and tossed it into the center of the ruin, away from us.
"Three!"
Leon roared, pivoting on his back foot. He swung the massive iron hammer with every ounce of his A-rank Strength.
BOOM.
The impact was deafening. The iron head smashed into the crumbling support pillar. The stone shattered, and gravity took over. The entire western wall of the outpost groaned and collapsed inward, throwing up a massive plume of snow, dust, and pulverized rock.
The thermal cloud from the flare mixed with the debris, creating a wall of static for the snipers’ scopes.
"Move! Move! Move!"
We broke cover.
We sprinted across the gap, boots pounding into the deep snow. The wind howled, masking the sound of our retreat. I didn’t look back. I focused on the dark, jagged line of the Ironwood forest ahead.
We hit the treeline just as the dust cloud began to settle. We didn’t stop. We plunged into the dense, metallic undergrowth of the forest, weaving between the steel-hard trunks of the ancient oaks.
"Did we lose them?" Leon panted, crashing through a frozen bush that chimed like breaking glass.
"We bought time," I said, checking my compass. The needle was spinning uselessly, but I recognized the landmark—a rock formation shaped like a split skull. "This way. We’re close."
The forest here was older, darker. The trees were so thick their branches interlocked overhead, blocking out the snow and creating a cavernous, claustrophobic tunnel. The silence was heavier here. It pressed against my eardrums.
"Coordinates 45.2 by 90.1," I muttered, counting my steps. "Look for the Weeping Willow."
"There are no willows here," Ren said quietly, appearing at my side. "Only Ironwood and rot."
"It’s a misnomer," I said. "It’s a developer in-joke. It’s not a willow. It’s a..."
I stopped.
There it was.
In the center of a small clearing, surrounded by twisted roots that looked like petrified snakes, stood a tree.
It was dead. Not just dead in the winter sense, but anciently, permanently dead. Its bark was gray and peeling, revealing wood that looked like bleached bone. It was massive, easily thirty feet wide at the base, but the top had been sheared off by some ancient lightning strike, leaving a jagged, hollow crown.
It looked utterly unremarkable. Just another dead giant in a forest of corpses.
"We’re here," I said, leaning against my knees to catch my breath.
Leon looked at the tree, then at the surrounding darkness where the snipers would eventually appear. "This? This is the secret entrance? It looks like... a stump."
"It’s a texture asset," I muttered, walking up to the trunk. "Asset ID: Ancient_Hollow_01."
I walked around the base of the tree until I found a specific knot in the wood. It looked like a knothole, shaped vaguely like a screaming face.
"Ren, watch the perimeter," I ordered. "Leon, give me a boost."
"A boost?"
"I need to reach that knot. It’s seven feet up."
Leon interlaced his fingers. I stepped into his hands, and he hoisted me up.
I hovered in front of the screaming face knot.
In The Extra is a Hero, finding this dungeon required a complex quest chain involving decoding Elven poetry. But players had found a workaround. A speedrun strat. You didn’t need the poem. You just needed to input the code.
I raised my fist.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I rapped my knuckles against the wood, directly on the forehead of the knot face. The sound was hollow, dull.
Nothing happened.
"Michael," Leon said, his voice strained. "I think I see movement in the trees back there."
"Hold on," I said.
I reached into my inventory and pulled out a small vial. A [Minor Mana Potion].
In the game, the prompt was "Offer a drink to the thirsty ghost."
I uncorked the vial. The blue liquid shimmered, cold and viscous.
"What are you doing?" Ren asked from the shadows, his voice tinged with genuine confusion. "That is a waste of resources."
"It’s the key," I said.
I poured the potion. Not onto the ground, but into the knothole.
The blue liquid splashed into the hollow wood.
For a second, nothing happened. The wind howled. The snipers closed in. I felt like an idiot clinging to a dead tree.
Then, a sound came from beneath the earth.
GROAN.
It wasn’t a mechanical sound. It sounded like a whale singing in the deep ocean. A low, resonant vibration that shook the snow off the branches above us.
"Get back!" I shouted, jumping down from Leon’s hands.
The ground around the base of the tree didn’t slide open. It unraveled.
The massive roots, thick as subway cars, began to writhe. The frozen earth cracked and shifted as the wood twisted, pulling apart like woven fingers unclenching.
A hole opened up at the base of the trunk. It wasn’t dark.
A soft, bioluminescent teal light spilled out of the opening, accompanied by a waft of air that was warm, humid, and smelled of ozone and ancient soil.
"That..." Ren stepped back, his stoic mask cracking. "That makes no magical sense. The mana lines shouldn’t move wood like that without a chant."
"It’s not magic, Ren," I said, checking the load on my sword. "It’s a developer backdoor. A glitch in the matrix."
Pfft!
A shot struck the tree trunk inches from my head, sending splinters flying.
"They’re here!" Leon shouted, raising his shield.
I looked back. Through the trees, I saw the white armored figures of the Demon Cult trackers closing in. They had stopped trying to hide. They were rushing us. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞
"Into the hole!" I yelled. "Jump!"
"It looks bottomless!" Leon hesitated, looking at the glowing teal abyss.
"It’s a loading zone! Just jump!"
I grabbed the back of Leon’s armor and shoved.
"Whoa—!"
The heavy tank tipped forward and vanished into the glowing hole.
Ren didn’t need telling. He looked at the approaching snipers, calculated the odds, and dove into the hole with a graceful, silent flip.
I stood at the edge. A sniper raised his rifle not fifty meters away. I saw the red lens flare of his scope.
I gave him a two-finger salute.
"Catch me if you can."
I stepped backward into the light.
Gravity took hold. The cold wind of the surface vanished, replaced by a rushing warmth. The world of white snow and gray sky disappeared, swallowed by the roots.
We were falling.
Not into darkness, but into a world that had been forgotten by time.
[Location Changed: The Under-Roots]
[Depth: -500 Meters]
[Ambient Mana Density: 300% (Ancient)]
The fall wasn’t a straight drop. It was a slide.
We tumbled down a massive, spiraling chute formed by the smooth, polished interior of the giant roots. It was like sliding down the gullet of a titanic beast.
"Slow down!" Leon yelled, his voice echoing weirdly in the enclosed space. He dug his heels in, sparks flying as his metal boots scraped against the petrified wood.
The slide leveled out abruptly.
We shot out of the root tunnel and landed in a heap on a bed of thick, spongy moss.
I rolled to my feet, instinctively reaching for my weapon.
"Clear," Ren announced instantly. He was already standing, crouching in a defensive posture, his daggers drawn.
I stood up and looked around.
"Whoa..." Leon whispered, pushing himself up from the moss.
We weren’t in a cave. We were in a lung.
The space was colossal. The "ceiling" was hundreds of feet above us, a tangled mesh of gargantuan roots that glowed with pulsing veins of teal light. The "floor" was a network of smaller roots and moss, suspended over a dark, misty abyss that seemed to stretch down forever.
The air here was thick. Heavy.
I took a breath and immediately coughed. It felt like inhaling syrup.
"The air..." Leon wheezed, clutching his chest. "It’s... hard to breathe."
"It’s Mana," I said, my own head swimming with a sudden rush of vertigo. "Ancient Mana. It’s denser than the atmospheric mana on the surface. Your lungs aren’t used to processing this level of purity. Take shallow breaths. Adapt."
I looked at my hand. The veins were bulging slightly, pulsing in rhythm with the ambient light of the roots.
[System Alert: Environment Detected - The World Tree Root System]
[Buff Applied: Mana Overload]
[Effect: All Mana costs reduced by 50%. Magic Power increased by 200%.]
[Debuff Applied: Mana Intoxication]
[Effect: Probability of hallucination and organ failure increases over time.]
"My magic..." Leon held up his hand.
A flame ignited in his palm. It wasn’t the weak, flickering candle he had struggled to summon on the train. It was a roaring, white-gold inferno that illuminated the entire cavern.
"It’s back," Leon laughed, the sound bordering on manic. "Michael! It’s back!"
"Put it out!" I hissed, grabbing his wrist.
"Why? We can fight now! We can—"
"Look around you, Leon," I said, gesturing to the walls.
The teal light in the veins of the roots was reacting to his Holy Fire. It was shrinking away, darkening to an angry purple.
The cavern groaned. The ground beneath our feet shifted.
"The roots are alive," I whispered. "And they hate fire."
As if to answer me, a section of the wall peeled away. A massive, insectoid shape detached itself from the gloom. It looked like a tick the size of a minivan, its body made of bark and chitin, its mandibles dripping with glowing sap.
[Enemy Detected: Root Parasite]
[Level: 52]
It screeched—a sound like wood splitting.
"You woke the immune system," I said, drawing my sword. The blade hummed, reacting to the supercharged atmosphere.
"Ren, flank left. Leon, hammer time. Don’t burn the map!"
"What map?" Leon yelled, swinging the Breaker’s Hammer as the parasite charged.
"The floor!" I shouted. "We are walking on the map! Don’t destroy the floor!"
The parasite lunged.
The dungeon crawl had begun.
