Cultivating Plants

Things happened too fast for the eyes. But Mother Nature still managed to barely react as the man's body was no longer stiffer than a steel beam and it lunged towards her. Subconsciously, Mother Nature changed her internal infusion to toughness as her body acknowledged the menace.

He-It prowled on all fours after having been dodged. His posture and behavior were somewhat animalistic, but most importantly, his eyes were tarnished.

"Xochipilli!" The master shouted in a mixture of reflexes and desire.

There was no recognition in those scarlet yet vegetable eyes.

The monster lunged at her again, but now that she was standing up, she had no problems dealing with it. As far as it was, the vegetable woman was able to grab it by simply extending her hand forward and then locking it down with a grip tighter than a planet's attraction.

"Please, fight it," she begged to it, to the him that still had to remain. "Do not do this to me Xochipilli, please, fight it. I know you can do it."

She was lying to herself and him, and she knew it. It was far too late.

He had already been reborn.

The monster struggled against her grip as it was being held like a puppy by the neck, but from all the types of struggle at its disposal, it chose the worst possible by trying to bite off her arm. Considering she was donning toughness, it was a more useful endeavor to try to kill death itself than scratching her skin.

Skin that was rapidly disappearing as her succulent texture was being replaced by bark. Her heart pulsated with frenzy, she almost felt alive, which made the situation even more desperate. Mother Nature didn't want to feel alive, and certainly not when her hope was about to be extinguished.

"Please," the druid continued to beg as she patted the writhing body's head, even when it tried also to chew that arm off. "Xochipilli, if you are not there… I do not know what to do. What I might do. Please, come back. I need…"

Nothingness.

Her hand's grip collapsed into a fist as she was no longer grabbing anything. Instead, only foggy shadows lingered around her arm.

By the time she processed what had happened, it was too late.

Xochipilli's body was no longer in the crater.

Mother Nature quickly sprang into action, donning haste in the process, but even a fraction of a millisecond wasted was far too much time in a situation like this. By the time she had reached the monster, it had reached Sadina proper.

The druid had completely forgotten about it between the powerful lighting system of the city and her unheavenly enhanced senses, but it was night.

Prime monster time.

It took only a handful of seconds to reach her disciple's body, but by then the streets had turned into a bloody mess.

"Xochipilli!" Mother Nature shouted with the tone of a mother scolding a child instead of the outcry of someone seeing such a gruesome scene of cobblestone dyed red. "Come on, listen to me! You can do it!"

The torn limbs, the spilled guts, the frantic cries of fear, the wrecked families, and the madness of the common man upon seeing what peak Nurture, Enlightenment, and Evolution could achieve. All of that mattered not. Her sole focus was on her disciple, anything else was secondary. Trivial.

Upon hearing the cries, the root-laden body twisted its head to face her, only to run away the moment later as a prey having spotted a predator.

The vegetable woman didn't give it the chance to flee as she lunged at him at supersonic speeds, the shockwave provoked by her voluminous self resulting in the complete shattering of nearby glass panels on the façade of every building. But she had caught it midair. As the monster struggled in her embrace, she was unable to control her direction in the air, making it so both went straight through a handful of buildings before their momentum finally died.

The sound of a couple of buildings collapsing could be heard in the background, but Mother Nature's attention only lingered on the being she had pinned to the ground.

"Fight it, Xochipilli! Fight it!" She no longer petitioned but commanded it. "Did I not teach you everything that you know of Evolution? So listen to me here and fight it!"

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The monster grumbled for a moment, its eyes gaining a fraction of its former luster.

"Come on you can do it!" Mother Nature's eyes shone with impossible, peerless, and gleeful hope.

"N-not…" Another guttural sound escaped the reborn creature's mouth.

"Yes?" She inquired with repulsively bright joy.

"…e-everything," Xochipilli added.

It took a hot second for Mother Nature to realize what he was talking about but when she did, her mouth broke into an unheavenly smile, one with the warmth of a mother that yet no such sacred figure could produce.

"Of course, of course!" The master admitted to her disciple. "You learned also by yourself. So you must show it to me. Do you hear me? Come back and show it to me!"

Her disciple smiled for a moment before his eyes turned dull again.

The next instant she was clutching shadows.

As Mother Nature instinctively turned her head around to look for the fugitive monster – even after these many centuries she still didn't know how the shadow magic of the assassins worked, though it displeased knowing that her disciple had learned it – as it had to have shadow stepped in its field of view, the druid was unceremoniously jerked to the side with the violence of an earthquake.

Whilst she didn't lose consciousness – as that was physically impossible – by the time she trekked back to her trail of thought, she found herself many streets away from where they had been at a few heartbeats before.

That's the problem of Nurture, it boosts one's strength, but the weight remains the same. Mother Nature coldly meditated as many buildings toppled to the ground from the human-sized projectile that had been shot through them. If they had been the low brick homes like the ones before in the environs of Sadina nothing would have happened, but the constant body throwing had led them to the heart of the modern city where all the needle-like buildings were at.

In a matter of seconds, all hell broke loose as a massive chain reaction started.

It took only a single skyscraper to bring everything to an end.

Impossibly tall were the buildings of the modern era, but also fragile to any sort of damage that wasn't the gravitational attraction of the planet. And as a splintered needle collapsed on top of another, a massive defect never noticed before was beheld by everyone.

Perhaps the buildings weren't situated close enough to create a catastrophic domino effect, but that was only true if they were normal buildings.

As that fateful skyscraper collapsed against another, it wasn't the force of the impact that made it collapse, but an opening in the infrastructure.

Thousands upon thousands of tons of Cottonpull were thrown into the sky, suddenly increasing the weight of the buildings, ripping more and more antigravitational cotton from the building's skeleton as the weight increased. All in a positive feedback cycle.

Or as the people in those buildings and the streets would say, a calamitous negative cycle.

Mother Nature's senses were enhanced enough to sense every single death, every crunch of a skull, every heart abruptly stopped, every flame of life suddenly extinguished, and yet…

Nothing.

Her heart was filled with absolute nothingness as the streets were filled with the dust of concrete, and the rivers of spilled blood. For some reason, her body felt rather heavy even though the crash hadn't even been registered by any of her pain receptors. Her reaction was sluggish, and she took a few seconds to stand up even though she was in perfect condition. Considering how Evolution and Nurture worked, every single day that went by, she was in more and more perfect condition, yet she could only slowly walk forward as if the weight of the world was placed on top of her.

Even walking was hard for her when she should have been able to traverse this whole city in a second.

Why? Mother Nature thought to herself as she silently trod the collapsed streets. There were many cries of panic, fear, and pain as people ran away from their lives, yet her brain didn't process a single one of those. Why am I moving this slowly? That was the only thought on her mind at that moment.

Then a figure.

Whilst everyone was running away from the collapsing buildings and the fires that had sprouted from the many incidents, amongst the dust a figure encased in shadows stood before her. For a moment she thought it might have been Xochipilli as he – or rather, it – had just performed such magics, but her hopes were swiftly disproven as the silhouette was too thin and small.

And it boasted a cane.

"Tell me," the figure spoke with a coarse and masculine voice. "Do you know who I am?"

The sheer confidence in the man's voice even when everything had gone to the lower hells unsettled Mother Nature. No sane person would have been talking to her in this situation.

"I do not," she responded calmly, though her thoughts were on Xochipilli. She had to find it before it was too late.

"I see, I see," the assassin sighed. "I am the Grandmaster Assassin Zayn Gerges. And I guess you don't know it either, but you killed a handful of my men more than a decade ago."

The druid frowned in confusion at those words, but she quickly threw them away as this was not the moment to lose time. She switched to the acuity internal infusion and started looking for her disciple's body.

"I knew that wasn't worthy of your attention and time," the 'Grandmaster' continued talking but Mother Nature remained stalwart in her quest. "I wonder what will happen if I mention that you sent my niece Nesrine insane?"

Those words yanked her concentration like a camel's leash, and she was pulled into the conversation.

"What are you talking about?" Her frown transformed into a scowl.

"A reaction, but one of ignorance, eh? It was obvious you didn't care – you wouldn't care – after all the destruction you have caused."

"Stop that rambling, assassin. What were you saying about Nesrine? I would never…"

"Tch, tch, tch," the Grandmaster interjected as he clicked his tongue and tapped on the pavement with his cane. "I care not for excuses. I have only come here to say one thing, Aloe Ayad. You are too dangerous to be left alive. This is where you die."

The druid almost laughed at the old man's word – a true, heartily chuckle – but before she could do that, the weight of the world came down on her. And unlike before as she saw the city she had been born and raised in collapse into rubble, this one was tangible.