The military didn't take long to reply to their call for help, and as soon as they were ready, dozens of planes flew above the army in the jungle's direction.

They began to release bombs as soon as they were above the vegetation, which exploded into balls of fire when they touched the ground. The fire spread rapidly, and in a few minutes, it expanded to a large area.

The planes spread over the jungle, releasing more incendiary bombs and making a large part of the jungle catch fire. At that moment, the vegetation began to shine before the light started to move toward the area on fire.

With the help of the green light, the vegetation began to regenerate, and the fire expansion slowed its pace. It seemed like nature had managed to control the situation for a few seconds and cut the loss, but the cojoined army began to advance toward the jungle.

The army carried the five rune totems through the fire and flames while finishing off any remaining vegetation that hadn't burned completely.

When the cultivators saw the green light enveloping the plants, one ran toward one of the trees and stabbed it with a knife with a rune on its blade.

The tree lost its shine in seconds, after which the cultivator recovered his knife and walked toward the totems. Stabbing the knife again on the totem, a few of its runes began to shine slightly with green light.

Little by little, the green light around that totem began to enter its runes, turning on more of them and increasing the suction power. After a few seconds, even the light on the nearby vegetation began to be sucked, forced to enter the totem.

That caused the vegetation to become even weaker than before, as it couldn't regenerate from the damages it suffered or reduce it by any means. And at the same time, it also made the cojoined army advance faster, as they didn't find any obstacle in their way that they had to spend time overcoming.

From time to time, they would find some moving tree that still managed to move and tried to attack them. Still, the army dealt with them quickly, using their numerical superiority and barriers to isolate them from any green energy they could receive.

While this happened, some angels kept flying above the army, watching their surroundings and telling the others if they found anything interesting. After a few hours of walking forward, the scouts told them there was a depression in the earth and that it looked like a crater.

Knowing that they were looking for the landing area of a meteorite, seeing something like that confirmed that they were advancing in the right direction.

Also, as they could feel their objectives inside the rift, they knew something they needed was in that direction, so they were sure that it had something to do with the meteorite if it wasn't the meteorite itself.

When they reached the crater area, they realized that the plants they found while going down seemed healthier and more robust than those outside, with most of them not having even slight damage from the flames.

As the army didn't feel confident walking between them, they began to cut and destroy all the vegetation they found along the way. To no one's surprise, as soon as they eliminated the first plants, the others around them began to move toward them.

As soon as they saw how an intense green light coated their rivals, the cultivators activated their totems again, only that they had used all this time.

The problem was that the same trick didn't have the same results as the last time they used it. Because of the large amounts of light, the totems didn't manage to reduce their intensity to even a half before two of them became full.

After discarding two of their weapons, the army did its best to open a path for them to the crater's bottom. After they had advanced about fifty meters, they managed to see something in the distance.

In the middle of the crater, an enormous tree stood above the rest of them. Its bark was light-grey, and its leaves were made of pure green energy, while some of its roots came out of the ground only to go inside again a few dozen meters away.

They didn't know what that thing was, but they were sure they had to deal with it in one way or another.