He stood atop fallen trees and ruined rocks, splintered wood and shattered boulders, a great shape amongst a mountain of rubble.

The Vigolith lumbered forward, each step causing earthquakes that sent tremors running through the ground and pieces of debris to jump for a single second. His weight was so great that the soft soil beneath him, even when infected by the great mycelium of a King Fungi, dented and bent from the sheer size of the entity walking atop it.

And the King Fungi had noticed his presence for a while now, how could it not? When the Vigolith practically rushed across its domain and started tearing things apart, from mushroom parties of great size getting stepped on and flattened into disgusting pancakes made up of broken wood, spore caps, and crushed lichen to the great beasts that had spawned from its body.

Nothing was safe under the constant onslaught of the stone giant, and not even the large numbers of Great Rotters could slow it down, let alone stopping it. Attempts in trying to hinder its movements with dangerous spores were for naught because there was nothing organic within the being for the spores to dig into, and roots of Lichen Crawlers the size of small villages could do nothing but stop it for a split second before those too got torn from the Vigolith doing as simple as taking a step.

By all means, the great being that had woken up and chosen to rampage within this forest was unstoppable.

Great legs made of hundreds of boulders crushed together took slow, careful steps towards an unknown destination, taking the body up above, which resembles that of a regular man's, along with it. It was all artificial, not real- authentic. Because the Vigolith's actual body isn't this great pile of stones but rather, the core sitting on its chest magnetically locking everything down.

The core manipulated the rocks that it created around itself as a shell, using them to lug itself around the area. Gravel grinded against each other and caused dirt to fall to the ground, boulders of great sizes were crushed against others of the same width, and dirt got compacted between all of that to create some semblance of coherency within the Vigolith's unnatural body.

He moved like clockwork and with purpose.

Where?

From where the core was- above a hundred feet in the air, - it could see in the distance a great forest consisting of nothing but towering mushrooms that almost rivaled him in height, as soft as those were, the entity knew that they could harden once pumped with water. Underneath them was a floor, and although almost invisible to it, the Vigolith could spot lichen so thick that it created a carpet above the dirt.

It was pulsing as well; a sign of great panic for the entity controlling all of the fungal monstrosities hiding in this part of the forest.

The King Fungi, the Vigolith noticed, has tried and failed to slow him down throughout the course of his journey, from snaring his legs with wood-like vines of lichen to attempting to make him fall and stumble by creating a massive blockade of hardened mushrooms on the trajectory of his footsteps, the Kung Fungi tried them all.

He, of course, couldn't be bothered by such feeble attempts, as he had not only gone against hundreds of King Fungi throughout his hundreds of years of living, making him used to their pathetic tricks by now, but also that as a Cliff, something as trivial as a wall of mushrooms could just be simply stepped over.

And the entity doing all of this wasn't such a big deal either, as from experience, he knew that King Fungi were nothing more than upstarts who truly did not know what they were doing. The oldest of them could likely strike him hard and even leave lasting damage but a King Fungi that's only two centuries old?

“Heh,” the Vigolith's scoff of condescension echoed through the air in a low rumble, pathetic as it was, the King Fungi reacted and expended a great deal of its energy pumping nutrients to a mushroom tree that didn't even slow the Vigolith down.

A single swipe of its arm was all it took to fell the hundred high mushroom.

He continued his journey, steps slow and careful- unless he was met with resistance from the fungal entities of the King Fungi then he simply just crushed them beneath his heel before moving on like nothing happened. Killing such feeble creatures wasn't that hard, and it didn't even require him to focus on doing it.

The Vigolith soon neared the great mushroom forest that made up the King Fungi's body.

From this distance, he could clearly see the lichen floor start to pulse in rainbow colored lights, as though the mycelium beneath them was panicking. All around, mushroom trees started to harden and compress, their sizes shrinking as the King Fungi processed them into something it could use to carry their weight.

He wasted no time and didn't wait for the fungal entity to continue its shift into mobility. The Vigolith took one brave step forward and pulled back its arm, it then let go of the force holding that arm aloft and let gravity take hold- stones and boulders hundreds of thousands of kilograms in weight swung through the air, causing a whistling sound to echo out.

His fist impacted the mushroom tree in front of him, felling it and causing it to hit another mushroom tree ways off to the side, then he pulled his arm back and did it again, all the while taking a step forward in a start of a light run.

The Vigolith rampaged across the fungal forest, falling great trees that stood taller than him- though were also shrinking by the minute, - and removing their connection to the King Fungi below, it wouldn't stop the aforementioned fungal entity from harnessing them and putting them into itself when it becomes fully mobile but stopping them from turning into armor-like mushrooms for the King Fungi would do the Vigolith favors in the upcoming fight.

He continued to smash through tree after tree, tearing them apart like they were nothing until most of them had fallen.

Then he moved on to stomping the lichen above the dirt and further damaging the King Fungi's method of assimilation, and as he ruined what might as well be the creature's muscles, the fungal entity finally decided it had had enough preparation and called forth everything that encompasses its being.

The dirt underneath the Vigolith's feet tried to shift from the movement of mycelium but he stopped it in its tracks and watched as everything around him ebbed into something far away, gathering at what seems to be an epicenter.

On it, the King Fungi's form started to show, starting off as a ball of lichen and dirt not dissimilar from the cotton of fungi and leaves found within colonies of leaf cutter ants into a misshapen mass made up of mushroom trees, fungal creatures, and great swaths of rotting corpses.

A neck sprouted from the spider-like shape of the King Fungi, and similarly to the way its 8 legs were placed- or rather, misplaced across its body, the head grew atop the mound as though the entity designing itself had no care about biological consistency or even anything related to proper form.

It just was, and the King Fungi was more than satisfied to be that way.

Compared to his coherent and clearly humanoid form, the King Fungi was like that of a spider with the neck of a snake and the head of a wolf. It snarled, baring teeth created from rocks and minerals. It glared with pulsing eyes made of Lichen.

The King Fungi moved forward and the Vigolith watched as its incoherent shape showed all its possible flaws; from the legs of mismatched sizes having problems in dealing with weight by their lonesome, making the monstrosity stumble when it lifted the long limb, to the odd body that was so inconsistent in its make, it could barely be called a shape.

Really, it was nothing short of a miracle that the King Fungi managed to get out of the crater it had created after gathering large swarms of dirt- and yet it somehow did.

The Vigolith collapsed the pillar of earth he was standing on and raised both his hands above his head as he fell, his fingers intertwined and locked onto each other into a semblance of a stance, when he deemed himself to be near enough, he swung his limbs downward into a hammer-blow and struck the fungal entity in its misshapen head, snapping its neck and splitting everything that his fist came into contact with.

As expected of something much like himself, the King Fungi didn't react to the damage and simply reformed its torn head- though this time, in a fake imitation of the great Hydra, another head grew alongside the one he had just split.

The King Fungi roared and the Vigolith responded by digging his fingers into its body and slamming it on the ground, he ignored the heads and arms and even extra body parts gnawing and stabbing at him as he started pummeling the mushroom armor covering the King Fungi’s circular body.

Mushrooms splintered and broke as his fist collided against their compressed flesh, tearing at them bit by bit until the lichen infected soil underneath revealed itself- large tentacles made of brambled lichen layered with toughened fungi wrapped around his arms but the Vigolith easily tore them apart by moving his hands, which then proceeded to lower into the soil and he started digging into the body of the struggling King Fungi.

Sensing its impending doom, the fungal entity fought back with everything it could but it was all for naught because soon, the Vigolith held a white heart in its hands, the container for the King Fungi's soul in the same way he had a core.

The Vigolith tensed his muscles and crushed the pulsing heart into a wet pulp and it was then that the King Fungi stopped struggling. Or moving for that matter.

…

He moved ahead of the Hero and her team to scout out the forest for any possible threat, he knew this area like the back of his hand and was well aware that there is a small family of Toiler Gorillas a hundred trees to their right as well as three warring Spider Monkey nest two hundred trees to their left.

All of those were valid threats to the savior of the world and so, he would make sure that they don't go near such dangerous places.

At the moment, the area they were heading towards was mostly safe, and the Dire Bear four times the size of a regular man got quickly dispatched by him- right now there was no thrill of the hunt and all he was is a weapon meant to kill as efficiently as possible, and so, he didn't waste his time with fighting such a great beast without his weapons and simply stabbed it in the head with his spear.

The beast fell and dyed the ground red.

He eyed the corpse of such a great quarry and then the bright arms responsible for killing it; in any other case, his mark of purple striped in white would have been something of a great source of pride for him but right now, as the Dire Bear took its last breath from an unfair fight, all he saw was a reason for exile.

He pulled his spear out of the beast's skull and with swift movements, tied the corpse to the branches and hefted it up to the canopies to be hidden with a pull.

Then he climbed back up to the trees above and silently watched over the Hero and her party. They were completely unaware of the chaotic state of the forest around them where intelligent creatures of all kinds fulfilled their purpose in keeping the saviour of the world safe.

And so, with their efforts, the three girls headed on to safety, where they were greeted by an entourage of Griffons and Pegasi ridden by powerful knights and capable Pledge Bearers. When they were informed of the Vigolith “rampaging” deeper into the forest, the three girls looked at each other in confusion.

The Hero said something in response afterward, “what? We didn't see something like that,”

The Jungle Warrior smiled underneath his mask- good, as the heroine wasn't meant to witness such a thing to begin with.