Taika lowered his head and blinked his eyes repeatedly. Sophia tried not to laugh; he looked almost exactly like someone who was tired after a large spell. He shook himself, then held his arms up, clearly asking to be picked up.
Sophis picked Taika up and cradled him on an arm. “So you have to sustain the illusion, or will it last on its own?”
Taika yawned. “It’ll last for a bit, but it won’t reflect its surroundings without my attention. Out here, that’s mostly watching shadows and when you brush against something.” Taika yawned again. “I have to keep watching. Can you put me in Dav’s pack?”
Sophia shook her head at the sleepy chinchilla and set him inside the pack. “Can you stay awake?”
A soft pop, like air being let out of a container, pulled Sophia’s attention to Amy. She held one of the energy drinks she’d brought to breakfast and had clearly just removed the stopper. “Anyone have a small bowl or something for Taika to drink from? This is exactly what these alchemicals are for.”
Sophia blinked, then quickly sorted through the assorted junk in her pack that she hadn’t gotten around to tossing yet. It took her a bit to find her tableware, but she did have bowls as well as plates and utensils. She pulled out a small square Corelle bowl.
It was her favorite pattern from a few years back, a rounded square bowl with a pattern that looked like random streaks of color that ran around the inside of the bowl parallel to the rim in the white background. If she didn’t know it was commercially produced and a consistent pattern, she’d probably have thought it was a child’s pattern instead. It also seemed to be one of the few bowls she actually had in her bag.
Bowl [https://i.imgur.com/bpVgfnL.jpeg]
Sophia set the bowl on the ground, then set Taika next to it while Amy filled the bowl about half an inch deep with the blue liquid, less than a quarter of the bottle. A faint green glow shone from the middle of the bowl. Sophia frowned; Taika was quite a bit less than a quarter her size. “Is that much safe?”
Amy shrugged. “You always have to take enough for it to glow or it just doesn’t do anything. This isn’t enough to notice for me, so I figure it’s the place to start. My guess is that he’ll need this much again to really wake up, but he’s small. I could be wrong.”
Taika glanced between the two women , then down at the bowl. The liquid vanished without further movement on Taika’s part. “Backpack. Now, please.”
Sophia picked up the bowl and tried to shake out any remaining drops of liquid. As far as she could tell, there weren’t any. “What did you do with the liquid? This isn’t an illusion.”
At least, she was pretty sure it wasn’t an illusion. Taika would have to be very good to hide the liquid and all secondary signs of it. She couldn’t come up with any reason he’d even try. She brushed the bottom of the bowl off on her pants; they looked like they were covered in plants but they felt like pants instead of plants. She ran a finger along the inside of the bowl. It felt glass-smooth and dry, so she relegated it back to its spot in her dimensional backpack.
“It was almost an illusion, color and magic. So I absorbed it,” Taika answered in a matter of fact tone of voice.
The explanation didn’t really explain anything to Sophia, but she probably shouldn’t have expected it to make sense. Taika had clearly been altered by his time in the Origin, and even if he seemed more coherent than Sophia would have expected, the Origin was strange enough that his answer could have been the literal truth. Perhaps he wasn’t an illusionist but was instead a creature with control of magical color?
Sophia shrugged internally. It didn’t really matter; for practical purposes, a creature with control of magical color was still an illusionist and Taika still seemed trustworthy.
After Sophia loaded Taika back into Dav’s backpack, they continued forward for only a bit over a minute before Amy held up a hand and gestured for them all to stop. She then had them quietly creep forward until they could see what she was looking at.
Only a few feet away, there was an obvious corpsevine. It was the most advanced corpsevine Sophia had ever seen, with a human skull covered in a series of lines of roots connected to a body made entirely of roots, vines, and leaves. At least, Sophia thought that was what made up the monster’s “muscles;” she couldn’t think of anything else plantlike that would somehow manage to closely resemble muscle mass.
If it were fleshy, Sophia would have considered it horrifying, with exposed bones that blended into flesh at the arms, legs, and abdomen. Since it was plantlike, it seemed wrong but somehow less horrifying. The one thing she could say about it from a distance was that it was almost certainly a brute. It might be more powerful than the bear, since that was “only” a plant-zombie, but at least it was smaller.
Zombie Corpsevine [https://i.imgur.com/NkTKrTA.jpeg]
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Should we fight it or try to slip by it?” Dav whispered, just loud enough to be heard, probably not loud enough for the sound to carry to the corpsevine. It probably couldn’t hear anyway.
“We should be able to take it by surprise,” Amy offered. “That would help.”
“Do we need to fight it to beat the Challenge?” Sophia asked Amy. “If we do, we should definitely sneak up on it now, before it knows we’re here.”
Amy frowned. “Probably not? Well, probably not if we’re trying to resolve the Challenge. If we just want to beat the Challenge, we might need to kill it.”
“I don’t want it behind us,” Dav offered. “At least, not if we can kill it quietly. What if whatever’s inside the Conservatory can call for help? If we leave it out here, we might have to fight it along with others.”
That was a good point. However much Sophia wanted to take advantage of Taika’s illusion to skip what promised to be an annoying fight, she couldn’t completely discount Dav’s guess. At the same time, she wasn’t sure it was correct.
“Everyone we talked to killed everything they saw. Only about half of them saw anything before they reached the building and none of them ever had anything chase them inside,” Sophia summarized. “Did they just miss it?”
“Probably,” Amy concurred. “So it probably won’t come after us once we’re inside. We never saw corpsevines communicating, just chasing what they could sense. I think we can skip this one. I’m just not sure we should.”
“If both of you think we should kill it, I’m game,” Sophia stated. “Same plan as usual, or should we try something different?”
“Taika, can you tell where the nexus is on the corpsevine?” Dav took his backpack off and turned it so that the opening in his backpack had a clear line of sight to the monster.
Taika’s answer was disappointing. “I can see three, one in the head, one just under the false ribcage, and one in the belly area. It’s strange; they aren’t evenly distributed. I can see connections from the head along the arms and from the belly down the legs, but the one in the middle doesn’t go anywhere. It barely even seems to talk to the other two.”
Sophia frowned at that. Did that mean it was really three corpsevines? “The last time you saw two, there was one central spot and a bunch of wrapped vines that looked like a central spot. I don’t see a lot of wrapped vines here, but we’ve never seen a corpsevine with more than one node.”
“We’ll know after we kill it,” was Amy’s practical answer. “Arrows might work on the lowest one, but I don’t want to count on it, so I’ll shift. Dav, you need to get its attention so that it’s not protecting its vitals from me. Can you get the one near the ribcage, or do you need to go after the head?”
“The head is more exposed,” Dav answered. “Also, if it’s controlling the arms, dealing with that one will help with everything else. Sophia can go after the head as well, then we’ll both switch to the chest while you deal with the lower one.”
“One moment,” Sophia said with a slight frown. She might be able to use a spell to get to the nexus, but it turned out that Spell Hardening wasn’t quite as useful as she’d hoped. It applied to every spell she cast, making them sturdier, but the increase was minor. It did help with penetration, but bone was still too much for her spells. It might help more if she increased its level, but that would require also increasing the level of the spells it applied to and she’d probably do that first anyway.
More importantly, there was something tickling her mind about what Dav said. If it’s controlling the arms … did that mean the lowest one was controlling the legs? That seemed to make complete sense, but in that case what was the one in the middle doing?
Wait. Corpsevines could use magic. If there wasn’t a physical reason, maybe there was a magical one; that was what she’d been trying to think of. How could she have missed it?
Sophia knew she needed to practice more with her MageSight; it should always be active, not something she had to remember to use. It would still be better when she really triggered it, but if it was active at a low level, she’d see something and that would remind her to use the Ability properly. She’d get there, as long as she kept practicing, but it was annoyingly slow.
With MageSight active, the entire area glowed slightly with magic. Sophia guessed that was probably the Leveled Challenge; dungeons had a background glow, too, and this was pretty similar. The corpsevine monster was far stronger than the background, however, and that told her the first thing she needed to know: she was wrong about it just being a brute. “It’s a spellcaster, or it has a spell active at least.”
The corpsevine didn’t move while Sophia inspected it, even after she moved a little closer to get a good view of it. There was a chance she was within its vision, but it didn’t seem to notice it. She’d give credit to Taika for that; even if all his illusion meant was that they could get closer before the monster realized they were there because they decided not to sneak past it, that was useful.
The magic seemed to cover the torso and head but didn’t extend as far as the limbs past the shoulder and hip joints. It was sort of a cloud, which hid the structure that should have been there, the structure that would help her figure out what the spell was.
She hated to admit that her father was right, but she really, really needed more practice with seeing magic. Yes, it was easier when it was within her aura and she could both see and feel it that way. She couldn’t afford to try that here; the corpsevine might detect it, and she didn’t want it to suddenly attack while she was concentrating on its magic. She needed to be able to figure out what spells were outside her aura.
It took Sophia minutes of uncomfortable staring at the minor gradations of light to see the lines that wrapped around the edge of the cloud. The mana moved in a pattern, a set of rotating ovals and ellipses that could only be one thing. She couldn’t see the inside of the spell to make out the spellform, but she had a good guess what the spell it was maintaining was.
It was a spell she didn’t expect to see on any monster she fought, but maybe the Leveled Challenge thought it was fair because corpsevines could normally be killed just by disabling their nexuses, without going through the Guide’s shield. “It has a shielding spell of some sort. I can’t tell if it blocks physical attacks or just magic, but it’s there.”