The search of the mummy’s room took a while. There were bones mixed in with the vines, but fortunately they seemed to be mostly animal bones. Sophia didn’t look closely; she didn’t want to know if any of them were human. All she could say was that she didn’t see any human skulls.
In the end, all they found was that there was exactly one vine that seemed intact. It was slightly magical, but seemed dead even though it was intact. Sophia couldn’t tell what it did; it might be some sort of good rope, but it could just as easily be a material that, when properly processed, would make wonderful fluffy towels that could always absorb a little more water. Given the source, Sophia was willing to guess that the second option was more likely.
Despite the fact that it seemed dead, Sophia was quite thorough in removing all possible roots.She almost wanted to burn it, but she hated the idea of giving up the treasure she’d fought for, even if it wasn’t the primary reason she was there.
With that in mind, she still wasn’t willing to hurry on her precautions; it might not be a corpsevine, since they weren’t overtly magical unless they were casting a spell, but they’d just fought one that could control vines. Sophia tucked the magical vine inside the glass energy drink bottle she’d just emptied and made certain the stopper was not going to come off easily. That was the best she could do, and it ought to be quite good. She didn’t think they could reach into the dimensional space of her pack, but she wasn’t going to risk it.
The way forward was on the other side of the vine mummy’s room. It was obvious, and led to a twenty-foot-long corridor which just as obviously didn’t lead to the area to the left or right of where they entered. The only exits were where they entered and a door at the far end. Despite as thorough a search as they could reasonably manage of both the vine mummy’s room and the corridor, there was no entrance. Either there wasn’t one at all or it was through a passage elsewhere.
Even Amy couldn’t answer that question. She didn’t know the original layout of the West Conservatory and she also didn’t know how the Leveled Challenge might have changed it. She was confident that it had changed; it didn’t make sense for the six entrances to not come together somewhere in the middle in a real building. The fact that which entrance they used mattered meant that the Leveled Challenge had changed things.
Sophia was in no hurry. The fight had pushed her back below half of her maximum mana available. She didn’t want to stop and meditate again, but she was happy to take things a bit slow.
Dav opened the far door with Sophia and Amy well back from the entrance. He jumped back in case of another forest of vines, but that wasn’t what waited on the other side of the door.
Instead, there was a short landing that led into fairly wide set of stairs that led up to another landing, where an archway led off to the right. Light filtered down from above through a clouded glass opening.
Halfway up the stairs was a woman, or more likely the corpse of a woman supported by a corpsevine. She wore some sort of green robe, dark brown gardening gloves, and a green leaf-like mask that covered her eyes and nose. Under the circumstances, Sophia had to wonder if that was actually leaves, rather than a mask.
Her shoulders and head supported swaths of plants and she held another plant in her hands. Unlike all of the other corpsevines Sophia had seen, these plants did not appear to be primarily vines; in fact, they looked more like ornamental plants and flowers. There were also no visible roots anywhere.
That was not reassuring, somehow.
Plant Summoner [https://i.imgur.com/sx0hgc9.jpeg]
The woman’s expression didn’t change as she lifted the plant in her hands and gestured as if she was throwing the plant to the ground. It didn’t leave her hands, but a ball of green mana did. When the mana impacted the floor, it shimmered and shifted into an eyeless monster covered in vines, leaves, and thorns that grinned hungrily at the group.
Summoned [https://i.imgur.com/mxR2Lhf.png]
“Kill the summoner!” Amy shouted as an arrow left her bow. It zipped towards the plant-infested mage, but the summoned monster’s upper leaves seemed to stretch upwards to intercept the projectile. It slammed into the leaf, penetrated, and ripped the leaf in two, but the arrow’s power was spent before it hit the woman. It thudded weakly into her robes then fell to the stone floor.
Sophia didn’t need the instructions, but she appreciated them. They told her what Amy was going to be doing next. Sophia needed to do the same thing, but she needed to act without the plant monster getting in the way and she could barely see past it. The limited space of the stairs was a problem, since the plant monster nearly filled them.
She needed to get past the summon.
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Or did she? It was a summon. That wasn’t easy to counter, but most summons were magic pulled from the Origin; regardless of what Affinity they used. That meant she could break the maintained spell that gave the summon its shape and That was true at home, and while the Guide was very different from the Voice, magic itself seemed the same. It wouldn’t be easy, but it might well be faster than trying to kill it or get around it.
“I don’t think I can hit the summoner, but I can take out the summon,” Sophia called out as she pushed her MageSight as far as she could. She needed to see the structure of the spell that maintained it and figure out what the best way to remove it was. A simple slash with a Dispelling Imbued Blade would work, but only if that hit the right spot.
Unlike Amy and Sophia, Dav didn’t call out his intentions. Instead, he clearly decided to be sneaky. He ostentatiously planted himself in the middle of the doorway, ready to block the summoned creature the same way it blocked access to its summoner. At the same time, a Thorn Emitter appeared on the stairs, behind the summoner. This time, it looked like a leafless thorny bush with blue and red spiked puffballs at the end of each branch.
Hidden Thorns [https://i.imgur.com/5WlpUN6.png]
Sophia grinned. That ought to catch the summoner off guard, then keep her occupied for a bit. If they were really lucky, it would hit something vital, but Sophia didn’t expect that. The Thorn Emitter could throw a lot of spikes, but they were all small and unlikely to actually harm a corpsevine too much.
The summoned plant-creature stomped down the last couple of stairs and backhanded Dav.
Dav tried to block the blow. The result surprised Sophia: he actually stopped the attack with his sword. Even though the blade sunk more than halfway into the summoned creature’s hand, He didn’t skid backwards at all. Instead, he just grunted, twisted his sword, and pulled back into a guarded posture. He lost a single step, that was all.
The summoner lifted the plant again. It flashed with mana for a moment, then roots sprang from the floor around Dav and Sophia. Amy, who was even farther back, seemed to escape the summoner’s attention.
Sophia saw the area was limited, so she tried to dive out of the way of the roots, away from the summoner. She nearly succeeded; only her right boot was struck by one of the flailing roots. It started to close around her foot, and she quickly shifted her attention from the summoned creature to her aura. She flared it and pushed on the root the same way she’d move her Imbued Blades.
It worked. Her aborted dive turned into a handspring before she smacked her side roughly into one of the corridor’s walls, a small distance from the roots. She could credit her Aura Armor for that; this was only the second time she’d successfully used it consciously. It was normally a very small passive deflection, but it allowed her to do something slightly bigger if she paid attention. She was now farther than the roots could reach, but that didn’t make Dav safe.
Sophia snapped her attention forward. She needed to banish the summoned monster, but that meant she had to have a free moment to concentrate on it to analyze the spell traces and see where to cut. She couldn’t help but glance at Dav to make sure he’d also avoided the roots, but she was certain that even if he hadn’t, he could free himself.
They were wrapped around his legs, holding him in place when he blocked and shifting his position as he moved to attack the summoned plant monster.
Sophia blinked at that. That wasn’t at all what she expected; it almost looked like the roots were helping him rather than trying to restrain him. At least that meant she didn’t have to try to free him immediately.
A pair of arrows zipped over the plant monster’s shoulders. It managed to block one, but the second one slipped through the space where the very first arrow shredded a leaf when it was blocked and caught the summoner in the plants that extended like a hat above her head.
Her head rocked backwards, then she turned without any change in expression towards the Thorn Emitter behind her. Did she think that was where the arrow came from?
Whatever the summoner thought, Sophia had her moment. She could study the mana flows in the summoned plant monster and she hurried to do so. The monster seemed to have a braid of spell energy more or less where the spine would be on a real monster like that, which meant that whatever created the monster design based it on actual anatomy, sort of, and damaging or destroying that would probably make the creature dissipate. That wasn’t what Sophia was looking for; hurting that would be just as hard as killing it normally.
What she was looking for was the stream of energy that ran from the back of the monster’s neck to the plant in the summoner’s hands, straight through the summoner when she was in the way, as she was at the moment. That had to be what she was looking for. Sophia pushed Disruptive Magic into the ImImbuement on her Animated Blade and stabbed it into the line she could see.
Three things happened almost at once.
First, her now nonmagical knife dropped onto the stairs, then bounced down them to the lower landing with the ringing sound of metal striking stone.
Second, the summoned monster poofed into a cloud of mana that swirled in place for a long moment, then seemed to almost condense as it fell into Dav. Sophia could see it sink into his body, but the only noticeable effect was on the roots that still wrapped around his legs as they grew thorns that matched the monster’s claws. They all hooked outwards, away from Dav’s armor.
Third, another arrow sped through the mana cloud and thudded into the head of the summoner. She spun around, still expressionless, and raised the plant above her head once more. This time, she seemed to have realized where the arrows came from, because a large thorn formed in the air in front of her focus before it sped towards Amy. Sophia couldn’t spare the time to check on her, but a grunt told Sophia that Amy didn’t escape unscathed.
Sophia quickly pulled another knife from her belt and Imbued it. She’d removed the monster blocking the way to the summoner, but the fight wasn’t over and she didn’t want to be weaponless.