Taika broke the uncomfortable silence that followed Amy’s verbal retreat when he climbed into Amy’s lap. “They’re not actually angry with you, you know.” His voice was more than loud enough for both Amy and Dav to hear as they searched the area for possible treasure.
Sophia paused her search and sighed. Of course the “comfort animal” was an empath. That made sense; it would tell him who needed to be comforted. He probably saw emotions as colors or something. It was also annoying; you couldn’t hide anything from an empath. Sure, they might not know the details, but they knew you were hiding something.
Maybe she was overreacting. It wasn’t like Taika was her mother, and this was a good time to show empathy. Sophia would have preferred to just let it be forgotten, but that was the thing about empaths: Taika clearly knew Amy wasn’t about to forget it.
“He’s right,” Sophia admitted. “I overreacted. I could see someone trying that, but I don’t think you would.”
“It’s not something to make light of,” Dav added quietly. “I’ve seen something all too similar, and with the attitude towards the Warped that we were warned about, it’s all too believable. At the same time, I’m not sure I want to completely abandon the idea. If there’s some way to share my immunity without the side effects of your alchemical purge, maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know Halven well enough to talk to him about it. So let’s move on. All right?”
Amy gave a weak smile but seemed a little more relaxed than she had a minute earlier.
The search of the stairs didn’t reveal a reward. Sophia wasn’t too surprised by that; while they made the summoner run, they didn’t kill her. They’d found something at the site of each previous battle in the Leveled Challenge, but each previous battle ended in the destruction of all enemies.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t follow immediately,” Sophia muttered, then raised her voice a bit. “But at least I have most of my mana back. How are you two?”
“Eh,” Dav answered quickly. “I’m fine physically. Still down a few Shield, but we should move on anyway.”
“I’m fine as well.” Amy still seemed a bit quiet, but she met Sophia’s gaze firmly. “The alchemical is unpleasant but it works well. Dav and Taika have handled the rest of the healing; I can breathe deeply again.”
Amy shifted Taika into her arms then climbed to her feet. “I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that we couldn’t follow immediately. If the Gardener-Mage was ready for us, waiting didn’t cost us much.”
“What’s done is done.” Dav offered his backpack to Amy and waited while she helped Taika into it, then he headed up the stairs. “Let’s try to kill her this time.”
Sophia chuckled and grinned. “Yeah.”
The archway at the top of the stairs led into a short corridor whose door was wide open. Beyond the door, Sophia could see plants and sunlight. In the distance, Sophia was fairly certain she saw glass panels set into the walls and ceiling as well; somehow, they’d gone from the base of the building to the top level by climbing only a short flight of stairs.
At first, it seemed peaceful, but Sophia didn’t trust it. She just wasn’t sure exactly what to do about it. Most of the plants weren’t vines like in the vine-mummy’s room, but that didn’t mean the plants couldn’t be animated.
Her lack of trust was proven correct the moment Dav crossed the threshold into the greenhouse area. A new type of plant monster rose from its concealed position on the floor and roared at them. Sophia was profoundly grateful that it did so, because its camouflage was really quite good; while its limbs were only covered in green vines and leaves, its head and crest almost seemed to be made of a single broad-leafed plant. Sophia wasn’t certain she’d have seen it if it hadn’t revealed itself.
The monster made the greenhouse look small, but that was only because of the size of the monster itself. It was at least twenty feet tall and more than ten feet wide. Even its teeth were gigantic; the largest was probably a foot long. Sophia had seen large monsters before, but this one was still among the largest she’d ever considered fighting.
Huge Monster [https://i.imgur.com/GOUQr9d.jpeg]
Sophia immediately swapped to her ManaSight and looked for the same things as the previous summon. If they were there, she could quickly break the summons and get on with the hunt for the summoner.
It wasn’t there. There was surprisingly little mana tied into the plant monster; it was far closer to what a corpsevine looked like than what the summoned monster looked like. The blood drained out of Sophia’s face as she realized that this meant that this monster either wasn’t what the Gardener-mage had prepared or it was something she’d prepared using time rather than a single investment of mana. There had to be something else in the room.
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The monster didn’t wait for Sophia to search. Instead, it lunged forward and tried to bite Dav. Its teeth snapped fruitlessly several inches from Dav’s face as he took one step backwards and made a short slice forwards, cutting a few vines but staying carefully balanced and guarded. He gave ground again on the next attack, then again on the one afterwards. Each time, Dav made the monster miss and cut a vine here and a root there without making any large moves.
One more step back and it became very obvious what Dav had done: he’d lured the monster into the hallway. It was tall and wide, but the monster was gigantic. It had to crouch in the fifteen-foot-tall corridor and every time it moved, it hit one wall or the other. It didn’t have room to move, but Dav did. Most of the monster’s strikes and bites somehow ended up in a wall while Dav slowly cut it to pieces. It was all the more impressive because the monster was easily three times Dav’s height and far more massive; it ought to have been able to use that to its advantage, but somehow it didn’t.
It was the best display Sophia had ever seen from Dav. It clearly showcased the fact that he was trained to fight monsters, not people; he used his small size to his advantage and had no difficulty with the odd angles created by the massive difference. He wasn’t even giving ground anymore; somehow, he’d give a few steps then he’d somehow get the monster to seemingly willingly retreat those same few steps. Sophia watched for over a minute before Amy tugged her backwards.
“Where’s the summoner?” Amy hissed in Sophia’s ear. “I can’t see into the greenhouse.”
“I can’t either,” Sophia whispered back. “And I don’t think I’m going to try to get around the monster.”
Almost as if it heard her, the monster’s left arm slammed into the wall beside it. Stone, or more likely concrete, flaked off the surprisingly sturdy wall.
“We should help,” Sophia concluded. “It’s not like it’ll hurt, even if it’s not much.” She decided to save her spells, but with Dav keeping the monster busy, she could use her knife to do exactly what Dav was doing and slowly cut the monster to pieces, one plant at a time.
There were no weak points. The red spots that seemed almost like eyes weren’t soft and weren’t how the monster saw; it saw just as well as it ever had after Sophia cut them out. Even its mouth turned out to be more of a weapon than a weak point. Even so, both Sophia and Amy kept up their attacks; they’d wear down the monster eventually. It wasn’t healing.
Sophia didn’t know how Dav did it. He was in shape, but that wasn’t enough to let someone fight in the highly athletic manner he did for most of an hour. At some point, he placed a healing beacon behind them, so perhaps that was the trick.
Sophia’s guess was that it was more likely to be an effect of his Eldritch Empowerment; they’d tried to figure it out, but she still wasn’t sure what to expect whenever he used it. The one thing that was consistent was that it was always related to what Dav was thinking about when he used the Ability, even if it rarely worked the way anyone expected.
Sophia often envied Dav. He was confident in what he could do and at times like this, it was clear how much of a difference his strength and skill could make. Sophia felt like her abilities were less useful; sure, she could stab someone without getting close to them, break a spell that the Gardener prepared ahead of time, or put out a fire, but she couldn’t stand between a monster three times her size and people she wanted to protect and expect to take it down without tricks.
Sure, Dav was using the relatively tight space and surprisingly sturdy walls to help, but Sophia wasn’t even sure she could manage it even with tricks like that. She just didn’t have any way to stop the monster. She didn’t have a real barrier spell of any sort and even if she did, the creature would probably punch straight through it. That was why Dav had to dodge everything.
When the monster finally fell, Dav swayed on his feet. Sophia moved to catch him, but he leaned most of his weight against a wall. “Are you okay?”
“Eh,” Dav grunted. “I will be, I’m just being hit with it all at once. I’m also completely out of mana. No idea where it went, it just all vanished when the boost ended.”
That was weird, but that made it almost normal for Dav. Sophia had no idea how that would work; if she had a chance, she’d want to study the spellform it created. Unfortunately, the spellform for Eldritch Empowerment was both insanely complicated and different every time; she’d made exactly zero progress at understanding it so far.
“Do you need a break?” Amy asked. “I want to move forward, but it’s not like everything else doesn’t already know we’re here.”
Dav shook his head. “Just a short breather. I won’t be able to summon anything for a while, but I don’t think waiting will really help with that.”
The summoner didn’t wait for them to make up their minds. Before Dav even finished the sentence, a strange reddish head with green eyes and plantlike hair pushed into the corridor carried on red tentacles. It was clearly another plant-monster.
Summoned Monster [https://i.imgur.com/k0EgmkO.jpeg]
It was also very obviously a summoned monster. Now that she knew where to look, the link back to the summoner was easy to find. Sophia recalled her Imbued knife, pushed Disruptive magic into it, then sent the knife back out and sliced through the link before it reached Dav.
Sophia’s knife clattered to the floor
“That one was a summons,” Sophia said with satisfaction. It wasn’t nearly as nasty a monster as the one Dav held off while the three of them killed it, but she’d also taken care of it in mere moments. “We should head on in before the summoner sends more.”