Sophia watched the sky. The flash of fire didn’t seem to have lit a fire in any of the branches it hit, which was probably deliberate on Samuel’s part but felt lucky to Sophia. She didn’t like the idea of being caught in a forest fire.
Over the next few minutes, she saw three other flowers of fire appear at or above the treetops.
“We’re all ready,” Samuel said as he turned his attention to the trees around him. “Now we just have to wait. If we don’t see any corpsevines in the next few minutes, we’ll move a bit closer to the West Conservatory and try to get their attention again.”
It was more like ten or fifteen minutes before Samuel decided they weren’t close enough and had them move closer, then closer still. The wait was the hard part; they had to try to stay alert in case of attacking corpsevines but they didn’t know when they would appear and could only guess that they’d be coming from the direction of the West Conservatory. It was possible they hadn’t started far enough out.
Rare fiery explosions in the distance told Sophia they weren’t the only group having the problem, though one of the four groups seemed to be actively fighting instead of simply sending up flares. “Why did we start so far out?”
Samuel chuckled. “We didn’t. We started well inside the area where corpsevines were found ten years ago. We know they’re here somewhere, but exactly where is-”
“Deer!” The shout stopped Samuel’s explanation in its tracks.
Sophia thought the guard who shouted was Liam, but she might have confused him with his brother Eliah; they looked and sounded almost the same. Sophia looked in that direction and immediately understood the strange shout. It wasn’t just a deer; the animal was covered in a net of vines and roots that certainly wasn’t natural or normal.
Vine-netted Deer [https://i.imgur.com/8DIRTMM.jpeg]
Samuel didn’t waste a moment in introspection. A condensed red flare erupted from the tip of his wand and hurtled at the animal immediately. A second and a third followed, erupting before Sophia could even tell what damage the initial attack did.
Sophia threw a pair of Force Bolts at the deer. One emerged from her floating Animated Blade, but the second started a clear foot in front of Sophia. She wanted to cheer; she couldn’t yet alter the starting location of spells cast through Animate Spell Blade, but she’d managed to properly aura cast her other Force Bolt!
Spikes from Dav’s Thorn Emitter and arrows from Amy and three of Samuel’s guards followed the spells into the vine-infested buck. The thorns weren’t aimed, but they penetrated deeply into the deer’s body. The arrows were all focused on the head, where they hoped the corpsevine’s central node would be found.
The deer leapt directly for Samuel. It was met by a large shield shoved into its legs and lower belly by Liam. He staggered backwards a step as the deer’s mass overcame his lunge, but the deer crumpled to the ground with broken bones in both of its forelegs. It tried to struggle upright, but the best it could manage was to stand on the stubby broken bones.
Sophia stared in horror. She’d seen bones broken before, of course, but she’d never seen anything that was so insensate to pain that it would stand on the ends of the broken bones. Even skeletons and zombies didn’t do that, though that might be more because of the inability of their spells to adjust than any sensitivity to pain.
The vines on the deer’s shoulders writhed and started to unknot. They were similar to the first corpsevine’s long tongue-vine and belt-vines, but they had trouble reaching as far. That didn’t really matter when they curled around the edge of Liam’s shield and yanked; the deer lurched, but Liam’s shield was yanked away from his body. It might have mattered if the deer-infesting corpsevine had anything backing it up.
Samuel was clearly not in shock. Another set of fiery bolts whipped towards the deer’s skull. Two were intercepted by the vines that weren’t trying to control the shield whipping forward, but the third one burned the flesh of the deer’s head enough to reveal the squirming vines hidden inside its skull.
Sophia wrestled down her revulsion as she realized she’d just been shown a target. Her next pair of Force bolts hit directly on the mass of vines. She’d never know if it was her strike or the well-aimed arrows from others that worked, because just as the deer shuddered and collapsed, Liam’s brother Eliah shouted, “Left!”
Sophia tore her attention away from the deer to find what Eliah saw. It took her a moment to focus on the quickly-moving creatures and realize that they weren’t monkeys.
No, they were squirrels. Giant squirrels roughly the size of chimpanzees with leaves fluffed out on their backs in a way that reminded Sophia of a turtle’s shell flooded towards the group in a wave.
This was exactly why she took Force Blast as well as Force Bolt. There were far too many of them to target one at a time; she needed to deal with all of them. The twin spells hurtled towards the squirrels slightly slower than the first of Samuel’s fire spells. It started as a single yellow point but quickly grew into a explosion of heat and light.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Vine-shelled Squirrels and Fire [https://i.imgur.com/q4AE6JF.png]
Half of the squirrels were in pieces, squished by Sophia’s spell or torn apart by Samuel’s explosion. Some bits of vine still twitched, clearly still alive but so shredded that they were no longer dangerous. For the moment, at least.
“Save your spells,” Samuel told Sophia as he threw another explosive spell at a group of three squirrels that escaped the trio of spells. “Use your floating blade to kill the ones that can’t move; it’ll be better than arrows or having someone get close. I’ll yell if I need your help, better to have you in reserve for when I’m tired. Keep your eyes on Essia; we’re going to need her all too soon.”
Sophia grumbled, but she could see the sense in his directions. This was supposed to be a long fight; she really should be using weapons instead of spells, no matter what she preferred.
A glance over at Lady Essia told Sophia that the girl was fine, if a bit closer to the front than Sophia liked. She was up with Liam, clearly healing his shield arm; something must have been damaged when the deer-vine yanked it away from him. The good news was that that was on the other side of the group from the squirrels, which seemed to be a far more annoying threat than the single deer.
Sophia stabbed one squirrel-remnant after another. It was frustrating, especially when there were clearly too many of the little things.
Samuel couldn’t hold the squirrels off. Surviving squirrels slipped past his zone of fiery death and in amongts the group where he didn’t dare use his large spells. However much Sophia wanted to help, she knew her spells wouldn’t do any better; like Samuel, she only had spells to hurt enemies, not to control the ground they walked on. There wasn’t anyone like that with the group.
Instead, the Quinn twins were doing their best to distract the squirrels while the more heavily armed and armored warriors killed them. Moti seemed the more effective of the two; his spells seemed to work on the controlling plants and make them slow or even stop for a moment, head the wrong direction, or even attack the wrong thing. A squirrel biting a tree was amusing, but not as helpful as when the turtleshell of vines on another squirrel unfurled, wrapped around the first squirrel, and started to crush it. When that happened, Sophia had a nearly clear shot at the crushed squirrel’s vine cluster. She even managed to get the confused squirrel as well before it recovered.
Nothing as convenient happened again. It was clear that Moti had to get lucky to manage anything that good.
Sophia found that she couldn’t effectively manage to finely control her Animated Blade and still fight herself. One way or the other, she could only really pay attention to one at a time; the other could certainly flail towards an enemy and get its attention, but it wasn’t even close to equal with the one she paid attention to. It was useful, certainly, and she could switch back and forth.
In many ways, it was the same basic problem that meant she could only double-cast the same spell at the same target. She could only split her attention so far. Animate Blade wasn’t quite like holding it in her own hand, so she had to concentrate, and while she was used to using a knife it wasn’t her preference. She was clearly going to have to practice using the blade while she fought physically herself if she wanted to be any good at it.
Periodic yelps told Sophia that the squirrels weren’t going down without a fight. She found that out for herself late in the swarm when she missed a strike and the still intact squirrel darted to her leg. She felt a sharp pain in her calf and could only hope that meant it had slipped past her armor and not gone straight through it.
A quick Force Bolt put paid to the squirrel’s ambitions. She really shouldn’t spend the mana on it, but what was the point of having spells if you couldn’t use them to kill the monsters that hurt you?
When she took a step forward, Sophia felt something tug at her leg. It hurt and didn’t want to respond, but that wasn’t all; there was something weighing down her leg.
The squirrel’s body hung from her leg by the vines on its shoulders. That had to be the reason her leg felt off. She yanked it out; it would bleed, but hopefully that would help with whatever toxin the vines were using. As she did, she felt her necklace already starting to warm a little in warning. She fed it a little mana to help it deal with the venom and shouted, “The squirrels’ vines are toxic!”
She was certain that Samuel at least already knew. He’d talked them through some of what they might see; squirrels wasn’t on his list, but frogs were. Sophia thought she’d rather see giant squirrels.
No matter what they were, they were the reason they had a healer and therefore the reason Sophia was there. She was supposed to protect Lady Essia so that she could heal.
Sophia turned back to her protectee and realized that Dav was the only one of Essia’s five bodyguards who actually stayed close enough to guard her. He was next to her, steadily killing any squirrels that got past the others with the aid of his Thorn Emitter.
Interestingly, the beacon seemed to work far better on the squirrels than it had on the deer. It was accurate enough that almost every spike hit a squirrel, and the squirrels were small enough and unprotected enough that more than half of the thorns severed a limb or destroyed the vines’ central node and made the squirrel collapse. Only the ones that hit in the center of the squirrel’s body left them capable of fighting and even those squirrels were impaired by the damage to the central vines that served as muscles.
Sophia took the few steps that were necessary to cover the third side of the triangle around Essia that neither Dav nor his Thorn Emitter could manage. It was empty for now, but Sophia couldn’t be sure it would stay that way.
She’d just reached her spot when a shout drew her attention back to the direction of the West Conservatory. The squirrels weren’t dealt with yet, but something else was clearly on its way, something that struck from the dappled shadows.