“You say that because you don’t know what danger is,” Amy disagreed with a glare. “A Leveled Challenge is the safest and most effective way to gain Wisps. Yes, you have to be careful, but that’s always true. We know a lot about this Challenge; it’s going to have something to do with corpsevines. There will likely be enemies that are like what we’re fighting here, puppeted bodies. There will also be creatures like what the Registry Master saw, constructed mostly from vines. That means we need people who can fight and a healer. Essia would be perfect, but as long as we can get in and get out, Dav will do fine. We can take some alchemicals for whatever he can’t heal.”
Sophia raised an eyebrow at that. Amy almost refused to participate in the corpsevine extermination because she wasn’t willing to bind herself to accept the orders of a commander, but she was happy, even eager, to take on a challenge that a more experienced person thought was too dangerous. It was very clear that Amy’s standards were different; Sophia needed to figure out if they aligned with Sophia’s or not.
So far, she rather thought they did. The Leveled Challenge sounded a lot like a level-appropriate dungeon, and she definitely liked that idea. She’d need a good group for it, but so far it seemed like she had one. She was covering more of the magical end than she liked, but magic wasn’t everything. Amy could help her out with distance. The Quinn twins weren’t straightforward with what they could do, but that didn’t mean they weren’t useful. Dav was the last on her list, but in some ways he was the most vital, since he was the healer and could also smack anything that tried to get too close into the next room.
Possibly literally.
“The Challenge itself will be about seeing something the Registry Master and her team missed. The Guide doesn’t think it’s something that requires Levels, or this wouldn’t be a Leveled Challenge. That means we’re as likely to find it as anyone else. We might even be more likely, since that’s exactly what Rae does. You can go or not, but don’t try to talk my group out of it because you won’t risk yourself. Talk to Samuel and maybe think a little; take alchemicals or see if the Registry’s willing to allow healers extra trips!” Amy was positively shouting by the time she finished.
“Maybe something like the reason the corpsevines came back?” Sophia offered. “It was missed the first time, so maybe it was missed again and that’s why the Guide decided to make it a challenge?”
Sophia didn’t know that much about the Guide yet, but it kind of sounded like something the Voice might do, though the Voice would probably give a quest through a Quest Giver instead of making an entire new temporary dungeon. The Guide seemed to interfere more while being less straightforward, but the world itself was also more broken than back home. Maybe the Guide couldn’t be more straightforward than it was for some reason.
Or maybe it just didn’t want to explain itself. Sophia hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the Guide for shoving Cliff into her chest and permanently affecting what Spheres she had. If it had asked, she might well have agreed, but it didn’t even consider that. It did what it wanted to and didn’t care about whether or not she and Cliff were willing. That didn’t seem to bother Cliff but it certainly bothered Sophia.
“Could be,” Amy agreed. “Even if it isn’t, it’s something to look for. Sometimes a Challenge will have more than one goal. Finding any of them is rewarded well and that one sounds like it would be worth a lot of Wisps.”
“That’s very true,” Samuel interrupted, “But we can talk about whether or not we want to take on the Leveled Challenge tonight after we get back from a second bait run. That was the other other news in the message: we aren’t the only group being attacked by far too many corpsevines, but we are the only group that doesn’t have any casualties that had to be sent back to the Registry for better care. We are also the largest group. The Registry Master offered me a choice, and I’m passing it along to you: Do we push farther into the forest and try to reach the West Conservatory or do we send people to help another group?”
Sophia was a little surprised they were asked. She could only think of one reason they weren’t just told what needed to happen. This had to be because of Amy’s stark refusal to allow others to make choices for her. Whoever sent the message was afraid that Amy would refuse to participate at all if they told her what to do and probably also worried that she’d get the rest of them to go along with her. Sophia didn’t say anything about it, but she sent a tight grin towards Amy.
“We’re barely holding it together and the Registry Master wants us to get closer to the Conservatory?” Eliah wasn’t the only person to speak, but his voice was the loudest. “Does she want us dead?”
Sophia had to snort at that. “We’re barely even trying hard and you think we’re at our limits?” She paused for a moment to make sure everyone heard her but not long enough for Eliah to come up with a rebuttal. “We’re used exactly one strategy: light a fire to attract everything and then try to kill it as it comes. It’s worked this far partly because nothing’s come from behind us, but it’s not the only thing we can do.”
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“We can’t kill them any faster, and that’s what she wants,” Eliah countered. “Samuel’s running himself out of mana, or Lady Essia is, and the rest of us are wearing our arms out hitting things. It’s impossible.”
Sophia noticed that he didn’t mention her mana levels or Amy wearing out her teeth, but that was truthfully a small quibble. The bigger problem was that he was still thinking inside a very small box. It was one Sophia liked as well, the one she usually used when she went into a dungeon, but this wasn’t a dungeon. It was the real world. “It’s very possible. We can’t do it the way we’ve been doing it, but we also don’t have to. This is exactly what traps are for.”
Eliah squinted at Sophia. “Traps? How do you plan to trap a plant? It’s not like it’s going to fall into a pit and we don’t have time to dig one anyway. We’d need a trapper Sphere for that, and we don’t have any.”
“The same way we’ve been attracting them!” Sophia didn’t add “you idiot,” mostly because she hadn’t really thought about it either until now. The plan Samuel came up with was working well enough, but it wouldn’t work if they had to do more than they were already. Eliah was right about that much. “Look, we know they’re attracted to fire and they’re also vulnerable to it, right? We don’t want to set the forest on fire, so we can only use it where it’s safe, but there’s no reason we can’t set a fire then leave, right? That will draw them in from the other teams. We don’t have to fight them, we just have to relieve the pressure enough that they aren’t overwhelmed.”
It wasn’t really a trap, but it kind of was. It was a lure and a delay; it didn’t have to hurt anything to help with the problem.
“That’s probably not enough, but it’s a start,” Samuel agreed. “I don’t know if I can move fast enough to set that many fires, though, not if I also fight.”
“Who says you have to set the fires?” Sophia grinned. It was coming together a bit more now. “You’re the only one with fire Abilities but that doesn’t mean we can’t set nonmagical fires. I can even manage basic fire Spells, they just aren’t fast enough to fight with. We can set things on fire. I’m more worried about not burning the forest down while we’re in it.”
Fire was easy. Uncle Blaze said things wanted to burn. Sophia’s physics tutor said it differently; he said that oxygen was one of the three main components of the fire triangle and the other two were fuel and heat. Oxygen and fuel, “stuff that could burn,” were everywhere in a forest.
Heat was easy to get because energy wanted to become heat; that was what thermodynamics was about. It wasn’t entirely true, especially not when magic got involved, but the important part was still true: if you had energy of any sort, you could make heat and enough heat applied to the right things made fire.
Even without magic, fire was easy. Most of the time, Sophia didn’t use a spellform or even carry a fire-wand that had a basic spellform built in; matches were far more convenient and so cheap that there was really no reason to use magic most of the time.
“It takes too much wood and too much time to burn the corpsevines without magic; we tried that. Fire magic was a far better solution, but it meant we had to defend the fire mages when they became lures. We had to use bigger groups. You’re suggesting we go backwards and use small fires to be additional distractions.” Samuel pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. “Come look at the map and tell me what you think.”
Feather Line Break [https://i.imgur.com/YWC5eEM.jpeg]
It took a while to plan their route that evening. Sophia appreciated the extra time to wait in the relative cool of the building enough that she wasn’t even bothered when Samuel admitted that he had never planned to have them head out for a second run of the day until after dark, when whatever fires they lit would be very visible but they wouldn’t, and the planning time was coming out of their rest time. The planning was too important for Sophia to be upset..
As it turned out, they didn’t leave at the original planned time anyway. Instead, they spent more than an hour at dusk gathering tinder and small branches. If they were going to light a lot of nonmagical fires, they needed things that would burn easily without creating so much smoke that they were a problem. The corpsevines were bad enough.
Samuel seemed to think that the biggest benefit of the plan was that it would be easy to run if there were too many corpsevines. Sophia thought it was better than that, but the only way to know for sure was to try it. The first night was going to be a test run; they wouldn’t push any deeper than they had earlier in the day unless it went well.
The final plan required them to split up into three groups.
Eliah, Liam, and Skarn would prepare a lot of different small clearings to hold fires, stripping away the ground cover for safety and setting up the initial fire. The goal was to build fires that wouldn’t spread and that also wouldn’t be easily seen for a while, so that the people who set them could get away before the corpsevines noticed. If they were set properly, they would also be fairly easy to turn into bonfires in a few minutes, to attract the attention of corpsevines.
Samuel wouldn’t do anything different from the previous days, but he’d have a smaller group. Two of his original guards, Padi and Mike, would stay with him, along with Lady Essia, Moti, and Rae. No one was particularly comfortable making the visible group that small, but they couldn’t split into three groups and still have enough people. They worked out a set of signals so that Samuel could call for help or tell people to move to a different part of the plan with fire in the sky. There weren’t many signals, but anything would help.
The last group was Sophia, Dav, and Amy. Amy was by far the best person at moving unnoticed in the woods, especially in her wolf form. Their job was to kill corpsevines while they were distracted by the different fires.
Sophia was a little surprised when she found out that she and Dav were the next best; she’d expected some of the locals to know what they were doing in the woods, but it seemed like they treated the woods as something to avoid, not something to learn how to deal with.