It was still hot, but at least they had more water.
Sophia, Dav, and Amy were able to clear two areas and set up small campfire areas before dusk. Unlike their previous trips in, they encountered no corpsevine zombine animals. Sophia knew they were around somewhere, but she didn’t know where. It was positively spooky to be in a seemingly normal forest when she knew what could be behind any tree or bush.
Still Forest [https://i.imgur.com/zkT6NWk.jpeg]
They lit the first beacon as the light dimmed into dusk. Sophia drank one of the potions of improved vision she’d bought back in Fallen Kestii and handed another to Amy. Dav didn’t need one; he could already see in the dark. It helped, but it wasn’t as good as true daylight; everything was dim and shadowy and it was hard to make things out. It was still better than without the potion, enough better that Sophia could fight even if she couldn’t read a map.
Sophia, Dav, and Amy waited and watched to see what would come. They expected a string of corpsevines, more than they could handle. They were not disappointed.
They also expected the corpsevines’ attention to be fixed on the fires, allowing them to kill the corpsevines from a distance without too much difficulty. Once again, they were not disappointed. Dav’s Thorn Emitter and Amy’s arrows were useful on the smaller and more skeletal corpsevines, while Sophia’s Force Bolts and Animated Blade handled the larger ones.
It worked well until the fire started to dim and the corpsevines began to pay attention to other things. By then, there were enough corpsevine-infested animals that Sophia would have wanted the whole group, including Samuel, not just the three of them. They left the retreat a little too late and ended up fighting between the trees in the dark. It was a mess and one Sophia couldn’t really follow. She didn’t dare ignite her Magelight and create a beacon for all of the corpsevines, but she couldn’t see in the dark.
Fortunately, Dav could. He led them to the next planned spot and dealt with the corpsevines while Sophia added some lamp oil and quickly started the wood burning. She wanted the flame as high as possible quickly. It would mean it wouldn’t last as long, but they needed the distraction.
They didn’t wait for the fire to actually go out after that; they were on their way once they’d culled a good number of corpsevines. Even with the increased speed, the time to get the fire going and attract new corpsevines meant that they were only managing a new fire every hour or so.
Even with the nap, Sophia badly wanted to stop for the night and get some rest after the fifth fire. The problem was that the corpsevines were still coming. They were a bit slower now, possibly because they’d killed a lot of them or possibly because it was so deep in the night; Sophia didn’t know which. Either way, they couldn’t stop yet.
The first break in the pattern came at the seventh fire. She lit it, Dav set up his Thorn Emitter, and they retreated to wait for the flood of enemies.
There was no flood of enemies. Instead, a single skeletal boar monster with its ribcage covered in dried vines slowly tromped out of the dark forest.
Boar [https://i.imgur.com/2doBkwc.jpeg]
In many ways, the boar was an easier fight than the hordes of small enemies, but it required getting closer. Sophia’s blade bounced off the skull, and while the arrows and thorns were able to slip between the boar’s “ribs,” they didn’t accomplish much.
Dav was able to walk up to it while it scattered the wood that made up the campfire and simply sever the skull from the rest of the “body.” He immediately jumped backwards, which was proven to be a wise decision when the vines in and around the boar’s ribcage detached and started flailing like some sort of demented tentacle beast.
One of the tendrils smacked Dav’s Thorn Emitter. It was pierced by a thorn, but the thorn didn‘t do much to the vine. A moment later, three more vines curled around the summoned beacon and started to crush it.
“Dammit,” Dav muttered. “Not going to get any mana returned from that one, am I.” He took a few more steps back and nearly ran into Sophia.
Sophia grabbed her Animated Blade out of the air. She could move it as fast as she could walk, but that took attention and was far more difficult when she couldn’t see the blade. “Let’s move on. I’m not sure if you got the node or not but this fire isn’t going to attract anything more.”
“It might,” Amy disagreed with a chuckle. “And if he didn’t get the node, the fire will.”
Sophia twisted back around and took a good look at what she could see of the flailing mass. Now that Amy mentioned it, it did kind of look like there were some spots on the whipping vines that were suspiciously bright. “All the more reason to run, then. I don’t want to be here if it figures out how to pick itself up and move again.”
It might set the forest on fire, but that didn’t seem likely; it was far more likely there would be a few local fires that would flame up then fade away. The forest was lush and green. She hadn’t seen any rain in the past few days but it was clear that there was enough for the plants. Starting fires deliberately was difficult enough that an accidental fire was probably unlikely. At least, she hoped it was; there was no convenient river for her to use as a makeshift fire hose this time.
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No, Sophia was far more worried about it picking the right direction and actually managing to grab one of them. The other large animals infested by corpsevines didn’t turn into masses of flailing, crushing vines when they were killed, but this one did and she definitely did not want to be crushed.
They didn’t run far before it was obvious that Amy’s prediction was right: by “killing” the boar in the middle of the scattered fire, Dav accidentally set its dry vines on fire and that spread to the rest of them. The fire flared high as the monster flailed, but it was already fading by the time the motion ceased. They weren’t going to be able to attract anything else with that fire.
The next fire presented a slightly different surprise. A rotting, leaf-covered bear slowly lumbered over to it. Sophia caught a good look at it and realized that the flesh was partly gone from its skull, but its nose was still there along with a lot of its fur. There almost seemed to be a flaking coating over the skull, like pale flesh that was still melting away, but Sophia didn’t think that was what rotting flesh actually looked like. Maybe it had something to do with how the bear died?
Crisscrossing vines covered its belly well enough that Sophia wasn’t certain if the flesh there was also rotten or if it was simply covered up.
Bear [https://i.imgur.com/iM9qJZs.jpeg]
Sophia shook her head in disbelief. “Do you think we should leave this one alone?”
“It’s not as dry as the last one,” Amy muttered, “But I think it won’t like the fire much more if we can drop it into it. Think you can do it, Dav?”
“No,” Dav said flatly. “Not in a single hit. The neck’s too thick and the height doesn’t help. I can’t cut down a tree with one hit either and that thing’s damn near a tree on its own.”
The bear zombie moved forward slowly, peppered by thorns from Dav’s Thorn Emitter. It ignored them and kept its attention on the fire. Sophia watched and tried to come up with a plan, but the bear was just too far outside their plans. With more people, it would be easy enough, but for the three of them it was better to watch and wait.
“Maybe it will set itself on fire,” Amy hoped.
Sophia didn’t think it would, but she also didn’t see any reason to punch holes in Amy’s ideas any sooner than necessary. She doubted Amy really thought it would happen.
The bear stepped into the fire and scattered the wood. It then sat on it and seemed to smother the fire with its own mass. Smoke rose from the clearing and Sophia had to suppress a laugh. “I don’t think that’s how Smokey Bear is supposed to stop forest fires.”
“What?” Dav sounded puzzled as she turned towards Sophia.
Sophai shook her head. “Nothing. Just a bad joke about an ad campaign from when I was a kid.”
“Right,” Dav stated. He sounded somehow both cautious and curious. She wished she could see well enough to make out Dav’s expression, but the light wasn’t good enough.
Wait, how did she see the smoke?
Sophia looked up and realized that the sky was starting to brighten. “It’s almost dawn.”
“It’s almost time to call it for the day, then,” Dav agreed. “I think we’re leaving the bear here, think we can mark it on the map so Samuel can cme kill it?”
Sophia grinned a tight grin at that. “As long as it’s still here, yeah. One more clearing before we head back?”
“As long as it doesn’t have another bear,” Amy answered. “I can kill a live bear without too much trouble, even a monster bear, but corpsevines make everything harder.”
Sophia didn’t entirely agree, but she didn’t entirely disagree either. Plants weren’t like animals; they lived slower. Corpsevines seemed to live at almost animal speed, but they still lacked many of the weaknesses animals had. If she could somehow remove the magic that animated them and allowed them to move and act like animals, they’d be easy to handle. Unfortunately, she didn’t know how to do that. “It’ll probably be another big animal, but hopefully not a bear. Unless it’s the same one.”
They ignited the fire in the center of the last clearing of the night and backed off. They expected it to take a while, since each of the large creatures took longer than the previous one. Sophia half expected that it would be the same bear, but that wasn’t what came out of the forest.
She did not expect a walking, three foot tall spiky but well-trimmed bush. It approached the fire from the side, planted itself next to the fire, and watched it as the fire almost immediately went out. It didn’t walk onto the fire like the others; it simply sat near it and extinguished it. That clearly meant that it was more magical than the others they’d fought, but it was at least alone.
Sophia focused on the creature and tried to figure out what the ambulatory bush was at its core. If nothing else, she needed to know where the corpsevine’s central node was, and that was usually in the head.
It had clearly once been an animal, and it was just as clearly now controlled by a plant even though its outer covering looked more like spiky leaves than vines. It was much, much too large but the only animal Sophia could think of to compare it to was a hedgehog.
It was even curled up into a ball. If it weren’t for the fact that it was a corpse piloted by a hostile plant, Sophia could have called it cute.
Hedgehog [https://i.imgur.com/DBoziim.jpeg]
It was her job to kill it, cute or not. Sophia sent her Animated Blade towards it for the easiest possible kill. If she could kill it before it even noticed she was there, that would be best.
Her blade floated behind the plant-hedgehog, then stabbed down through the skull where the nexus was on the other infested animals they’d fought so far.
Sophia expected it to fall limp. She had to have hit something important even if she’d missed the node.
She was therefore completely shocked when it rolled into a true ball. It looked more like a topiary than before. A moment later, spikes shot out from the defensive zombie hedgehog.
“Maybe I should make my Thorn Emitter look like that next time,” Dav muttered grumpily. “It would be better than what I got this time.”
Sophia looked at the Thorn Emitter. She did have to admit that it looked more like a weird fusion of a handheld weapon and the stem of a thorny rose than it did like a stationary beacon that acted on its own to throw spikes at enemies.
Thorn Emitter [https://i.imgur.com/FIzzlTn.png]