Byron incinerated the flock of birds directly behind us as I skidded into the entrance. The stone tunnel was now almost four feet long as the woman shaping it continued her ongoing race against the horrific tree. Annie, John, and Lottie already waited inside, anxiously eyeing the tree’s interior, which seemed like some kind of eldritch lovechild of pink spiderwebs and honeycomb. The webbing had been smashed away in a small area, and I could see splinters of wood littering the ground. Four more people - two in fatigues, two in civilian gear - were fighting monsters that reminded me of furless giant ferrets. The claws at the ends of their six legs seemed sharp enough, but their limbs were short. They likely wouldn’t have been much of a threat if encountered in the open, but the interior of the tree seemed to be the perfect environment for them. They dashed by the defenders, trying to score grazing hits, then dove amidst the web-like structure that filled the interior of the tree. They were difficult to spot without infrared once inside, their pink skin identical in color to the tree’s internals.

The defenders took out two of the monsters as I watched, but the innumerable flickers of movement and heat I spotted in the wood lattice around us suggested that the assault wouldn't end anytime soon.

We were under attack from the outside now, too, with hell’s own starlings diving into the entrance. Byron was keeping us safe for now, knocking each back with a Fire Bolt. He was the strongest of us in many ways, but he’d just put a ton of effort into controlling our crash. He seemed okay for the moment, but I doubted he could handle the vast flock that had descended on us.

I frowned at the woman next to me, who stood with her hands pressed against the stone. She was busy, obviously, but we needed answers. “Why are you here? We heard these things couldn’t be destroyed.”

The woman grimaced. “It's sure as hell not easy... this one's big enough that I'm not sure if we can manage it, but we don't have much choice. We don’t yet know what the max size is, and we can’t let it keep getting bigger… hell, it could put the whole of north Alabama at risk, for all we know.”

“You have a good shot at taking it down?” Byron asked. He didn’t look back, maintaining his defense of the entrance. “You know it goes invincible?”

“It doesn’t. Not… exactly. It’s just that past a certain point, the only way to damage it is to kill rare monsters it spawns and use the item they leave behind. The tree regenerates the damage those items do, too, so you have to kill several of the rare spawns simultaneously and… it’s a mess. I was part of a team that killed one, but it was a lot smaller than this.” She frowned at the roots outside. “A lot smaller.”

Wood began oozing over the edge of her tunnel and she cursed, hurriedly expanding the stone. She managed to get ahead of it, but the size of the tunnel shrank by several inches.. “ANDY! Michelle! Get your ass back here! I’m losing the entry!”

The guy who’d dragged us in here - Andy? - appeared moments later, an unfamiliar man thrown over his shoulder. He was followed by a woman I didn’t know. The moment they were inside, the stoneshaper retracted the tunnel slightly. Wood oozed downward quickly, the entrance shrinking closed by the second.

“Hey! Our friends are still out there!” Byron said.

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The woman who’d just arrived - Michelle? - shook her head. “Short woman and a man? They flew away. I tried to catch up, but failed. They’re close to being out of the tree’s range, though, I think. They should be okay.”

“The flyers weren’t chasing them?” Byron asked.

Michelle shrugged. “Not sure. Not much I could do to get to them. I can’t fly.”

“I’ll… tell them what happened to us?” John said, voice uncertain.

“You do that,” Andy said. “We need to clear a path, get Trent to the healers.”

He gestured to the man he was carrying, and I now realized the guy had passed out… probably due to pain. His leg was clearly pulverized, likely by one of the tentacle whips, but it was intact-ish. I mean, it was sickeningly flat and there were slivers of bone sticking through the skin, but all the parts were there.

“I can heal him.” I laid a hand on the man’s mangled ankle, and looked away as the leg gruesomely contorted back into shape. “There. He’s all better. I think we need to head out, though. If the flyers are chasing our friends, they might need help.”

“Don’t!” This came from the older stoneshaper. “Please don’t. Our Analysts… it’s borderline if we’re going to be able to handle this. Having two more intensifiers could make the difference between success and failure. We’re worried that this tree could threaten all of northern Alabama. You’re wearing the black-and-white! Team Humanity needs you.”

Belatedly, I noticed that several of the soldiers had armbands like mine, and that all the strangers carried or wore some item done up in a black-and-white motif, everything from referee jerseys to painted shields and cuirasses.

“Team Humanity?” I asked. “This was… we met some Japanese people in a Challenge, and they said…”

Andy frowned. “You’re not local?”

“Born and raised in Alabama, but we started this shenanigans out west,” John said. “Kirtland Air Force Base helped send us east. They’ll want to get in touch with your colonel.”

Andy looked delighted for a bare second, then shook his head. “That’s amazing, but it’s going to have to wait. Please. Helen’s not wrong: we need your two intensifiers.”

“Intensifiers?” Byron frowned. “There are four of us.”

“But only two of you have intensifiers, if I’m not mistaken,” the woman said. She nodded toward my wrist, where my lackluster prize from the last Challenge hung, forgotten.

I inspected it, fingers brushing the gem. “This? It just tells me who has specialties and gives a sketchy description of what they do. Like, if I look at Andy, it says ‘Unstoppable: Passive. Difficult to slow, halt, or turn.’ That’s… alright, I guess, but it doesn’t seem that important. Especially since I see five of you with the same bracelets.”

“The ability is just from the gem,” Andy said. “The bracelet itself is the intensifier. Essentially, anyone with a bracelet can trigger an increased challenge. Here, that means forcing a powerful defender monster to appear, a kind of miniature version of the treezilla. We’ve been calling them woodwalkers. Kill it and grab the shard it leaves behind. Slam the shard into the heartvein in the center of the tree and you’ll hurt it, badly.”

“So we’ll each summon these monsters one at a time and take them down?” I asked.

“Not… exactly.” Andy looked uncomfortable. “A tree this big will be able to regenerate any damage we do to its heartvein pretty quickly, and the shards disappear after a few minutes, so…”

“Fucking hell.” Byron sagged against the wall of the tunnel. “You need us all to summon giant monsters at the same time.”