Andy was the closest. Monsters surged toward him, tentacles reaching out to entwine him from every angle.

He was fast enough to dodge the first several, but speed didn’t matter if there wasn’t anywhere safe to escape to. Branches wrapped around his body and… slid off?

I wasn’t sure that I had seen that right, but there was no time to stare: I was here to fight, not spectate.

The sword I’d borrowed was a western-style longsword, not the faux-katana I’d trained with. That would have been a big deal in a duel, but was hardly relevant here; our enemies were huge. A thick tentacle reached for me, almost as wide as my torso. It was large but slow, far slower than me. I brought the sword down with all my strength, amputating it in a single hit.

My rush of triumph was short-lived. Something closed around my ankle and yanked me off balance. My back and left elbow struck the ground, making me partially lose my grip on the sword. It dangled loosely in my right hand as I was dragged twenty feet across the floor toward another woodwalker.

As the root dragged me, it snaked up my body, restraining me further, trying to keep me still so the treewalker could flatten me with its thrashing branches.

Ugh. Just like how the big one flattened buildings. These really are mini-treezillas.

My muscles were strong enough that pulling myself to sitting was easy enough. I slashed, chopping straight through a branch headed for my face. The severed limb still struck me, a stinging slap against my cheek, but then fell to the floor and lay still.

I was still restrained, however, and the monster didn’t seem fazed by the damage. More branches were plummeting toward me, one after another. The tree moved slower than I, but it also had over a dozen ways to attack. Defending against the onslaught would be a full-time job, leaving me no time to go on the attack.

So I didn’t bother.

I was tough enough to keep moving through the hits hammered down on me. If I didn’t defend, the force was painful... but not crippling. I was sure I was taking bruises, but equally sure that it would take dozens to take me out of the fight, not even considering my regeneration and healing.

Instead I slammed my sword downward, slicing through every root it put in my way until I got the one holding me and the tree’s grip went slack. I shook myself free, rolling out of the way of the next hit from the tree and coming to my feet.

Another root was creeping after me. It was difficult to spot, blending in with the textured floor, but I was watching for it now.

You won’t get me the same way twice!

I dashed forward, bringing my sword down near the base of the root. The monster attempted to grab at me, but I evaded.

Slow. Way too slow. Just have to pay attention to my surroundings!

Another severed root made the monster teeter noticeably. With three from the same side gone, it stopped attempting to grab at me with its roots, curving the others in an effort to keep itself upright. It still kept hitting me with its branches, but I was confident I could do more damage to it than it could do to me.

I moved in close, slamming a slash into its trunk, trying to cleave the monster in two. Unfortunately, its trunk was tougher than the rest of its body. The sword bit in only a few inches. The treewalker continued to pummel me as I yanked out my sword and tried again, targeting the same spot repeatedly until the damage was too much and the monster dissolved, leaving an amber teardrop behind to clatter to the ground.

Moments afterward, the teardrop levitated, presumably telekinetically grabbed by an ally. No longer my concern.

My foe down, I checked in on the rest of the room.

All the little monsters had been cleared from the chamber, but more continued to pour from the openings in the walls and wriggle free from growing sacs on the central pillar. John, Davi, Byron, his relatives, and two of the strangers were huddled together, trying to guard each other’s backs and keep the small monsters off the rest of us.

They were doing impressive work. A bird-monster burst from a sac on the central pillar and dove toward me, only to be sniped out of the air before it had gone ten feet. A ferret-monster charged out from a gap in the wall toward Andy, only to halt and fade after a bullet slammed into the side of its skull.

My surprise at that almost got me grabbed again. I’d noticed the rifle on Helen’s back earlier, but until now I hadn’t realized that it was working.

The ranged group was okay for now, but I doubted they could keep up this wholesale slaughter indefinitely. The cloud of horrible birds I’d seen as we approached had been enormous, and it seemed like they’d all been pulled back to defend the heartvein, accompanied by more of the ferrets that had been attacking us on the way in. I felt like we must be reaching the limits of what the tree could have held, but the onslaught of tiny figures scurrying and flying through the gaps in the walls of the chamber showed no signs of slowing. On top of that, more monsters were slowly spawning from the central pillar.

The other melee were in more immediate trouble. Of the others I could spot, only Andy was still free. I could see three others restrained by tentacles, desperately trying to defend themselves from an onslaught of roots and branches. None looked close to escaping.

I took a moment to check myself over, not using my Healing Touch but considering it, checking my body. My posture had protected my face, but my helmet was loose, cracked in half by repeated hits from the treewalker. My arms and back were sore, and my legs weren’t doing much better. Bruises were forming all over my body.

Just bruises, though, I decided. No broken bones. Everything intact. Gotta keep going.

I sprinted across the chamber, jumping over two roots and ducking under a branch as I headed for the nearest of my allies. A woman was pinned beneath a root, her face bleeding.

I dragged my sword across the root restraining her, but couldn’t wait to see if my efforts were effective. Two more treewalkers were reaching out, hemming me in. I chopped off one of the seeking branches, shoving it out of the way as I crashed through.

There were monsters on all sides of me now. I spent several seconds just dodging. The treewalkers weren’t terribly fast, but there were eight of them and each had multiple limbs. We’d had seven melee to face off against them initially, but we had fewer now. Not only had some of us been restrained, at least one of us was dead. I’d seen a tree release another body, dropping it like trash. I’d hoped, for a moment, that the man wasn’t beyond healing, but as I drew close and saw the caved-in skull and chest, my hope had waned to nothing. I could only heal what was still present, and this man’s face and most of his brain… weren’t. I still darted in to brush a hand against his wrist, trying to pulse a heal, but I wasn’t surprised when Healing Touch refused to trigger, returning no more information than if I had touched a rock.

Andy came by, headed toward a distant treewalker’s captive. The branches kept slipping off him like he was coated in butter, but one got a solid grip on his backpack. Andy didn’t slow: the straps of the backpack came undone, slipping off the soldier’s back and remaining behind in the treewalker’s grasp.

The monster seemed to think it had succeeded. It wound a tentacle around the pack and diverted several branches to attack its supposed captive.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I was sure it would realize its mistake soon enough, but its confusion gave me an opening. I rushed into range, cutting off one branch near the point it attached to the tree and partway into the next. The second branch-tentacle immediately went limp, but remained on the tree, constantly getting in the way of the monster’s other movements.

Nice!

On a whim, I used the injured tentacle to pull myself atop of the treewalker, lashing out wildly until the attacks on me stopped. The monster was still upright, but its branches twitched only fitfully, bearing smashed segments and oozing cuts. They were now useless weights instead of weapons.

From my vantage point, I spotted another restrained person to my left. I couldn’t see much of their body, but I thought it was the female speedster.

Here goes!

I leapt off my monstrous pedestal, my height and enhanced strength letting me make a truly inhuman jump. A tentacle got in front of me on the way down, but it was angled to threaten the captive, not me. My feet crashed into the branch and it bent downward under the force of my landing. A single sweep of my sword was enough to detach it.

Unfortunately, both it and I landed on the captive woman, but when I cut her loose, she managed to free herself in seconds. She was still mobile, so whatever injuries she’d sustained could wait until the end of the fight.

I stepped out of the way of another tentacle slam, trying to assess the situation. Andy and I had managed to release several of our allies, and all of the treewalkers were injured, although only two had been taken down.

An announcement in my head interrupted my survey.

Hurry! First shard has been used. Take down your foes as quickly as possible, then move to help other chambers if you can. Give it everything you can! If we can take down the heartvein, the minions will die with it.

The voice of the colonel startled me. How long had we been fighting? It could have been a minute or five: I had no way of knowing.

I saw the heartvein shudder, the regular pulses skipping a “beat.”

From what we’d been told, once we started hurting it, we needed to do enough damage within a small window.

If we didn’t, the tree would recover and we were totally screwed.

A machine-gun line of Fire Bolts thudded into the trunk of the most intact treewalker, and I risked a glance behind me. Davi was kneeling on the ground, maintaining Force Shields in a wedge-shaped bunker, a narrow gap in front of their faces the only place for attacks to exit.

She was using all her energy in an all-or-nothing effort to keep my friends alive long enough to finish this. Byron was clearly burning all his energy as well, focusing huge amounts of damage on the treewalkers while ignoring the tiny monsters attacking him. If we didn’t take down the heartvein soon… if their attackers didn’t vanish…

My friends had risked everything.

I could do no less.

Here we go.

I flung myself at the nearest trunk and attacked it in a frenzy, ignoring the tentacles that latched around me. This time, I kept my feet planted firmly on the ground, and its efforts to yank me off balance or move me failed. Our strength was near-equally matched, and the aliens’ physics fuckery meant that I could bring that strength to bear even when I really shouldn’t be able to, when simple mass differential should have left me at monsters’ mercy.

I cut into it with one last wild swing of the sword, slamming the blade into the deepening crevice I’d been cutting. This last effort brought it more than halfway through the trunk and the monster split in two with a cracking noise, then vanished, an amber-colored teardrop bouncing off the ground where it had been.

I considered picking it up, but most of the enemies were still standing.

We need to kill all of them. I can’t play delivery boy.

I took a second to kick the shard back toward our ranged, counting on someone using telekinesis to slam it into the pillar, then threw myself toward the other monsters.

One of the horrible little flyers raked my shoulder as I moved, the first time the tiny monsters had been able to reach me. Our ranged had been doing an excellent job of keeping them off us, but they’d stopped to focus on the treewalkers, letting us and them bear the attacks of the smaller mobs.

I’d tried to lift my left arm to swat the small flyer away, but it… wasn’t working so great. The minor damage I’d been taking from each treewalker hit had finally accumulated to the point where it was affecting my strength and mobility. I could heal the arm, but that would have a cost in energy I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay right now. These were large targets and I was strong. I didn’t need the control that two-handed strikes could bring me.

I needed to hurry.

A monster’s trunk nearby bore a smoking crater, testament to an onslaught by Byron. I slammed my sword into the injured monster as deeply as I could and yanked the blade from side to side. Blows rained down on my back and shoulders as I worked, thudding impacts that rocked my body painfully, but I did my best to ignore them, widening the injury until the monster evaporated into smoke.

I waved its remnants away from my face and looked around.

Two treewalkers were left alive, and four melee were still standing. A hail of attacks from our ranged group continued to help us, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Davi collapse, her blue shields winking out. The wave of monsters she’d been holding back washed over the group.

“Hurry!” shouted Andy. “End the tree! They’ll vanish!”

There was no way I could take out a thousand tiny birds on my own. I had to hope the Announcement had been correct, that the end of the treezilla would mean the end of all the smaller monsters.

I threw myself at one of the last treewalkers as Andy did the same with the other. It got a branch around my torso, but the woman I’d freed earlier returned my favor, severing the limb. She stepped in to cover my left side, fending off blows that I had no way of defending against and leaving me free to strike.

Strike I did, over and over, as fast as I could, pushing my superhuman speed and endurance to the limits until a strike took me straight through the monster’s disappearing form.

I fell to the ground, landing next to another amber teardrop, and I snatched it up, sprinting toward the heartvein. Andy was beside me, a similar treasure in his own hands. We slammed them into the central pillar and I looked behind me desperately, praying the birds and ferrets would vanish.

For a second, nothing happened, and I started to run back to my friends, ready to do absolutely anything I could to save them. There were so many little monsters. They -

Belatedly, the monsters faded.

Everyone was clumped together, their own bodies the only shelter left against the claws and beaks of their horde of attackers. They were covered in blood, the damage they’d taken so pervasive that I couldn’t even tell how bad it was until I reached out my hands at let Healing Touch fill me in.

Dozens of bites. Scores of scratches. A deep gouge in Byron’s lower spine that was currently paralyzing him.

But… everyone was alive.

I slumped in relief, using the dregs of my energy to seal their bleeding wounds and stabilize them, and only then did I check over my own body with the senses granted by my healing ability.

As I’d suspected, most of my own injuries were painful, not life-threatening. I’d lost my damaged helmet somewhere - I wasn’t sure when - and the last few hits to my skull had caused some internal bleeding. Fortunately… yeah. Regeneration was taking care of that. Good thing, since I was pretty sure one more cast would send me snoring.

I was spent.

Byron opened an eye after I sealed up his wounds. “...Thanks. Lottie… OK?”

“She’s alive. Asleep, but alive. Your grandma too, and John and Davi. But… what’s up with this, Byron? This is the second time I’ve repaired your spine today. Is this some kind of cry for attention?”

“They broke… all the motorcycles,” Byron rasped. “Gotta get creative with my midlife crisis.”

“Idiot.” I said. “Be careful!”

Byron raised an eyebrow. He didn’t bother forming more words. He didn’t need to.

I shifted uncomfortably. “Look, if I’m saying it…”

It was a halting, wheezy sound, but I was relieved to hear Byron laugh.