Children, they are a bunch of excited children. That was the first thought that Tristan had when he saw what was occurring in the Colosseum bowl. The spriggon were not sitting respectfully in the stands, they were instead swarming the central area. This gave Tristan more leeway when spying.
His entire section was quickly emptying as no more spriggons were flowing into it. That was cause for a human to investigate, and he hoped that the beasts would not see anything odd about it. He was still careful to keep most of his body hidden behind the retaining wall.
The first thing to catch Tristan’s eyes was the ent in the center of the room. It was the same one he had seen before, sitting in the center. At the time he had not realized how much larger this one was than its comrades. The leafy mane was more vibrant with a slight glow that gave it the appearance of green fire. It was a good twelve feet tall, and at least four feet from shoulder to shoulder.
“Are you seeing this,” Tristan sent to Vulcan, “What tier do you think that one is?”
“Maybe tier eight? I’m guessing based off of size. I would be more worried about the fact that it's holding a sword,” Vulcan said.
Tristan nodded, that was indeed an issue in more ways than one. It was a chestnut brown blade made entirely of wood. Normally Tristan would have scoffed at the material choice, but he could feel the dense aura of adamance. The ent had a tier appropriate weapon, but that was not the only problem with the blade.
Flowing green runes ran down the center of the double edged weapon. They flickered and pulsed with a light that pulsed in time with the light in its leaves. Tristan could not read runes yet, but he knew some things about them. He knew that they were real words and could be used to determine the effects they facilitated. Unfortunately, he could not read the language.
“Slag that's a nasty effect,” Vulcan muttered, “Don’t get hit by that weapon, it has some kind of gravity effect. Maybe to hold you down and take the whole force of the swing.”
“I wasn’t planning to get hit by a ten foot long sword,” Tristan hissed back. The weapon had to weigh nearly fifty pounds by itself, “Is that an issue at higher tiers, people just flying away when you hit them?”
“Depends, us metal guys don’t tend to, but I can only punch someone with the same force that it takes to move them. The rest is lost, so against an air legend I would try and back him into something so he actually takes damage,” Vulcan explained some of the more ridiculous aspects of high tier combat.
Tristan was not dumb enough to fight an armed ent. Especially not one armed like that. He scanned the rest of the room and noticed something else. The giant wading through the swarming spriggons was the most eye catching thing in the Colosseum but at the center of the vortex of clamoring tree men was another creature.
Mother did appear to describe this newcomer quite well. It had the general shape of a woman, though its skin had the waxy green texture that new shoots had. Branches grew like horns from where the eyebrows would be and twisted back over its head. Flowers bloomed on what appeared to be vines that took the place of hair.
The creature was kneeling, giving Tristan a poor view of its eyes. Just like the spriggons, its proportions were slightly off. The fingers were a bit too long and the waist a bit too narrow. Tristan could see this creature being in some of the stories people told around campfires, especially considering what it was doing.
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Due to his elevated angle relative to the mother creature, he could see that it was pulling apart the dead ent’s chest. It was a struggle for it, meaning it was likely not a powerful plant monster variant. When it opened up the ent corpse and found the heart gone, it let out a cry that Tristan was sure conveyed anger.
It was not the rough grainy texture of the spriggon and ents, but more similar to the screeching when the bow was incorrectly pulled across a stringed instrument. Tristan winced but did not move to leave, he wanted to see what the mother would do with the body. The mother stood, looking around at the vortex of spriggons. It screeched a few times and the movement of the spriggon stopped, they looked at each other uncertainly.
“Which one of you will give me your seed? Hmm, then something that roughly translates to surgery graft, I’m not a botanist,” Vulcan said. Tristan looked forward to reaching a city, he needed to learn some new languages.
One spriggon stepped forward with a strut that conveyed a sense of pride. It spread its arms as if it wanted a hug. The mother placed a hand on the side of its face in an almost loving gesture, then she tore out its heart with her other hand. She did not spare the spriggon another glance as she strode over to the ent and placed the new organ inside the corpse.
“Time to go,” Vulcan said.
“Why?” Tristan asked as he backed off. He still saw the mother tear apart the spriggon’s body to patch up the ent.
“They don’t have a soul,” Vulcan said.
“I noticed, it makes them easy to drain off their essence,” Tristan said sarcastically. Vulcan knew he was aware they lacked souls.
“You can’t die without a soul because you were never alive in the first place. At least not like you and I,” Vulcan explained.
Tristan cursed and started running. The mother was going to resurrect an ent that knew exactly how he fought. It was so obvious that it should have been his first thought. Though maybe a mother raising her children had a slightly different meaning to the spriggon. He rushed down the steps and opened the door.
Three spriggon who were inspecting the puddle of decay alloy looked up in shock. Tristan did not want to ruin his shoes, so he jumped over the puddle and the spriggon, landing just behind them. He smashed a knife hand strike into two hearts, or seeds if that’s what they were, and kicked the final one into the puddle of decay.
It started screaming as the decay started eating away at its wooden body. The concentration was more than high enough to kill it before it would be able to pass on the direction he ran. He tossed the two other bodies in the puddle as well before sprinting away. Most of them were in the Colosseum at the moment, so it would be a few moments before any emerged if they did at all.
Moving at around fifty miles per hour, it still took a good amount of time to reach the wall that was built into the cliff. The wall was lined with the prison cells for slaves, miles of them. Knowing it would be difficult to find a specific one, Tristan had left that door open. A plan that would have worked if the spriggon had not searched each one and left the doors open as well.
Should he run along the doors looking for the daylight that would signify his exit? His internal clock was off, an irregular sleep cycle had made him unsure if it was day or night. Grimacing, Tristan decided to make a new hole. He reached for his mason artifact, but thought better of it. If hammers worked better than picks, the miners would have used them instead.
He summoned Vulcan and made a pick head attached to the shaft. The miners were no slouches, but being able to put more force behind every swing than an entire team made progress quick. Relatively. It was still loud and slow, the rock wall was not thin. Eventually, he made a small hole that let in the sound of running water.
It was just in time to hear the patter of feet. He had been found by a spriggon search party. They lacked an ent, but they also ran as soon as they spotted him. Soon they would be back with help that could handle him.
“Any ideas, Vulcan?” Tristan said.
“You could try pushing in gaseous metal into the cracks into the wall, it might crack the wall. It might also kill you, iron turns to gas at 5200 degrees,” Vulcan said.
Tristan was not aware that temperatures went that high. He was also not sure that making a gaseous metal was possible. The essence cost went up with the temperature making the idea mostly infeasible.
“Ice takes up more space than water, would making a solid with decay alloy work?” Tristan asked.
“No that's a water only thing. Everything you have gets smaller the colder it gets,” Vulcan said.
Tristan grimaced, He still had a good two or thee hours worth of mining left. There was no way he would make it in time. Better to fight where he could maneuver, this closet would only remove his options. When he stepped out he could see a search party of spriggon. They were spread out far enough that he would not be able to catch all of them in a single attack.
When they saw him they started screeching at the top of their lungs.