There wasn’t a single inch of bare stone to be found. Instead, layer upon layer of vines coated everything, even the ceiling. I wasn’t sure how exactly they clung to the stone, but my guess was some sort of magic rather than the physical methods non-mobile vines used.

There were surprisingly still, considering the plant monster had made its move to seal off the exit. I’d expected an attack already. When that didn’t happen, I flew over to the interior door and sent a burst of force blades scything through the vines clogging the entrance. They were so thick that I wouldn’t even have known there was a door there at all if not for the scrying I’d already done.

The monster, predictably, didn’t appreciate me cutting apart its vines. The entire temple quivered as its body flexed and ripped itself free. By the time the room was done coming to life, I’d already flown past it and blocked the door with a force wall. The mana drain was negligible enough that I decided to just leave the spell active purely to inconvenience my opponent. If it wanted those particular vines to be part of this battle, it would need to withdraw them through the various cracks and side passages they’d filled.

The monster had filled the interior of the temple over years and years, and there were plenty of vines ahead of me. As soon as I floated out of the foyer, I was set upon by a hundred or so, all lashing out as one in an attempt to batter and restrain me. Individually, their attacks were too weak to matter, and that meant there was no danger of them piercing my shield ward.

Monsters like this didn’t really care about individual attacks failing, not when they had thousands of limbs to bring to bear. Additionally, plants didn’t feel pain like animals did, which meant that while the monster definitely knew I’d damaged it, I’d done nothing to actually slow it down.

My only concern here was that I could conceivably be pinned down, though the vines couldn’t actually grab hold of me. Even if that remote possibility came to pass, I saw no reason I couldn’t simply brute force my way free, so I advanced without concern. Blades of force rotated around me, chopping apart anything that got within their range and allowing me access the inner rooms of the temple.

I didn’t bother heading for the main worshipping hall. There was nothing interesting there, and the heart of this monster was underground. I followed the hallways, stopping occasionally to hack through walls of vegetation, until I reached the staircase leading down into the cellar.

While I worked my way forward, I kept an eye on Senica outside. She was doing well, mostly because the trolls had quickly rediscovered their fear of open flames. The trees provided excellent cover as she flitted through their upper branches and ducked behind the trunks. Even better, the trolls themselves were wary about getting too close to the temple, which greatly reduced the amount of open space they could occupy in the square.

More than one of them had been snagged by the surprisingly strong vines and dragged into the temple. Unlike me, they hadn’t made it past the first room and now their regeneration was working against them as the vines repeatedly tore off chunks of flesh and wormed their way inside the trolls’ bodies. Eight of them were being slowly pulled deeper and deeper into the temple, all still alive while the vines repeatedly tore them apart.

It was a gruesome reminder of the fate that awaited me if my magic were to fail for some reason. I could take some solace in the fact that I’d be dead in under a minute, at least. Those trolls would last for as long as they still had mana in them. The irony that this plant monster was essentially doing the same thing to them that we’d come to do—drain them of their blood—was not lost on me.

Light spells guided me forward, not that I really needed them with all the divinations I had going right now. I flew at a sedate pace, a little slower than an unempowered run. If I’d had any concerns about running out of mana, now was when I would have turned back. The stairwell was a writhing mass of vines, these ones covered in metallic thorns instead of leaves. As they reared up and snapped at me, I could see the gouges in the stone walls beneath them.

That made them considerably more dangerous than the outer defenses, enough so that I felt it would be impractical to let my shield ward handle them. I cast a spell to drain the heat from the area that flash froze every vine ahead of me. That wouldn’t kill the plant monster as a whole, but it did make it exceedingly easy to bust up this particular section with a simple force wave.

The first basement level had two sets of stairs leading back up to the ground floor and one more leading even deeper. It wasn’t clear what exactly the purpose of that layout was, but I’d already figured out the entire layout before I entered the temple, so I wasn’t worried about finding my way. I simply floated through the darkness, only my light orb bobbing ahead to illuminate my path.

Up above, Senica had gotten herself into a bit of a sticky situation. She’d overcommitted to the east side of the square, and had done an admirable job of keeping those trolls at bay. As a result of that effort, more trolls on the west side had gotten to the point where they could start climbing trees to get at her. That, combined with the third group on the south side who were bombarding her position with rocks, was making it hard for her to fight back.

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I could see a few ways to turn things around, but I wasn’t sure Senica had the skill needed to cast so many spells in that tight a timeframe. The point where she needed to break away from the fight and flee was fast approaching, and if she didn’t realize it in time, I’d have to go rescue her.

I figured she’d last another few minutes one way or another, so I hurried down a third set of stairs and found myself in the plant’s core room. It was a massive grayish-purple sac that hung suspended from its own vines. Thick, razor-edged, ropy lengths of vegetation were tangled all throughout the room, wrapped around the stone pillars supporting the temple overhead. The whole room writhed like a pit of snakes crawling across each other, and the second the core came into sight, I was under attack.

Ice flowed out across the room, radiating from me and lancing toward the core a hundred feet away. It caught the vines in the air and buried them as more and more layers built over the plants. Unlike what I’d used upstairs, this wasn’t an instant effect. It took several seconds for the ice to coat the room, which was far too large for my previous spell to cover.

It probably wouldn’t kill any part of the plant monster, either, but I didn’t need it to. Now that I had access to the core, it would be a simple matter to finish it off. I formed a force lance and launched it across the basement to strike the sac, only for the magic to rebound and shatter.

“Huh. That’s… surprising.”

Fire exploded around it, but did little more than leave greasy soot across the sac’s surface and thaw out half an inch of ice over the nearby vines. I approached cautiously and studied the sac, both with my eyes and with a series of divinations.

The first thing I realized was that I’d been mistaken about the sac. It wasn’t any sort of vegetation or fruit like its appearance had led me to believe. It was hardened, like an ironbark tree. Strangely, it didn’t seem to be any sort of innate magical invocation, either.

I prodded it a few times while I analyzed its composition, then pulled back in surprise. Unless I was very much mistaken, this plant was actually an incredibly valuable find. Not destroying it was going to make digging here harder, though. It might be worth finding some other starting location just to preserve this specimen.

I summoned my scrying mirror and fed a trickle of mana into it. “Querit,” I called out, but, annoyingly, he didn’t answer. “Come on. What are you so busy with?”

That wasn’t exactly fair, considering how much work I’d dumped on him to do for Hyago. My golem assistant did have the advantage of never needing to sleep or rest, which gave him the ability to get through an incredible amount of work very quickly, but it had only been a few hours since I’d filled his plate. He was probably just doing what I’d asked.

“Keiran?” a voice came out of my mirror a few seconds later. I glanced down at it and blinked.

“Hyago,” I said. “I’ll assume Querit’s busy redoing enchantments.”

“He is, but if it’s urgent, I could go get him.”

Now that I thought about it, Hyago was someone who’d be interested in this, too. “Take a look,” I said, angling the mirror to catch the core sac’s reflection. “Some kind of plant monster that took over tens of thousands of square feet with prehensile vines. This is what’s at the center, about fifty feet underground.”

“A plant monster,” the druid said, his tone not quite unfriendly but clearly unimpressed.

“Yes. That’s not the interesting part. The vines are all held down with a layer of ice right now, but they’ve got razor-edged thorns growing out of them. And this thing,” I said, pausing to rap a knuckle against the sac. “This is entirely metal. Living, growing, biological metal.”

“Not really metal,” Hyago argued. “Just a plant structure that mimics the properties of metal when it’s charged with mana.”

“No,” I said with a laugh. “That’s what’s so interesting. It’s not using any mana to maintain its structure. I think it’s actually growing this way. It might be doing some sort of transmutation to use troll blood to fuel the change, but once it’s complete, it stays that way.”

“Really?” Hyago was eyeing the plant hungrily now.

“I’m thinking about cutting the vines and relocating the sac for further study,” I said. “Would you be interested in being part of that?”

“I…” He paused and shook his head with a sigh. “I have too much work to do already. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Let me go grab your golem for you—”

“Damn it,” I said. “I’ll be right back. I have to go save an overconfident teenager from her own bad decisions.”

“Wait, what?”

But I was already gone. Phantasmal step would have been the perfect spell to get out of the temple quickly, except that it couldn’t pass through living objects and everything was coated in vegetation. Instead, I used an expensive combat teleport with a limited range to pull myself five hundred feet straight up.

I appeared in the sky just in time to watch a troll leap out of a tree and catch my fleeing sister by her foot. She plummeted with the monster, unable to hold both their weights and not strong enough to break its grip. With a sigh, I caught them in a grand telekinesis spell, broke the troll’s fingers in an act of precision, and flung it away. Then I pulled Senica up into the air next to me and looked her over.

“I’m going to bruise where it grabbed me, but I’m fine,” she said.

“I’m still disappointed. I thought you knew when to disengage.”

“I was trying to! I wasn’t expecting the damn tree to come to life and grab me.”

I frowned at that and mentally reviewed what I’d seen with my scrying spells. It was subtle, but she was telling the truth. There was a moment, just when she’d decided to cut and run—probably about thirty seconds later than she should have, but still with enough room to escape—where a branch shifted in front of her.

It could have been the wind, if I looked at that branch in isolation. But it wasn’t. Nothing else had moved – just that one branch.

“Huh,” I said. “This place is full of interesting flora.”