"Uh, I don't think this is gonna be fun," Beth muttered, seeing one ear flicking on top of Blood’s head as her only response.

"So…" Blood continued after another minute of staring. "Are we going to do it?"

"Of course," Beth replied with a shrug, mana coursing through her body as she stepped forward. "I don't see anything, literally anything, else at all around here…and that includes a way back out of this place. Let's start the fun."

She continued forward and laid her hand upon the heart, or tried to, before everything exploded. It wasn't so much that everything exploded, but that a massive tidal wave of mana, thick and dense enough that it was visible as a slight mist, suddenly exploded outward from the heart. Beth and Blood were both blown back into the wall containing the door, and then right through that wall and out into the broad corridor outside. Neither was really injured, the wall having been quite weak as compared to the wave of mana, and both were on their feet and moving a second later.

They sprinted down the corridor, making a rapid turn as the magic surged even more powerfully behind them. Sprinting down the second corridor, they approached a large window, with a very finely carved casement and wonderfully made glass, and slammed into it, exploding out of the palace as there was a horrific groaning and rending noise behind them. They had leapt with enough force, Beth in the lead as she was the more resilient and heavier of the two, despite Blood's mass being condensed into her human form, that they flew over the ravine and out into the area around the palace.

Beth turned as she flew, spinning to look back at the castle before landing on her feet in the open ground. A massive, towering plant with vines bigger around than her torso, and lots of them, had burst from the top of the palace. And not just the top, as vines had seemed to fill the entire structure, bursting from the windows and doors of lower levels before exploding out the main entrances, filling the open spaces around the palace before dipping into the steep ravine around it. Beth signaled Blood and the two leapt back, moving away from the palace at a rapid pace before stopping for a time to observe the changes.

It was as they watched the plant totally consume the palace, though it strangely didn't do that much damage, if any at all, to the overall structure, that they started to have some better idea of what had happened here. Likely, there were things that they just wouldn't ever be able to figure out, but some things became clear as the pollen released by the giant, golden flowers that grew from the vines reached the girls even at the distance they stood. It had a bit more affect on Blood, but both of them felt their blood boil and their thoughts grow rapid and maddened. It appeared the plant not only had an intoxicating effect on any that drew near, but it caused a berserk madness on those exposed to it.

"You’re not-" Blood started to growl as Beth walked back towards the castle.

"Of course I am, you dumb mutt," Beth growled back, though with a bit of an amused edge to her voice that let Blood know she was still joking even as the power of the plant affected her mind. Blood sighed and sat where she was, not needing to venture any closer to have to try to stave off whatever combination of airborne toxin and magic the plant was using to alter their minds. Beth moved back almost to the very edge of the ravine, bold to the point of folly, before sitting down and starting to meditate. She breathed deeply, in and out, over and over, as she healed her own body and mind.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there, but eventually she was disturbed from her concentration by something thumping down next to her. That something turned out to be Blood, who had progressed back to her with several hops forward over the hours she had been meditating. Beth simply returned to meditating, waiting for Blood to be ready, as she herself had needed far less time to adjust, having already been at Copper[8] in her resistance. She continued regardless, it being both good practice, and not really having anything else to do before Blood adapted.

"So," Blood said eventually, only a bit of growl in her voice as she stood. "How the fuck do we handle…that?"

"How do you eat an elephant?" Beth replied while watching the wolf wave her arms.

"What?" Blood asked, Beth just imagining her scrunched brows under her mask.

"It's an old saying, 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.'" Beth replied.

"You want to just…lawn-mow it to death?" Blood asked, confusion still evident in her voice.

"Pretty much. It looks like the weird, mind-altering toxin magic crap is its main form of attack. Not that I think we're in the clear, but it looks like it relies on that primarily. Now that the toxin isn't a problem, it's just about how much it can physically fight as a giant plant."

"Or grow," Blood muttered darkly.

"There is that," Beth said with a sigh. "Anyway, we're here now and this is what we've gotta do, so let's get to it."

"Plants. I hate plants," Blood grumbled as they moved forward. There was no room on the causeways that led over the ravine anymore, the plant having overtaken everything, including the ravine itself. They still made their way to one of the causeways, needing somewhere to stand as they cleared the plant, assuming, of course, that the plant didn't regrow faster than they destroyed it.

That turned out not to be the problem, though there definitely was a problem. As soon as Blood twisted her arms and stepped forward, slashing down and unleashing her energy claws, two things happened. First, the plant seemed to detect the attack, releasing even more toxin in the area around where they stood. Second, as Blood's attack bit deeply into the plant, more toxin and other nasty juices spumed out, the two girls easily dodging the acid-like substance that sprayed everywhere.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"This is going to suck," Beth muttered crossly, the toxin again affecting them both. They had to take a pause and focusing on healing themselves and let their resistance try to equalize before they could do anything else. Luckily, they had both gotten their Toxic Resistance rather high by that point, allowing them to sit directly in the thick haze of toxin and focus on repelling it. The concentration was so great that it took them a long time to acclimate, Beth glancing at her screen to double-check when they stood after weathering the worst of it. She noted that they had both managed to get the resistance to Silver, that likely leading to why they were suddenly far, far less affected by the toxin than they had been just moments before.

Now, they just had five hundred tons of angry, toxic, acidic plant to chew through, though they would definitely be chewing it figuratively. Beth wondered for a few moments if she could get some kind of resistance to the acid, which was answered in less than a minute of them chopping and cutting by just such a resistance popping up. She mentioned it to Blood and the wolf reluctantly let herself get some acid on a spot on her arm and hand, eventually getting the resistance herself. Beth pulled the only empty glass bottle she had laying around out of her necklace, greatly regretting not having more container-type objects stashed away, filling it with acid before continuing on. She had her blade out and was using a combination of Celestial Annihilation and Monstrous Blow to hew through plant matter at a rapid pace.

She didn't concern herself with the toxin or the acid anymore, letting herself get coated in both as they chopped across the causeway and then through the courtyard outside the small door they had first used to peek out. Blood was much more circumspect, but still applied acid to herself to train up the resistance, neither much minding the slight ache that was all they felt thanks to Pain Resistance high in the Silver range. Pushing through one corridor and then another, they chopped for a couple hours while leveling resistances and trying not to exhaust themselves. It was a long slog considering just how much plant mass there was, as well as them not being a hundred percent sure what the best route from the door to that room with the crystal would be.

Beth still didn't know what exactly had happened, but the basics of either the full plant, or just the crystal, causing everyone to go mad and kill each other seemed reasonable. There were still holes in that story, however, including the fact that before the plant burst out of the crystal again, there was no damage to anything within the palace. There was also the question of all the corpses getting piled in the ravine; if everyone went mad and killed each other, why weren't there corpses throughout the palace? Beyond signs of battle, where was the blood, broken armor pieces, and body parts that would be strewn about if everything sentient was dead? Did someone not succumb, but manage to survive and clean everything up, including throwing the bodies into the ravine afterwards?

There was a change when they got to the room where Beth had set off the whole catastrophe, or re-set it off, as the case may be. The corridor outside was choked with the densest, and most acid filled, of the plant matter that they had yet encountered, but the room beyond was a different matter. Inside was a massive web-work of vines no thicker than Beth's index finger, crossing and crisscrossing the room, all of them with golden flowers blooming across them quite densely. These flowers appeared far more intricate and pristine than the ones on the massive vines outside, and also far more potent, as the air was hazy with a fog of the toxic substance the plant used to delude the mind. Both girls could feel their minds cloud and anger spike just standing in the doorway and so had to take some time to build another level or two of resistance before they could even step inside.

"Be careful with this," Beth said.

"Yeah, I know, it's dangerous," Blood replied with a snort.

"No, I mean, take it apart carefully," Beth said. When she saw Blood's slightly tilted head and flicking ears, she elaborated, "I'm sure a lot of this is valuable, and we're not in a special fake instance right now. We might be able to sell these super potent vines and flowers for buku bucks."

"I don't know what that means, but fine," Blood replied, starting to carefully cut through the vines with her claws.

Beth assisted, but was much less useful, as a greatsword wasn't exactly a precision tool, and pulling them out by hand also posed several difficulties. Mainly, it was Blood that spent the next twenty minutes clearing out the room, storing all the thinner, but stronger, vines in her necklace. Beth waited until the room was mostly clear to walk up to the pedestal and grab the heart, trying to store it. That proved a mistake, as she was immediately locked in an intense battle.

The heart wasn't sentient, but it did have a huge amount of mana and a massive force driving it to enrage and corrupt anything around it. With the heart now active and pushing its power out, Beth touching it had immediately pitted them against each other. She snarled as she pushed forward, not retreating but instead grabbing the block of crystal with her other hand, space warping in the room as a crown settled on her head. Blood shouted something that she couldn't devote even the tiny amount of processing power necessary to for her to understand, Beth blotting it out as she filled herself with mana, particularly focusing on her brain. She ran Lordly Reconstruction and flooded Indomitable Heart with an immense amount of mana and willpower, shoving back against the heart.

The two were locked in battle like that for a minute, then two, then another as Beth's mana drained faster and faster. She wouldn't be able to keep this up, and the inexhaustible well of the heart didn't look like it was drying up any time soon, so she went further on the attack. Perhaps a ludicrous thing to do, but Beth wasn't one to back down, and she especially wasn't going to lose a fight against a little shiny rock. She focused her will and power, crushing her Presence down on the little cube with an immense effort, causing the air throughout the room to shudder and crack. She didn't let up, squeezing down, slowly and inexorably like a pneumatic vice, her raw willpower suppressing the power of the heart.

In the end, it was like a switch was suddenly flipped, as Beth went from contesting a vague and amorphous will that only wanted madness and rage to, suddenly, *SNAP*. There was nothing there. The pressure disappeared and Beth accidentally crushed part of the pedestal under the heart from the sheer force of will she was exerting. The heart itself, fortunately, was entirely unharmed, and sitting there calm and neat as could be. Beth collapsed on her rather ample ass with a coughing huff, the crown disappearing from her head in the same moment. Blood walked over and gave her a quick check to make sure she hadn't broken anything important by being an idiot but, as usual, Beth turned out to be far stronger that whatever she happened to be slamming her hard head against.

The wolf moved out into the hallway then and returned a moment later to report the vines were disappearing, shriveling up and wilting away into nothingness. Beth just nodded her head tiredly and asked for a few minutes of the lupine woman standing guard before dropping into deep meditation. She was almost entirely out of mana and very low on stamina, feeling the weariness of how far she had pushed herself deep in her bones. It was all on a mission for Blood and not herself, but the woman was not just a companion, not just a sister, but even closer to her than Kim or Soph had ever been and may ever be. Beth was perfectly happy to throw her life on the line for someone she loved unconditionally.

She was eventually recovered enough that she was back on her feet, tossing the damned heart, which had lost the Fell moniker, into her necklace before leaving the room. The two made their way through the castle, having to search for an hour before finding that a new, different portal had appeared in an entirely different location. Beth just looked at Blood and shrugged before leaping in, the wolf growling before following her.

They got dumped out somewhere near where they had originally entered, the second portal not sticking around. They took a minute to go and check the first location, finding that that portal had disappeared as well, though there were still a lot of the damned monkeys hovering around the area. The two ignored them for now, not having any obligation to clean the rest of that mess up. It was time for them to go back and turn in the two missions, bringing Blood to one away from her own Silver test.

############################