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“I wish my team were here,” he said.

“They are, somewhere,” Jory said. “We get to the middle and you’ll find each other.”

They finished eating and resumed their course through the city. A few hours and a couple of monster packs later, a welcome message popped up in front of Jason.

Contact [Niko Tomich] has entered communication range.Contact [Bethany Cavendish] has entered communication range.Contact [Hudson Kettering] has entered communication range.

Jason immediately opened a voice chat.

“Beth,” Jason said. “Are you all alright?”

“We are,” Beth’s voice came back. “Niko and I were dropped on the same tower and we found Hudson along the way. No sign of Emily or Mose, yet. How about you?”

“Missing two as well; Clive and Humphrey. Want to meet up?”

“I do,” Beth said. “We’re kind of stuck here, anyway. There’s a bunch of people all looking for a way to the centre of the city.”

“Something’s blocking the way?”

“Yeah. Come find us and you can see for yourself.”

Jason added them to the party, allowing him to find her with his map ability. Not to long thereafter, Jason and his group were arriving at what turned out to be a sizeable camp of adventurers. From the looks of it, some of them had been here for days. The wariness the adventurers had been treating each other with was absent here, with all looking to find a way forward.

The Greenstone adventurers were easy to pick out from the imports, just from their auras. The foreign adventurers had clean, controlled auras. Outside of Jason and Beth’s groups, most Greenstone adventurers had shoddy aura control at best.

“What’s going on?” Jason asked, after greetings and introductions between his team and Beth’s.

“Some kind of plant monster infestation,” Beth explained. “Anyone trying to get closer to the city centre than this is faced with tentacles and plant monsters crawling out of the ground. People have tried going around, but the infestation seems to be encircling most of, if not the entire the central region of the city.”

“How do you know it’s encircling the central area and not covering it entirely?” Jory asked.

“We don’t,” Beth said. “We’re just hoping, because otherwise, how is anyone going to complete these trials. A few groups have tried fighting their way through but we have no idea if they made it or if they’re mulch, now. We know from the people who’ve tried going around that there are a few camps like this one, with people gathered to see if anyone can figure out a way through. Assuming there’s a way through at all.”

Quest: [Reclaimed by Nature]

Plant life has not just reclaimed this part of the city but actively defends it. Find a way past the aggressive flora to reach the heart of the city.

Objective: Circumvent aggressive plant life 0/1.Reward: Varies by effectiveness of method.Some party members are too far away to participate in this quest. They will not receive this quest until they re-enter proximity to party leader.

“What the heck is that?” Beth asked.

“That’s Jason’s ability,” Sophie said. “He gets free stuff for doing what he was going to do anyway. It’s basically a scam.”

“I can drop you out of the party if you don’t want to participate,” Jason said.

“I can drop you off a building,” Sophie told him.

“I can float down, remember?”

“Not if I knock you out first.”

“Look, I love some sexually-charged banter as much the next girl,” Beth said, “but we have a bunch of plant monsters to deal with.”

While Jason and Sophie looked at Beth with matching expressions of silent affront, Beth turned her attention to Jory.

“You’re an alchemist, right? Plant monsters can often be handled with alchemical solutions, so is there anything you can do.”

“Maybe,” Jory said. “I’ll need to know what we’re dealing with before I can look at solutions.”

“There are a lot of impressive adventurers, here,” Neil said. “I have to imagine someone knows something.”

“There’s a little council, of sorts,” Beth said. “Each team sends one or two people to discuss a way past it. People are trying all sorts of things, so we’ve been meeting every few hours to talk about results.”

“How’s that going?” Jason asked.

“It’s a bunch of adventurers used to getting their own way, so about as well as you’d expect.”

“Jory,” Jason said. “You’re about as close to a plant expert as we’ll get. Beth, can you take us around to people with firsthand knowledge of this thing?”

“I can,” Beth said. “I told you that some groups have tried to make it through. Some didn’t come back, so we don’t know if they made it through. Others tried and came back when things got too rough.”

Jason nodded his thanks, and suggested the rest his group to ask around, see what they could find out. While the others roamed the camp, Beth took Jason and Jory to speak to some of the other teams, Jory taking notes on anything they could tell them. After speaking to enough teams that they were just getting the same information over again, they regrouped to take stock.

“What do you think?” Jason asked Jory.

“This is potentially very bad,” Jory said.

“How so?” Beth asked.

“I think what we’re dealing with might not be plant monsters,” Jory said. “I’ve heard of something like what’s been described to us before, and that wasn’t a monster at all. It was a magical plant.”

“You think these plants have taken over this section of city?” Keane asked.

“Not plants,” Jory said. “Plant, singular. One single, massive plant mass, buried underground and sending up parts of itself to find prey.”

“Prey?” Neil asked. “Since when are plants predatory?”

“I’ve heard of predatory plants,” Jason said. “The one on my world are small, though. They lure in bugs, that kind of thing.”

“The one I’m thinking of is bigger,” Jory said. “Much bigger. It takes centuries, but they have been known to grow to the size we’re looking at, here. It thrives underground, slowly expanding. It forms symbiotic relationships with the other plant life in the area, which become like sensory organs for it. Then its starts preying on anything that wanders into its area. Animals quickly learn to avoid it and it goes dormant. It lets the animals come back, waits until the area is teeming, then strikes. Tentacle vines and spawned, semi-independent plant creatures.”

“And you think this is what we’re dealing with?” Jason asked.

“I can’t know that for sure,” Jory said. “It’s what I can think of that fits.”

“You think this whole section of city has a giant plant monster under it? One monster?”

“Not a monster,” Jory said. “We know from the people who fought them that the spawned plant creatures are iron-rank, while the tentacles, which will be appendages of the main body, are bronze rank. No bronze-rank monster spawns that big, or occupying that much space underground.”

“What’s it called?” Jason asked.

“It’s called a blood root vine,” Jory said. “It’s named that because it straddles the line between plant and animal, with its predatory behaviour and blood sap. That was what really gave it away, when people started saying the tentacles bled when cut. The sap of a blood root vine is almost identical to blood and has a number of alchemical uses. Most of the big ones you hear about are from alchemist grow houses that were abandoned and the blood root vine slowly expanded until someone found it again. It’s a story that goes around in alchemy circles but you never actually expect to see it.”

“So, what do we do about it?” Beth asked.

“Assuming I’m right,” Jory said, “the key is the main body. That means an underground root network. From what I hear, when clearing out a blood root vine that’s gotten out of hand, there’s two ways of handling it. One is to dig the whole damn thing up and burn it. That’s logistically infeasible, especially in five days. I have heard, however, of another method. A method we have the good fortune to have on hand.”

Jory turned a pointed look on Jason.

“Me?” Jason asked.

“You,” Jory said. “I can’t guarantee the authenticity of this story, but I have heard of using afflictions to infect the main body and rot the whole thing. You have to get underground, at the root system itself, though. If you just try it on the tentacles, it will let the tentacles fall off to protect itself.”

“We’ve already tried that,” Beth said. “There’s a few people in camp who can use afflictions, including me. We blasted a chunk out of the ground and poured every affliction we had into the roots. They withered up, but it didn’t spread.”

“Were any of you focused affliction specialists, like Jason, or were they all area abilities like yours?” Jory asked.

“Area, like me,” Beth said. “Not to put you down, Jason, but who afflicts one person when you can affect whole groups.”

“That’s your problem,” Jory said. “We’re talking about a plant spread over an area the size of Old City. The afflictions you fed it were like trying to turn the sea yellow by taking a sneaky wee in it. You need afflictions that grow worse and worse, faster and faster, instead of petering out.”

“Will my afflictions even work on it?” Jason asked. “We’ve seen a few plant monsters since we got here and my abilities have been very inconsistent on them.”

“They should,” Jory said. “As I said, the blood root vine is more akin to animals than other plants.”

“Blood is one thing,” Jason said, “but to get the kind of damage escalation we need, I’ll need my curses. That requires a soul, or at least the motive spirit most monsters have instead of one.”

“I can’t guarantee anything,” Jory said, “but once it reaches a certain size, it even has a dim, animalistic intelligence. Hopefully it’s close enough to an animal that there is something inside it for your curses to told hold of.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we get out and come up with something new,” Beth said. “Unless you have a better plan, we may as well try.”

“The trick will be getting access to the root system,” Jory said. “You said you had someone who can open up a hole in the ground?”

They all turned to Hudson, the large man who served as the front-liner for Beth’s team. He had been staying quiet through the conversation, leaving things like planning to Beth. His earth powers were the most prominent abilities in his power set.

“It’s not me,” he said. “I have the earth essence, but not a hole-digging power.”

“It was another earth user,” Beth said. “We can get her again.”

“Alright,” Jason said. “Beth, talk to this council you mentioned. See if you can’t find us some extra muscle to fight our way in with. Jory and I will try and get more specific about what we can expect when we try this.”

“What about the rest of us?” Keane asked.

“Get some rest,” Jory said. “This thing will be relentless in fighting back against us. You’ll need all the stamina you can muster.”

The group they gathered had twenty six members, including the five from Jason’s group and three from Beth’s. Keane had found a member of his own team in the camp and pulling him into the endeavour, along with that team member’s own temporary group. Aside from that was another earth essence user and a few more people Beth had wrangled into participating.

The region of the city occupied by the plant was more overgrown than other parts of the city. The buildings were mostly rubble, the paved streets long overturned by roots and other plant growth. As they moved into the area, tentacle vines crawled out to the ground to ensnare legs, thorns covered in soporific toxin biting through skin. The team fought back, cutting away vines as healers purged the poison, a task in which Jason participated using his own cleansing power. It was highly effective, although the way Jason consumed the cleansed afflictions did not go unnoticed.

“Did you just say ‘feed me your sins?’” another adventurer asked him.

“There’s a lot of people chanting spells,” Jason said. “You probably misheard.”

A variety of plant creatures came shambling into the attack. Plodding mounds of fibrous matter that whipped at them with tentacle arms, they weren’t very dangerous but they were tough, their numbers swelling as the group struggled to put them down as fast as new one appeared.

“This should be far enough!” Jory yelled after he determined that they should have definitely made their way over the root system.

“Alright!” Beth called out. “Everyone knows what to do. Gather on me!”

The group pulled in tight on Beth as Hudson, beside her, started casting a spell. Shortly after, a stone dome rose up out of the ground in two halves, closing over them. As it sealed them in, crystals embedded in the dome lit up the interior with luminescence.

The other earth user called for more room and the people inside the dome moved up against the walls. The creatures outside were shut out, but tentacles still came up through the ground. Beth designated a team to protect the earth user while she used her spell to dig. Her spell did not take long and soon gobbets of wet earth were geysering out of the ground and over everyone inside the dome.

“Sorry,” she called out. “I don’t normally do this indoors.”

With the earth user’s spell completed, Jason glanced at Jory, who nodded back. Jason then walked up to the hole, even as more tentacles crawled from the ground to attack the people under the dome. Beth directed the people who had been shielding the earth user to switch their protection to Jason. Looking in the hole was a vertical tunnel from which the wet ground had been excavated. Left behind, scraped but intact by the digging spell, were thick roots, looking like thick green and yellow veins.

“Moment of truth,” he muttered to himself. Loaded up with every buff the whole group could muster, he chanted a spell.

“Bleed for me.”

A crack appeared on the thickest root, blood red sap trickling out. The sap was, as Jory surmised, close enough to blood that Jason’s ability took hold.

Special attack [Haemorrhage] has inflicted [Bleeding] on [Blood Root Vine].

“Now the real test.”

He chanted another spell.

“Carry the mark of your transgressions.”

Spell [Castigate] has inflicted [Sin] on [Blood Root Vine].Spell [Castigate] has inflicted [Mark of Sin] on [Blood Root Vine].[Blood Root Vine] have resisted [Mark of Sin].[Mark of Sin] does not take effect.

Transcendent damage burned a symbol into the root as the spell took hold. The bronze-rank vine resisted one of the effects, even with all the buffs Jason was under, but it was the one Jason didn’t need. He let out a relieved breath, then remembered he couldn’t afford to relax as a thorny vine wrapped around his leg.

Special attack [Vine Thorn] has inflicted [Subjugating Toxin] on you.You have resisted [Subjugating Toxin].[Subjugating Toxin] does not take effect.You have gained an instance of [Resistant].

Before Jason could cut away the vine, one of his protectors had done it for him.

“Need a cleanse?” the man asked.

“All good, thanks,” Jason said, turning his attention back to the hole.

He cast another curse on the vine, which it resisted, then a second and third time before it took hold.

[Inexorable Doom] has inflicted [Inexorable Doom] on [Blood Root Vine].

Jason held a hand out, slicing it with his wrist razor. Leeches went spilling down into the hole.

“Sorry to drop you in a hole, Colin. See if you can’t suck some blood out of that vine.”

At another of the adventurer camps around the aggressive plant zone, Clive and Valdis watched a heavily injured group retreat from the danger zone.

“I think you were right to urge caution, Clive,” Valdis said. “It looks like something has set the vines right off.”

Previously, the tentacles would only emerge from the ground to attack intruders. Now, however, they were erupting from all over the ground, thrashing about wildly.

“I think something is happening to them,” Clive said. “Are you seeing those black patches?”

“I am.”

They watched as the black patches grew larger, some vines even rotting and falling dead to the ground.

In another part of the city, Humphrey and his temporary team were deep into the territory of the aggressive vines. Their intention had been to fight their way through, but the deeper they went, the more plant monsters and tentacles appeared to meet them. They were a powerful group but they were slowly being overwhelmed.

“Do we keep pushing forward, or go back?” Carly called out, panic tinging her voice.

“Forward,” Lowell called back. “There has to be an end to it. We could be almost clear.”

“There’s no guarantee of that,” Humphrey countered. “We go back.”

“We can’t make it back,” Lowell objected. “We have to risk it.”

“No, we don’t” Humphrey held firm, not pausing as he hacked away at the tentacles. “Our chances may be slight but at least we know there is one, going back.”

The tentacles started growing more and more numerous but flailed wildly, rather than grab at the adventurers as they had done previously.

“What’s happening?” Carly asked.

“Something’s rotting the tentacles,” Lowell said, and as he said, pointing to where the tentacles were turning black from the base. Some rotted away and dropped dead, even as more emerged from the ground. Then a silver, blue and gold light lit up all the tentacles, dissolving them to nothing. As it did, the plant monsters became inert collections of plant matter.

“Was that transcendent damage?” Carly asked.

“It was,” Humphrey said.

They looked around, seeing that whatever had destroyed the plants around them had affected everything within sight. Hurt and exhausted,  they dropped to the ground to rest.

“What do you think did that?” Carly asked.

“Not what; who,” Humphrey said with a smile. “I know who did this.”

“You’re telling us some iron ranker did all this?” Lowell asked.

“I know these powers,” Humphrey said. “They belong to a man who can’t help making a spectacle of himself. Thankfully.”