They fell over onto their backsides as in front of them even more of the floor split and crumbled away, and up out of it rose an enormous green plant monster.

That was the only word Huld had for it. A tangled mass of knotted green and brown shoots and vines, covered all over in green leaves, even with bits of wood and branches discernible in the huge, seething mass of it, the plant monster was humanoid in shape, and at the top of its torso the shoots and vines were twisted into something that resembled a head, with an open space for a mouth that emitted an inhuman roar again somewhere between that of a lion and a dragon. The little shoot sticking up from the floor, it turned out, had only been the tip of one of its fingers, which were each a shoot of their own, at the ends of long arms of twisted vines. The plant monster had come up onto the platform hand-first, and used its arm to pull the rest of itself out of the ground.

It stood before them now in the sunlight and open air on top of the earthen platform at the summit of the earth shine, terrifying in its tangled majesty, and roared at them. By magic, the earth floor had re-formed itself underneath the monster to make the platform flat and complete again.

“What do we do?! What do we do?!” fireboy was yelling desperately.

“We fight it, you stupid pup!” ponytail shouted back. “Use your damn fire, quick!”

“Watch out!” cried the Manolian.

The plant monster slammed a huge leafy hand down on the fireboy, but he managed to leap out of the way of it in time.

“Fire!” shouted fireboy, appropriately enough, and thrust out his hands in a gesture not entirely dissimilar from the Strike That Moves Mountains. Maybe he was copying it. Huld wouldn’t put it past a foreigner to do something like that.

Flames leapt from fireboy’s hands and engulfed the monster’s torso, setting it alight. It stepped back from the fireboy and roared again, and Huld wondered if he didn’t hear pain in the roar this time.

“It works!” yelled the Manolian. “More of that, Ryn! Can you help us out?”

“Help you out with what?”

“By setting our weapons on fire again!”

“Why don’t I just attack it myself?!”

“Don’t be greedy, pup!” yelled ponytail. “Don’t hog all the glory! There’s enough of it to go around!”

“Alright...come here, everyone!”

The other foreigners all rushed forward to the boy while the plant monster roared and staggered around on fire at the other end of the platform. They drew their weapons, mainly made of steel.

“Put them all together!” commanded fireboy.

The others all held their blades to each other so they touched, except in engineer-girl’s case, who instead contributed a metal whip. The Manolian and the old man had simple, straight swords. Ponytail put in two curved Imfisi blades. Vish had a black Imperial weapon.

“FIR-AHHH!” the fireboy yelled, his magic-word cracking and turning into a shout of exertion. Again fire jumped from his outstretched hands, this time engulfing the upheld weapons in a localised inferno. Then the fire ceased streaming from his hands, but instead of ceasing it remained burning on the blades, the whip.

The monster roared again, more loudly, and the roar was full of inhuman fury.

They all turned to look at it again, then watched in horror as with one leafy hand it tore a flaming chunk of vegetative mass out of its own torso and flung it, still burning, in their direction.

The party scattered, except for fireboy, whom the chunk of flaming plant-mass hit head-on. But instead of hurting him, it broke apart on him, falling apart to either side of him, burning up even more quickly and smoking away into charred ashes, leaving him there, holding out his hands in the same pose he had used to set his friends’ weapons alight.

The plant monster roared yet again. There were still a few flames burning on its body here and there, including on the hand with which it had ripped a section out of its own chest, but it had largely succeeded in removing the part of it that had been on fire from itself. In the cavity that had been left in its chest, new shoots and vines now quickly grew to fill the gap, reforming its body.

“Poodoo!” yelled ponytail vulgarly. “It’s got a way of healing itself!”

“Yes,” but the fire still hurts it! the old man yelled back. “Attack! Attack! Use your flame-assisted weapons!”

“Death and glory!” ponytail shouted, and ran at the monster, readying his twin flaming blades.

“For Imfis!” shouted engineer-girl as she followed him with her fiery whip.

“Manolia!” cried the Manolian.

The old man and the Imperial ran with them too, though without feeling the need to shout battlecries, leaving only fireboy remaining standing where he was, holding his hands out.

Huld watched all of this happening like a curious observer. He was a good distance from the plant in this corner of the platform he had ended up in, and he was strangely fascinated by the foreigners and their unorthodox fighting techniques. He saw no reason to join in yet, if at all. This monster, fearsome as it was, was a guardian of the Primeval Jewel that belonged to his people. Nothing that had happened on their journey through the Shrine had convinced him that it was a good idea to be taking the Emerald from its safe hiding place here, wherever it was. It may be his orders to do this, which he was bound to obey, but he didn’t have to rush to obey them, did he?

What was more, he didn’t have a weapon that could hold fire like the others’ could. So he had no weapon that would be effective against the earth elemental.

Did he?