Rory couldn’t recall what exactly the Wilder they had fought before had looked like. All he remembered was a strange amalgamation of plant matter arranged into the most hostile shape that a plant could have ever been.

This one was no less amorphously threatening. Branches formed clawed arms and spiky protrusions without any rhyme or reason, more thick vines popped out from all over its leafy body like haphazard tentacles, and heavy bark formed some sort of defensive carapace likely as protection against enemy attacks. Rory noticed thorns digging into the ground and a central trunk, likely functioning as the creature’s core.

“What is that thing?” Lucy asked. She looked like shed was trying desperately not to be afraid. Even in the dim light, it was easy to see how pale her face had become.

“A Wilder,” Rory said.

“A what?”

Rory’s Sigil of Knowledge was reporting a lot of interesting, if useless, information. But there were some key points that could help them, though a couple he already he knew from having seen one in action before at the palace.

“It’s a monster that was… changed. The Wraith was right. This thing didn’t come from another world like the Otherworlder. It was born here, thanks to a side-effect from all the changes our world has gone through.”

The vines started slithering towards them, and they took several steps back as one. All the branches and other stiff parts of the Wilder started creaking with the promise of violence.

“Well, that’s a great lore lesson,” Lucy said. “But how do we kill it? Fire?”

Rory nodded. “Yes. Pretty much anything will work. We’re just going to have to keep our distance and take it down before it can grab us with its vines or lash out some other way.”

“Easy,” Dez said.

He stepped forward, his hands brimming with dark fire. As a vine shifted closer to them, he blasted it with a fireball. The Wilder groaned in pain as the tendril went aflame, burning to ash in seconds as the black fires spread up towards the monster’s main body.

Dez didn’t give the creature any time to rest. He summoned and pelted more of his Abyssal—no, Chthonic—Inferno. More black flames went up all over the creature. It started rampaging around in panic, the whole dungeon beginning to shake as its groans stormed outwards.

They had thought the creature would fall easily to Dez’s rapacious fires, but it seemed the monsters had counters of its own. It stabbed all the flaming vines into the earth around it, lashing out against the walls and the ceiling.

The fires started going out. Of course, the worse fact was that the dungeon itself might break over their heads.

“Try something else?” Lucy suggested.

Rory threw his ice at the monster. Parts of it frosted over, but with more expert strikes, it again broke free by using its surroundings.

“It’s all the dirt and dust,” Dez said. He coughed. Some of it was starting to affect them too. “Let’s attack together.”

They did so. Rory threw his Frozen Lightning to shock and paralyze the creature simultaneously, though to not much effect. Electricity didn’t work against plant matter, not at the level Rory could currently produce. He’d need a much stronger thunderbolt. The Wilder broke free of the icy with ease as well.

The case was different for Dez’s flames, however, which gave the monster enough trouble to start panicking again.

But the true damage was only dealt by Evelyn’s Pyroclastic Hellfire. Her stream of smoke, ash, and most importantly, magma collided with the Wilder’s wood-bark shields. They burned through its defences, striking its core and setting the whole thing ablaze quickly. The lava immolated the branches too quickly for the Wilder to protect itself against them.

“Don’t let up,” Rory said.

Evelyn nodded, face set and hard. She threw more magma. The creature began to die, its thrashing and groaning lessening for the first time since the fight had begun, though the air was starting to get clogged up with smoke as well.

They retreated once more. Lucy coughed, and Rory’s eyes began to water in the thick smoke that was clouding up the tunnel.

“I really wasn’t expecting to die of smoke inhalation after fixing my Sigil,” Dez said in between fits and coughs.

“It’s fine.” Holding his breath, Rory used his Weaving. He spread out the white lines everywhere, letting them catch both the cloying smoke and land down on the lava and fire causing the smoke to rise in the first place. “I’ve got this.”

Soon enough, all the pollutants and heat sources had been removed by giving Rory another Sigil, another Pyroclastic Hellfire. Only a single Sigil, strangely. Though it made sense when he thought about it. Teal II was far stronger than Argent I. Of course, it was going to need more of the material that it converted into Sigils.

“No, this isn’t for you,” Rory said when Evelyn held out an expecting hand. Instead, Rory gave the Sigil to a surprised Lucy. “You take it. You can’t Extinguish the monsters, so you’re going to have to fight them. Since this works the best, you’re getting one too.”

Lucy frowned but didn’t argue, instead absorbing the Sigil after plucking it from Rory’s hand. Its image glowed on the back of her hand. “Let’s go.”

They stepped past the remains of the Wilder. Just behind it was a six-foot high ledge they had to climb down. The path ahead twisted and turned this way and that, sloping downwards more often than not. After a few more ledges, Rory began to hear the telltale slithering and rasping of leafy vines.

“Hey, do you see that?” Lucy was pointing ahead again. “Against the far wall.”

Rory’s heartbeat spiked, thinking there was another Wilder they were going to have to face. It wasn’t exactly that. The creature in the distant shadows looked more like a long hound, though made of the same haphazard combination of plant matter as the Wilder they’d fought had been.

As soon as it saw them though, it fled down a nearby corridor.

“Do we go after it?” Evelyn asked.

“It could be a trap,” Dez cautioned.

“There’s not much choice.” Rory looked around. The next ledge they had come to didn’t look like a ledge so much as it did a cliffside, the drop disappearing into darkness far below. Just to be certain, Rory threw an icy bolt down. It faded to nothing far, far away. He swallowed. “Looks like our path forward has been chosen for us.”

They headed after the strange Wilder. The earthy smell was growing stronger, so Rory figured they were nearing wherever this dungeon had originated from.

“There’s something glinting…” Evelyn came to a halt beside a fissure in the wall after a few twists and turns had led them to a long hallway gently sloping down.

Rory and the rest of the party had gone ahead, but he stopped and headed back to Evelyn. “What do you see?”

“It looks like some kind of crystal deposit, I think. We’re too far to tell properly.”

Rory joined her and peered through the fissure. She was right. A lone ray of light was shining into a chamber on the other side of the fissure in the wall, glinting on a surface that looked glassy.

“I think you’re right,” Rory said. “It’s an Otherworlder material. I’m sure of it.”

“Well, doesn’t look accessible at the moment, sadly.”

Rory grinned. “Who are you talking to?”

She eyes him for a second, then laughed softly. “My bad.”

Evelyn stepped back, joining the other two who had arrived to stop and watch. Rory hoped the tunnel wasn’t about to collapse with what he intended to do. He activated his Weaving again, focusing it on the earth around the vertical fissure to make the gap grow wider. After receiving a couple of Teal II Sigils of Earth, which he was going to have to remember to grant to Miles, Rory stepped through the gap.

It was a tight fit. He wasn’t exactly waiflike, so he had to shimmy forward and struggle a bit until he had pushed himself through to the other side.

The chamber was nothing more than pocket in the earth about the size of a tool shed. There was a large conic crystalline deposit growing out of the centre of the little room. A gap in the ceiling high, high above let down the ray of light that made the crystal gleam green.

“You alright in there?” Evelyn asked.

Rory waved back at them. “I’m fine. Let me just get some of this… whatever it is.”

He focused on the mineral before him. His Weaving turned the entire thing luminous white, and a Sigil formed in his hand, showing the image of the green cone he had just Woven.

New Sigil!

You’ve obtained a Sigil of Espritium. You can now summon Espritium, a material used in the making of rare jewels and fine glass.

[Teal II] allows creation, manipulation, imbuing, embodying of element in a 73-meter radius.

Stats

Type: Element

Rarity: Exceptional

Tier: Teal II [0%]

Efficiency: High [69%]

Rory pocketed the new Sigil. Before leaving, he used his Weaving to widen the fissure some more, though he was careful not to overdo it in case the tunnel came crashing down.

“Got everything?” Dez asked when he returned to the main tunnel.

“Not even close,” Rory said. “But let’s keep moving for now. I don’t want to spend the whole day here.”

They went through the tunnel after a few more downslope processes and ledge jumps, they began to hear the same viny slithering once more. They all kept their eyes and ears peeled for any sign of Wilders, no matter what form they took, but nothing was immediately apparent. Eventually, they came to the opening of a large room.

“Ready?” He looked around at the others. Their faces were set and resolute. “Let’s go.”

They hurried forward quickly, determined to not give any potential monsters inside the chance to prepare. Unfortunately, all they found was a rotunda-like hall, with one side open to another, slightly larger chamber. The rotunda was dark, but the room beyond it had several shafts of light piercing down from fissures far above. Rory hadn’t even realized they had climbed this far down.

“I still hear it,” Lucy said, voice strained as though she was keeping it on the edge of too loud and not loud enough. “But I don’t see it. Where is it?”

They all looked around. The rasping noise was coming from all directions, unless Rory’s ears were playing tricks on him. High as he raised his staff, all he saw were the curved earthen walls.

“Where—”

Lucy was cut short when the walls exploded all around them. Rory shouted out a warning, but he was nowhere near quick enough with his instinctive blast of ice at the leafy vine shooting towards him. His icy bolt missed, and the vine scratched past his leg as he managed to dive just in time. Thank goodness his Sigil of Rejuvenation was working in his shirt.

But he wasn’t the only one suffering. More vines had broken through all the walls around them, nearly a dozen of the plant tentacles attacking them in a circle.

Evelyn, Dez, and Lucy had set several alight with lava and black flames, though Lucy looked like she was having trouble aiming her Sigil-induced magma. But the vines that weren’t burning to ash at that moment were using the same trick as the last Wilder had. They ruptured the ground and threw up dirt to douse the flames.

“Keep going,” Dez said. “We’ll burn them all one by one if we have to.”

Fat chance of that. Whatever Wilder was controlling these vines, it was smart. Even as the others tried to focus on a single vine while using other Sigils to prevent the rest of the vines form attacking, it didn’t work as well as they thought it could. Before the flames could race up the vines and attack the monster directly, the Wilder simply tore the burning section of its vines right off.

“The walls,” Rory said, activating his Barricading Blizzard. He summoned several icy walls to stop some of the vines in their tracks. The general freezing aura also slowed down their assailants. “Break them down.”

The others heard him. With a combined effort, the walls started crumbling and falling down. Smoke from all the lava still obscured most of the monster on the wide, but Rory got enough of a glimpse.

“What the—that thing’s everywhere,” Dez said. “Can’t be just one like that, can it?”

Rory had no idea. After what he had seen, he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of the creatures could take strange shapes, including wide cylinders meant to trap prey inside.

“The balcony.” Lucy pointed at the opening, where the chamber farther ahead still shone with faint light between the gaps in the Wilder’s body. “We need to get through that.”

“Then let’s go!” Rory shouted.

The concentrated fire. With Rory’s icy barricades providing the perfect protection, and Evelyn’s and Lucy’s magma providing the warmth they needed not to freeze over thanks to Rory’s blizzard, they were able to focus their fire on the opening.

Powerful as Evelyn’s and Lucy’s shots of magma were, they still fell short of the sheer ferocity Dez finally unleashed. Apparently, being stuck in the palace for days on end had fired him up. He launched volley after volley of his Chthonic Inferno, striking the Wilder like a one-man artillery battalion. His blazing black fireballs hammered into the Wilder like cannon fire. Together, they burned through the monster’s barrier in no time.

As a last-ditch effort, the Wilder screamed and tore open the ceiling above them.

“Oh, crap!” Dez shouted.

“Go, go, go!” Rory shouted, beginning to hurtle towards the flaming opening as chunks of the ceiling started to shatter and rain down upon them.

The floor was slippery thanks to the melting ice but there was nothing for it. Evelyn and Rory both slipped once, but the others were there to prevent them from hitting the floor and haul them onwards. Rory hadn’t yet focused his blizzard’s destruction or preservation yet, so for now, he focused on the things blocking them. Namely the magma and the remaining plant matter of the Wilder.

They burst through successfully. There was no pain or mess involved, apart from the Wilder’s suffering. Just beyond the monster, there was another ledge, though this one was several feet deep.

Nobody was sure if it was a good thing there seemed to be a lot of water at the bottom. They dropped a chunk of earth to make sure it was deep enough. Behind them, the dying Wilder was still tearing apart the room, intent on getting to its prey. There was no room to wait.

Taking in a deep breath, and thankful for the Sigil Warded into his shirt that should help him survive, Rory dived in.