Anything ~ 54!

- Andre -

A perfect equilateral triangle—formed of scintillating liquid energy that shifted among a trio of colors—blazed in the air, fed by nearly indistinct veins of power that vanished into the earth around them. The Earthen Node slowly rotated in place, a wellspring of power that displayed no signs of damage at all. Andre stared directly at the light, swallowing dryly and looking away only when his eyes began to hurt from the intensity of the collected power.

“Breaking that would kill the Dragon, right?” The Murderhobo’s blasphemy almost made the Druid throw the man into open air out of pure shock. “How hard do you think I’d need to-”

“It’s energy, Luke.” Taylor, ever the voice of reason, came to nature’s defense before Andre needed to do so. “If the colors are anything to go on, it’s red for fire, blue for air, and green for stone or gravity. Now, a simple question arises here, Luke. How do you propose we break energy?”

“You…” Luke looked to the others for confirmation as he slowly finished his thought, “…you figure out how hard you need to hit it?”

“No. Just no. Please don’t try to figure out a way to permanently kill a large section of the planet by removing an Earthen Node,” Andre pled with the group at large, who quieted down. As they approached the ceiling, he released the stone slab, and they coasted the rest of the way up. A coiled vine arresting their momentum was sufficient to terminate their descent gently before they landed, removing any chance of damage even for the Bard. “As you can all tell, the reversed falling is just barely more powerful than the natural force attempting to reassert itself.”

“I can jump pretty high.” Luke launched himself up—down—and the Druid coughed as he tried to speak and shout a warning at the same time.

“Luke!” Andre groaned as he used his vines to yank the Murderhobo back to the ceiling. “Listen, all of you: a forceful enough jump will bring you all the way down to the actual floor again. We have a few minutes before everything else reaches us up here, especially the swamp muck, but we need to be careful as we close in on that Node. The Teeth will not be happy that we’re here. Don’t fall. I’m removing the vines now.”

With all his safety devices removed, The Four could autonomously explore once more. Taylor took note of all the acid-green Teeth coming to rest on the cavernous ceiling, and began to ready her spells. “Andre… I’m fairly certain I have something that could destroy that Node. If we can’t figure out a way to save it, I will break it. It’ll destroy this area permanently, but it’ll give this world time to fix itself. Time to prepare. Time that the Dragon will remove if it gets to another Node.”

“Your Nullify Spell?” Andre went numb at the mere possibility that she could make good on her ultimatum. His mind whirled and settled on ‘blank’. He simply stared at this terrible person in front of him until Zed slapped him and nearly got a thorn in his arm for his trouble.

“Teeth!” the Bard screeched as he pointed toward the Earthen Node. Andre shook himself out of his thoughts when he realized that the Murderhobo was already among the near-countless creatures. Various spells were arcing away from Taylor, and he dazedly wondered how she had regained her mana so quickly.

Even with his mind tormenting him with vague hopes, he began setting up his battle station. Roots drove into the stone around him as a vine anchored itself to his Livingwood Staff, and a moment later, the new bushes were providing him with a sustainable arrow supply. Still, he knew that basic arrows weren’t going to take down these beasties. Therefore, he had given the arrows a single directive to follow whenever they slammed into the shambling Teeth.

Grow.

His first shot zipped out, swerving slightly as Luke got in the original path, then embedded itself in the leg of one of the timber Teeth. Andre allowed himself a momentary pause as he waited to determine whether he would need to be an active participant in the next step, but a moment later, thick roots sprang out of the impact site and burrowed into the ground, bringing the Corrupted Tooth to a standstill. It screeched and tried to grasp the wound it had previously ignored, but its body couldn’t contort enough to-

“Celestial Feces!” Andre flinched as the Tooth was swarmed by other nearby Teeth as they sensed the ‘natural’ plant matter and attempted to get at it.

Potentia gained: 25. (5% kill credit)

“The first successful root canal!” Zed howled enthusiastically.

“Why didn’t I think of that before?” the Druid chastised himself as Zed shouted encouragement to the entire team. It was only then that Andre realized that the Bard was also frantically playing his original-design instrument, the ‘Ukulele’ they had banned in the mountain pass so long ago, so that monsters wouldn’t know their exact location. That ban was out of the question at the moment, and Andre was pleasantly surprised to find that he really enjoyed listening to the instrument. He enjoyed the other benefit even more.

Ballad of Vigor is impacting you! Most-used resource regeneration is increased by 25%!

“Keep that up, Andre!” Zed called to him. “I really like the part where they eat each other and not me! Woo! Yes! Taylor on your left! Woo-hoo, that was close!”

The Druid didn’t have time to track all of his teammates; he needed to start clearing their path. He slammed his Staff into the stone and ordered it to fire arrows at anything that moved, except his team. The Livingwood Staff had a slight intelligence, really just enough to understand that the three other people it had been around for so long were friends and not targets. Arrows constantly sprouted from the bushes, presented themselves to the Staff, and moments later erupted, from whatever Corrupted Dragon Tooth needed to die the most—at least from the Staff’s point of view.

Now having a plan of action, the Druid turned two of the bushes to seed and poured his blood onto them as soon as he scooped them up. With a push of power, he scattered them and repeated the process. In under five minutes, Andre managed to collect thousands of seeds using the new template that he had given them, then turned and began sprinting toward the Earthen Node, which was in the exact center of the cavernous ceiling. “Everyone except Luke, follow me! Murderhobo! You get in front and scatter them!”

He wanted to look back at the Bard, if only to laugh at the man as he tried to play, run, and continue chanting encouragement all at the same time. He hoped that his friend would survive, but now was not the correct time to be worrying about a single person. This entire world could die, and that would set the Plane in a downward spiral that would eventually force it to Descend. If the Bard died, but they saved the world, that would be worth… “Feces, I’m acting like Taylor was. Zed, get over here!”

Andre refused to justify the cost of his friend’s life for the benefit it might have given. Taylor had done that, and until she proved otherwise, it wasn’t just him that had lost faith in her. He hadn’t wanted to say it out loud before they were done here, but frankly… the team had outgrown her. It was time for her to go.

He didn’t even need to do anything overly special. When they finished this mission, they would hide in the desert, start an oasis, and wait for her to go ‘looking for something’, her code for sneaking away and informing the crown of their mission’s success. Then they would vanish to the true hiding place they decided on as a trio.

The fact that he felt her betrayal of the team was inevitable made him slightly sad. It was hard to let go of hope that he had kept alive for decades, even when that hope failed over and over again. He would not make the same mistake of losing trust, even if it actually cost him the world. “Hold tight, Zed. You aren’t gonna like this.”

As soon as the Bard was beside him, Andre used his vines to make a seat under Zed and lifted him up to function as a backpack. He started running again even before the man was fully stable, using the framework of greenery to bear all the weight, as well as propel them both forward. He loved the fact that moving with such ease made him look as strong as Luke, even when his leveling points had almost exclusively been dropped in Capacity. He might not be able to do what the others could, but he could continue forever. Just like nature itself, he would grind down his enemies, remove their defenses, and destroy them with sheer endurance.

The Druid fell in behind Luke and began scattering his seeds to either side as fast as he could grab each handful. The plants sprouted in the rock easily, but only tiny shoots appeared. Zed called him out on it in the same encouraging tone as before, “You’re doing great, Andre, even if I don’t know why your Ability to control plants doesn’t seem to be working!”

“It’s working just fine,” Andre coolly answered as the first of the Teeth closed in behind them. The wooden warrior stepped on his bamboo caltrop-thorns, and the plant hissed as it released its payload into the fresh wound. There were no visible effects, but moments later, the Teeth accompanying the affected Tooth dove at it and began chowing down, revealing a tangled wooden structure growing within the Tooth’s body.

Potentia gained: 25. (5% kill credit)

The Druid vomited to the side as he felt his connection to these plants becoming greater, only for them to be torn apart mere moments later. It felt like a perversion of the natural order to do something so barbaric, and he wondered if the Potentia would comfort him during his inevitable nightmares of this moment if they survived.

Zed’s strained enthusiasm interrupted Andre’s thoughts. “So, yeah, that was my pants, but I think these clothes were ruined the moment we landed in the swamp. Um. yeah, great job! No one can… um. No one can puke on me quite like you can!”