TT:E C17

Alex dived forward, bringing his armored arm up in front of himself as if he had a shield. The head of the green creature collided with him as it dove through the broken window and both of them staggered back from each other. Ed used the opportunity to charge forward himself, his boar spear held out in front. Loose shelves and the items that covered them were knocked to the floor. The creature’s head twisted unnaturally on a neck that Maeve couldn’t spot as it pulled back and away from Ed’s attack.

Alex scrambled through the scattered items on the floor and came back up with his shield in his free hand. He drew it up in front of himself and advanced toward the fight, his steps steady. The creature slowly pulled back, it’s head raising up toward the ceiling and it’s arms spreading out in a way that reminded Maeve of an insect somehow. The rest of its body climbed down from the outside wall and dropped through the broken window reinforced that feeling.

It’s lower body was just as green as the upper half and resembled a stickbug with a long slender rear and six thin legs. Looking closer as it slowly moved around, completely opposite its fast strikes, the weird texture of it’s body was revealed to be grass, twisted and weaved together to create its strange form. It was like an insectoid centuar, with a thin upper body growing up from a lower thorax like a mantis, but with two humanoid arms and a head that was nothing like a bug.

The grass based creature thrust out with both arms, rocketing its fists forward in a sudden burst of speed it punched out at both Alex and Ed. It’s eyes twisted in its head to track both of them as it attacked. Alex managed to deflect the fist aimed at him up using his shield but was rocked back by the blow. Ed was forced to take the attack on his armor. He was knocked back even farther than Alex and grunted in pain as he struggled to stay upright.

A thin beam of mint green light hit Ed and splashed against his armor like a water balloon bursting. Maeve’s head snapped to the side to see Amelia, one hand out and a faint trace of similarly colored green light fading from around her hands. The sight of her friend contributing to the battle snapped her out of her shock. Cursing under her breath she points a finger at each of the two men who are directly fighting the creature and tries to trigger a spell. Energy, mana, feeling like a fountain spilling water over its edge burbles in her chest and flows up her arms as she tried to cast Lesser Haste twice. The monster was fast, at least in bursts, and speeding up her friends to hopefully get closer if not match it’s speed was a better choice than strengthening them. She hoped.

The fountain in her chest felt less full as the mana stopped flowing into her hands, and two bursts of almost translucent energy, looking like heat waves wafting off of hot asphalt but moving sideways, flew from her fingertips one after the other. The moving blurs of magic hit Alex and Ed and wrapped around them, coating them in Maeve’s mana. The faint sight f the translucent energy faded immediately as it melted into them.

The grassy monster threw another haymaker at Alex, who was getting up in its face. Maeve didn’t have any real knowledge of fighting, at least nothing that could be compared to the two men who’d spent years training with medieval weapons, but it felt like Alex’s shield got into a better position than when he’d blocked the last blow. He moved back even less and immediately counterattacked with his sword instead of having to recover.

Alex’s sword cut through the side of the monster’s arm, dividing the weaved blades of grass and leaving a gash. Inside of it’s arm was empty space, empty space that quickly disappeared as strands of grass grew into the cut from both sides and wrapped it up.

“It can heal!” Alex shouted as he danced back.

The mask-like face of the monster contorted into an angry frown as it glanced at where it had just been cut before swinging its gaze to Alex. It shifted it’s body weight full onto its back legs and slowly brought up both arms, its fingers lacing together as it very obviously prepared for a single, crushing blow.

Ed, who was no longer breathing harshly with pain, suddenly appeared beneath the creature, the tip of his spear racing up toward the thing’s head. The empty eye sockets darted toward the incoming threat and the creature’s entire body accordioned in on itself as it pulled away from the attack. Ed’s spear only nicked the edge of the mask-face and that tiny cut soon sealed over. Not stopping his assault, Ed slammed one foot on the ground behind him and surged forward with his weapon held out in front of him. He looked like a figure from an art piece, his helmet’s visor up as he used his aptly named Charge skill to pursue the monster as it recoiled. The spear blade came up slightly as Ed stampeded forward and it slammed into the creature’s chest. The backward movement to avoid the attack became an uncontrollable tumble to the ground as Ed’s momentum slammed into the monster.

“It can only move quickly in short bursts!” Maeve shouted out, having noticed the thing’s sluggish attempt to dodge the follow up, “Hit it before it charges up again!”

Alex was already diving in, his sword briefly glowing as he held it up and start hacking into the downed monster. Maeve glanced to the side to see where Scarlet was, the only person she hadn’t seen during the fight and found her throwing two racks of junk food of of her prone body. Scowling darkly she threw herself into th fray, her fists glowing a slightly different color than Alex’s sword as she added her weight to the pummeling.

Watching her friends attack the monster over and over, there wasn’t much she could personally do to hurt it herself, she noticed something she’d missed before. The strands of grass that made up the plant monster’s body were tightening and constricting, like a woven bowl that was being pressed on.

“It’s about to move again!”

The creature flipped over onto its front in a brutally ungraceful move, its two arms sweeping out like scythes to either side to clear the space around it. It’s thorax did a spin and a flip to land on all of its feet at once and it immediately began taking slow steps backward. Her three friends, warned by her shout had each managed to dodge away from or dive under the huge swings. The grass wrappings were now looser than before and Maeve saw them begin to tighten again. She shouted out what she’d figured out to her friends as the cautiously spread out around it.

“Okay, we hit it when its all loose and cant move fast and dodge its big moves, great.” Scarlet called back. “How do we kill it? Ed stabbed it big time and it’s already patching itself up!”

Maeve glanced at the monster and saw she was right, the large wound Ed had given it was already starting to wrap itself in more grass. The places where Alex had stabbed and slashed into it while it had been down were also repairing slowly. She noticed the wounds were moving to close themselves much more slowly than before though, and the creature looked haggard. Something in it’s lack of eyes conveyed emotions to her. It looked wary.

“I don’t think it can regenerate forever, it’s already slower than before. If we keep wearing it down we can probably kill it.”

“Right.” Alex crouched slightly, his shield raised and his sword faintly glowing again. “Wait for the move then.”

The slow shuffle of the creature as its body tensed brought it closer to the window, and for a moment the building’s shadow coasted up and across its face as it stepped out of the dim light filtering through the windows and partially into the open.

Maeve’s eye’s widened. I’m an idiot! She shrieked internally. She flung out her hands, then paused. She’d been reacting and panicking throughout this sudden fight. She distantly realized that it was okay, that this was the first fight she’d been thrust into without preparation and the spells she had forgotten to use were brand new to her and thus easy to forget. But there was no chance that she was going to keep being unfocused and inefficient.

She waited until just before the monster’s body finished tightening completely before casting Lesser Shadowbind. As the creature began to leap forward, it’s retreat toward the window a feint, thin wisps of shadow rose up from around it and lashed around whatever they could reach. Some managed to slip between the small gaps of the weaved grass and hook inside of it. The spell was weak, it was being cast by a brand new sorcerer at level one after all, and the tendrils broke easily as the creature attacked. But they were more than enough to completely redirect the force of the charge even as they were snapped and the leap that would have taken the monster over the three melee fighters and into their back line turned into a lurch forward, putting it just within range of it’s enemies.

There was no hesitation as the three attackers hit it with everything they had. More than one blow was covered with a faint glow and the damage dealt by those blows was magnified. In the space of the next few seconds, the monster was hacked and bludgeoned into the ground even harder than before, Ed raised his spear straight up and stabbed it down into the thing’s chest as Alex hacked at it’s limbs and Scarlet repeatedly punched the thorax, then he twisted it it as he pulled it out, leaving a gaping, jagged hole.

For a moment the monster’s grassy makeup tried to heal as it had been, retying itself together, but it failed. The monster slumped down as the strands of grass lost all sense of coherency. The monster’s body became a piled of loose grass that vaguely resembled it’s previous shape a second later. Then, the relieving notification flashed in front of Maeve’s eyes.

___

You meaningfully contributed in defeating:

1x Mantis Weavling (Bruiser)

You receive: 54 XP

___

They all slumped in place, except for Amelia who hurried up next to each of the front line fighters and pressed a hand against them. A brief glow of that same mint green color from her healing magic coated her hand before fading as she move to each of the three of them. Shaking herself out of her stupor, Maeve moved up to the broken window and peered out.

“What’s up?” Alex asked as Amelia lingered at his side, the glow from her hand sticking around for a little longer than with the others.

“Checking for more.”

“Oh, good idea. … See any?”

“No, thankfully.” She pulled back from the window. “That was… honestly it was easier than I thought it would be. Does anyone else feel the same?”

Ed nodded at her as he said, “No, you’re right. Probably part of it was that we have classes now, but that, Weavling, didn’t feel all that tough.”

“The experience it gave was higher than that armor thing.” Scarlet commented as she joined the others in moving close together.

“But not by much.” Maeve shook her head and she could feel her annoyance flash. “We still don’t know enough.”

“What do we do now?”

Taking a deep breath, Maeve steeled herself against the expectations shining in her friend eyes. They weren’t all encompassing glows that conveyed their unending faith in her, but they obviously all thought she was the leader. “We do what we said we were going to. We grab our supplies and make our way toward the safe zone. If we can, we kill anything, and monsters, that we encounter.”