The cold, heavy clamp of the earth pressed down on Nic as he was buried alive, the roots dragging him deep under the soil. The weight only increased moment by moment, his limbs bound by living tendrils of plant matter. There was no air.

He drew in the last of his oxygen in a long, slow breath.

Alright.

Alright.

He had two sources of Essence now. Two strands of aura within him. Killing the bug-demon had given him the fuel he needed…

All that was left was the execution.

There was a special kind of will that came with being truly, finally against the wall. Under that life or death pressure all distractions and egos washed away, leaving Nic in a calm, collected place within his own mind, pushing forward with the full might of his willpower.

And even that, alone, might not have been enough.

Nic opened the channel in his mind that he'd been holding closed. Instantly, golden runes flooded his vision, but down here they were more subdued. There was only dirt around him, limiting the torrent of knowledge to his own body, to the glowing constellation of meridian lines and infectious, clawing parasite-roots spread throughout his body. It was like looking at a pair of long-limbed ocean creatures trying to strangle each other, luminous in the abyssal dark.

Now he could see himself, the way was clearer. He didn't have to navigate like a blind man in a maze, feeling his way through the dark, only to realize that this pathway or that was blocked by the soured energy of the poison ash...

Within his chest were two cultivations. He seized both, throwing the borrowed power from the bug-demon towards the roots and dissipating it down through as many of his meridians as he could. It was like tossing a panicked hare into a pit of dogs. The roots dug in painfully, twisting through his flesh to drink from his veins.

He held on against that pain, resisting the urge to scream, to open his mouth and let the dirt pour in...

With the vines distracted, there was a window of opportunity. He drew the single thread of his own power up, feeding it to the Primordial Mist shard in his throat. The golden diagram runes that blossomed along the crystal surface of his left eye guided him around the obstructions, allowing him to weave it through his broken and damaged pathways...

That one spark produced a tiny wisp of mist, which he spat from his lips onto the vines chaining his arms.

And that was enough. The single bite of the mist ate into the flowers, wilting them to dust and salt. The roots and vines soon followed, shivering inside his body as they were destroyed. All the life the plant had drained from Nic was leeched away by the horror of the mist.

He was free...

For the first time in days his cultivation flowed outwards from his core, filling his limbs and spreading through his pathways like a golden tide. He was exhausted, but there was rich, powerful energy in the soil around him. His aches and pains receded. Only the need to breathe remained urgent, and Nic held on as long as his body could, wanting to replenish his aura before making any other move.

It was only when the burn in his chest became truly desperate that he gave into his pain and lifted a hand. Mire-Caller's power gripped the soft well-watered soil and shoved.

Above, the soil exploded upwards. Nic rose as the earth spat him back out, leaping free of the pit and spitting out a clod of black earth. The dryad jailers turned in unison to stare at him in horror.

"Alright..." His neck cracked as he twisted back and forth, rolling his jaw. "I'm pretty sure you creepy treefuckers tried to lay eggs in me, and I'm not going to lie, that's got me a special kind of angry."

---

A vine whip snapped through the air, trying to bind Nic's arms again. But he was full of aura and long-delayed anger now. He slid back, dodging, and lifted a hand in a scooping motion. A torrent of black soil poured up around the dryad's legs and pulled it down, rooting it into the earth.

Nic shot forward, and simply brought his knee up to fly into the dryad's skull. There were a brittle, cracking break, and sap-like blood rained down as he smashed its head open like a melon.

He hit the ground again with a backward hop, and immediately wove into retreat, slipping left and right as spears of thin wiry sapling-wood burst from the ground. More were coming out of the woods. Their green eyes glared at him as they closed off his paths with their summoned spikes.

Nic kicked forward again, leapt up into the branches of a fir, and pole-vaulted across. They were ready. The ground where he would have landed collapsed down, opening into a spike-filled pit. Nic punched a hand forward and a wave of black earth rose up, crashing over the pit and catching him as he landed, letting him ride forward atop the rolling wall of dirt.

After so long pent up...

He intended to get his pound of flesh in revenge.

The tide swept several dryads under as it hit the ground again, and Nic punched into the air, bringing up a fist of muddy earth to swat another with a giant's uppercut. Their bodies were brittle and fragile. The dryad's chest caved in as it was sent flying back.

A stomp downwards, and another dryad lost its life as the earth to either side rose up and the two walls slammed together.

Nic wasn't fighting smart or efficient. He was fighting angry. As the jailers poured after him he began to run towards the edge of the greenhouse, whipping around suddenly to fire off a volley of shots from the earth and then suddenly darting off in a new direction.

Their numbers didn't matter. Not when they couldn't catch or surround him. It had become a chase in the woods, catching sight of his pink skin darting between the trees and trying desperately to follow, only to run dead into a salvo of heavy missiles lobbing themselves out of the dirt.

And then suddenly he was running right at them.

As he ran, Nic dropped to all fours. Four became six as his Warform expanded out through his original body, his skin turning paper-thin and shredding as the shoulders and serpentine head of his naga body emerged. Vine whips shot towards him, trying to slow him. Spikes erupted to try and gouge his flesh. He shot along the earth in a muscular, flowing tide and crashed through both, his hand shooting out like a comet to snatch a dryad up by the neck and smash it down again with pulverizing force. As his back bent his tail whipped out overhead, destroying another by pounding it into splinters of blood-drenched wood.

He twisted, and his tail came whipping back around. It smashed into two more dryad's along their chest and legs, sending them tumbling through the air in pieces.

Grasping a nearby pine tree, Nic broke it in half and wielded it like a heavy staff, extending the reach of his arms to match his tail as he rained down blows. They were the ones running now. All of them except their matriarch.

She advanced and the roots of the trees surged up to surround her. With each step she grew taller, rising to meet Nic as a colossus of thorns, green vines, and wooden flesh. A Warform of her own.

Nic smashed down on her with his makeshift club. She deflected with the back of one arm, driving a haymaker towards his gut with neat precision. He caught the blow with three hands, gripping her fist as he brought the staff down again and again, hammering away at her guard.

A long tendril of wood shot from her heart and jabbed through his chest. A spike of pain ripped through the pattern of his breath as a lung collapsed, pierced through.

A roar, and Nic forced his way forward, flinging the staff aside and grabbing her throat. He slammed the massive treant down into the earth. Two of his unburdened hands shot forward and grasped the bare, exposed cage of her ribs, splintering the bark under his nails as he wrenched it open to the green core below.

Nic breathed in, feeling the blood burble into his throat from his punctured lung, but he fought through, unleashing a whirling torrent of Primordial Mist into the treant’s bared vitals. The green vibrance of the beating organs below faded to nothing. Her wooden limbs began to crumble as the Warform collapsed and all that was left was a small, defeated body.

---

Nic reached the edge of the garden to find the city in chaos.

Fires were burning in all directions, and crows circled above each blaze, screaming out in their clumsy voices-

“WII-IINTERHOO-OOME. WII-IINTERHOO-OOME IS HERE!”

Inkspur had certainly done his job. Nic bounded across the green grass of the outer gardens, but there was nowhere to go. The fire barrier was still there, and beyond just threatening to burn him to a crisp, it displayed a power to force him back. Trying to throw himself through and deal with the wounds simply wouldn’t work.

But he’d prepared for this.

Bounding down the street, its belly bouncing against the dirt road with every slithering step, was Gwungo. The odd jelly-salamander-abomination had its tongue out, droplets of slime spraying enthusiastically from its mouth as it ran towards him.

It barely even noticed the boundary. As the flowers of silver flame burst into its path, it burst through them, scattering the wall into sparks.

Nic grinned.

The little abomination had the power to adapt to anything, and just like the much dumber, blissfully silent oozes he had been spawned from, that power could be transferred from body to body. Nic had been forced to thrust his arm into the flames, but in the process, he’d given the fragment of Gwungo he’d pocketed earlier resistance to that fire. When that fragment rejoined the whole, the resistance was shared.

It slammed into him like an enthusiastic puppy that didn’t know its own size, bouncing back.

“Hello, Maker-Mine! The small yappy one said I could visit you in prison, and I said-”

“Gwungo. We don’t have time.” Nic held back a laugh as the slimy idiot began to bounce around him, completely oblivious to the ongoing chaos as it rolled about in the dirt. “Did you bring me something?”

"Oh yes yes. Special gift for Maker-Mine!" And it proceeded to spit out a small, angry lump of scales and wings.

As Inkspur shook off the clinging slimy saliva and shot up into the air, he immediately turned, beginning to berate the creature. "You INCOMPARABLE IDIOT, has it not been explained to you that LIVING THINGS NEED TO BREATHE?"

Nic clutched his head. These two...

"Inkspur. You said you'd found something for me." He said calmly, pushing each word through his clenched jaw. "Where is it?"

"WELL. I found where they TRIED IN VAIN to hide away your STOLEN WEALTH, but when I gave this BABBLING BUFFOON the simple task of STEALING IT BACK, the fool TURNED AND RAN AWAY."

"It's not my fault." Gwungo whined. "The scary lady was there..."

"And when I tried to SEND HIM BACK IN..." Inkspur continued. "He swallowed me. ME! I should flay him alive for this indignity!"

As the two argued back and forth, Nic looked out on the city. The guards would only be off tending to the fires for so long. They knew who was to blame, and they'd be coming here as soon as they could without leaving the Settlement to burn.

As for the other prisoners, Nic wasn't sure what had become of them. It was possible they'd seized on the chaos to put their own escape plan into motion. Either that, or they didn't care to risk him slaughtering them in their weakened state, and were laying low.

Everything was colliding, and Nic needed to make good on his escape.

He stared at the space where the wall of fire would be...

"Gwungo."

The slime-beast's head snapped up. Its tongue lolled out, like a particularly stretchy dog. "Yes! That's me!"

"What shapes can you make yourself into?"