Flikflikflikflikflikflikflikchokchoksqueeeeeee...

The blood mantis was huge, thorax well over my head, pincers the size of yataghans, and it was both fast and flexible. It stabbed down with its pincers, trying to impale me with a rain of blows, totally unlike the grab and crush it was supposed to be using... but effective, nevertheless.

Until I chopped off both pincers, it drew them up and realized they were missing, just as I hopped forward and up and split it from head to thorax in irritation.

I lashed out before I landed, and the Banestar flashed out to the ten-foot dragonfly buzzing around Briggs and demanding his attention. Compound eyes caught the motion and it barely dodged the streak of slicing energy that would have cut it in two... and unfortunately, Dodge Missile is a 1/round thing unless you’ve got the Mastery and can burn AoO’s off to dodge more, meaning Briggs’ hammershard ventured into its face and blew it into mush.

He, in turn, spun and let go of Endure, which hurtled out and caromed into the side of the big slicer beetle that was stick-leg-dancing towards AA, who had just succeeded in blinding another dragonfly with his Helices and cut off its head. Big mandibles were nipping for a quick limb to pinch off and run away with, when Endure crashed into the side of the deer-sized bug’s head, lifting it off its feet and making it the subject of a smithing project, with a manor’s stone border wall playing the anvil. There was a wet crunch, and Endure zipped back to Briggs’ hands... just as he jumped five feet to the side and hammered down.

The burrowing centipedal creature came bursting up right through the ancient stones of the street, looking to dig some gleaming pincer-mandibles into his guts. The next moment its iron-hard head crunched to the ground, deforming visibly, and everything within it squirted out of there.

“Shit!” A dozen root-lances exploded out of the soil, and it was a damn good thing I was so skinny, contorting myself around to watch the poisoned things zip up, nearly touching my cheek, and I circle-hacked with Tremble, cutting them all down as I jumped away, and then rolled my eyes.

The ground caved in at my destination, and a big mouth down there yawned open, four tentacles writhing up in my direction, hungry for a meal, and not incidentally the dead mantis tumbling down in that direction.

I slammed to a halt five feet above it on misting heels, spun and clipped all those tentacles, and then cut two, no three, banestars down into its mass, feeling annoyed and-whoop!

You wouldn’t think giant locusts would be so aggressive. I counter-jumped past them as they came down at me, and as the pit gulper convulsed and died, two, three, four locusts in multiple parts crashed into the slope and fell down into its gullet.

A swarm of moths spreading white dust, skull marks on their wings, flowed towards Brother AA, whose Helix swirled through them and Zeitgeist chopped down. The Swarm exploded into floating dust, which was blown away as the rhinoceros beetle charging Briggs was grabbed by its horn and thrown over his head, its short, thick legs scrabbling, and crashed through the cloud of poison dust, sending it everywhere.

I pulled out Fall just because I was irked, and Sparkie popped in, grabbed his Skull from my Masspack, and energetically started zipping around shooting the smaller stuff. Some great worm thing heaved itself out of the ground, three feet thick and looking hungry, covered in and made of green stuff and wood fiber and nope, didn’t help it much when AA ripped it down the side, Helices and Glaive turning that cut into a withering, dying wound of ghastly power.

Endure sent it crashing over on its side, shattering what it called a head, just to make sure it couldn’t turn and take a bite at the Brother. Briggs caught his Hammer as he arrived next to the beetle he’d thrown away and brought Endure down to stop its wild scrabbling and contorted attempts to turn back over.

Something that looked half-lizard, half-centipede, and all ugly came racing through the undergrowth in serpentine, many-legged motion, bringing with it a couple friends. They all reared up as they got close to me and spat out this really nasty-smelling cloud of poison and acidic goo.

Then I was past them, thanking them for presenting their necks, inhaling the triple dose of poison and using it to catalyze my Poison Healing and get rid of the blistering sores from the exploding stand of seed pods that had tried to turn me into a source of fertilizer for some new grenadier flowers a little earlier.

Our mental communication was naturally faster and more accurate than any shouting, which would be drowned out by the crashing bugs humming, droning, shrieking, chittering, rustling, grinding, and skittering all around us. We all had versions of omnidirectional awareness, Briggs and I based around Tremblesense, and AA with his Helixsense. We noticed, we reported, we moved, we coordinated, and bugs and animate plants and whatever died around us.

There was a lot of nasty pollens and seeds floating in the air we had to actively use our Vajras to keep out, and pretty much all the plants were poisonous to one degree or another, all the flying sap and little hooks on the leaves and squirting bulbs and lashing roots and exploding seed pods and poking thorns trying to invite us in to stay for a while.

They didn’t seem to take rejection well.

Now I knew why the spiders fed so well...

-------

They looked like reeds, but they were as sharp as blades, and seemed to hum around us as Tremble played machete and I ceaselessly hacked apart everything in front of us. Banefire reduced the stalks to withered scatterings on the ground, popping up from the ground like buried fireworks.

There wasn’t any safe place in this area. Giant bugs laired everywhere, and where they didn’t, it was because the animated plants were there instead.

The dimensional stretching was at least ten to one, we’d moved at least five miles and were only halfway to the temporal barrier. The amount of killing that we’d done had been tremendous.

It wasn’t like we could leave all these bugs to go flooding towards the food source behind us, i.e. the berserkers. So, we deliberately had to stir up trouble and attract the most active predators here to be butchered.

The plants, now, they could have sat back and done nothing, let us trundle on past. But no, no, they had to get involved, too.

Briggs hacked Endure in axe mode through a hollow trunk, wood exploded, and the quickwood quivered from roots to crown as he drove his shoulder into it and sent it crashing backwards.

AA was just coming around the corner of a half-crumbled wall, and the truck-sized scorpion caught the crashing tree right on its main body, hammering it down to the ground and cracking its carapace.

I was coming in the opposite direction, the van-sized wolf spider on my trail a bit startled when AA slid underneath it and Zeitgeist opened it up the long way. I inserted Tremble into a crack in the stunned scorpion’s shell as it made some effort to lift up the dead and burning quickwood, and fired off two banestars into important areas inside it. Plink-plink, Sparkie picked off two oversized glow-bugs divebombing me, which blew up in midair in a sticky, acidic mess, and Fall politely inserted two force-quarrels in a couple of lidless scorp eyes, just to be sure.

Briggs splattered a dozen lightning bugs in a rolling double circle of his Hammer, and then hacked into a shambling mound of unusual (read: a small hill) size that was now without its I-love-lightning healers and size-boosters. It exploded into rotting plant matter in regret, and he sighed.

AA spit a pig-sized tiger beetle racing at him at a mad clip, stepping back and letting it split itself apart on Zeitgeist as it went by at a breakshell pace, and also looked around.

Cut like a knife, this mass of green and daylight from a sun that had not changed its angle for the last six hours gave way to another barrier. Roiling clouds of temporal action at the far end were slowly shredding this moment in time, the cycle of day and night about to go back to normal.

“So...” Briggs asked, taking deep, long breaths.

AA did the same, looking all around for signs of motion, listening for approaches.

“Clear over here,” I announced, hopping down from the tail of the bus-sized scorpion, where I’d just harvested its poison sac. “Oh, wait. Briggs.”

I threw out a banestar. Endure’s hammershard roared up behind it.

Juking and jiggling like a ball on a string, the twenty-foot tall daddy longlegs dodged out of the way of my banestar, and moved right into the path of the hammershard. It splattered nicely, sending its torpedo-sized body flying away, and the legs at least thirty feet long after it, back into the trees and hanging vines it had come from.

AA walked over towards the wall. Briggs was closest, and spun out his Disk to sit down with a sigh. The urkhar joined him on it as I skated over.

“You can’t be not tired,” Brother Ancientaxe glared at me.

I screwed up my face, scratched my head. “Dunno. You think there might be some benefit to having a working 42 Con with the Endurance Mastery, or something?” I looked back at him, my eyes dancing. “And don’t you be thinking I didn’t notice you drinking that Elixir of Vitality.”

His mouth opened, closed, and he smiled ruefully. “Endurance fights are not the specialty of Void Brothers,” he admitted.

“I know. Slogs are jobs for big dumb strong me-not-think-go-hack types. Fortunately, a true warrior excels at all modes of combat, because mastery of one-shot kills doesn’t help too awful much when fighting a forest.” I nodded much too seriously at him, and he chuckled again.

He glanced at Briggs, then down our backtrail, which wasn’t actually too awful straight, but for some reason was missing a lot of trees in the way. Some of which were burning, with big clouds of toxic smoke that stuck to the ground and clung to the thick undergrowth. “Are you sure Lumberjack isn’t your chosen trade?”

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay...” Briggs replied firmly back to him, keeping his voice flat. It was a bad idea to make Briggs sing.

“He sleeps all night and he works all day!” I added on with a slow nod, and much more melody.

AA looked at Briggs, then me, knowing something was going on. “Is there a joke here I am not aware of?” he asked slowly.

“Ah, I don’t remember it all,” Briggs admitted.

“I do,” I piped up, and Briggs blinked at me. “Dream is probably closer to Terra, so the Minstrel Levels grabbed a lot of the old music.”

He looked intrigued, despite himself. “Do you remember the skit?” I pursed my lips and looked up and around, and a big smile crossed his face. “You’re missing a hairy beard and some scones.”

“I recall there was a dance line of hairy brutes along, too.”

“Well, we definitely have the hair between the Brother and I, but I’m afraid that we’re off on the dance line.” The bemused AA nodded agreement, having no idea what was going on... but he did have almost as much body hair as Briggs.

“I guess I shall just have to make do without it.” Briggs grinned wider, and AA looked interested, while I could tell Tremble and Sparkie were VERY curious. I let Tremble float, drew out her Scabbard, deCompressed it to full length, and held it out before me.

“Well, the weather for the whole area...” (1)

---

“That was totally ridiculous...” Brother Ancientaxe mumbled, and both Briggs and I agreed heartily.

===========

Google the Lumberjack Song. Then imagine a half-orc Void Brother’s expression. Credit to the Mick for first bringing it up to me, who’s not a lumberjack, but he’s okay.