Out of the dense floor-bound ivy rose a plant-like creature. It appeared enormous at first. A large stalk served as the monster’s base, at the end of which sat a large, fleshy bulge that resembled a fruit with a dense, dark brown hide. It was the centre of the monster’s nervous system. Two eyes sat at the apparent top of it, with a gape on the underside, about the size of the hole created when putting the tip of your index finger and thumb together. What created the initial illusion of size were the dozen tentacles that grew further out from that fleshy bulge. They were thin and long, moved through the air and pulled together. With instinctive mastery, the tendrils weaved together to form some sort of shield. The monster went from seeming large to being compact.

The group had just turned towards the one creature when several more appeared from underneath the ivy. Each of them raised their tentacles upwards and then weaved them together into a diamond shaped shield. They kept them in front of their fruit-like centres. All of them except one. Keeping its shield raised, it closed the gap and drew back like a striking serpent. Before it could do anything more than that, a throwing knife it hit right in the fleshy centre.

Without a sound, the creature tensed and then relaxed one last time, falling back down into the thick ivy it had come from. “I still fucking got it!” Reysha exclaimed, drawing a new throwing knife with her right while holding onto her regular dagger with the left.

“You do,” Apexus agreed, while looking around. One more or less didn’t seem to matter much. More of the monsters rose from the brushwork. A chain reaction had been triggered. Each new monster that rose caused another of its kind to rear up nearby. The darting up of one of the plant-like creatures at the bottom of a cliff stirred another on top of it to show its tendrils.

This was the base hunting strategy of the Common Thornspitter. In its dormant form, it lay close to the ground and hid as best it could. Its tentacles mimicked roots or were strictly too thin to be seen underneath brush or leaves. The best tell one could get was the fleshy centre, but with all the ivy around even those were mostly hidden. Once it felt vibrations approaching, it rose up and waved its tentacles around, agitating other nearby Thornspitters and then forming the weaved shield that protected its incredibly fragile centre from attacks.

As for why it was called a Thornspitter, Apexus got to experience when the one atop the cliff drew its shield up. Reysha tried to nail it with a throwing knife like the last one, but missed thanks to the considerably higher distance and awkward angle. The Thornspitter’s centre snapped forwards just as the gap opened. A sharp piece of wood was launched in their direction at an absurd speed and burrowed its way into Apexus’ stomach. Only the back end of the elongated projectile stood out when it came to a halt.

The slime moved some of its membrane to pull the piece in completely. “We should run,” he said, extending one of his wings to cover Reysha's back while the tiger girl looked around. “These aren’t dangerous to me, but if they get you…”

“Yeah, I get it,” Reysha agreed. “Me and Clysia over there wouldn’t look quite as pretty with wood buried inside u-“ she stopped to throw another knife. She nailed the centre of another Thornspitter, but another two were in the same motion. Aclysia conjured a Sunlight Bolt, which hit one of the two only after the attack motion had been completed. Two thorns came flying their way. One missed, the other hit Reysha in the shoulder. It punched through her leather armour with as little problem as there had been with Apexus’s membrane. “Fuck!” the redhead hissed. The pain was intense enough, but the real problem was that the thorn had lodged itself in the joint. It was a crippling blow from the get go.

“Retreat immediately, Reysha, lead the way!” Aclysia finally managed to give her agreement to the situation.

Not having to think longer than half a second, the tiger girl immediately turned to run in the direction that seemed most attractive. Her decisive nature was one reason why Aclysia wanted her to take the lead, the other was that Apexus could cover her with his body much easier this way. As for the metal fairy herself, the fact that she could float rather than fly made it easy for her to keep up while making herself too difficult a target.

One by one the thorns flew around them. They could barely even react to any of them. Launched without any sound and at a speed almost too quick to follow with their eyes, the group could only keep on running in a serpentine pattern. Apexus felt several of the thorns bury into his body at several points in his back and punch through the thinner areas of his wings, but that was a small sacrifice to cover Reysha.

As they ran down the natural dirt paths, they stirred up even more of the Thornspitters. Once they left the original area, however, the shots got considerably less frequent. The ‘get-up ritual’ that these plant monsters had gave them enough time to generally leave the area before they were ready to shoot. This did mean they were relatively safe but it also meant that this only held true for as long as they kept running.

Their speed was dragged down by Apexus in the first place. Even with a crippling injury to her shoulder, Reysha was still considerably faster than the muscle-less slime. This led to the tiger girl going at a pace that she, the only one of the three with a regular understanding of stamina, could keep up for a long time.

Time meant nothing if there was no safe haven to be found however. Time meant even less when they ran into another kind of monster. They only caught a fleeting glimpse of it. It had waited behind a boulder and darted forwards. It had no arm, only two thick legs and a torso that was made to ram things, most of it made from wood with some integrated pieces of stone.

Reysha just barely managed to dodge by executing a jumping roll. Apexus then kicked the legs away from under the new enemy and kept following behind Reysha. They had no opportunity to finish it off and more Thornspitters were already rising. “GO LEFT!” Aclysia suddenly shouted.

Without questioning things, Reysha and Apexus obeyed and took a sharp turn. Where they would have gone instead, the tip of one of the sky-guarding tentacles descended and rammed into the ground with enough power to make the earth tremble.

Which awoke even more Thornspitters everywhere around.

They should have accelerated, but Apexus came to a sudden halt. The sudden turn had sent them trampling into a field of ivy and a hidden tentacle had grabbed him by the ankle. Falling thanks to the energy of his own momentum, the slime slammed down to the floor. He barely started to rise when the grasp on his ankle was gone again. Reysha had finished the Thornspitter off the moment it started to rise with another quickly placed throwing knife.

“Get up!” the redhead shouted and extended a helping hand. Apexus moved to take it. He was halfway up, when suddenly he had to support Reysha. The tiger girl let out a pained scream, as a new thorn slipped into her flesh between two ribs. “This shit sucks!” Reysha declared.

“Keep moving, I can’t properly heal you until we remove the thorns!” Aclysia shouted, her voice a pitch higher than usual.

“Don’t panic!” Apexus shouted back, as he and the tiger girl did as they had to. “Panic isn’t helpful for survival! We’re doing good, keep going! Keep going!” Reysha would have answered if her lungs hadn’t been occupied with breathing. Unlike her inhuman lover, she didn’t just vibrate her words into existence. She still had stamina, but her lungs were burning and the literal thorn in her side wasn’t helping.

Instead she kept the necessary words. “ivy-free area ahead!” she screamed, spotting a large area of nothing but dirt and mushroom in a circle of stones. She had almost missed them, covered by the ever-present ivy as they were. A few more thorns flew around them, as they trampled down the natural path that led in there.

Aclysia strained to fly ahead. Stopping in the middle, her expression shifted from strained to relieved. Against her worst expectations, there were none of the ramming enemies hiding in the circle. Instead, she saw a natural pond in the centre of the circle. “Safe area!” she shouted back.

Knowing that Apexus would make it either way, Reysha broke into a sprint to get safe as quickly as she could. She made it into the inside of the circle and immediately swerved to hide between one of the stones. Even though she was at the location of a healing fountain, the Thornspitters still kept firing in her direction.

Apexus had to take one more shot, burying unpleasantly into his neck, then he too arrived inside the safe area and hid behind one of the stones. Inside the circle, they were completely free of ivy. The grey rocks had a peculiar shape, being almost perfectly rectangular. There was even a roof. Half of it was holes, taking a shape that was similar to the wooden wheel of a wagon, but it would ward off rain and giant tentacle attacks.

“Fuck, that was dangerous,” Reysha stated with a smile. She was breathing heavily, but still moving to take off her armour while Apexus spied outwards into Verdany. The Thornspitters, with no more target immediately apparent, started to lay back down. None of them were close enough that they could be agitated by the movements of the group inside the stone circle. Soon enough, the entire landscape had calmed down. They were truly safe.

Apexus relaxed. The slime on his bones became droopy for several seconds, making him seem like a half-melted wax figure. Then he pulled himself back together. Dissolving the last few thorns inside him, he looked over to Reysha. The tiger girl was now naked from the waist up. Not for any fun reasons. The crimson red spot on her right side distracted heavily from the otherwise so pleasurable viewing of her naked chest.

Aclysia was already next to her and trying to help. “…This is going to be difficult,” the metal fairy mumbled, looking at the wound. “It’s so deep in, you might have a small hole in your lungs.”

“Certainly, feels like it,” Reysha responded, forcefully calming her breath. “Although you may have now given me placebo. Can we skip the part where we deliberate what is wrong with me and get to the part where you heal me? Because listing all of my issues is going to take way too fucking long.”

“Affirmative,” Aclysia said and made an unhappy face. Taking her adventurer’s bag, she retrieved a small cloth. “It is simply going to be a complicated task. Between how deep in it is and your blood making it slippery, getting rid of the thorn will be difficult… I will have to be very careful.”

“I trust you,” Reysha just said and closed her eyes.

“Thank you,” the metal fairy smiled slightly. Tugging the cloth between her knees for the moment, she raised both of her hands to Reysha’s naked torso. Golden light spread from her hands and, as if concentrated through a looking glass, focused on the wound.

Healing magic was potent. It eclipsed the natural healing factor of almost everyone in the Omniverse in terms of speed and reliability. A broken bone that healed naturally may not be set right; a cut that is treated only by physical means could leave a nasty scar. Healing magic did not have to contend with these things. It mended injuries as if they had never existed – if the person who wielded it knew what they were doing.

Even a terrible healer could heal a clean injury, but there were numerous things that healers should be wary of. A foreign object still being inside the body of the person they were healing was a pretty basic example. Enclosing a large glass shard inside mended flesh was not going to do a person any favours.

Similarly, just healing the area around the thorn would fix very few things. The wood would remain there and start to rot. Small pieces, the body could handle on its own, but something of the size Reysha had lodged inside her couldn’t be ignored.

Very carefully, Aclysia directed her magic to start the healing effort inside the body. The mending flesh pushed the thorn backwards. Once it was out far enough, the metal fairy took the cloth and pulled the thorn out properly. From there, healing the wound the normal way made the rest of the treatment a quick procedure. “We should acquire tweezers and the like for future complications,” she stated. “Luckily, these thorns don’t appear to be prone to splintering.”

“What would you do if they were?” Apexus wondered, while picking up one of the nearby mushrooms and eating it. It tasted rather bland and the spongy texture wasn’t that great. Although it grew in a dungeon, it was just a regular piece of flora.

“In the specific case of wood, I would keep treating the wound every day to prevent the rot from having adverse effects,” Aclysia explained. “Other materials will be more complicated. Stone or glass splinters would be difficult to remove in their entirety.”

“I’ve once seen a pretty great Shaman heal a kid’s eye that was riddled with shards without issue,” Reysha told both of them as she checked her now healed side. The blood was still there, but there was no issue otherwise. “He didn’t deal with the shards at all.”

“I presume that healers of higher skill know their tricks to circumvent issues like this,” Aclysia commented. “There are many things I don’t know. I can only heal wounds, as I am. Poisons and other adverse effects are beyond my capability at this moment. Now, let me see your shoulder.”

“Yeah, about that,” Reysha tapped on the spot where she had been first hit. There was no wound left there, neither was there any blood. There was just smooth skin, as if nothing had ever happened. “Seems like the demon blood works pretty well when it comes to regeneration,” she drily said. “It must have pushed out the thorn while we ran away.”

The group should have been happy about that development, but all three of them would have preferred if Reysha had suffered a normal injury. It was good that the regeneration factor of that area was strong enough to prevent the issues that careless healers could cause. The origin of it left all of them unhappy.

“You should clean yourself,” Apexus spoke up, refusing to be taken by the bad mood. They had spent months coming to terms with what had happened, there wasn’t any reason to revert now.

Reysha smirked. “Only if you join me,” she purred and winked at Aclysia, extending the invitation. Threats to her life rarely failed to make the redhead horny.

As far as Apexus was concerned, any excuse to practice procreation was a good one.