🙡 Chapter 4.2 🙣

The meeting

Shepti whipped around, only to see in last moment as dark shadow shot towards her—an, as she heard many times from her dad about his time as an adventurer, in this moment just before the surely deadly blow struck, she saw a memory—a memory of her trembling sisters back, while she protected her from—

BANG!

She collapsed backwards from the impact, pieces of shattered ice cutting her face.

The demonic branch stopped by a protective ice shield, cast by heavy panting Icicle.

*Zap!* *Zap!* a moment later Candle shot back at the assailant with a series of electric sparkles!

But that was not the time for dilly-dallying, she turned towards the exit and rushed forwards trying to get out of range of the hidden monster. Root covered ground trembled below her, making it impossible to keep one's balance without using hands, yet she ran as fast as she could.

But the demon was faster. One of the branches grabbed her ankle, and pulled her deeper into the forest.

“Nooo!” She screamed, before another branch wrapped around her throat. She started trying to pull it away, but she wasn’t strong enough. Once again, Icicle bit her, snakes own blood dripping down its mouth from earlier exertion, with strong “Get a grip!” feeling, which helped her calm down. She tried her best to gather her thoughts and remember combat related spells she learned—which was pretty much none, she was studying to be a healer at a nice town, not a combatant!

“Thinkthinkthink… No this won’t work.. But.. no.. but! Ouch!”

Her captor definitely didn’t care about her comfort. Shepti also couldn’t count on much more help from her familiars, the two oldest snakes were now out of mana, Icicle looking especially bad—the casting of this level of shield drained all her mana and even some blood.

Summer and Snow, the younger twins, were still casting their spell but she stopped them. They needed a lot of time to do so, and they will need quite a long break before the next cast. Instead, she caught the branch around her neck with her hands. The demon treant was trying to make her lose consciousness by suffocating her, but it picked a wrong target for that—she could breathe through her snakes. Just in case, she decided to pretend to be barely conscious.

“Pleasepleaseplease woooork!” She poured her mana into “organ sense” magic, the basic analysis tool of most healing classes. As expected, the structure of an ancient half plant, half stone demon was mostly incomprehensible to a young mage like her… but for her plan she didn’t need to understand how things worked, she only needed one piece of information to fuel her next two spells. First, she used “Comfortable treatment”, a pain numbing skill, that also took patients' minds away from the magical treatment being administered to it. And, with a level of concentration she never achieved before, she started executing her desperate plan.

Soon, she got dragged close enough to see the silhouette of the treant, dimly glowing with mana. Unfortunately she lost her light-amulet during the initial attack. She tried her best to ignore it, and concentrate on the spellwork, but the panicked thoughts like “teeth!” “death!” “now? now!” shared by the snakes were not helping.

The only reason she stayed calm... well, as calm as one can be expected to be in such a situation, was that she could feel her plan working. All the time she was casting “blood create”, while also artificially lowering creatures blood pressure with “Comfortable treatment”. Never was she as thankful for having to help her mother at the clinic as right now.

As she was getting closer, she was able to see more and more details on the dark stump of the fallen treant. Its dozens of eyes, leering with sinister joy, And the mouth… A gaping hole full of thorns, with small dots around it, those who are eaten entombed inside it for weeks, while the creature feeds on their mana and flesh, even feeding them water and sap in the meantime. She thought it was just an old wive’s tale, a way to scare children, but now she was willing to believe it!

And suddenly, the sneers and hungry glances changed to those of confusion… and soon anger. “NOW!” she screamed in her mind, while stopping the “comfortable treatment”, and doubling down on blood creation! The effect was near immediate. Dozen otherworldly eyeballs started inflating, while the wood let out a deafening scream of creaking agony.

At the same time, a heat ray burned down the branch holding her throat, while a magical bullet froze the one around her ankle. She shattered it with her other boot, and ran, without looking back. Even when a series of dozens of popping sounds could be heard.

🙚🙘

A few hours had passed and Shepti wanted to cry. Against her best judgement, she really hoped that would be the end, that she could just run away… but that hope only made the reality more painful. Yes, what she did took away the monster's sight, but it could still feel it when she stepped above its roots! Not only that, it was actively searching for her with its wooden arms! Stabbing the ground at a random spot every minute or so.

She just couldn’t take the tension and stress. She lost count of how many times she nearly died, after taking a wrong step, saved mostly by her trusty snakes, but every time she had to retreat closer to the tree—and now she is back to where she was three hours ago. She suspected that her surprise attack also took creatures' hearing, as it didn’t react to her shriek a few minutes ago, when one of the spears shot just between her legs.

Thirsty, hungry, too exhausted to do anything, she just sat there, considering just giving up—no, she couldn’t do it to her snakes—when something hit her belly and pushed her to the side. A Moment later she could hear the “swoosh” of a branch piercing the air where she used to be a moment ago.

🙚🙘

I know it’s not exactly “on brand” for world-ending monsters to say, but seeing a crying kid always made me want to cheer them up and ask what’s wrong. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure hugging a kid in this body would land me in prison. Actually, any human contact might. Damn.

Yeah, that’s why I was not going to intervene. As I decided before, people mean society, society means trouble, and conflict with monsters, like me!

At the same time, this girl was my ticket out of this prison! So I hid and observed the situation. She seemed to be a surprisingly human looking medusa! A real bona fide monster girl! Her snakes were looking at her, worried.. And one of them seems to have even noticed me, glancing at me from time to time.

Interestingly, she was t he second highest source of points I’ve seen in this world—though unlike the previous ones, this one was green. The only other object that had visible green points was the buried obelisk. Even more interestingly- the brightness of the marker was increasing with every passing second.

Thank gods—literally in this situation—I was looking at the markers at that moment, as its the only reason I immediately saw the big red marker above the ground appearing just next to her legs.

I sympathize with you, my tree monster brother, but this girl is my ticket out of here!