Huld reached out with his earth-sense, feeling the soil and clay of which the shrine was composed below him, under his back, on all sides of him, in the floor of this platform, right at its edges where the stone walls had been…

“Earth! I summon you!” he found himself yelling, forcing his mind to focus on the material of the platform and honing his concentration around the words he spoke.

At the same time he thrust both his hands upwards towards the sky, then rolled onto his side, arms still outstretched, pushing himself up with his legs onto his knees, then, with effort, with a great force of his will, straining, standing, lifting his hands high above his head as they trembled and shook.

As he did so, the earth around the perimeter of the platform rose up into the air with him, stretching, extending, growing, thinning and pushing up from lower down in the Shrine, becoming a wall around the top of it which rose as high as Huld, then higher than him, replacing the original stone walls of the chamber.

Acting on instinct, with what felt like the very last of his earth-projection energy, or ‘mana’, or whatever the foreigners called it, Huld brought his two hands above his head slowly together, clasping them in a loud clap.

The earth he had called up to form walls bent inwards towards the middle of the platform then continued extending to form a growing dome, making a large hole in the air above them which shrunk and shrunk. As the hole closed, the light coming from the sky diminished, progressively blocked out by the newly risen walls, eventually forming only a single, small circle through which a beam of sunlight fell, spotlighted on the plant monster, until with the last clap of Huld’s hands as he clasped them together the hole closed up completely and the light disappeared.

They were back in blackness.

In the dark, the plant monster roared, and now Huld heard fear in the roar.

“Again!” Huld shouted as he sank to his knees from exhaustion. “It gets its energy from the sun! Attack again!”

In the darkness, he only heard the frenzied footsteps of the others charging forward to attack, and their battlecries.

“Death and glory!” ponytail shouted again, perhaps to telegraph his position.

“Manolia!”

“For Cleasor!”

“For the One!”

“For Imfis!”

The dull thwacking sound of blades hacking at vines and foliage.

The sound of a plant monster roaring even more loudly again in...pain?

Grunts of exertion, a shout of shock, a rush of air, the thump of a body and metal as someone fell to the ground with their weapon.

A hand pressed on his shoulder again. “Here you go, Huld,” said the old man. “This strategy had better work, as this is the last of my mana.”

Lightness filled Huld once more.

“I thought you said that you were out of mana?”

“A version of the truth,” said the old man. “I kept a little in reserve for any emergency healing, or to use at the right moment. Such as now. Half the trick of fighting is knowing when to strike. I’ve just given a little to Ryn too, now that that monster can’t seem to regenerate itself anymore.”

A flare of light from fireboy’s upheld hand confirmed his words, and lit a vision of the six foreigners crowded around the monster, hacking and whipping at it as it writhed and lashed out at them, apparently stripped of its regeneration power now the sun had been blocked out.

Huld almost felt sorry for it.

But not really. It had tried to eat him after all. And it was his orders to destroy it and take the Jewel.

“Hold it, Huld, hold it!” fireboy shouted, no doubt having seen that the old man had replenished the monk’s energy reserves.

The plant monster was on fire again, the crackling light from its burning body now illuminating the re-walled chamber. Stripped of its regeneration ability, it could do nothing about this but flail around madly at the foreigners, who merely ducked and dived out of the way of its limbs, then jumped in again when it turned away from them to hack at it some more.

Huld stretched out a hand, and for the third time that day held the monster in place.

Weakened, it held fast, stuck in a pose with an arm pulled back to strike at fireboy.

They had it.

Safe from the strike, fireboy unleashed another attack at the monster, orange flying from his hand and setting anything that wasn’t already on fire alight. The rest of them pressed in, hacking whole chunks of flaming vine and shoot from it, some of them

Fixed in place, falling apart under the swords of the foreigners, as bits of its body came off it the monster let out one final, deafening roar that went deep and long, then began to peter out growing quieter and quieter until it ended in a failing hiss, then stopped altogether.

They had defeated the plant monster.

All that was left of it now was a formless pile of burning mulch, into which its body had disintegrated.

Something shone bright and leaf-green at its centre. Something small and oval, so bright that it gave the walls and the foreigners a green glow.

The Earth Emerald.

Without another thought, and before any of the foreigners could do so, Huld ran forward and reached into the mulch, not caring that it was still on fire, to grab the Jewel and pull it out.

As soon as his hand wrapped around it, he felt power surge through him, just as he had done when he had touched it with his lips from inside the plant monster, only moreso. Strength surged along his arms and legs, reinvigorating him. He felt solid, stable, secure. And all the more disliking of fire than ever.

He hopped back a safe distance from the burning remnants of the plant monster.

The Jewel was cool to the touch, despite the fact that it had recently been embedded in a pile of flaming plant mass and was shining bright green.

He looked around at the foreigners, who stood panting, watching him with wide eyes and faces lathered in sweat, and breathed a long sigh of relief.

He had completed his mission.

Now to return the Jewel to the Governor, who would keep it safe from these prying foreigners.