“Hold, noble brethren. Something is placed I the ground ahead of us. Take not one step forward, lest you wish for the foul and unnatural objects that have been forcibly embedded within our planet’s embrace to erupt in flame and wind.”

He thought that he was rather smart, saying all of this openly. He would show these evil, soulless mongrels that they could not easily lure his kind into such an obvious trap. Although, to be fair, he had led them across a minefield despite his words just now.

“Corrupted beings! You will not harm another of my kind ever again! Know that we will find a way around these obvious traps of yours, and you will face our wrath and that of all of nature soon enough. Come, my kin! March with me this way!”

The eldest of the plantoids motioned and the rest of the plant-people ambled along the internal edge of the minefield, heedless of the fact that they could have just taken a few more steps and gotten out of that death trap. However, that may have actually been less of a bad idea than you might initially have thought. While they now had to deal with more landmines (some of which inevitably went off and harmed them) they were not close enough to Kain’s final sinister surprise to trigger it.

This, more than anything else, was likely what resulted in fewer wooden people dying in the agony that would follow soon enough. While they did suffer under the landmines, and some of them were killed, those that were too injured left the field while trying much more intensely to avoid the explosive devices in the ground. And yes, some of them did die to these little obstacles, those that either died or fled were spared the horrors that were about to be unleashed upon them.

The eldest of the tree-kin reached a path devoid of land mines and, at first glance, seemed to be devoid of the cylinders placed at an acute angle in the ground as well. He did find it odd that this path towards the gates of the town was lined with these cylinders, but he wrote that off as a deterrent in the event of a swarming horde. However, as he gathered his kindred into a more compact formation, he figured that whatever their purpose was it obviously would not be that big of an issue. Besides, they hadn’t done much of anything up till now, and he was standing even further away from these buried cylinders than he was to the other, smaller ones!

He raised his massive sword (which was made of ultra-dense wood) and roared out a primal, groan-like battle cry. His fellow plant people followed suit, and they began to move as fast as they could towards the gate. Well, they were not moving as fast as possible, actually. They were just trying to make it seem like they were, but in truth, they were keeping in line with the speed of their eldest, all so that he could claim the first blow against the enemy.

The group of wooden men of various sizes began to close in, and that was the moment that the defenders were waiting for. The tree-kin were now too deep and too heavily invested in their charge to stop in time or to dodge what was coming, and that was the idea all along.

“NOW!”

The eldest heard the people on the walls of the town yell one word in their barbaric tongue before the cylinders that he had ignored up till now puked out a nasty and vile gunk all over him and his fellows. At first, he didn’t feel a thing and began to laugh. What was that supposed to be? Some kind of strange paint? Did they have some kind of bullshit superstition that coloring an opponent would make them weaker?

Ha! The utter fools! They were truly as barbaric and backwards as they had been told that they wer-.

PAIN!

ABSOLUTE AGONIZING PAIN!

He was suddenly assaulted with a feeling of pure suffering the likes of which he had never had the displeasure of experiencing before. Every place that the gunk had touched on his body, as well as everything nearby it… All of it burned as though he was being branded there by a piercing hot metal object! Worse still, he could feel the horrid concoction seeping into his body, flowing through his plantoid veins and eating away at everything they came across!

He could no longer keep himself upright any longer.. the pain was simply too much for him to bear. He managed to look over his shoulder before he slumped to the ground, hoping beyond all hope that his fellows were not hit by that vile and evil weapon as he was.

His wooden heart nearly shattered as he saw his brethren writing in agony and issuing mute cries into the air around them. Wait… they were not mute! Instead… had the foul chemical really stripped him of his hearing?!

No, it was more than that… the concoction was stripping him of more than just his senses. It was doing more than just filing his mind and body with pure and unadulterated agony. It was killing him. Not overly quickly, though if he were a normal plant he would almost certainly have died a bit ago, but it was killing him. It had seeped deep into him now, and he could feel more and more of his body simply shutting down as the hellish mixture did its vile work.

As the last glimmers of light faded to darkness, he realized something altogether even more terrifying than the fact that he was being killed in such a way. He realized that, during all of this time, he had been screaming. Not merely screaming normally, but he had been screaming at a level that would have normally be impossible to keep up for this long. Normally, his body would have cried out in pain and forced his voice to go silent.

Now, though? There was so much pain in his final moments that he could not stop screaming. He knew full well as he faded into darkness that his vocal cords were likely reduced to a horrible state by now, but in a way that was fine. At least he didn’t have to feel that pain on top of everything else.

He was so sore.. so tired… so weary…

He could afford to take a rest now, right? The Great Tree would bring him back, right?

Yes, he was sure of that. It would be decades before he would have a new body again, but he was sure that he would be back.

Yes, he could afford to call it quits here for now…

He just… needed to sleep off this pain…