Chapter -2147483632 (Blighted)

  “There’s a big chunk of metal over there,” Ada pointed in a direction.

  Marcus nodded, “Alright, probably as good a location as any to start looking for where they stashed all our equipment.” He looked back at the sentinel, still standing there, watching them all. “Sentinel, do you have anything else you need from us?”

  “Me? No, I’m just thinking about all the free time I have now thanks to you all stumbling into this mess. I was going to be stuck looking for this group for the rest of the season in completely the wrong area, but now I actually don’t have anything I need to do for a while,” replied the sentinel. “Apart from return to headquarters and report what happened. What did happen, exactly?”

  Alex sighed and looked up into the sky. After a moment she looked back at Gravity and said, “Aortic dissection. It’s an effective way to ensure death without immediate healing. After weakening a small section of the aortic wall, the person’s own blood pressure will rupture the blood vessel, which results in an almost instant loss of blood to the brain, followed swiftly by death. Using an image to do exactly that, I channeled mana into the skill for most of a day to ensure it affected everyone in the camp. Ironically, the skill is counted as healing despite the effect, and bypasses vitality resistance as a result. With everyone affected, even their healers were unable to do anything to help. I also layered on a second effect that prevented coagulation.”

  “Huh, that’s rather grim. Good job.” Sentinel Gravity looked around and nodded. “Well, my work here is done. Good luck, Rangers. I look forward to seeing your full team at headquarters next year.” At that, the woman took flight and shot off into the distance.

  The rangers all stood and just watched as she grew smaller and smaller, until finally they could no longer see even a dot where she had gone.

  Ada was the one who finally broke the silence, “Right, so, meeting a sentinel was cool and all, but what are we actually going to do about all the bodies?”

  Alex sighed again and said, “I have something that can take care of everything if my supplies haven’t been trashed. Marcus, should we head for the wagon?”

  “Yes, yes we should. Rangers, that way,” Marcus pointed in the direction that Ada had previously indicated, then continued, “Keep your eyes open, and speak up if you spot anything that could be our equipment. It’ll be incredibly embarrassing if we have to return to Odessos and requisition replacements.”

  There were multiple grunts in reply as they all started moving.

  They didn’t have to go far before reaching a wagon shaped pile of blown over tents, which proved to indeed be the armored wagon. Helpfully, all of their confiscated equipment had simply been piled up inside, and the rangers quickly rearmed themselves. Alex was quite relieved to find that her pouches hadn’t even been touched.

  “OK, all of you get inside and close the doors, I can’t make this thing differentiate between targets,” she said after rummaging through one pouch and retrieving a seed that was not completely unlike a peach pit, albeit somewhat smaller than the ones Ada remembered. She was puzzled about what was going on, but all eight of the rangers simply climbed into the wagon as if rehearsed hundreds of times.

  Ada didn’t climb in, and instead turned to Alex and asked, “What’s going on? What are you doing with that?”

  “This is a corpseroot seed, and it’s going to take care of our dead body problem.” The self described [Druid] gave Ada an appraising look and continued, “Actually you should be fine if you want to stay out here and watch.”

  “Uh, yeah, absolutely I want to watch you do your thing,” said Ada.

  With that confirmation, Alex waved at the rangers waiting to close the wagon, “It’s alright, go ahead and seal it up.” She then waited for them to do exactly that. Once she was sure that the rangers were sealed inside, she gripped the seed tightly, then bent down and punched her entire fist into the dirt at her feet.

  Ada jumped back slightly in surprise, but then laughed, “I guess I didn’t really consider how you were going to make it grow. What happens next?”

  In response, Alex just grinned back. “Watch,” she said.

  Ada was surprised when a tremor began within the earth beneath her feet accompanied by a low rumble. She turned back to Alex to ask how long this was going to take, when a myriad of thick vines burst from the ground all around the pair. In moments, the vines grew to extend throughout the large encampment forming multiple splitting branches. Large oval leaves emerged from the vines, and Ada saw that each time one of the vines reached a corpse, a large mass of roots grew to completely engulf the body.

  “Corpseroot is decay aligned and normally grows in patches of nitrogen poor soil in the jungles further north, has insect pollinated flowers, and produces fruits that are both quite sweet and extremely toxic to most of the animals that live there. The fruits attract animals which eat them and die from the toxin, then those animal’s corpses get scavenged by tigers, ornithocheirus, small raptors, and the like. Those mostly also then die, and the corpses close enough to the vine get enveloped by roots and digested. I managed to find a plant with a mature fruit still on the vine and collected some seeds the last time we traveled through the jungle. They’re useful for cleaning up after a mass casualty event, but that was the last one I had. I’ll need to.. ah, there we go.”

  Alex stood and walked over to one of the vines where a fist sized purple fruit had grown. She plucked it off the vine and walked back over to Ada.

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  “Anyway, as I was saying, because I used a skill to force it to grow rapidly and much larger than it otherwise normally would, it’s not entirely safe to be near the thing. I’m fine because it’s my mana sustaining it, and I can keep it off myself. You’re fine because, well, you’re completely inorganic. The others, however, need to stay sealed in the wagon so they don’t get mistaken for corpses that aren’t quite dead yet. They wouldn’t be in danger of actually being consumed before I could get them freed, but it’d be a waste of mana.”

  As Alex was speaking, the fruit in her hand had grown plump, then swiftly desiccated. She then closed her hand around the fruit, crushing it. When she opened her hand there were a number of large seeds that looked very much like the one she had plunged into the ground earlier, which were placed into the pouch where that same seed had been retrieved.

  “There we go. These should last a good while.”

  Ada raised an eyebrow and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to collect more?”

  “Nah, they aren’t worth anything to anyone outside of rangers with herbalism skills, aside from assassins wanting the toxins produced in the fruits, and I don’t really feel like supplying them. If I need more, I can grow one of these into a mature plant and harvest seeds again.”

  “Huh, I suppose that makes sense. You know, we haven’t really had a chance to talk about the things you’re into now.”

  “Eh, I don’t mind. You’ve had an exciting week and needed to work through all of that. Anyway, the vine should be about done finding all the corpses.”

  Alex squatted down and put one of her hands against the now rather massive woody trunk of a vine where it emerged from the dirt, and it swiftly rotted away, leaving behind nothing but a rich dark brown layer across the surface of everything around them. Alex stood and brushed her hands off against each other.

  “Alright, guess it’s about time that we get moving.”

  Ada looked up into the other woman’s eyes where she found something new. Where the woman’s eyes had previously shown the shifting green fractals of the verdant element, they were now filled with a dark swirling pattern. Mesmerized by the new effect, she said, “Alex, I need you to know how amazingly sexy you are right now.”

  Alex just smiled and offered her arm, “Shall we go?”

  “Let’s,” said Ada, looping her own arm through the other’s, and the pair strolled over to the rangers’ wagon where they together knocked at the hatch, alerting those inside.

  “We're all done, Marcus,” Alex called out. “It's safe for everyone to come out.”

  The armored hatch opened a moment later, and the ranger team piled out. After looking around at the altered landscape for a moment, the [Leader] spoke. “It's always shocking to see the results of that one. You're definitely getting faster.”

  “I'd hope so. The last time I'd had to use that seed was over 200 levels in both classes ago, if you remember.”

  “Don't remind me. I never want to think about that mess again.” Marcus shuddered, then turned to his squad. “Alright, rangers, I’m leaving Lucius in charge and taking Atalanta with me back to Odessos to pick up some new horses, retrieve Nyssos, and inform the governor about this place--it can be his problem to bring the 3rd legion out here to recover this mess. I’m also sending a report to Ranger Command, since we called in a sentinel and then ended up not needing her.”

  Quintus spoke up, saying, “We also need to restock the trail rations. They did not waste any time looting all the food we had in storage.”

  “Excellent point. OK, orders for you all while we’re away: go through what you can of the camp here to replenish what was taken and then move the wagon back to the road. If we don’t run into any issues, we should be back with horses within the week. If not, then start heading to the next town. We’ll likely catch up before you all get there.”

  Marcus and Atalanta then put together a couple packs with some of the funds that were somehow completely untouched from the lockbox built into the floor of the wagon and headed out.

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  Based on the world from the original work by Selkie Myth

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