Matt went off course. Above him somewhere, Lucy noticed.

　　"Matt! Wrong way! Veer right!"

　　He was still trapped in his suit, holding his breath as best he could. He couldn`t even try to yell at this point. If he did, he`d be unable to keep going without ripping the suit itself open to get air. He continued on in the new direction, hoping Lucy would provide more instructions. She did.

　　"I don`t see anything unusual that way. Keep going!"

　　From a place he couldn`t see in the vines, Matt heard one canister suddenly stop hissing, then another and another. It wasn`t gradual as if they were running out of gas, but instead it was sudden, like someone had put their finger over the nozzle. He didn`t know how, but the Scourge was stopping them. Whatever advantage he was getting from the gas was ending soon.

　　As he ran, Matt realized he had made a slight mistake. When he had turned to chase the vulnerabilities that Survivor`s Reflexes was showing him, he had run only a few steps before turning again for the same reason. After a few adjustments, he realized the problem was that he had been running almost exactly in the wrong direction, and turned almost entirely around before he stopped running out of brighter, more vulnerable directions to chase. He had been going in the wrong direction.

　　Luckily, the combination of gnawing strike, his movement meta-enhancement, and his ultra-sharp shovel was still working. He suspected it was working even better because of the shovel, in fact. The Scourge didn`t like being attacked, sure, but it seemed to specifically dislike strikes from the shovel. When he cut a vine, they jerked back slightly as if burned by fire.

　　Is it allergic to the metal, or something?

　　Almost the moment he had that thought, the mental instruction portion of Survivor`s Reflexes kicked in to give him more guesses, as if his own thinking had given it fuel. He had a sense that normal strikes or even spells would be less effective against the Scourge`s vines, given that they carried mana and that it was essentially a mana-absorbing machine at this point in its evolution.

　　Matt really wasn`t sure how reliable Survivor`s Reflexes could be with a pure educated guess like this, but if he was reading what it was saying correctly, the Scourge had something like damage reduction that was proportional to the mana in the strikes and weapons themselves. It was bad news, and a great reason to keep his shovel in play.

　　But for now, his biggest problem was his lungs. A lifetime of reflexive breathing built instincts that were hard to ignore. He wasn`t taking damage, but his lungs were burning horribly, and it was only by intense willpower that he was able to keep from ripping his suit open. It was like he was drowning, and it took every ounce of battle-built toughness to resist his own panic.

　　Then disaster struck.

　　Matt had deeply, deeply hoped that the Scourge couldn`t shift tactics mid-battle. He and Lucy had batted around the possibility that the Scourge would either not be able to change how it acted that fast, or wouldn`t be able to do it while actively facing an attack. Both of those hopeful guesses were proven untrue when Matt cut away a section of vines only to see several new vines just beyond them, oriented with their tips pointed directly at the front of Matt`s body.

　　Shit.

　　All the vines fired at once, filling the entire space of the tunnel ahead of him so closely there was no room to dodge. Matt instinctively clubbed downwards with his shovel, knocking several of them down towards his feet, then turned himself somewhat sideways to try and fit through the gap he had made. It wouldn`t have been possible at all, except the vines` movements were still visibly affected by the remnants of the gas in the air and would break from the blunt force of the strike.

　　It still wasn`t quite enough. As Matt spun with the sharp point of the shovel and made himself some more room, several things happened at once.

　　The first was pain.

　　Status effect: Mana Siphon

　　You are under the effect of a mana siphon. A local environmental hazard or specialized attack is drawing on your internal mana resources. Some of your skills and stats are temporarily disabled as a result.

　　Current effects: Survivor`s Digging effectiveness reduced. System-provided stats reduced by 10%.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

　　Matt had felt the suit tear near his pack, and the air rushed in behind it. But the good news was that he wasn`t dead. It looked like having a small hole limited the whole-body mana siphon attack the scourge could usually put in play. It hurt like hell, but the effects were less than before. He could handle it, at least for a while.

　　What was worse was that it got his shovel. As the attacks swept by him, Matt tried his best to clear as much space as he could around him. This worked, and he managed to get in a few gnawing strikes that cut off most of the vines that were attacking him head on. But the momentum of the vines was incredible. As his shovel passed through them, it was deflected slightly, pushing the cutting edge of the blade out of line with the vines. When he failed to cut the last few, they caught the blunt edges, spinning the tool in his hands, wrenching it out of his grip, and pulling it away from him.

　　He reached out for it, but apparently this wasn`t just random happenstance. The vines wrapped around the shovel as they sailed away from him, then the shovel disappeared into the greater mass. It was gone.

　　Matt took a deep breath, which he could now do. He needed it to yell.

　　"Lucy! Suit integrity is compromised. It`s still working a bit. I got mana-lanced, but it`s manageable." Matt was furiously dodging vines while he reached back to pull a few items from the sides of his pack. "I`m activating the inferno."

　　"Do you need the capsules?"

　　"Not yet."

　　Matt`s hand groped only for a split second before he found his knife and the fire mortar shells Barry had gifted him. Gripping the ropes that tied them to the pack, he ripped the shells free first. One of the advantages of high DEX that he rarely got to use was a vast improvement to his fine motor skills, which meant pulling the pins in each and tossing them was much easier than it should have been. Within seconds, he had all five out lit and in play, throwing four far out into the tangle in a direction more or less in front of him and one much closer, essentially directly at the base of the wall where the Scourge`s latest coordinated attack had come from.

　　Barry had definitely envisioned Matt firing these from the artillery, but there had been no way Matt could have stood outside the Scourge and fired the thing without the plant getting clued into his location. Instead, he and Lucy had figured out how to activate them by hand. Each worked on a slight delay meant to keep them from catching on fire until after they were pushed from the mortar tube towards whatever enemy they were meant for, but it wasn`t long. Within a few seconds, each exploded into wide, intense rings of flame.

　　Matt faced the explosion nearest to him as directly as he could, and was gratified to find it didn`t immediately incinerate him. He and Lucy had guessed that the armor they were wearing had never been seriously tested against non-Scourge attacks, but their experience with Leel meant they knew that Nullsteel was excellent at nullifying at least fire-oriented forms of mana-based attacks. Which was exactly what the mortar shells did.

　　Matt could tell that the flames weren`t normal. They burned in a too-fast, twitchy way. They also burned too white, and Matt could smell a mixture of burning matches and scorching fabric as they singed the outside of his pack through the gap in his suit. But he himself was mostly fine. What the suit wasn`t stopping, Rub Some Dirt In It was mitigating and healing. The suit was working to protect him from the heat.

　　The same could not be said of the Scourge. The fire was intense enough that it actually was getting burned, and its attentions immediately turned from Matt to the fire. While it did, Matt pulled both his knife and shield from the pack, strapping the latter around his left suit sleeve. He doubted the knife would work as well at cutting the Scourge as the shovel had, and he`d need help deflecting what it didn`t catch.

　　The Scourge immediately started beating on the fire with its vines, which were almost as immediately ignited and burned by the direct contact with the fire. But as each vine was burned into non-functional states, it fed new ones in while pulling the greater wall of vines around the fire further and further away. After a few moments, Survivor`s Reflexes clued Matt in on what the Scourge was doing. The strikes themselves would slightly lessen the intensity of the flame when they hit, but that wasn`t enough to actually stop it. What was worse was that the ash from the swatting vines was quickly building up over the fuel from the fire, smothering it. It was sacrificing some amount of its bulk to protect itself from the greater damage that the intense heat the fires would otherwise produce.

　　Matt had no time to wait and see if the tactic was as successful as he assumed it would be. He charged forward, swinging his knife into the wall as he kept pressing towards the brightest, most vulnerable parts of the plant.

　　His first knife swing not only didn`t cut, but instead actively clanked off the vines. The advantage Matt had been getting from the shovel was much larger than he had guessed. As it was, the knife wouldn`t be enough for him to take even a single step forward through the tangled mass, and the gnawing strike didn`t work nearly fast enough to help.

　　"Matt! Shift attacks!" Lucy screamed, overhead. She was right. There wasn`t any option but to go for broke, even if it meant burning resources sooner than he had planned.

　　Regal Scythe

　　In the entire colony, the Wolf Ant Queen is the only ant truly optimized for battle. Even the soldier-guard ants are merely bigger, stronger versions of the normal worker ants. The Queen herself had the luxury of abandoning mandibles meant for work in favor of pure killing potential.

　　With Regal Scythe activated, the sharpness of any weapon you use is increased to a level similar to the Queen`s own weaponry. The sharpness you gain will rival finely chipped obsidian blades, without any significant cost of durability to the weapon itself.

　　Regal Scythe is a limited-use upgrade, good for several minutes of normal use, after which both the effects of the enhancement and the enhancement itself will disappear. At any time, the remainder of the trait can be "burnt" to cause a massive increase in the range, sharpness, and speed of a single strike. Doing so will immediately remove the trait and all effects.

　　Meta-Trait occupied: Attack