Ding!

　　Matt felt like he hadn`t even fully materialized before the ding went off. It was odd to get the notification now, since Barry had time to send it while they were in the dungeon. Worried, he pulled it up as soon as he could.

　　Quest Assigned: Clear the Weeds

　　I know this is playing dirty, but I didn`t want to have to watch you read this. As you get closer to home you`d find out anyway, so I need to tell you, but I absolutely command you not to be worried about me.

　　The actual text of this quest should have been something like "The Scourge is trying to eat a dungeon and getting remarkably close to figuring out how." Don`t panic.

　　Of course, Matt panicked.

　　"Lucy, the Scourge is trying to eat Barry. The dungeons, I mean. That`s really bad."

　　"It can do that? The dungeons survived last time. Is this a new evolution, or something?"

　　"I don`t know. I didn`t get that far into the message."

　　"Well, do! Read it!"

　　I don`t know why the Scourge couldn`t eat the dungeons in the before-time anymore than you do. I wasn`t awake then. Maybe it couldn`t adapt that fast before it starved itself out. I don`t know. But it`s doing it now. The dungeons resist damage, so I`m not completely without defenses. But every time I change how I`m defending, it shifts with me. I need to concentrate to do it faster.

　　That means two things:

　　1. I`m going dark for a while. I`ve preloaded your victory gifts for when you come out on top, but I`ll be down for the count for a while. I have to dedicate myself wholly to this.2. You need to hurry. Dungeons are efficient, but that doesn`t mean they don`t use a fair amount of energy, or keep much stored. If it can consume that energy, it`s going to have a lot to work with.

　　Once again, don`t worry about me. Don`t stop with what you`re doing. I`ve got it under control. Focus on what you can control.

　　And Matt? Lucy? Win. Kick its ass.

　　I love you guys.

　　Barry

　　—

　　Matt and Lucy couldn`t go home directly, since they still had to sprint to the original food-box Matt had found. He took out the relevant items, and they immediately turned towards home. Once they reached line-of-sight on the closest dungeon to the estate, they saw what Barry was facing. The Scourge hadn`t spread its main body too far, thankfully. But it had sent out a feeler all the way to the nearest dungeon and had grown vines from the end of it that now engulfed the dungeon while pulsing, squeezing, and generally worming through any cracks around it. The whole dungeon structure was metal, but still groaned under the pressure of the attack.

　　They were far enough away that the Scourge didn`t notice them coming. It was time to suit up. Matt had experimented and had found that, just as the voice in the armaments building had said, he was now able to hold his breath for an unbelievably long amount of time. Whenever he wanted air, his VIT would resist whatever loss of function he should have experienced and would even supplement stamina as a replacement by leveraging Rub Some Dirt In It in a way he didn`t fully understand.

　　He`d need that, since the suit apparently would only work if it was completely closed. He and Lucy had talked it over, and they guessed that meant anything not under the suit would be visible to whatever senses the Scourge used to find mana, unless it was made of a material it also couldn`t see.

　　Matt closed the suit and hefted the shovel, which he prayed was as Scourge-invisible as he hoped it was.

　　It was time to go to war.

　　—

　　The beginnings of war meant a lot of creeping about, trying to avoid more direct contact with the Scourge until they got closer. But because Matt couldn`t actually breathe inside the suit outside of the few mouthfuls of air under it, he also had to hurry. He ran forward as fast as he could while making sure he didn`t actually touch any of the vines and let the Scourge know he was present.

　　As they drew near the estate, they saw that the Scourge had grown. That wasn`t only true in terms of its main body, the Scourge had feelers spread out everywhere. Matt could see one snaking toward the museum, and who knew how many of Barry`s dungeons it was attacking as well. It was also true in terms of its sheer size. It had long since overgrown what Matt thought of as his primary estate, spilling out into the plots of land he had bought after.

　　Every plant on every plot was drained and gone. They might not have had much mana in them, but it was apparently enough for the Scourge to want to make use of. The Ape-iaries were long gone. Even the soil itself was drained, looking less like what he had purchased and more like standard, dead Gaian soil, minus the red.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

　　It was huge, and it was moving. The vines closest to it were more clearly under its control, whipping around almost defensively, like it was passively warding itself against danger and making itself a less predictable target to hit. Worse, it was doing it mindlessly. If it was focused, Matt could have probably figured out a general direction to look for the taproot in. Now, he`d just have to go in chopping.

　　They moved in further and further until the waving vines were finally too close to consistently evade with any perfect level of confidence, and close enough that Matt could get into the thick of things almost immediately. If the Scourge knew he was there, it wasn`t tipping its hand.

　　Unable to talk through the suit and unwilling to give away his position, Matt looked at Lucy and nodded. She nodded back. He hefted his shovel and charged.

　　His first cut was meant to be exploratory, but the shovel felt like it barely caught wind as it sliced through a wall of vines, immediately dropping the few that weren`t tangled with the greater mass on the ground. Those vines stopped moving, but Matt didn`t. He immediately sprinted from that spot, which was good, since several other undamaged vines almost immediately slithered to that spot trying to find him. In moments, that whole section was covered with vines, writhing around defensively and perhaps hoping to find mana-rich prey.

　　He ran a good fifty yards away and cut again. The same thing happened. Matt was reluctant to make any more tests. He needed to get to the center of this thing. He went in guns blazing.

　　The next cut was followed by another, and another, each one starting down at the ground and looping up through the air in a rough tunnel shape. It was something he and Lucy had work shopped. Since the Scourge was tangled, straight cuts wouldn`t drop the vines in a way he could get through. He had to start from the ground and cut out a loop. It wouldn`t have been possible except for two things. First, Matt was much, much stronger than a normal human and though the Scourge was pretty tough, it wasn`t entirely impossible to cut. The second was that the shovel was so damn sharp that he could move it through the Scourge almost without any drag at all.

　　The vines still didn`t fall cleanly, but Matt had a plan for that too, one of only two movement skills he had been able to find the entire time he was out.

　　Turtle`s Momentum

　　How do Flash Turtles move that fast? They cheat. Don`t ask us how because we don`t know. They simply ignore most laws related to breaking inertia to a limited degree to get their weird shelled mass up and moving much faster than they should be able to.

　　Turtle`s Momentum allows you to do the same thing, getting more out of a conventional or skill-related dash over a very short distance. It doesn`t actually increase your top speed much, but it increases acceleration such that you reach that top speed much more quickly, and doubles whatever impact your mass and speed imply you should have had.

　　Between his rapid-fire cuts and being able to hurtle harder and faster into the vines than he should have, Matt was able to move forward through the Scourge much more quickly than he otherwise could have. But the Scourge wasn`t slow. Matt still wouldn`t have been able to stay ahead of its retaliatory strikes except for another skill he picked up.

　　"I told you it would be worth it, Matt!" Unseen Lucy could talk without much risk, and couldn`t resist the chance to gloat. She deserved it. Matt had been very, very reluctant to eat a Clownrat. He still felt somehow infected from the experience. It took her hours to talk him into it, and she had to play dirty to do it, pointing out how much the Gaians had sacrificed and how, deep down, he knew that eating clown meat wasn`t the worst thing possible.

　　She was wrong. It was the worst thing possible. It had tasted like meat-based cotton candy. But it did give up a skill, one that was working exactly as they hoped here.

　　In the course of what they were now calling their training montage, Matt and Lucy had learned a bit about the Palate of the Conqueror skill. First, it seemed to revolve around three total metatraits. The skills Matt had found before were entirely composed of things that applied to attack, defense, or movement. Of the attack spells he had found, quite a few seemed to synergize with magic. Only two had given up real, honest-to-god improvements for how he thwacked things with other things, and this was the first.

　　Gnawing Strike

　　When you strike a plant with Gnawing Strike, it exacts a small stamina cost to enact a damage-over-time effect that continues working over several seconds. Mimicking the sawing, gnawing damage of rodent teeth, it eats away at the target, inflicting pain, distracting, and generally giving you more bang for your buck for several seconds per strike.

　　Works exceptionally well on the targets Clownrats are adapted to, particularly plants, tree branches, and roots.

　　Where Matt had struck, the attack left a gnawing effect that he could literally hear, slowly eating away at the vines. It worked about how he had hoped. As he moved, the Scourge appeared confused about where the attack was coming from at any given time. Whatever primitive "If Damage, Then Attack" programming the Scourge was running didn`t seem able to differentiate between damage types. If he wasn`t wearing the suit, it would have probably found him. But as it was, its attack was split over several different parts of the tunnel, leaving a manageable amount for him to deal with as he made each new cut.

　　In the meantime, Matt was making the best of the time he had bought. One of the weirder things about having both high Dexterity and high Perception was that when both were kicked in, time seemed to slow. Since he was in a battle with a plant that appeared to be as quick as lightning, the effect wasn`t that noticeable. He was making multiple chops per second and pulsing his turtle charge after each one, but since everything in his local environment was keeping pace with his speed, everything felt slow.

　　Worse, the probing attacks of the Scourge behind him were closing off any point of reference he had. The weaving vines weren`t quite thick enough that he was working in the dark, but he had no idea how far he had come. It was just him in a small, closed, claustrophobic hallway made of death.

　　That`s where Lucy came in. The rules against her working as a scout mostly had to do with telling Matt about places he hadn`t been, or things he couldn`t see. Telling him his exact position on his own property didn`t trigger those restrictions at all, since he was intimately familiar with the area and the System`s rules were apparently nowhere near granular enough to account for the difference between asking that question in the shade of a tree, or asking it in the shade of a god-like murderplant.

　　"Matt, about ten more cuts to the center!" She yelled. Matt was surprised at how far he`d come already. So far, they hadn`t needed a single trick beyond his initial loadout.

　　Which means something`s about to go wrong.