Something could go wrong. Several things, really.

　　The first was that when Matt broke into the general center of the space, he found that while the Scourge was a god-like monster plant, it was still a plant. And a very real inconvenience of the way plants worked was that they buried their roots underground.

　　That actually wasn`t the worst case. Presumably, all of the vines were growing out of one taproot, which meant that there was a good chance that Matt would have been able to see where it was sprouting from the ground. The worst was the off chance that one of the Scourge`s adaptations was the ability to hide its root by choosing a different place for the bulk of the plant to break the surface.

　　Either way, he had to dig. Not necessarily a ton, but enough to expose the root or at least some underground vines that he could track back to the source. But that also meant breaking his cut, bash, and run stride for a moment in order to drop his defenses and dig. At this point, his digging skill was pretty developed. It wouldn`t take much time, but even a split second was going to be dangerous.

　　Matt took one last slash at some incoming vines, then dropped his shovel and dug, hoping that his digging skills extra-dirt-moved multiplier would kick in and save him some seconds. It didn`t, but his conventional skill-enhanced digging was still pretty quick. After three or four quick plunges of the shovel into the soil, he had dug down far enough to satisfy himself that whatever else the Scourge was, it wasn`t a plant with an extensive root structure.

　　"Matt! Heads up!" Lucy was still up top somewhere, keeping an eye on things. "It`s closing up!"

　　Even just digging the small hole had involved several quick dodges using Spring Fighter, weaving his body around the Scourge`s unguided strikes. He didn`t find the root. As Lucy yelled, Matt looked up to find that the vine tunnel he had dug behind him was almost entirely closed up now, woven in with new vines that had moved in. They had already shut off his escape and were now closing the small space he was standing in.

　　It seemed his Clownrat damage-over-time strikes had worn off.

　　Which means this is the only place it`s going to be checking.

　　Matt looked up in time to see vines lancing through the general tangle and shooting down towards him. The Scourge had narrowed in and could now concentrate on searching the last remaining damaged cavity in its mass by arcing vines toward him like spears of death.

　　"Any second now, Matt! Hold on!"

　　Matt kept swinging and dodging, but it wasn`t any use. He didn`t have time to cut a new tunnel without getting stabbed, but staying in place meant getting caught sooner or later by one of the Scourge`s attacks. As if to prove that point, the vines that the Scourge sent didn`t retract after they landed on the ground. Matt was cutting through them as fast as he could, but every vine he didn`t get to was shrinking the space he was left with.

　　Within seconds, he was hemmed in on all sides to the point where he couldn`t swing the shovel. Desperate for even a split second of time and elbow room, Matt choked up on the shovel, holding it with the handle pointed down to towards the ground and the blade of the shovel protruding only slightly out from his body. Then, he strained every muscle in his body and cranked around in a circle.

　　The maneuver didn`t make much room, but the several inches of space he cleared were just enough for him while the Gnawing Clownrat strike gave the Scourge just a moment`s confusion as to what exact space Matt occupied.

　　The next step of the plan wasn`t precisely timed, but Matt had done everything he could to stall for it. It was now or never.

　　—

　　All across the Scourge, axons were firing. To the extent the Scourge could be said to think, it thought mainly in reflexes. Those involuntary reflexes were going crazy in a large portion of its mass, and so far, it couldn`t find the source that was causing mayhem. However, that didn`t mean it wouldn`t respond at all.

　　In some adaptations, the Scourge had encountered damage from a material that was invisible to it, one that its reflexes could not see coming and caused damage that it was unable to resist. Sometimes the material would be attached to mana sources, while sometimes it would seemingly propel itself.

　　By the time the material became a threat in its previous life, the Scourge had adapted down the wrong path, assuming the universal nature of mana in things. Suddenly dealing with something that skirted by all of its developed sensory capabilities was a tough problem, even for its superior toughness. But eventually, one Scourge iteration developed a mutation that took into account the fact that invisible non-mana material could be a source of damage. If a section of the Scourge was being actively damaged, it was as good as a flare indicating where the threat was located.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

　　Once that piece of the puzzle was in place, the rest of the Scourge`s adaptations were more than enough to nullify threats. It could not destroy the material by gathering mana, but it could use more primitive methods from much earlier Scourge generations and wrap the threat in vines and constrain the material. Then, if possible, it would squeeze and crush. If not, it would bury the material, removing it from the field of play. Sometimes, it took damage when it did such things, but a bit of incidental hurt was not something that overly worried the instincts on which it ran.

　　This current threat threw indications over a truly large portion of the Scourge`s mass, but that didn`t change the basic instinctual formula it used to handle that sort of thing. Where broken vines sent impulses indicating damage, it filled in the space with new ones. There was no mana source that it could notice, so it would just smother whatever was hurting it.

　　Suddenly, the damage stopped. The Scourge was not a clever, thinking thing, so this made little difference. It would fill in the space, driven by its instinctual drive for homeostasis and to fully occupy any space it possibly could. As it closed in the space, a small amount of damage flared, indicating that whatever threat it faced was not entirely finished yet. So it sent more vines to fill the space. It was what it did, what the vines were for.

　　But just as it was closing the very last of the void within its mass, a new threat flared, one that it could see, and one that it had seen before. It was something the Scourge was well-adapted to handle, and it had tools to suppress such a threat. But time was of the essence, or else it would face a large, unnecessary energy cost to regrow what the threat would damage.

　　The instinctual priorities were clear. It reoriented its focus to mitigate the new threat.

　　—

　　Surrounded as he was by vines, there was no way Matt could have heard the thunking noise he was waiting for. Luckily, he didn`t need to.

　　"Matt! Incoming!" Lucy screamed. "Hold on!"

　　It was Barry who had made Matt remember the herbicide gas canisters. They had been present in the very first cache of Gaian emergency supplies Matt had ever found. At that time, they were a heavy afterthought that he had left behind, since there weren`t any plants around to use them on. Now there was, and they were incredibly important.

　　Matt had built a catapult in the past in the fight against the first hero that the system had dropped on Gaia. This time, he improved upon the design and built a full-blown trebuchet.

　　Rigging the canisters to open when launched from the trebuchet had been pretty easy, since it turned out the canisters were closed by lids meant to be easily ripped off before they were thrown. Building a timed trigger for the trebuchet itself had been harder, and eventually had come down to an imprecise timed trigger that Matt had rigged with his water stone, an empty food cube bag, and a lever. All in all, the trebuchet wasn`t a small contraption, and Matt and Lucy had to work hard to improve the range of their original catapult to make sure it was far enough away that the Scourge didn`t take it down before it served its purpose.

　　He and Lucy had not been able to get the firing timing more precise than a range of about thirty seconds or a minute, and on this firing, the timing had taken much longer than usual.

　　It had finally fired. As the canisters hissed through the air towards the Scourge, the incoming vines that would have otherwise hit Matt suddenly retreated, heading towards the canisters. Matt heard several clanks that he interpreted as the Scourge deflecting the cans away, but nowhere near enough to indicate it had got all of them. They hadn`t held any of the cans back, and there were dozens of them.

　　Matt was particularly pleased when the vines above him parted away from a canister that nearly landed on top of him. Holding his breath for so long was just as possible as the Gaians had predicted, but was also just as painful as they had implied it was. But it came in handy with his airtight suit saving him from breathing in what he assumed was pretty nasty stuff. The agony in his lungs seemed that much more worthwhile.

　　The gas itself was bluish, and as it filled the air around Matt, the vines reacted by pulling away from it. The general tangle of the Scourge meant this happened much slower than the speed of the gas diffusing. Where the poison touched the plant, it had an immediate effect. The vines slowed. The gas visibly weakened them, and even seemed to impart a sort of stiffness to them. It didn`t kill them, but Matt hadn`t expected it to.

　　The Gaians had indicated that the Scourge was still vulnerable to most forms of attacks, just not vulnerable enough for them to matter long-term. A herbicide that didn`t actually kill the plant would have been all but useless to the Gaians, who needed to clear the majority of their planet`s surface of the problem. But for Matt, who was dealing with a much smaller version of the same problem, it was a different story. Every second counted, and this had bought several.

　　Matt picked up his shovel and swung wildly at walls of vines around him, laying down his damage over time effect in three or four directions before Lucy called down the actual best-bet direction of travel to him from above. He then cut his way into the mass again, smashing through weed-killer-weakened vines even faster than before.

　　There still wasn`t a lot of hope. The taproot wasn`t at the center of the plant, which meant it could be anywhere in the entire mass. It was a big space to search, and probably too big for Matt to search in the time it would take for the Scourge to close in on him again.

　　He might get lucky. He had been lucky in the past. But something inside him told him that he couldn`t rely on luck this time. He needed something else, some different kind of hope to rely on, or he`d die surrounded by a writhing monster made of unrestrained, mindless growth.

　　He was a dozen cuts deep into his new tunnel before that hope began to show itself. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the Scourge was glowing. And some directions were glowing brighter than others.