Downtown Druid

The Frasheid soldiers hesitated for just a moment as they attempted to size up Dantes and Jacopo. When more grayclad men made their way over the barricade though, the hesitant ones were pushed forward and attacked. They were young, Dantes noted, and not very well trained or prepared. Frasheid had perhaps saved their best men for putting down the slave rebellion back home. Between all the work he’d managed to do in the Pit and now this, he’d have to thank Gavain for everything if he ever saw him again.

Jacopo caught a spear, yanked the man holding it toward him, and carved a bloody slash through his face. He then leapt at another man approaching Dantes, and speared him in the throat before he could even raise his weapon.

Dantes held out his wooden hand, anchored his feet using some weeds that had pushed through the concrete and skewered five different men through the heart instantly before pulling it back, jerking their bodies toward him in such a way that he was able to throw them into other men that were attacking him. He pulled his pistol free from his hip and shot another man in the head that had been about to throw a piece of masonry at Jacopo.

While they fought, Dantes and Jacopo combined their focus and started to reach out, turning their attention from within the city to all of the men in front of them. They could feel the seeds sitting in the stomachs of hundreds of the men in front of them. They were still holding strong, in spite of the blood he’d fed them, fighting against the order he’d given them with their strong desire to grow and spread. He connected to each and every one of them, weaving together the small threads of life that were connected to him, and pushing even more life into them from the city itself, forging all of it into a rope with the thickness of a Mother’s Reach tree.

He took a breath, feeling the weight of the connection as he drove his dagger into a man’s eye that had gotten a little too close.

“GROW”.

Nearly all of the men knew something was wrong immediately as they felt a rumbling in their stomachs, but they pushed on for a few moments, more concerned with what was in front of them. Then the screaming began. Men collapsed to the ground, clutching their stomachs and screaming as the plants spread throughout their bodies. Dantes could feel the roots, vines, branches, and leaves piercing their stomachs and running through their veins in search of more blood to sustain themselves. Those who were not affected, who’d been lucky enough to avoid ingesting any seeds, looked around with a mixture of horror and confusion. The bravest of them grabbed their fellow soldiers, trying to help them in any way they could, or at least figure out what was wrong. Their courage was rewarded with branches and roots shooting through the men they were clutching and into them, searching hungrily for more life to sustain their impossible growth.

The guard looked on in terror as Dantes and Jacopo walked steadily over the barricade and into the killing field they’d been defending. A grayclad soldier managed to cut a root that was attempting to tangle his ankle from himself, and leapt at Dantes with his spearpoint aimed high. Dantes sent a flicker of his will out, and a different plant caught the man in midair and slammed him back to the ground before muffling his screams with vines that crawled down his throat.

Dantes made his way outside of the walls where he was rewarded with the sight of even greater chaos. Men screamed as they tore at the plants that wrapped themselves around them, a few men had managed to stay on their feet, and were stumbling around with thorn bushes slowly pushing their way through their skin, tearing them apart slowly. Dantes willed a bit more life into them, to speed the growth and end their suffering.

“Leave them,” yelled a man in a gray coat with several red marks on his arm indicating he was of a higher rank. “Grab your spears, you can’t help them now. Come now, we can still push through!”

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A few of their men began to rally, and as they did they noticed Dantes and Jacopo casually strolling through a field of their dead. They charged him, screaming with a mixture of fear and rage to push themselves to attack.

Dantes and Jacopo stood still and waited for the gray tide to reach them.

“You can shift back. I don’t think we’ll need the muscle anymore.”

Jacopo shifted into himself and climbed on Dantes’s shoulder, making himself comfortable as they watched the enemy approach him through matching pairs of golden eyes.

The gray tide in front of them was torn apart at its edges by the hungry, thirsty roots that had already killed their fellows, and those few men that nearly managed to reach him, slowed and started to try and turn themselves around before they reached their target.

From the smoke and destruction behind Dantes emerged a wave of rats, roaches, dogs, bats, and pigeons. The Frasheid soldiers that turned around to flee, couldn’t move fast enough through the tangling roots that surrounded them and screamed as they were buried beneath the tide of vermin. Dogs tore out throats, roaches swarmed into any available orifice, rats ate at any exposed flesh they could find, bats slammed into men with high speed tearing at their faces, and pigeons pecked out eyes.

Dantes walked through all of it, occasionally blocking a strike with his wooden hand, or shooting out flame from a wand in his hand. A mage sent a blast of lightning toward him that bounced harmlessly off of him thanks to his new amulet, and Dantes willed the swarm to target the mage in response, hearing his screams swiftly muddled by the press of vermin on him.

“We could’ve done this from the sky, or even from a distance. We didn’t need to be here for it,” said Jacopo.

“I wanted people to see me. It’s important that they know who saved them.”

“So they can be afraid, or grateful?”n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“A mix of both.”

“As long as it's you that deals with it from now on.”

Dantes walked all the way to the Frasheid camp, where his newly grown bloodgarden had completely routed them. Those that hadn’t been killed had run without even taking any of their belongings with them. Dantes didn’t send anything to hound those that ran, the survivors would tell a very important story to those back in their homeland. Cannons, gunpowder, food, weapons, armor all lay where it had been abandoned. It would be good for the city to claim it. Dantes put a hand on the snout of a draft horse to calm it as he walked past, making sure that the vermin he commanded left any of the other animals in the camp alone.

Dantes checked on the other breaches in the walls, finding that the guard had pushed the enemy out once so many of them had been torn apart from within by his plants. The city’s defenders were very careful to avoid stepping on anything he’d grown though.

He then checked on the status of the docks. The Viscent cannons were bombarding them with a constant volley that had forced the guard and sailors back behind the cover of buildings, but the prisoners that Dantes had put under the control of the guard were there and had started to reinforce their numbers. Even with the Frasheid assault stopped, and all those reinforcements sent to reinforce the docks, Viscent could still conquer the city on its own. Dantes counted more than fifteen warships, though not all of them had yet reached the bay. He could see the well armed and armored halflings and gnomes as well as mercenary orcs and even dragonkin, their scales shining brightly under the sunlight. Their army’s armor was black, and they wielded mostly rifles fixed with knives at the ends of them. While Frasheid’s army had been a large undisciplined force, Viscent was organized and ready for war. Sending a few doves closer, he also saw dozens of goldmasks scattered throughout every ship. He didn’t see Godfrey, but he knew he was there.

Before he started to make his way toward the docks, he looked out over the field of bodies that he’d created and wondered idly if it was anything like the locus Serpica had grown into, full of death and decay. He sent his will through all of it, and made a simple request.

“Bloom.”

From the corpses, thousands of flowers began to grow. Poking out like thorns before separating into separate petals and opening, letting out a sweet scent that mingled with the smell of blood and gunpowder. The flowers were every color, blue, yellow, red, white, purple, all of them were spread madly throughout the field.

Dantes flexed his hands. He’d been able to do in an instant what he would’ve struggled with when he’d first gained his abilities. He shifted into a dove and flew toward the docks.