Good old Forest Elementals

John counted down the timer. They had beaten the Wood Giant, the boss of the fifth wave of the Forest Elementals dungeon, with relative ease. The reason for that was pretty simple; he was made out of wood and Salamander set him on fire. Sure, it wasn’t THAT easy to just set the guy on fire and the way he swung grown trees around, using them as clubs, was intimidating but compared to the Vermintide it was a rather easy boss. If John thought about it the hardest boss he faced this far, comparatively to his level at the time, was probably the Vermintide, anyone else he could through simple kiting, make all of their great abilities totally useless but the oppressive number of rats with their simple **** tactic was dangerously effective. Better become stronger and fix that sort of weak spot.

The timer reached 0 and through the forest went a sudden transformation. The air became humid and filled with spores that tinged the air slightly yellow like a poisonous mist. Indeed, every breath John took felt slightly painful.

‘Huh, that is one way to up the difficulty level. Also, I guess we are going with a mushroom theme this time around,’ John thought. 2 HP per minute was not immediately concerning (Although it vastly outclassed his regeneration) but who knew what other nasty effects might pop up over time. “Sylph, Salamander, can you take care of these spores?” John asked and indeed they could. Burning and blowing off the spores they cleared a free area where John could breathe freely again. “Were any of you affected?” he asked and looked around.

Aclysia immediately shook her head; she only needed to breathe to speak in the first place. “Burnt them out,” Salamander stated with her usual mean grin, “Held my breath!” Sylph chirped, “Cleansed,” Undine whispered. John, however, felt embarrassment from the last of his elementals. Gnome stayed silent as she tried her best to get rid of the small mushrooms that were sprouting all over her body. They were not harming her, at least to the best of his knowledge, but just like they were sprouting from the trees, and the ground all around the spores indifferently grew on her earthen body.

‘Is it painful?’ John asked through his mind. ‘No, John, just unpleasant.’ Came the swift answer. ‘We can’t have that,’ He decided and instructed Salamander to burn the mushrooms away. In the meantime, he kept an eye on the surroundings. He noted three different kinds of mushrooms. The first ones were the ones that grew on the ground and Gnome, long and thin with tiny heads that only sprouted upwards; they seemed to fulfill no other purpose than to set the new ambiance. The other two were much more concerning; there was one that seemed to consist only of one giant head, about half a meter in diameter of bright red color with yellow spots, which grew very close to the ground. The last kind infected the trees, white outward growths that quickly covered most of the exterior. The reason John was concerned about the latter two is that they were shaking in a way that made them look very much alive.

The suspicion he had was confirmed just a moment later when a hand appeared from beneath the ground, a second one following just a moment later and then a third and fourth, the hands were the same bright red as the mushroom caps that sprouted around. The four-armed monster unborrowed itself and revealed its form. Two stumpy legs on a round, yellow body, four arms that grew from it as far distanced from each other as possible and the big cap on top. It had no eyes or mouth yet John felt that the thing knew very well where he was.

The exploding part was slightly worrying, as was the number that started popping up all around. Aclysia was likely immune to poison, so he had little worry to send her to the front lines but the spores still hung in the air, so Gnome would just get infected again also he needed Sylph and Salamander around to keep the air clean. This would be a lot more defensive than he was used to. “Keep close!” he, therefore, instructed just as the white shrooms on the trees started bulging outwards, giving birth to an old acquaintance of John.

‘The Loot table sucks!’ John decided as he watched more of the Treants break out from their mother-trees. Only one legendary? The drop chances were so bad he did not feel like it was justified to add ranged attacks, however light they were, on Treants, as that disrupted his nice defensive strategy. “Okay, new plan. Aclysia you take out the Treants ASAP, the rest of us will stay here and hold our ground. Gnome, create a slate plateau so that we have the high ground, Undine, prepare to block whatever kind of attacks the Treants will shoot at us!”

Aclysia nodded and clenched the Cleaver of Streets in her hand before storming off. John poured his mana into Gnome, and she changed the battlefield as he requested. His mana bar was a bit a cause of concern, as easy as the Wood Giant was to beat by setting him on fire had cost John a fair amount of mana so he was already down to half and when Gnome had finished changing the terms of engagement it was down to 489. Better be conservative with what he had.

John and his elementals now stood on a circular platform atop a small hill that reigned about two meters atop the rest of the forest ground. The hill looked freshly plowed and while easy to set foot on would probably be a bit hard to climb for the assailants. Speaking of which the Sporelings got moving. Only the ones right next to Aclysia paid any mind to her; the rest waddled towards John. They were slow, calmingly so and although their number was concerning only so many of them could climb the hill at once.

With singular assailants like that Mana Ray was probably his best bet. He could kill one every 25 seconds and remain at status quo with his mana. Raising his newly gloved hands, he used the skill. For a moment a panicked thought surfaced ‘Wait, the attack originates from my palm, wouldn’t it just destroy the glove?!’ but it was already too late, so he kept his hand steady at the quickest of the Sporelings. Thankfully Gaia was not that much of a hassle, and the Mana Ray bypassed the glove and hit the Sporeling on its red body. It stumbled backward, a mixture of blue lightning and smoke rising from his body, rolled down the hill he had barely even climbed before vanishing. Mana Ray was still as strong as ever, but for its cost it better be.

John saw a ball of wet spores fly at him. The projectile was slow, and Undine had no trouble blocking it by stretching her body into its trajectory. Following the path back to its origin Johns' eyes landed on a Treant that Aclysia cleaved apart like a woodcutter with his ax a moment later. His Artificial Guardian was being chased by a small army of the Sporelings she attracted by circling the hill, killing the Treants that rooted themselves down there to bombard John at the top. She was untiringly keeping at it, running counter-clockwise and quickly disposing of whatever Treant she came across, distracting a fair chunk of the Sporelings.

However, that still left a crap-ton of them to try and climb the hill. Salamander and Sylph teamed up to take on one of the things after another while Gnome and Undine kept close to do their usual job of protecting him. John used another Mana Ray after some hesitation, he disliked spending more of his mana, but there were too many to ignore, and so his pool slowly dwindled as he took care of three, four, five more of the enemies. He felt like he was in one of those reaction games as he kept track of his back using the Killer Queen(bee). Speaking of which, there were so many of the Sporeling that John was slowly growing **** here, he couldn’t bank on a clutch level up; he was barely at half of the required EXP, so he used the Laser Beeam for the first time. Pointing the stinger at one of the Sporelings he unleashed the skill with its abnormally long cooldown, hoping for some kind of grand result. What he got was a yellow beam that struck through several of the Sporelings, which then proceeded to roll down the distance they had traveled. However, they didn’t vanish after arriving at the foot of the hill, leading John to believe that they were paralyzed instead. Not that that was a bad thing, as long as he temporarily was freed from some pressure every result was good.

A sudden explosion ripped his concentration away, and he turned towards the source, barely catching a slightly burned Sylph that was tumbling towards him. “What happened?” John wanted to know; he hadn’t given any mana to Salamander, whose happy giggling he could hear in the smoke. “Dunno, we attacked one of them and then he went boom-boom!” Sylph, aside from a slight singe on her armor, said in a happy tone that showed that she was unharmed.

Two Treant projectiles hit Undine, causing John to look for Aclysia next. She was still at the foot of the hill, however instead of taking care of Treants like before she was currently occupied by a couple of Sporelings holding onto her left leg, slowing down her movements. John noticed the cap of them swell unnaturally and he could see exactly what would happen next. They burst into another explosion, spores quickly dissipating through the air, reaching even halfway up the hill before Sylph rose from John’s hand and blew them away by speeding around the cloud and locking it in a wind tunnel.

In John’s mind, the facts came together, and he formulated a plan. A daring plan, sure, but unlike the one he had to deal with the Vermintide, it was of low risk to himself. He left his position on top of the hill, sending hasty instructions and explanations to everyone else. He grabbed one of the Sporelings by the arm and picked him up only to slam it to the ground a moment later. This would have proven a stupid idea days ago, when his strength was just slightly more than that of an eighteen-year-old nerd, but now he was at Strength 25. While he wasn’t exactly a physically strong member of the Abyss or bulging with muscles he was still a pretty fit human being now and so a couple more times of whirling around finally succeeded in causing the Sporeling to bloat. John tossed the thing as far as he could “Salamander,” he shouted. It was his theory that the earlier explosion had been caused by Salamander hitting a Sporeling at the exact time of its own explosion, causing the spores to ignite in an effect similar to a dust explosion before they could dissipate. Meaning that if they could nail the timing, they would have an extremely effective way to use fire without John having to sacrifice what little mana he still had.

Salamander broke from the smokescreen, a flame flickering through the air burning hot as it consumed what John offered her, and collided with the Sporeling at the exact time of its explosion. A wave of heat rolled over the hill, and John smiled. ‘Okay, let’s repeat this, Aclysia how are you doing with the Treants?’ ‘The numbers are dwindling, master,’ she answered a heartbeat later, and so they continued their fight with hope and an effective plan.