The moment she ran out of the house, Evelyn was hit with the sheer exuberance of life around her. Trees as tall as buildings, much taller than the ruined moss-covered home they were in, surrounded her in a sea of vibrant greens. From their branches, exotic-looking fruits she had never seen before hung ripe and juicy, ready to be picked.
The grass and shrubbery had grown so wild and high that they reached up to her waist, except for an open path she suspected had been opened as they were bringing her unconscious body there.
Evelyn saw in awe how the cut plants were already halfway regrown, as if nature itself refused to be molded by human hands. Everything was so... alive. It was overwhelming for a city girl like her. But it was more than that. There was a vibration in the air, like static electricity, but more intense.
It took a flare of her Awareness to tell her that it was mana. Exhuding from every single living thing in the area, but also from the rocks, the drops of dew falling from the leaves, and the insects crawling to feed on the piles of fallen rotting fruit under the trees. There were animals somewhere beyond her senses, hiding from her Awareness as if they were actively staying just outside the range of her mana-improved senses.
She felt hundreds, if not thousands, of varying senses in a myriad of forms on her at all times. Some were cautious, others curious, but a few of them were hungry, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Evelyn wasn't in the ruined District Zero anymore, but she knew what it was like to feel the eyes of monsters on her.
"We are not alone," Evelyn warned her new companion, stopping in her tracks as she got her metalwood staff ready.
The druid followed her outside, looking around for Brother Marrow when she noticed her guard up.
"Out here in Wildenterra, where everything wants to eat you, you rarely are." She focused her mana, but her aura felt unstable and weak to Evelyn's Awareness.
"Rot me. I've used too much mana, so I'm gonna need you to cover me while I recover." Cloud admitted begrudgingly.
"You are out of mana already?" Evelyn asked, rather surprised.
"I died and came back to life after summoning you, and I still had to heal my leg. Something like that takes a toll on your reserves. And using two high-level techniques, one after the other, in druids at the same power level as me has put my Core well over the limit. Truth be told, I'm pretty vulnerable right now, and they know it." The druid said, pointing towards the tall grass, indicating she had noticed the monsters' presence as well.
She had to admit that it made sense, although she was still iffy about the whole resurrection part and wanted to ask more about it once they were no longer in danger of being devoured by monsters.
Evelyn noticed three lifeforms coming their way, hiding in the tall grass. They were moving fast in a triangle formation, one in the front and two in the back. These monsters were using hunting tactics, so they had to be a pack. And where there's a pack, there's usually an alpha nearby.
That could be really bad news if she was forced to fight alone.
"How long until your Core generates enough mana to recover?" Evelyn asked, her eyes darting around as the monsters surrounded them.
"Of course you'd think that way, you are a Classer... Druids don't generate mana. We borrow from the world around us. And it takes time and effort, especially when you push beyond your limits, as I have. I'm gonna meditate now. Protect me until I'm done." Sister Cloud said, sitting down on the moss-covered entrance of the house.
Evelyn nodded; no more words were needed. A different person would have complained or wasted time arguing, but that wasn't her. There was a clear goal before her and incoming enemies. Evelyn Anima had more than enough with that.
If anything, she appreciated the simplicity and purity of the situation.
Kill or be killed.
For the busy mind of the time-traveling cyborg, worried with so many questions and doubts about her uncertain mission to save her future, a fight to the death against monsters in a land of magic felt like a vacation.
She glanced at Cloud and noticed the mana in the air around the sitting druid start to slowly shift towards her. She was joining her gloved hands in a particular shape, like an inverted triangle, over where her Core would be. Like a funnel, the mana was being channelled through it and into her.
Evelyn noticed how her breathing seemed to synchronize with the movement of the mana itself, like she was the wind blowing over the clouds in the sky, moving them across the heavens as she pleased. But there wasn't a feeling of dominance in the way she took the mana, rather an integration to an invisible rhythm that Evelyn couldn't comprehend or follow completely.
It was like watching Sister Cloud become part of the environment itself, as if nature were realizing it wasn't filling a sudden vacuum in the whole and was seeking to make amends. It wasn't a conquest over the power of nature, but an abandonment to be reclaimed by it.
A screeching noise and a warning from her Awareness pulled her out of her fascination with the ways of druids. Evelyn would have plenty of time to learn about them.
Now she would test her own powers on the monsters of the past.
A shadow jumped from the tall grass straight at her, sharp claws at the ready, but it was met with a strike from her staff. It was so fast, she barely had time to react. Evelyn felt the crack of something hard on impact as the creature was launched to the side. It hit the ground running, quickly re-entering the grass out of sight, but not out of mind.
Her Awareness was keeping track of the sneaky monsters, her mana senses covering the areas where her eyes weren't enough to see what she was fighting. Evelyn stayed close to Cloud, making sure none of them could reach her while she was recharging her mana.
She could see an accumulation of mana and aggression with her mana senses, moving swiftly through the grass, repositioning for another attempt at her life. The shape was about as big as her head, but it lacked enough details to identify the type of monster it was.
Evelyn figured out that it was distracting her, giving the other two a chance at a sneak attack behind her back. Hearing the rustling of the grass behind her, she called to her mana and activated her Ecologist Action Skill.
"[Hylosynthesis]" She muttered, sending mana to a bunch of coins she had puffed out from her Inventory.
She snapped around and threw the coins into the border of the tall grass where the pair of monsters was coming from before she crouched forward, free hand on the ground and the other with the staff on her back as she got down into Spider Patience, one of her nemas, the martial arts stances that Kornos had taught her.
Aggressive cable vines exploded out of the tiny metal coins, detecting the incoming creatures and lashing out with their sharp amber blades with incredible violence. The monsters screeched in pain as the amber blades cut into them like a sudden wall of knives and the cable vines. They tried to escape, but like constrictor snakes, the cable vines coiled around the agile monsters even faster.
Now that they were trashing in place, Evelyn could finally see their monstrous form in clear daylight. A chitinous exoskeleton, like that of an insect, but formed by layers of what looked like some sort of armor of scales like those of lizards, covered the otherwise familiar body shape of a cat, with long, slender legs and a sleek torso, but no tail. The scales came in white, purple, and pink, their many hues shimmering in the light. Its head was shaped by additional layers of the same insectoid-scale carapace, forming the adorable features of a feline, with big black eyes that reflected the light like dark pearls.
One of them looked directly at her with its big black eyes, trapped by constricting cable vines, as it gave the most pathetic little meow Evelyn had ever heard.
They were the cutest little murder critters she had ever seen in her life.
Then their heads opened up.
One by one, the layers of chitin scales separated from each other, undoing the illusion of a cute cat face that would make most people drop their guard even if just for a moment. As their fake heads unfurled, Evelyn realized what those strange scales were.
They were petals.
Their heads were now like big flowers, formed by multiple petals of flexible chitin. Inside, rows of teeth ran along the walls, connecting to a center where a fleshy cat-face, furless and skinless, looked at her with the same big black eyes.
The flesh of the cat had marks of teeth all over, but it wasn't bleeding.
Evelyn realized with profound fascination what she was looking at. The monster wasn't just shaped like a cat. It was a cat.
But that part wasn't the monster. The real monster was over its undying body.
The armor of petals was a parasite.
And it was looking for a new defenseless host. One like Sister Cloud.
The black eyes in the monsters shifted and extruded from the skulls of the flayed cats, kept somehow alive by the parasites, until they unfurled into small, shiny black flowers of their own, the inside of each petal covered in cat eyes. All were looking at her in fury.
But their scare tactic had the opposite effect, as they had been unfortunate enough to face someone who found beauty in very dark things.
"Look at you. Aren't you the most precious little thing? You are so wonderfully grotesque!" She exclaimed in awe, giddy at the discovery of something new and excitingly macabre. "I wish I could just admire you forever, but I'm gonna have to kill you now. Sorry."
The cable vines were exhausting their mana fast, getting close to withering, when the third monster, believing her distracted, jumped from the grass again towards the meditating Sister Cloud.
This was what Evelyn had been expecting, as she switched from the faint that had made it look like she had been about to leap into the trapped monsters, and instead twisted her body to strike at the one that was trying to reach Sister Cloud.
"Lucky for me, you don't know my nemas," she said with a smirk, as her staff crushed the third monster into the ground with a resounding crack. It was another cat, this one a little smaller than the other two. The creature kept moving under the weight of her metalwood staff, so she punched its unfurling head with her runitronic arm into a small crater until the body stopped moving altogether.
"Hard to kill, huh? We can fix that." She said as she turned around to the other two.
It had taken her so long to kill the smaller one that her connection with the cable vines was lost. They would now attack anything in range, but they were too weak on their own to keep the monsters trapped anymore.
With sharp claws and sharper teeth, both of which she was noticing now were just smaller versions of the same shiny petals, the pair of monsters broke the amber blades, killing the cable vines that disintegrated into mana dust.
They looked at the smaller monster she had just killed and, much to her surprise, gave long mournful meows before they hissed at her with redoubled fury in their many petal eyes.
Was that the cat's kitten or something? But if they are parasites, why do they act that way? Did I make a wrong assumption here? Doesn't really matter, though. I'm still gonna kill them.
Evelyn kept her distance from them, shielding Sister Cloud as the monsters made circles around her. They pounced again, coming from opposite directions. Evelyn threw more coins at them, but they had learned their lesson and quickly got out of the way as the cable vines erupted from them.
She hadn't expected the same trick to work twice anyway; she just needed enough time to get into position. Evelyn got back into Spider Patience and put her runitronic hand into the ground. Focusing her Awareness, she pumped mana into her arm as the monsters dodged the slashing cable vines.
"[Hylosynthesis]" She muttered, almost like a whisper. The strongest cable vines she could make erupted from her arm into the ground as she closed her eyes to sense only the mana in them and that of the monsters. Every other sense was an obstacle to her concentration.
The petal cat monsters jumped one last time, having avoided all the coin cable vines and, in their fury for the young killed, decided to target Evelyn directly instead of the immobile Sister Cloud.
Big mistake.
While they were in the middle of the air, about to tear Evelyn apart, she activated her trap.
Erupting from the ground like bamboo trees, the sharp amber blades at the top of the pair of thick cable vines she had sent to wait for their approach cut the monsters in half like a hot knife cuts through butter.
But they weren't done. They still managed to reach her, cutting and biting at the skin in her legs while the life of their hosts was slipping away. Evelyn grabbed one and crushed it with her runitronic hand, then hit the other away with her staff, sending it flying into the moss-covered house.
Breathing hard, Evelyn grimaced at her destroyed pants more than she did at her bleeding legs. Her Endurance given regeneration would heal them after some time, but her pants were a different story.
Keeping her guard up, she glanced inside the house with her Awareness, but the moss covering everything interfered with her mana senses, unlike the grass. It was like the whole house was shining with mana now.
The ground shook as the ruins of the building trembled. Her Awareness was screaming.
"What now?" She asked out loud, glancing at Sister Cloud, still concentrating on the ground. "Sorry, but we have to get out of here!" She apologized, grabbing the druid with the help of her cable vines, careful not to break her concentration.
Something big was coming, and Evelyn was going to need her at full capacity.
They managed to get away from the house just in time before an enormous arm made of moss-covered stone burst through a wall.
"BLASPHEMER! DARK DRUID! I WILL DEVOUR YOUR CORE FOR THIS!"
What came out of the cloud of dust raised by the debris was a hulking humanoid shape made of parts of the house and the ground itself, covered and connected by the moss as if it was muscle tissue over bones.
Great arms and legs connected to a torso opened like a rib cage, all of it shaped as armor around the body of a man with a bloodied green tunic. All the moss was connected into a pulsing mass of bright green moss, humming with mana, where there used to be a gaping hole in his chest.
And where there used to be the masked head of a man before it got vaporized...
"BEHOLD THE TRUE POWER OF BROTHER MOSS! MROOOW!"
...was now, surrounded by a collar of shiny, toothy petals, the tiny skinless head of a cat.
