Jason holds up his hand with three fingers out, two, one. On both sides of the mossram the group stabs their weapons into it and run towards its back. Jason is able to open up a couple of shallow slashes down its side. Effective but Rosha is better. Her long staff blade is able to sink into the monster and cause a long-lasting cut. She even manages to half cut through the back leg.
Above them though Courtney does the most. While her claws are the shortest weapon, she has five on each hand. Instead of opening up a slice of the mossram her claws shred it. Jason’s slashes soon close. Rosha’s cut doesn’t heal right away but the water flow lightens. Courtney’s damage however isn’t healing. In fact, now that they can see what happens it looks less like regeneration and more like the edges are being held together. The mess Courtney has left on the mossram’s flank on is so messed up the beast can’t hold it together.
The monster wakes up with a pained roar. Courtney and Jason both jump back but Rosha stays in close to work on the leg. She pulls back her weapon and swings it down hard on the leg she half cut off. Before the mossram can react she hacks it off. Water is now streaming off the monster in great quantities. In fact, more water than its size would seem to be able to hold.
Task complete Rosha also backs off as the group plays at passing around the aggro. Confused the mossram keeps turning from one to another as they take turns attacking it. While this goes on Rosha notices the leg she cut off has lost its shape. While the mossram never had that much of a defined shape the leg is now more of a puddle on the ground. In fact, the only thing that separates it from a puddle of algae is the massive amounts of water pouring off of it.
Besides that the stump has proven what they suspected. Instead of healing the edges of the wound are pulling together. Water still pours out of it and combined with the other wounds the mossram has shrunk. However the area they are fighting in has now flooded. Despite the lake nearby over an inch of water covers the ground.
Courtney goes in for a quick slash and as she backs out she yells to the others. “This thing must have gotten water from other lakes before this. I don’t know what this means but we might be here a while if we have to bleed it dry. We might need to get a deeper hit on it. The damage we are laying down is just not enough. I will back up and cast an info spell on it. If nothing pops up, we can ask the scout but I would like to handle this by ourselves.” She backs up even further and makes some gestures.
Now with Courtney ducked out aggro stabilizes on Rosha. While Jason is attacking more her spear lays out more solid hits. As it readies to charge at her Jason puts away his daggers. While the obvious spurts of water feel cathartic the mossram is just shrugging his attacks off. As the mossram charges he runs at it and jumps.
Rosha grabs her staff in the center and as it gets to her she jumps under it. With the blade she hooks the leg on the side she cut the other off of and swings around out of the way. Jason is mid leap at this point and as the mossram skids to a halt he slams down on its back. A small wave spreads out from his impact and then a second wave as he uses his momentum to punch down with both fists.
His double blast punch causes a much greater reaction from the mossram. It tries to rear up but with only one back leg this doesn’t work. Instead, it topples over to the side and Jason is forced to bail. As he goes to jump off though his feet are somewhat trapped on the mossram’s back. He still makes it off but it forces Jason to go into an emergency roll as the ground rushes at him much too soon.
-1
The ground scrapes at his arms but he makes it out of the way as the mossram tumbles onto its back. As all this nonsense happens Courtney is able to get her spell off. A screen pops up for her about the monster. After she reads through the info, she nods and then yells at the others.
“The dang thing isn’t what we see! Mossrams are like an organic type of golem. Somewhere in the center is a blob of violet moss. All the outer stuff is just normal moss it has collected with time. The fact it has so much water in it makes the tribes worries quite valid. Mossrams reproduce by mitosis of that center mass and they need lots of water to do it.”
Jason nods, “cool, sooooo how do we kill?” Courtney coughs, “ah yes, to do that we need to damage the violet moss clump. While us hacking away at the outside can deal some damage, it would take us a long while. Rosha, go back to arrows and try penetrating arrows. Jason, your last attack did more damage than anything else so I guess just do that again? The center mass doesn’t move around and should be a little behind the hardened moss head.”
Rosha nods at her and retreats as she adjusts her weapon back into a bow. Once the bow is ready, she climbs a tree to get a better shot at the mossram’s back. Jason on the other hand doesn’t have to anything and just shrugs. This leaves Courtney to stand to the side and twiddle her thumbs, waiting to heal someone if they need it. Though she does promises herself that she will find some extra methods of attack because at the moment she can’t help at all. Even her illusions would not work anymore as the mossram could shake it off much easier now.
TFTC!