Of course I’d be okay against the toxic gas; I mean, I’ve used it tons of times and it’s never once affected me, right? But the kid sure wouldn’t be able to survive it! Just a little whiff of that would probably be enough to kill the boy in about 10 seconds or less, so there’s no way I was gonna risk it. Luckily I have a bunch of arms to try and fan the stuff away, although I don’t really trust that very much. What if enough errant puffs made their way towards the kid, even while I was trying my best? Maybe I could get away with a few seconds of fanning, but if I really wanted to play it safe, then I was gonna have to get that bush-dog to stop letting his fumes out and fight me instead. If he’s busy fighting me, then he shouldn’t care too much about the kid anymore, right? Right!

So yeah, I left the kid tied in the tree for his safety, and dive-bombed onto the stupid dog!

Now you may be thinking Mellily (Ah, it feels so nice to have a name to call myself!), isn’t it unsafe to dive right at the thing that’s been trying to bite you? And I say no! It’s not unsafe! It’s not unsafe because the bush-dog won’t be able to uproot himself fast enough to turn and bite at me! I know roughly how long pulling up your roots and turning them into feet again can take, and with me sending a surprise attack down, it won’t have very much time to prepare! Sure, it might try to turn its jaws on me once I get close, but with it being stuck in place like that it’ll only be able to turn its head so far, right? So what if I do the obvious thing and just aim myself for the back of the stuck little bush-dog, huh? What about that?

I’ll tell you what; He won’t be able to bite me!

Now, let’s be honest: The dive bomb attack wasn’t quite as effective as I would have liked. Yes, I didn’t get bit, but uhhh wow did I completely forget it could just take its tentacles out and attack me. The good news is it had to stop putting out its toxic mist to try and protect itself from me, but the bad news is that it did a pretty neat job of smacking me off course with its tentacles since I completely forgot the need to protect against them. Whoopsies! At least the main objective of keeping the kid safe from being poisoned to death was still going great.

As soon as I got smacked away, I used my tentacles to spring myself a safe distance from the bush-dog. Opposite of how it was in the middle of removing its roots from the ground, I got busy planting my own, quickly summoning up vines to grab and hold the darn thing before it could manage to move very far from its spot. Vine after vine overlapped and wrapped around the bush-dog, tying it in place. Sure, it tried to fight, and its root-paws' claws actually did a pretty good number against some of my vines, but unless it let my vines pull it flat on the floor, it only had so many paws that it could use against me at once. Its jaws were almost completely out of the question considering the angle my vines were at, and it could reach, it would only maybe bite away a small handful, which wouldn't really make much of a difference.

Yup, I was sure this was my easy victory, but you know what?

Looks like I forgot something that I should have already learned from my fight with the treant!

I’m fighting this corpse plant on its home turf.

And what is this place covered in?

Lots and lots of bush-dog bushes.

At first I was confused about what was happening. All the bushes that surrounded the place suddenly seemed to be coming towards me. Sure, they were on the slower side, but if I stayed rooted here for too long, then they’d totally get to me sooner rather than later and do whatever it was that carved up that poor boy’s foot. Oh, and let me clarify, maybe I was confused to see the bushes that had been staying still this whole time suddenly move, but what I was the most confused about was that the bush-dog was able to control them even though it wasn’t currently rooted. It’s stupid of me, since I totally saw the treant controlling his trees without ever being rooted too, right? I guess I never really analyzed that fact until now. I would hate to think that I’m just some idiot who never learned how to control the things I grow without being rooted, so is it possible that this is just some buff that my kind gets once we settle down into a territory? Am I just unable to control things freely like that since I never made one? That’s so interesting! I wanna be able to do it too~!

Oh right, the bushes. Yeah, I guess I better wrap this little bush-dog nice and tight before I pick up my tentacles and get out of here. Here you go doggy, now you be good and stay here for a moment, okay? I’ll even put a cute little bow on top, just for you! Or… Well I meant to, but that’s more of a knot than a bow, isn’t it? Guess my control over these vines isn’t as fine as I wanted it to be…

I got a little too focused and frustrated on tying the bow, both for aesthetic and beauty purposes, and I had to keep resupplying and wrapping the vines that the bush-dog was constantly ripping apart, so I got really distracted, you know? Plus the bushes were getting closer and closer, and working with a time limit was never really a strong suit of mine, so maybe my thinking power was just a bit too split, which made me not realize what was happening in the background very quickly. And by the time I did notice what was going on, I guess it must have already been too late. Heck, even if I had noticed it sooner, it's possible there still wouldn't have been much I could have done to stop it.

This bush-dog is much smarter than I thought!

Looks like I was looking down on it a little too much!

I thought its bushes were only trying to get to me, you know? But it seems like a good number of them were also coming even more quickly to the bush-dog’s side, and I could see them aggressively lunging at it. Every time I saw a bush lunge, many of my vines were snapped off. I’d had every plan of grabbing the kid again and leaving after I'd finished wrapping up this dog, but if this is how things are going to be, there's no way it won't just follow us after it breaks free in half a minute or so. Guess wrapping this bush-dog and hoping it gives up on us just isn’t gonna be the play, huh? I didn’t want it to come to this now that I knew that we corpse plants exist to protect the forest against invaders, but I might just have to kill this one off for the safety of the kid and I… Sorry, Forest, but it’s really looking like that’s going to be the case.

I swatted away the nearby approaching bushes with my tentacles and decided to switch up my plans with my vines. You know, surprisingly, the bushes were actually swept away quite easily, since it didn’t seem like they were actually rooted into the ground like you would expect bushes to be. In fact, as they flew away, I could see a bunch of little flailing root-legs on the bottom of them that they must have been using to move around. It was honestly a little cute to watch, although I can probably only think that because I see my own squiggly little roots moving around every day. I’m sure to the average person it would have looked a little bit gross, like a bunch of wiggly worms coming out of them. But yeah, I-

Oh hey, sorry, let me get back to the point.

I switched up the plan with my vines, right!

Even while I was busy sweeping at the bushes, I started channeling my magic into the ground, focusing on growing several specialized kinds of vines. The first one was my special slice-y vine, the one that I had used to kill off those lizard-newt things in the swamp with Til. I figured that if they were able to cut through thick lizard scales, then they should have also been quite effective against the roots and sticks that made up the bush-dog, right? I wasn’t sure exactly where to aim with it, since I wasn’t positive where the seed of this particular corpse plant was supposed to be located. With the treant I could kind of guess, since we were both of basic humanoid shape and I knew where my seed was, but with this thing being all dog-like and stuff…

Yeah, I wasn’t really willing to take chances, so I just decided five vines would probably be enough to do the trick!

The vines grew taught and pulled back, and since I’d gotten some good practice using them over the past few weeks, I was pretty good at growing ‘em nice and fast now! It only took seconds before I was ready to violently unleash them, and as soon as they were good enough, I let them fly. I was sure that even if they didn’t make it all the way through the bush-dog, they would at least make some good cuts into it so that I could see where the thing’s seed was located, you know? But you know what I didn’t expect? For the thing’s bushes that had gathered to it all suddenly flocked to the spots that my vines were getting ready to sail for, and protect it! Lots of ‘em got absolutely torn through, but in the end they dampened the force of my slice-y vines enough that they were barely able to cut the bush-dog by the time they made it to it.

…Fine! That’s totally fine! So what if my slice-y vines aren’t gonna work?! I have more options than that anyways! On to plan two, I guess!

I readied my spring vines (or whatever dumb-ass name I’d called them before), the same kind that had been the downfall of the treant during our fight. I was much better with these vines now and could compress them even more tightly and strongly than I had at that time, so I wasn’t worried about not being able to pierce through the bush-dog. Its exterior shouldn’t have been as hard and tough as the treant’s anyways, what with it not having any bark on it. Still, even though I was able to pump out more power with the springs, my ability to make them was still only slightly faster than before, and they took a bit of setup time. And by the time I finally let the three that I’d prepared burst out of the ground, the remaining bushes around the bush-dog had finished doing their job.

The bush-dog finally got free, and simply leapt away from my springs…

Honestly, there was a small part of me that was kicking myself for not also replacing the vines that had been holding the bush-dog down while I was busy setting up all those other failed vines, even though I know that it would have just summoned even more of its bushes than it already had and my vines would have gone to waste anyways. Still, it’s always ‘what if’ when things go wrong, you know? Anyways, now that the bush-dog was free, it’s completely unlikely that it would let me trap it in any more of my vines anytime soon, so that’s completely off the table. So then what am I supposed to do now…?

The bush-dog unsurprisingly started to charge at me. I did my best to kite it away backwards, trying to get closer to the more densely packed trees so I could climb up them and gain the advantage, but the fact that I had to keep sweeping away all the bushes that got too close to me was really hindering my movement. The bush-dog was starting to gain on me, and the flocking bushes didn’t allow enough space around me to safely leap away like I would have wanted to.

And then while I was playing my little game of keep-away, I guess either the bushes adapted or the bush-dog gave the order, because the bushes refused to be swept away anymore.

By ‘refused’ I mean they bit onto my oncoming tentacles and hung on for dear life. Yes, that's right, they bit. Turns out that these aren’t just little bushes like I thought. No wonder that kid’s foot was all torn up and the bush-dog got free of my vines; Deep inside of their foliage were little mouths, just like the bush-dog had, ready and waiting to bite!

Guess it wouldn’t be wrong to say I had a bunch of mini bush-dogs biting onto me right now.

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