>>5285851The academic’s continued ramblings wither beneath your gaze, but you have the gist. Fibrous tissues, a payload of hallucinogens and embryos, and open flame… An explosion, that would poison your mind and body.
You direct the Botanist to join your other allies in their defensive ring, while you, Bastard, Thief, and now the two Degenerates all charge at the main force of plant-monsters which seem to have been corralled around the isolated and utterly-entangled South-Merchant. You shout a command: the others are to engage the main force and to cover you, while with a quick leap, you vault and tumble past the majority of the enemy force and into their centre. There, with another battle-cry you chop, and hack, and slash until the South-Merchant is free.
“Thank you!” he gasps. “I thank you, Dragonborn!”
“I had no desire to return home to recruit another of you so soon,” you quip, through though you are winded.
The South-Merchant may have been brought on for reasons other than martial dash, but he has two knives with which he acquits himself well. Before long, you and your forces are dominating the vegetative menace which, which they outnumber you vastly, are slow, sluggish, and demonstrate no strategic coordination. You have them on the ropes…
>20When you make a terrible mistake, thrusting a blade into one that—a moment too late, just a moment!—you realize looks more swollen and bulbous than the others. Perhaps, if what the Botanist theorized was true, it was an overripe fruiting body, full to bursting with spores. Whatever the case, it splatters you with stick pollen and gaseous dispersal. Before you can help yourself, you gasp in surprise… And inhale some.
From that point on, everything is a haze. You are blind, deaf, dumb, and yet… Not. You are surrounded on all sides by enemies, by mammals or plants or glowworms or WORSE. You roar again and swing your blade, but the damned and hated foes evade, avoid, dip and dodge out of the way of your righteous execution. You take a deep breath, ready to immolate the lot of them with firebreath…
When, properly this time, it all goes dark.
