<This is what the quest meant by metastasized. It's spreading like cancer.>

The raid pushed deeper. The normal green foliage fought for space against the crimson menace. In some places, entire trees had been consumed, their leaves blood-red and their branches wrapped in thorny vines.

Lena stopped. The raid halted.

"What?" Helga asked. Lena opened her mouth to speak, but it was too late.

A scream split the air. One of the survivors from a smaller group, a young man, maybe Level 60, thrashed as red vines erupted from the ground. They coiled around his legs, his waist, and his chest. Thorns punctured his armor, drawing blood.

"Help! Help me!"

The raid erupted into chaos.

"Why didn't you warn us?!" Helga shouted at Lena.

Lena didn't answer. Her eyes were wide, her expression one of utter shock.

<She didn't sense it. These things must be invisible to her trait until they attack,> Reidar thought.

Reidar summoned more Rift-Sprites, directing them toward the vines. The creatures detonated against the plant matter, flames spreading across the crimson surface. But the vines didn't burn easily.

The survivor screamed again. The vines pulled, dragging him across the ground toward a massive cluster of red growth. His fingers clawed at the dirt, leaving bloody trails.

Fighters hacked at the vines with swords and axes. Each cut released a spray of sap the color of blood, but it was no use.

"Cut him free!"

They tried. Swords swung. Magic flared. But the vines moved too fast. There were too many of them. They looped around the survivor's neck, choking off his voice.

Then he was gone, yanked into the crimson mass. The growth swallowed him whole.

The raiding party stared at the spot where the man had vanished, a collective horror etching itself onto every face. The silence that followed was heavier than the screams.

"Everyone, weapons ready!" Aldric's voice cut through the shock. "Summon your Rift-Sprites now! If this goes bad, we burn everything to cinders!"

Survivors moved into defensive positions. Ember Rift-Sprites materialized and filled the area. At least they would act as decoys.

Lena stood frozen. She felt nothing.

"What happened?" Reidar asked the woman. "Why didn't you sense them?"

Lena's gaze remained fixed on the crimson growth. "They weren't there…" She paused. "I don't know. It's like they sleep until they sense prey. Then they strike. It was impossible to know. Not with how my trait works."

That was a problem, because if the group couldn't rely on Lena's trait, then the quest was bound to get far more dangerous, especially based on how these monsters hunted. They didn't just rush to the enemy in droves, but they were subtle, ambushing and attacking when the best moment came.

Helga stormed over to both Lena and Reidar. She jabbed a thick finger at Lena.

"What have you done?!"

"Pardon?" Lena asked.

"Because of you, a person died! Your one job was to watch for this! It was to lead the way through the safest path, and you fucked up!"

"I did wh—"

"Shut up, Helga," Reidar said, stepping between them. "It's not her fault."

"These things are ambush predators," he said, recalling the suddenness of their attack.

"They have no presence until they attack. Yelling at her won't bring that man back."

He knew that blaming Lena would only add to the already difficult situation.

Aldric approached and studied Lena's face, her pallor, and the dark circles under her eyes. "She is exhausted. Perhaps that is why she failed to notice them. Even the sharpest senses dull with fatigue."

"It's not that," Lena said. She turned to Reidar. "You couldn't have known," he said.

But he saw the woman believed that was a personal failure.

"I should have."

"Then pay attention from now on." Reidar then addressed the other leaders.

"Helga, Aldric, Seraphine. These monsters are a problem even for Lena's trait. Assume the ground itself is hostile. Advance slowly. Test every patch of red. If it moves, burn it."

He shared more skills. Spectral Knights and Rift-Sprites were going to be useful, but unfortunately, there was nothing that would make tracking the plants easily.

However, Reidar had a bad feeling about this. He looked at his status, then at Summon Feral Pack. It was at 35% proficiency.

<I need to bring this up…>

Reidar didn't know why he suddenly thought about that, but he did.

<If things go bad, I can share the skills with others, and we can all escape.>

He didn't know if it was going to work, but…

<I'm going to spend a hell lot of mana points today.>

And he would have to do a lot of repetitive actions.

The various groups took positions, but the summoned creatures surrounded the humans in a protective circle.

Then and only then, they got confident enough to move forward again, but the earlier fast rhythm was gone, as everyone was too scared to stomp on something they shouldn't.

…

…

…

Hours passed as the raid pushed deeper into the infected forest. The crimson growth thickened with each step, transforming the landscape into something very hard to go through.

Vines covered every surface. Thorns jutted from bark like infected wounds, and the problem was that those could have been monsters all along. Lena hadn't been of help since entering the forest. She could at best tell the way just because her target had a will of the sort, but the common monsters were hard to track for some reason.

Of course, that meant people stopped blaming Lena for the deaths that came.

Reidar's mana reserves fluctuated as he cycled through summons. He was trying to increase the proficiency of his Summon Feral Pack. He was sure the raid was going to need it soon for some absurd reason.

The raid pulled Spectral Knights into existence, sent them forward to test the ground, then replaced them when vines dragged them down. The rift-sprites, of course, killed the monsters. For Reidar, no, for the entire raid, the mana expenditure was constant, draining, but necessary.

Reidar had to actually join in the fight just to keep his mana from running dry through arcane leech.

His Summon Feral Pack skill sat at 38% proficiency now, but he had to summon them hundreds of times.

Yet the number climbed slowly despite his repeated castings. The skill required actual combat usage to advance more quickly, not just repeated summoning.

<The gain was insulting. Maybe 0.01% per cast. To get to 51%, I'd need another 1,300 casts just to reach that goal, but it would take hours, which I don't know if I have, and my mana would melt. The System isn't that crude. That's the baseline, but it's not the path...>

He noticed that the proficiency increased more if the summoned creatures fought, at least a little, but it wasn't easy to do it here with so many people and such hard-to-spot monsters.

He scanned the battlefield, his eyes skipping over the weaker vines. Reidar was basically blocked. On the one hand, he had to risk losing the rewards; on the other, he would waste a lot of mana and time.

In the end, he made a decision. Since he was acting based on some gut feelings, the best thing was going to be to just spam the spell.

<I hope nothing bad will happen.>

The raid moved. Every fighter kept weapons drawn. Every mage got ready to cast shielding skills and barriers of many kinds. The survivors who'd laughed and joked during the prairie march were silent now.

Lena led the way up front, but she was tense. She couldn't rely on her trait anymore, not after what happened. Now she watched for anything out of place: a patch of dirt that looked wrong, vines that seemed too neatly arranged, the tiniest shift in plants that should've been still. It took more time, but it kept them safer.

Jake stayed close to Reidar, wondering what he was doing by summoning so many monsters. As for what the young man was doing? He used his trait Augmentation, to increase how powerful his senses were. At the beginning, it was pretty hard to concentrate with all those noises and scents, but he was getting the hang of it.

He was actually keeping his eyes open to warn Lena in case something was approaching or moved, knowing that she would get the merits. It was the best he could do, and something for which Lena was grateful.

However, he didn't have to warn her often since she noticed almost everything.

"Movement ahead," Lena said.

The raid stopped. Weapons rose. Skills got ready.

Shapes emerged from behind a cluster of infected trees. Short figures, maybe four feet tall, with bodies composed of dense red fungal matter.

They looked vaguely humanoid, had two arms, two legs, and a rounded head, but the resemblance ended there. Their bodies were covered in overlapping mushroom caps, each one releasing visible clouds of pollen into the air.

Level indicators appeared. Level 83, Level 76. Level 79. There were at least two dozen of them.

For Reidar, Jake, Lena, Helga, Aldric, and Seraphine, they were easy to kill, but for the rest of the party, not so much.

<Well, at least they are in greater numbers, and the summons are here too…> It was unlikely the raid members would get killed, or so Reidar hoped.

"Mushroom monsters," Aldric said. "Be wary of the spores; we don't know what they do."

The fungal humanoids shuffled forward. Their movements were slow but as they advanced, the clouds of pollen thickened. The air around them turned hazy, tinted pink and orange.

One of the Spectral Knights at the formation's edge entered the cloud. The summon's armor began to corrode immediately.

Patches of mana got dissolved, exposing the human shape made of mana that was beneath. Within seconds, the knight collapsed into dissipating energy.

"Burn them!" Seraphine said. "Don't let that cloud reach the formation!"

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