Hours bled into the oppressive silence of the forest, broken only by the squelch of their footsteps and the occasional distant rustle.

Until the raid entered the town. Shadows stretched across streets, cast by structures half-consumed by crimson growth. The spongy ground continued to squelch beneath their feet. Each step made wet sounds, as if walking across exposed tissue and blood.

Vines covered everything. They wrapped around lampposts, traffic signs, and abandoned vehicles. Windows were shattered, and doors hung open, revealing interiors choked with red vegetation.

"Which way?" Helga asked.

Lena pointed a trembling hand toward the collapsed street ahead. "Through there. The exit is on the far side. The heart of the patch is beyond it." Her face was pale.

The raid moved, keeping close to each other. Summons walked alongside, providing screens against ambush.

Reidar continued his task of summoning and re-summoning the Feral Pack.

Wolves materialized around him, then Panthers, then Bears, then Crows, and so on. He held them for no more than thirty seconds, let them scout ahead, then recalled them and cast again.

The proficiency climbed. 39%, 40%, 47%, and 49%, but it took hours of continually casting the skill.

Reidar had been forced to use arcane leech often to recharge his mana. That kind of grinding was nightmare inducing.

Not even the Shadow Guardians were enough to keep his mana high. Reidar realized that bringing his proficiency up that way was rather dangerous and fully unsuitable for survival, and the reason was that it left him drained of mana since the casting cost was a fixed 345 mana points, which meant Reidar couldn't use it that much. Besides, it required him to be fully focused on casting the skill each time rather than focusing on his surroundings.

It was something he might have done outside of a battle, but clearly, when his mana got fully spent, he would inevitably be forced to stop since without targets to use Arcane Leech on, he could not do much.

At that point, Reidar lost count of how many times he had cast the skill in the past hours, but it was surely close to 1300 times.

Jake stayed up near the front with Lena. He'd given up on using summons in fights; he wanted real experience, wanted to level up, and wanted to prove he could handle himself. Reidar got it. The kid was tired of being shielded, tired of standing back while everyone else did the fighting.

Lena led the formation, but her exhaustion showed in every move she made. Dark circles were under her eyes like clouds below the moon, and her movements were slower than usual. She'd been awake for more than thirty hours straight.

She kept her blades drawn, refusing to summon the Spectral Knights or Rift-Sprites others relied on. Her fighting style was hers. Fast, brutal, and personal. She wouldn't abandon it for convenience.

"How much farther?" Seraphine asked.

"Twenty minutes," Lena said without looking back.

They passed through what had been a shopping district. Store facades were barely recognizable beneath the vegetation.

A pharmacy, a grocery store, and a clothing shop were there too. They had all been destroyed. The signs were still partially visible, and that was why they found out what these shops were.

Reidar summoned another feral pack. The proficiency bar wasn't going up anymore, as reaching higher proficiency became increasingly slower and harder.

He sent the creatures ahead to scout the next intersection, then recalled them thirty seconds later.

The town was dead. Aside from the sounds the raid made, there was nothing else. The Briar Patch had strangled all life except itself.

They reached a town square, a wide space where the crimson growth was particularly thick, carpeting the ground like a diseased lawn.

Aldric raised his hand. The formation stopped.

"Movement," he said.

Everyone tensed.

Shapes emerged from the buildings ahead. Humanoid figures, but wrong. They were built from vines woven together into crude approximations of human form. Arms, legs, torsos, and heads. They were all made of twisted and crimson plant matter. At the center of each torso, a sphere of packed vegetation pulsed with a disturbing rhythm.

More appeared. Dozens of them. Then hundreds. They crawled from windows, emerged from doorways, and pulled themselves from beneath the spongy ground. Their movements were unnatural, like puppets controlled by invisible strings.

The level indicators appeared. Level 68, Level 70, Level 72. They were all Thorn-Lashers; unfortunately; they were not elders.

The Thorn-Lashers had featureless heads that looked more like metastasized masses, and their long, thorn-covered limbs hung limp.

Those things were humanoid…

"Not elegant at all." Seraphine said. It was clear what they were, their targets, although not the main one, the elder.

Some of them had arms missing that they recreated once they saw the humans; some others, instead, had four arms. There was only one thing in common, and that was that they were made by clusters of vines that got tighter at the center and revolved some kind of sphere.

<A mana core of the sort.>

When hundreds of them appeared, the first one uncoiled, and dozens of meter-long appendages lashed as thick, thorned vines burst forth from their vine-woven bodies.

The appendages writhed in the air, seeking targets, and the ground beneath them cracked as the thorns dug in, anchoring the creatures in place.

The vines flexed like muscles despite the plant matter they were made of, coiling and uncoiling.

"Prepare to defend yourself!" Lena shouted, and that was because the Thorn Lashers showed clear intention of not letting the raid members go. Most likely, as they did with the original residents of the town.

Once again, Lena failed to sense their presence, which weighed on her already sleep-deprived mind. Now that they had shown themselves, she could sense them again. It was weird. What was worse was that it looked like this was an ambush all along.

Then Lena noticed the central core spheres.

"The spheres!" Lena said. "At their center, there is a core! That's their weak spot!"

The Thorn-Lashers attacked.

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