[Shrubley, the Monster Adventurer] Chapter 108 – Berry Nice to Meet You

“Damn this accursed light!” Count Haalften wailed, pulling his puffy crimson and black robe over his head, utterly spoiling the villainous effect he had cultivated for all of 2 seconds.

Despite his humiliating entrance and the cape turned over his head, the smoking vampyr thrust out his chest, his fists on his hips, in an over dramatic pose.

“Foolish husband,” Miranda whispered, shaking her head.

“...Why though?” Sose muttered, holding a paw out.

“I will not be made a fool of in my own home!” the Count bellowed, pointing one smoldering hand at Shrubley. The tip of his finger caught fire.

“Oh, hello Count Haalften!” Shrubley said cheerily, waving to him in a friendly greeting. “What a nice day to see old friends!”

“Do not speak to me that way, you cur!” the Count sneered. “You will–Oh! Oh, no!” He pulled his finger in and blew on it until it was just a charred nub. “Drat it all! You will hear from me soon, you little menacing shrub! You won’t steal my wife and get away with it! I will have my reveeeeenge…”

The Count’s voice drifted away as he shrunk into a cloud of bats and dove into the hole he had burst out of, disappearing into the comforting embrace of the dark.

Shrubley blinked slowly at the Count’s departure, considering that to be an odd way to return a cordial greeting. “What a nice fellow. Coming all this way to greet us.”

While everybody else was staring at the hole, Shrubley ambled over to the side where the Count’s clothes had fallen when he turned into a cloud of bats. He picked up the Count’s evening dress, sword, and dagger.

Looking over at the Countess, he lifted the items that radiated considerable power. “I will keep these warm for the Count until he can come and claim them.”

Finally catching on, Cal looked quickly between Miranda and Shrubley. Perhaps my rival in love isn’t the Count, but actually Shrubley!

This was hopelessly incorrect, but Cal’s misguided understanding was only slightly less oblivious than Shrubley’s.

Miranda wanted to bury her face in a pillow and scream. Both because of the utter idiocy of her husband, and because Shrubley had narrowly escaped a battle with an Iron Ranker and had no idea.

Each rank was dramatically more powerful than the last. While Shrubley had just recently risen to Bronze, an Iron Ranker still considerably overshadowed his capabilities. The Count, for all his idiocy, would be a serious threat to the soul shrub.

Initially, the Count had been grateful to the soul shrub. And then the harrowing reality set in that a little shrub saved his wife and all of his lands from utter destruction, rather than the vampyr himself.

The Count achieved nothing other than letting his enemy in through the proverbial door, getting his form copied and then his connections exploited.

Naturally, this severely wounded the vampyr’s pride.

At least Shrubley got some spoils out of it, she thought. Miranda recognized both [Night Dancer] and [Shadesbreath]. They were her husband’s most prized weapons. How he could have forgotten to store them before he transformed was beyond her, but at least he no longer had them.

It was a small consolation.

Miranda looked around. “Igor! I know you’re out here somewhere. If you don’t wrangle that foolish man, I will do it myself, and then I’ll come for you!”

There was some faint shuffling off to the side of the road, but Miranda knew better than to go looking for an Igor. They appeared where and when they wanted.

If Igor didn’t want to be found, he wasn’t going to be. Not even by me.

That bit of excitement done for, they headed back to Talvar.

Things were worse than Shrubley had feared.

A thin noxious haze hung over the town. Shrubley wasted no time in trying out his new Bronze powers. The golden-copper aura surged around his small body and he took off like a shot toward the hospital.

Miranda wasn’t as surprised.

Without Shrubley’s healing, the townspeople had grown sicker with his absence. The Dungeon was diseased, though far worse than she would have thought possible.

Miranda had spoken to Shrubley, and while she didn’t possess his knack for healing, she understood simple things like disease vectors. Humans were easily infected, and their natural response seemed to be getting every other human in a hundred-mile radius sick as well.

Unfortunately, the town had already checked the food and water supplies. That would have been Miranda’s first guess as well. She was hardly surprised the aggressive little healer had already inquired about them.

Where Miranda’s knowledge shone, however, was in the esoteric. That was a gift from her mentor, Mistress Ceasewane. The old bat had imparted a great deal of magical knowledge to her, knowing that as a vampyr–a magical creature herself–she would get the most use out of it.

There were more ways for a human to fall ill than there were stars in the sky, but one of the most insidious was mana toxicity. If the ambient mana is disturbed enough, the people can get sick and die.

Not just humans. Monsters are at risk as well. It was one of the few ways both core races and monsters could become ill from the same source.

It was no surprise after seeing the miasma that the Dungeon had been infecting the town. For how long was anybody’s guess, but clearly the infected Dungeon had been altering the local mana composition for a while. If the noxious poison had time to reach critical mass…

Miranda shivered. The poisonous haze that settled around her ankles was telling enough. They had purged the Dungeon, but in doing so they must have forced the Dungeon to expel all the poison it had.

As one of the only towns in the area, the poisonous miasma was drawn to it like iron filing to a lodestone. Mana draws in mana. That’s how high ambient mana zones like the Inner Ring come to be.

They feed off each other.

In this case, the town of Talvar attracted an enemy that no wall nor door could hold back. The sound of coughing and hacking echoed across the ghostly streets.

Nobody was venturing out. At least some people had enough sense to open the windows on the upper floors of their homes and keep the lower windows shut.

For all the good it would do, she thought to herself.

“What is going on?” Cal asked nervously.

“The poison that was being made in the Dungeon has found its way here,” Miranda told him as they walked up the street. “You’re a mage. You understand the Mana Twining Theory?”

Cal nodded. “Mana is attracted to other mana.”

“Right. That’s what’s going on here. All these people, and all that expelled mana from the Dungeon.”

Slyrox checked the repairs on her mask and breathed easily when it seemed they were holding. “But if we did not destroy the fleshies then more poison would keep making people sick!”

“You’re right,” Miranda told her. “Eventually, the town was doomed, anyway. By destroying the source of the toxins, the rest were released into the town in one huge wave of illness. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

What Miranda didn’t say was that this shouldn’t have happened. A Dungeon was ordinarily a good thing. They brought jobs and stable homes to monsters looking to fight the core races without much worry, and the core races had places to plunder for experience, training, and loot.

It was a win-win.

That Dungeon however… it had been terribly sick. Something had used the Dungeon, and that was a terrifying thought. It should not have been possible, but there was no denying it.

Dungeons also did not disappear like that. They stuck around unless you destroyed the core. That alone suggested something deeper was going on.

But what? Miranda shook her head. She had a bad feeling.

That meant the original source of this poison was still out there, undiscovered.

Worse, the [Emerald Card] she received from the Dungeon told her, in no uncertain terms, that this was far from over.

“Hm, suppose that girl is all right?” Sose asked his mistress.

“What about Shrubley?” Cal asked.

“Go on to the hospital,” Miranda told them. “You’ll find Shrubley there. Take these to him.” She fished in her inventory and pulled out three bottles full of blue liquid. “He’s going to need them.”

“What about you?” Slyrox asked.

“I’m going to do what I can for Konko and the rest of the town. Shrubley can’t bear this burden alone. We need an Alchemist.”

Smudge turned on a dime and bounced in place. “Smudge can help!”

Just as Miranda was about to say no, she thought better of it. “I’ll take all the help I can get. Slyrox, I need you to get me some ingredients while you’re at the hospital, okay?”

The koblin saluted, hitting her mask in the process.

“Okay, here’s everything I’m going to need…”

***

Shrubley lost track of time within the hospital. Enveloped in his golden coppery aura, he spread intertwining Light and Life essence across the ill and infirm. Having achieved the might of Bronze, he could weave synergistic essences together in ways he had never even dreamed of.

As a fortunate result, his healing became dramatically stronger.

Using [Recovery] to hold those back from the teetering precipice of death, Shrubley single-handedly kept the entire hospital from losing a single patient. Even with his newfound Bronze Rank, he wasn’t strong enough to cleanse the entire town.

The miasma was still there. The moment he healed somebody, the poison would be back again. He needed a more permanent solution.

However, that wasn’t his goal right now.

Shrubley had to stabilize the patients first. It wouldn’t matter if he cured the poison, only for them to die of wounds deep within their body.

Strengthen the body before you purge the poison, Shrubley told himself. The body had to be strong enough to recover. No matter how excellent the medicine, it always used a portion of the body’s strength to work.

If the body had no strength left to give, the medicine might as well be poison.

Using [Counteract], Shrubley fed the antidote berries to each person he healed. He made more than he needed and gave them to Slyrox to deliver to Miranda. It would only be a matter of time before the temporary immunity wore off, but he had to work on one problem at a time.

Slyrox came with mana potions which Shrubley drank down, using his Bronze aura to drastically enhance his ability to grow the antidote berries as well as heal the sickest people.

The windows were thrown open, letting in fresh air and light. The sunlight warmed his leaves, heightening his natural mana, health, and stamina regeneration. Those potions weren’t enough on their own.

[Solar Synthesis]: Accelerated health, stamina and mana recovery while absorbing Solar mana. Alters your affinity towards Nature, Wood and Life mana.

***

Konko was up in the attic, wheezing and clinging to life, trying to cobble something together from her alchemical knowledge.

The girl had gone from one unfortunate event to another. She was starting to wonder if things were ever going to look up for her.

I must really deserve this for what I’ve done, Konko thought feverishly. Why else would the Shard dangle the promise of Alchemy before me, only to snatch it away?

“Here, eat this,” Miranda told her, outlined in light like a fallen angel. “There are more on the way.”

Konko chewed weakly on the berry, feeling the effects kick in immediately. Her eyes cleared, her mind’s fog lifted, and she realized with dreadful certainty that she had been knocking on death’s door.

“Thank you, Countess,” Konko whispered hoarsely, clutching the vampyr’s sleeve. “You’ve saved my life. Again.”

“Don’t thank me,” Miranda told her. “Thank Shrubley.”

The young blonde girl nodded and pulled her cloth mask tighter around her face. It was the only reason she managed to survive as long as she did. Though it hadn’t worked as well as she hoped, it had slowed the poison enough for her to get to higher ground.

She had seen so many people collapse into the purple haze the moment it slithered beneath the door of the Rooster’s Rest.

“We must flee!” Konko said, her red-rimmed eyes wild with fright.

The Countess put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “No, my dear, we must save them. Come, I require your assistance.”