Izzy Chapter 27: Once You Get Locked Into A Serious Vineling Collection, The Tendency Is To Push It As Far As You Can (Patreon)

The plan was good. At least it wasn’t bad as such. It got some good results, and that was what counted. It just took a lot of work to carry out.

To start with, there weren’t that many dead gnolls in the nearby forest. They only found two all the next day. That was fine, though, because otherwise the other major issue would have stopped them: each gnoll vineling that Izzy raised used more than a third of her mana. On top of that she only barely got anything back while she was controlling one, and that slow gain turned into a trickling loss when the vinelings got far away from her. She couldn’t have done a third without time to regain mana anyway; as it was, they’d be lucky if she could do two the next day.

But even with only two vinelings the results were good. The first, which they sent in early in the morning, got a stronger reaction than the one the previous day. The two humans standing guard with bows shot some arrows at it, but those did nothing; the vineling just kept going. Then there was a lot of screaming, yelling, and running around before the village gathered into a furious mass, wielding tools that Mash recognized as farming implements. They beat the shuffling mass of flesh and plant matter to pieces, but it didn’t go down easily. Then they stood around talking loudly. There was some crying and screaming, too, which was a good sign. The whole point was to provoke the humans, after all.

They sent the second vineling a little after the sun passed its peak in the sky. This time the response was faster. The humans still tried shooting arrows at the approaching monster, and again they did absolutely nothing. But this time it didn’t make it inside the village proper. Humans with scythes, hoes, and felling axes came out to meet it.

It was hard to tell from so far away, but it looked like some of the humans were nursing wounds after they destroyed the second vineling. And they sure were upset! A group of them went to the big wooden structure the newcomers were building, and there was a lot of angry yelling before the leader came out and they talked in more normal voices.

Buttercup of all people found another dead gnoll late that evening. It was mostly skin and bone, but it would do.

They sent it in just before sunrise the next day. It used most of Izzy’s mana reserves, but it was worth it; this one could move more easily than the others, maybe because so much of the meat had been eaten away. In the twilight the humans didn’t spot it until it was almost inside the village, and the shouting went on for ages. This time it looked like the whole village went to shout at the newcomers, who still hadn’t done anything except provide a few useless bowmen.

It took them all day to find another carcass. It wasn’t a gnoll this time but a decomposing deer. It was too far gone for even Crash to want to try to eat it, so they figured, why not? It used more mana than even the gnolls and left Izzy dangerously low, but it looked absolutely horrifying and moved faster than the two-legged vinelings Izzy had tried.

They sent it in a little before sunset. The results were… not what they’d expected.

Besides the bowmen — there were three now — there was a human woman in the clothes of the newcomers but with no weapon guarding the edge of the village. Mash wondered what her role was, but she was too far away to get a label on.

“A Witch, maybe?” Mash suggested.

“Or a Shaman,” Stick agreed. “Some kind of magic user. Has to be.”

“That’s bad,” Izzy groused. “The gnoll Shaman has lightning.”

The humans spotted the deer vineling coming in — “We should have sent it after sunset,” Mash said. “That’s my bad.” The bowmen didn’t shoot though. One of them went back into the village, while the other two put down their bows and picked up big axes that they’d had leaning against the wall of the nearest hut. Then they waited as the woman took a position in front of them.

With the angle it was a little hard to see exactly what happened next, but the goblins all got a pretty good idea. When the deer vineling passed some invisible threshold the human woman brought her hands out to the sides, then clapped them together in front of her. As she did there was a rush of dust inward from all around her, followed by the vineling just… falling apart. Not like the spell ended, though. No, it was like an invisible blade had scythed forward from the woman, tearing through the vineling from breast to hindquarters.

A blink of an eye later a sound like a small thunderclap reached the goblins. The dust around the woman billowed forward and settled as she brushed her hands on her trousers, then returned to the wall she’d been leaning on among the cheers of the two remaining bowmen.

“Uh…” Izzy said into the following silence. “Wind Magic?”

“Yeah. Maybe Wind Magic,” Mash agreed.

“Boss, can we not fight her?” Crash asked, to a chorus of agreement from the rest of the scrum. “I don’t wanna get cut in half.”

Despite how terrifying the display of magical killing potential was, it didn’t discourage them. It did mean that they didn’t bother sending any more vinelings at the humans, at least not yet, but they were nicely riled up as it was. The next morning the goblins watched a small group of newcomers wearing leather and carrying weapons gather on the road, which passed the village. As the humans set off into the forest, Izzy gave the order; it was time to start working on the gnolls.

“We’ll need to harass the humans,” Mash said as they moved. “The best thing would be if they go back to the village and bring more fighters. But we also can’t let them see us.”

“And we need to get the gnolls moving this way,” Izzy said. “Hey, all! Any ideas about the gnolls?”

“Send plant monsters at ‘em!” Buttercup suggested.

“Good idea,” Izzy said doubtfully, “but we’d need something for me to raise. And if we try another deer those nasty bastards would probably just eat it.”

“So build one, like when you started,” Mash said.

Stick looked up at her curiously. “You can animate anything with your spell, not just bodies?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Izzy said. “My first ones were just twigs and bark.”

“How big can you go?”

“Dunno. Bigger uses more mana. The ones I made back then were goblin sized. Used a lot less than the gnoll vinelings.”

“Could you go bigger than the gnolls?” Stick asked eagerly.

“I guess?”

“Gnolls care a lot about size!”

There was some snickering from the scrum. Crash helpfully used his limited but unexpectedly well-matched Fairy, along with some gestures, to explain to Caj what was so funny. That got him cackling, too.

Izzy studiously ignored them. “You think if I use all my mana on one really big vineling, that'll tick them off?”

“Oh, yeah. Don't send it into the camp, though. Let some of their hunters see it. If it's big enough they’ll be too scared to fight it, but they’ll tell the Chieftess.”

“Why?” Crash asked from the side.

“She’ll want to kill it to look good to her warband, and whoever tells her about it will get favor with her.”

“But… why?” Crash asked again.

Stick shrugged. “Because it’s bigger than her? Gnolls are cunning, but also dumb like that.”

Mash again felt a wave of appreciation for the Witch. She didn't know anything like that herself; Akashic Knowledge told her things like how strong gnolls usually were, and what Classes and Levels they could expect, but very little about their behaviour beyond “cruel and violent.”

And his idea was good! It was clever, had a good chance of working, and most of all didn’t put her tribe in excessive danger. She liked it! “The gnolls are already trying to catch us,” she said. “If we can put together a vineling that's as big as Izzy can keep going, it should be easy to make sure that some of the fuzzies see it. We’ll just need to be sneaky about it, so we don't end up in a fight we don't want.”

“What do you say, Boss?” Stick asked Izzy. “Should we try to build a giant, three goblins tall monster of wood and vines?”

“When you say it like that, I can’t really say no, can I?” Izzy groused. “We’ll need quite a few bits, though, or it’ll be stiff and not move well. And we should make it sturdy. I don’t want it splintering as soon as someone swings an axe at it. Oh, and we should make it somewhere near where the gnolls can find it. I don’t always know quite how much a vineling will drain, but bigger is more, and this is going to be big.”

The scrum, including their honorary fairy member, had been in a pretty good mood after harassing the hated humans; now they were downright enthusiastic. They didn’t have anything like the obsession with size that the gnolls supposedly did, but who wouldn’t love the idea of building a walking murdertree? They fantasized cheerfully about giant stump fists smashing gnolls into the ground, and feet like small logs kicking them all the way into the river. Caj was sent out to find a suitable fallen tree to serve as the spine, ideally one that was fairly fresh, and not too wide; they’d need to cut it down to size, and there was no point in having to cut through a whole proper tree trunk. Too thick would just make the whole vineling too heavy, anyway.

The final product wasn’t quite the avatar of nature’s vengeance that they’d talked about, but it was still impressive. With Buttercup and Twitch’s Crafter Skills they managed to cobble together a puppet half again as tall as an average gnoll female, with a skeleton of thick, flexible wood and a skin made of big pieces of bark. The thing took almost all of Izzy’s mana, even when her gourd was full, and it used so much to keep going that if she was gaining or losing anything, she couldn’t tell. That worried Mash a bit; she would have liked Izzy to have a reserve for emergencies. But sometimes you had to take chances, and she believed in Stick’s plan. They’d just have to be careful.

They built and raised the vineling giant — that was what Izzy had dubbed it, so that was what the squiggles called it — in an area where Caj had spotted a small party of gnolls. While they hid and waited, Izzy ordered her enormous minion to “Stay close to me, walk around, and defend yourself if someone attacks.” It would have been nice if Izzy could command the vinelings silently, Mash thought, but that just wasn’t how the spell worked. They’d talked about the exact orders before Izzy gave them, and agreed that this should do what they needed; the vineling would make itself noticed, wouldn’t just let some gnoll with more courage than smarts hack it to bits, and should follow Izzy if and when they moved, even without her giving any new orders.

It was still light when Caj spotted a group of gnolls observing the vineling. They soon slunk off in the direction of their camp.

The stage was set. All they needed no was for the Chieftess to be as foolhardy as Stick thought she was. And going by what Mash had seen of the gnolls so far, that seemed like a safe bet.