[Job] Down With The Sickness (Lily Ambrosia)

Job Details:

"Lily! Basin! Wait up!"

Lily looked around as she heard a familiar voice calling her name, a worried look on her face as the tone made it clear that the one calling out was in a state of stress. The dryad had been repairing a tree which had been struck by lightning during a recent storm. Basin was resting, which in its case was less recovery and more just using the opportunity to think and perceive the world around it. For a guardian stamina wasn't much of an issue, but having spent your entire life in one location resulted in a more curious personality once given an opportunity to explore.

"Delilah? What's going on?" The voice that had called Lily's name belonged to a woman named Delilah, the herbalist of the village Lily and Basin had been helping with a rather curious problem. Strange purple weeds had been showing up with destructive properties, and the last time they visited Basin had to disable an unusually angry stranger who seemed intent on making sure the dryad and the guardian didn't learn what was going on with the weeds. They'd delivered the man to the Rune Knights but they had yet to receive any news on the investigation.

Delilah ran up to Lily and bent over in front of her, planting her hands on her knees for support as she was breathing heavily. She must have been running for quite some time to be this exhausted. "Animals... village... not safe for... villagers. Please help... the weeds." Lily hurriedly stepped forward and bent her own knees to lower herself, using both hands to gently persuade Delilah to sit down and take a deep breath. "Fill your lungs and start again from the beginning. What's happening at the village."

As the two women were busy Basin shifted, some dust falling off of its body as it stood up and turned towards Lily. In the meantime Delilah had taken severa deep breaths before she began to speak again. Although she clearly was as stressed as before. "There've been sightings of animals covered by that plant we've been studying. They're very aggressive and I think they'll attack the village soon. We can't protect ourselves against that so you must help us."

Now that they had a better idea of what was going on Lily and Basin only had to exchange a single glance before the dryad answered for the both of them.

"Of course!"

---

There was a heavy expression on Lily's face as she watched the last of the chickens stop struggling and drop down, all the life drained from its body. Up ahead Basin was very thoroughly entombing half a dozen boars to ensure that by the time the plants infecting their bodies had dug their way through the stone they wouldn't have the nutrients left to spread any further.

As a dryad Lily was keenly aware that nature was a cycle of life and death. It was naivety to believe that nature was about nothing but kindness and love and nurturing. However what was happening here was a lot worse than just animals having to die for the cycle. These animals were dying to something of which Lily was increasingly convinced that it wasn't in any shape or form naturel. It was saddening and anger inducing.

While she took care of making sure the chicken-weeds wouldn't spread either Basin suddenly spun around and slammed its big stone fist into the head of a wolf which foolishly had decided to try and bite the earth guardian. Aside from being made of stone and dirt Basin didn't have vitals so the wolf's powerful jaws wouldn't do much.

Lily finished her work and turned around in time to summon roots from the ground that wrapped around two more wolves. She bound them tightly against the ground before casting another spell that made earth spikes erupt from the ground to puncture the skulls of the remaining four wolves, although Basin crushed one of them before Lily finished launching her projectiles. With five wolves dead and two captured the dryad thought they were doing pretty nicely.

They hadn't wasted any time in heading towards the village, where the animals were already showing signs of preparing to launch the attack. Rather than waiting for them to actually attack Lily had begun to take them down, which in turn had drawn their attention. Fortunately even with the apparently infectuous properties of the purple plants there still weren't that many animals infected so they still stood a chance at containing this outbreak.

"Only one more left and then the village should be-" Lily interrupted herself as she heard the ground shudder. The shuddering came in a steady and constant rhythm and kept being louder and louder as the source approached at high speed. Basin moved in front of the green-haired nature spirit in time to catch the infected bear which had tried to grab Lily only to find itself roughly smashed against the ground and choked to death. Curiously the plants didn't seem to survive once the infected person was dead.

"Don't worry Delilah! They're all down!" LIly yelled this to draw out the herbalist, who had been hiding for as long as it took the two outsiders to take care of the hyper-aggressive animals. She looked rather shocked as she inspected the infected corpses, the way that the roots of had insidiously burrowed into the flesh of the poor creatures. "Th-thank you. I think you got all of them. But if the plants can infect animals it's even worse than I thought."

"Than you thought? Do you know what we're dealing with here?" Lily asked but Delilah quickly shook her head. "Only suspicions and questions. But what I do know is that this is bad. You've been very helpful so far but I think it's going to become even more dangerous now. If you still want to help I'd ask that you two don't try to solve this alone. This must be something bigger than I thought."

Another exchange of glances, another nod from Lily. "We get it. We'll go out and see if we can raise some awareness and also try to convince another mage to work together on fighting this. What will you be doing?" She tilted her head to the side in curiosity.

"I'm going to tell my friend to hurry up. We can't afford to wait for answers at this point. It seemed like the herbalist was quite resilient towards the horrors of a body cut open once she got over the initial shock. The dryad and the guardian nodded in agreement, then left to find allies on this job which seemed to keep revealing new parts of some huge mystery.

WC: 1,125
TWC: 1,125/500 (Completed)