Penelope, sweet person that she was from what I’d seen of her interactions with Nasha, had spent the majority of her life in the wilds. I still hadn’t learned what that life was like, aside from the fact that she was part of a wider community of mutated beastfolk, but something told me it hadn’t been an easy life.

  So, even acting like a kid trying to stave off boredom, she looked like nothing less than a deadly huntress.

  Her entire body was toned and wiry underneath her fur. Her new leather armor only emphasized this. The sharp look in her eyes was the gaze of a predator on the lookout for prey, no matter how enthusiastically her legs were swinging from the branch she was perched on.

  Therefore, when her ears twitched and she zeroed in on the approaching soldiers well before Kiri’s bird familiar alerted her to them, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Impressed, but not surprised.

  I took a quick glance at the other two clashes just in case something notable was happening there. Martha was still running, though she was drawing rather close to her own ambush spot. Nasha looked a little awkward, continuously backing away from the expanding edge of the poisonous, bubbling paste as it spread through the forest.

  It wouldn’t do too much damage if I left it alone until things wrapped up. I would simply have to rush there the second I saw the conclusion of the other two conflicts.

  Regardless, this meant I could focus on Penelope for a while.

  The lynx jumped down from her branch, pulled the cloak she was wearing tightly over herself to cover up the leather armor, and then picked up the basket she’d left by the tree’s base. She strolled over to the middle of the ambush spot, the nettle reaching almost up to her knees, and bent down to start plucking a few.

  Moments later, the soldiers drew close enough to hear the melody she was humming, even through the patter of rain.

  If I had blinked, I would have missed the moment their expressions changed from surprise to cold determination. Though Martha had played her group expertly, these soldiers were still trained killers. This was more than obvious as they gripped their swords and their postures shifted to something predatory.

  They stepped carefully closer to Penelope, making an attempt at stealth. They might have tried to take her out swiftly and quietly had the lynx not whirled around and looked at them with wide, innocent eyes.

  I blinked at that. She was startlingly good at playing the innocent victim. Then my surprise vanished as I scowled at the expressions flickering over the soldiers’ faces.

  Perhaps calling the soldiers bandits wasn’t far from the truth, after all. I loathed the hidden lust they let slip for just a moment. If there was any crossover between the body language of lynx and draconians, then the disgusted twitch of Penelope’s tail meant she had caught the moment, too.

  “They are not even trying to pretend,” Kiri suddenly said, breaking the silence and ripping me out of rapidly darkening thoughts. “They are ordering her to submit herself to their mercy and lead them to the town.”

  Penelope’s answer was obvious: she immediately broke into a run. Some of the soldiers laughed, but they all broke into a sprint after her, finally wading into the sea of mutated nettle.

  Satisfaction flickered to life inside me like embers awakening under a gentle breeze. The emotion only strengthened when the soldiers ventured under the boughs of manchineel trees in pursuit of the feline.

  The patch of forest I’d contaminated was decently wide. Even at their pace, it took the invaders a minute or two to run through it. They didn’t make it all the way through before the first person faltered and collapsed onto their knees.

  The real pain didn’t start immediately. The mutated nettle wrought havoc on the body as a potent neurotoxin that caused paralysis with frightening speed. The pain kicked in a few minutes later, beginning within one’s bones and slowly spreading… everywhere, really.

  The manchineel, meanwhile, started off as a powerful itch. This quickly developed into a burning sensation as blisters and literal burns began to spread over the victim’s skin.

  And those soldiers were the lucky ones. The ones who happened to swallow the contaminated rainwater, or get some in their eyes, were already suffering far, far more intensely.

  Blindness, temporary if treated and permanent if left alone. The sensation of all that was happening to their skin extending to their internal organs as the poison traveled through their digestive system.

  Some fought it, of course.

  Mana was a major balm to nearly every injury or poison, until it ran out. This meant the elven officer managed to fire off a few attacks at Penelope. She dodged by twisting her body in ways that would have snapped me in half had I tried to copy her. The feline then spun around, threw the basket she’d been carrying at the man, and charged at him, claws first.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The basket did far more damage than one might anticipate, since it was full of stinging nettle and managed to hit the elf right in the face. His cutting it in half only made the issue worse. The nettle absolutely showered over him, pieces clinging to his face and a few getting in his mouth.

  The man was flailing to get it off when Penelope reached him and tore her claws right across his face. The splatter of viscera that arced away from him strongly suggested his eyes were now ruined.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him.

  Penelope left him there to suffer, choosing to rush down the rest of her pursuers who were still struggling to put up a fight. They did not last long.

  “Shows what happens when people follow the plan,” I grumbled, casting a half-hearted glare at Martha’s screen.

  The minotaur was only now reaching her own ambush spot. Her pace had slowed, and she was showing nowhere near the same level of ferocity and power as when she’d initially charged at the soldiers. How much of that was for show and how much was genuine exhaustion, I didn’t know. What I did know was that the wounds she had taken were wholly unnecessary.

  She was lucky her cuts had mostly healed by the time she reached the spot. Antidote or not, manchineel-contaminated rainwater would have stung against open wounds.

  To her credit, the soldiers were so angry and bloodthirsty when they reached her that they didn’t even pause before ensuring their doom. They’d already waded well into the field of nettle and manchineel before Martha spun around on them with a sadistic smirk, and by that point, it was too late.

  The minotaur showed none of the lynx’s restraint.

  Whereas Penelope was content to take out possible threats, even taking care to leave them mostly whole as she did so, Martha rampaged. The soldiers died beneath her gauntlets and hooves in equal measure. She took her time getting around to those who had succumbed to the poison particularly intensely, ensuring their agony was drawn out.

  By the time she was finished, the forest area I’d set up for her ambush was splattered with so much blood and gore that the nettle looked red rather than purple. The churned-up mud was a rather uncomfortable color, too.

  I didn’t and couldn’t blame her.

  Alys had an expression of satisfaction on her face which I strongly suspected was mirrored on mine. From the twitches of Kiri’s lips, she shared the emotion, too.

  The invasion of Swiftband was officially over. There was not a single invader left standing who could do a thing to us or the townsfolk.

  I realized, with a bit of a start, that cleaning up the mess would actually take longer than it had to stamp out the attempted attack. For one thing, I was going to have to visit all the fields of nettle and eradicate the plants. They counted as weeds. Deadly weeds, now that they’d been mutated by my mana, but weeds nonetheless. If we gave them a chance, they would become as widespread as regular nettle. I didn’t think the hunters and foragers would appreciate that.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with the manchineel trees. Getting rid of them would probably be safest. I didn’t think they could thrive in the local climate without constant support, anyway. And while the chances were extremely low, someone could recognize the trees eventually. They would need to be deeply familiar with both plants and fae Courts, Autumn in particular, but it could happen.

  Perhaps I could put in an effort to adjust the trees for the climate and shift their appearance enough to pass them off as a local variant? Stranger things had been discovered out in the wilds. Just take our local ginger, for example.

  I would need to weigh the negatives and positives of either route before making a decision. The manchineels would make a nice deterrent if people tried to sneak up on us again, though I would need to spread them out more for them to be truly useful in that capacity…

  “Thorn!”

  I jumped and turned to face Alys, who was watching me with an amused expression. “Hmm? What’s wrong?”

  “I was asking if you shouldn’t be rushing off to handle… that?”

  She gestured at the set of scrying mirrors, particularly the ones featuring the spreading, bubbling mass of poison.

  “Ah. Right. Saving the leaders of this little invasion. I wasn’t putting that off. I was just… thinking,” I hedged. “About important things.”

  To be honest, I didn’t want to save them just yet.

  A few seconds later, though, I sighed. “Fine, fine. I’m going! Only because of the forest, though.”

  My dragoness snickered at my back as I turned away to leave. “I’ll wait for you at home with the bath drawn and some warm tea!”

  A smile split my gloomy expression immediately.

  The cold bite of Winter grew more pointed as I walked away from the warmth of my dragoness, but at least now I had something to look forward to once I returned.

  —

  Saving the invasion’s lowlife leaders from my poison was relatively simple. Nasha and I simply sprinkled around a powder that dissolved it away, and the rain did much of the work for us. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty when the poisonous paste cleared away and the aftermath of its use was revealed.

  The ground was blackened and scorched. Any and all greenery was simply wiped away. Entire trees had collapsed and been reduced to nothing after their bases were dissolved, so we had a decently sized clearing on our hands now.

  In the midst of all that lay the three elves.

  The only remaining parts of their equipment were enchanted items. The swords, the plates of their armor, a and few clasps and buckles. A single pouch, too, which seemed to be a storage bag similar to mine.

  That was a very nice find. It would assist the town in any number of ways. I obviously couldn’t part with my own, since I still had practically all of my belongings stashed away in it, but this new one could go to the hunters and gatherers or be used to transport building material.

  The elves themselves were in rough condition. Their skin was red and irritated. All of their hair was simply gone. They stared out at the world with the sort of blankness that said there was nothing behind those glassy eyes.

  I would definitely need to fix them, which only made me more irritated with the idiots. As Nasha and I started dragging them back, having bundled them up in cloaks to avoid touching them more than we had to, I silently planned ways to make them suffer more.

  They would definitely learn how unlucky they were that we needed them alive.

  the ebook launch, so if you are like me and you tend to reread the series you are following, you have until the 13th to do so here.

  https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0GDH1KQ13?maas=&ref=