I Am A Carnivorous Plant

There was a loud thunking noise, like something blunt striking wood, but no creaking or cracking sound followed. From what I could tell, my coiled vine, the same type I’d used to pierce through the tough leathers of the massive crocodiles/alligators, doofy looking bears, and the impossibly resilient cats, had barely even cut through the tree roots coiling around the treants body. It only made it a thumbnail’s length in at most! That’s insane!

No well, insane’s not the word, since I’m sure trees are way thicker than any animal, but still, crazy!

While he was still struggling against the lesser half of my remaining vines, I tried 3 more times to spear through him, but with little effect. I was chipping my way deeper and deeper into him, but it was such slow progress that I was sure I’d need to do it about 20 more times before I made it to his seed. There was no way that I had that many more tries at the coil vines left, since I was already starting to feel a ravenous hunger gnawing at me from my empty feeling digestive sac. But despite how agonizingly hungry I was starting to feel, I still had to spend more nutrients on a handful more vines to keep the treant that was close to escaping in place.

Didn’t really matter though that I was keeping the treant stuck.

It seems he certainly had a few more tricks up his sleeve to use on me, even from where he was.

The ring of trees had now gotten uncomfortably close, and I could see two smaller trees that had weaved their way into the ring, picking up their thick roots from the ground and using them to crawl towards me in a weird scuttling way. They menacingly waved their surprisingly pliable branches at me, as if they were practicing what they’d do when they made it close enough to hit me.

You know, I had actually been a bit surprised that the treant hadn’t used its little branch attacks on me while I was forced to sit still here, rooted. I’d been expecting to get hit by it at least once or twice in this crappy little makeshift attack I was performing. It wasn’t a perfect plan, for sure, I admit it, but what can you do when you’re put on the spot like this but risk it all for the victory, right? So long as my seed wasn’t broken, I could use my magic to heal myself up after I won, so it wasn’t really that big of a deal, even if it would totally hurt.

This whole turning the smaller trees into sub-treants or whatever and sending them after me thing, though?

Yeah, can’t say I was prepared for that.

The small treants came at me quickly while I was still struggling with trying to maneuver the vines I’d grown. I say ‘small’, but that’s totally relative, since they were actually about the height of a bus. I was betting that they’d hit like one, too, but if I got up and moved out of their way then the magic connecting me to the vines would be broken. The treant would probably immediately escape and join in with the other two, and three against one aren’t the kinds of odds that I’d like to take!

I guess I just have to do my best to fight the two treants while I figured out how to take down their boss-

Yeah no, seems like that’s completely the wrong idea!

I’d tried to block the sub-treant’s attacks with my tentacles, but they did indeed hit quite hard, hard enough that they slammed their big sturdy branches against my intercepting tendrils and still completely clobbered me, with no force lost. Basically I got hit by my own limbs, on top of the tree’s branches. And since they were covered in bark, it felt like my petals were getting keelhauled against them when they moved. My petals are actually thicker than they look, and the tentacles that got slammed into me actually helped to protect my petals from the roughness a bit as well, but I still totally managed to get scraped all over just from that one hit. And when the second tree also managed to get a hit in while I was reeling from the first attack, my roots felt like they were getting bruised and tugged from the strain of keeping me in place.

Yeah, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to stand still and defend against this hard of attacks. If staying here rooted is no longer an option… then I guess the only thing left I can do is go on a suicide mission! At least I’ll probably take less damage in a one on one fight, right? But still, this is going to be really extra super dangerous. I’m already getting huge stabbing hunger pangs, so I doubt I’m going to be able to use very much magic anymore… I want to heal myself up before I do this, but there’s no way I can if I want to have enough to take that treant down.

Oh well, I’m just going to have to cross my tentacles and hope that this treant doesn’t immediately dig my seed out of me.

Last resort, here I come!

Before the sub-treants could land another hit on me, I dug up my roots and launched myself at the slightly far main-treant, wildly waggling my tendrils as I flew, until I smacked into the hard bark covering his body and frantically wound them around him. Some of my tentacles that had been caught in the smaller treant’s attacks weren’t responding as well since they’d been severely scratched up by the jagged bark earlier. I was sure that my hold wouldn’t be nearly as strong as I’d need it to be to really restrict the treant’s movements, which meant that he was free to land plenty of attacks on me right now. Once he realized that, it probably wouldn’t take very long for him to tear me apart. At least the two sub-treants I’d left behind were taking their sweet time to get here, so I’d have a small window to try and implement my horrible plan.

Maybe you have a bunch of things that I don’t, treant!

Maybe you’ve made me jealous a few times!

But you know what?

I have something that you don’t have!

And I promise, it’s way better!

I dug my roots into the ground, opened up my mouth nice and wide, used the opened ‘mouths’ on my two inner tendrils like scooping hands, and repeatedly splashed my digestive acids onto the treant’s midriff. He let out some kind of angered creaking groan, and I could feel the claws of his root-hands raking over me in retaliation as he struggled against my restraining tentacles. It seems he’d noticed where I’d been barfing my acid from, and his flailing claws aimed mostly towards my ‘face’ and opened neck, as if he were trying to get me to close my mouth back up. At one point he even accidentally swung one of his root-hands into my stomach, and the way he immediately flung it away from me told me all I needed to know about how much it hurt!

Too bad it apparently didn’t hurt enough to stop him from clawing at me.

Of course, I wasn’t sitting still while the treant was attacking me; I kept attacking him right back! My tentacles still desperately tried to reduce the damage he was doing to me, and my inner tendrils still continued to splash acid at him in regular intervals. A few of my tentacles, the ones I couldn’t control as well anymore, pounded against the spot my acid was burning on, not giving a damn if they started to get corroded as well.

The sub-treants had hurried their approach once their master started writhing in pain, so I didn’t have much longer until they made it over here and ripped me away from him. I hurried up too, splashing and banging and trying not to get shredded by those surprisingly sharp roots. I could tell that I was in absolute tatters by this point, although not enough to stop me from doing what I needed to do. I could make out that the treant’s roots over his midriff had finally deteriorated enough, and my ruined tentacles that had just been desperately pounding against him so far began to tug, making the small opening they'd found just the teensiest bit wider. And when I knew I couldn’t stall any longer than I already had, when the sub-treants were only a branch length away, I finally sent the signal to the buried roots I’d left in the ground all this time.

The coiled vine I’d set up, my final attack and last of my nutrients, flew up and attacked the opened spot, breaking through the tough roots and piercing the treant’s tiny hidden seed.

The treant grew surprisingly stiff, and only a moment later he slumped down, before suddenly dissolving into ash and scattering away in the breeze. The sub-treants behind me mimicked him, also disappearing at the very same time. And with the treant gone, who I’d been holding on to for dear-life while we fought, I no longer had anything to support my ragged body. I fell like a (very light, actually) sack of potatoes, and it was all I could do to close up the torn up remains of my mouth before I dumped the small remainder of my stomach acids all over the ground.

I reeled for a moment as the adrenaline (or whatever the hell a plant has) drained away from me. I was in pain. I was in a lot of pain! Some of it was from how broken and ripped up my poor body was, but most of it was from the awful starvation that was afflicting me. It was like I was being devoured by my own body from the inside out, only without the digestive acid doing it. It felt like a thousand tiny mouths were chewing the inside of my everything, and I was sure I wouldn’t last very long if I stayed like this.

I’d used up at least about 98% of my nutrients if I had to guess, but at the very least, I still had enough energy to drag my broken and wilted body around with the few tentacles that had managed to (somewhat) survive the whole onslaught. It was hard and I hated it, especially since I was basically running on fumes, but the struggle was necessary if I wanted to survive. My target while I’d been running from the treant was actually a nice and open lake area near the edge of his territory. I was pretty sure that I’d spotted some fish and things swimming in that lake, and since it was so open, I would be able to see anything that might be coming towards me in enough time to attack or counterattack it, so I decided that was probably going to be the best bet for my recuperation and recovery.

Besides, a nice calming lake view would help heal my soul up after what I’ve just gone through, I think!

The lake wasn’t so far relatively, but in the state that I was in now, it was going to take me about an hour of dragging myself before I could make it there. And sadly, during that hour, I was going to have to put up with this horrifically painful starvation. Honestly, knowing that was making the whole thing feel more daunting than any amount of struggling while pathetically dragging my body around. But the sooner I did it, then the sooner I could feel better, so of course I hurried forwards at a slow, painful crawl.

Ah, I hope I’m not too broken to catch a fish…

That would be absolutely awful...