Fashionably Late
Priest was starting to worry.
Thus far, he and the others - and their myriad of allies - had been dishing out what should have been more than enough punishment to penetrate Gaovulte's defenses. Grimm, Sam, and Danny had managed to sneak in somehow, and Brianna, Ozzy, and the others were busy dismantling the Red Archers. Giants and zombies ran up Vanguard's tally almost as rapidly as Gaovulte could put fresh forces on the battlefield.
Almost.
But try as they might, they just couldn't batter through the ring of defenses surrounding Gaovulte's fortress. The opposition just... kept... coming.
"This is too big," Priest murmured.
"What's that?" Ozzy asked as he disemboweled a nearby Archer.
"There's too many of 'em," Priest said. "We're barely making a dent. Those statues are neutralizing our heavy firepower, and Godbolt's zombies and archers just keep pouring onto us." He shook his head. "We need something big."
Brianna soared above the treeline and wheeled around to make another pass on a formation of Red Archers. She spotted something that just about made her topple from the sky.
"What is it?" Ozzy called as he pummeled an Archer.
Brianna landed behind him and gaped.
Baxter set his jaw. "There's... something moving... in the treeline?"
"Try again," Brianna breathed.
Ozzy's eyes widened. There wasn't anything moving in the treeline.
The treeline was moving.
"Shit!" he exclaimed as he backpedaled.
Brianna put a hand on his shoulder. "Wait!" she whispered.
"Are you nuts?" Baxter was terrified. "Godbolt's done something to the damn trees! They're coming after us!"
The trees seemed to be slithering along the ground on freshly-unearthed roots as they slowly made their way toward the two Vanguardians.
Brianna shook her head. "No. They're not."
The trees came closer.
"How do you know?" Ozzy demanded.
"I just know," Banshee insisted calmly.
"That might be good enough for you," the prizefighter insisted. "You can fly."
"Godbolt hates trees," the bird-woman explained. "They represent the one thing he can't defeat."
"And what's that?" Ozzy asked, still nervously eyeing the approaching trees.
"What's the opposite of death?" Brianna asked. "How do you cancel out death?" She smiled. "With life. He can try to dominate life, but it won't willingly serve his purposes."
Priest started to piece it together. "Then somebody must've figured out a way to harness nature without hurting it."
Brianna nodded. "Three guesses."
"Oh." A faint smile crept across Ozzy's face as the trees began sweeping past them.
A huge, lumbering mountain troll began charging toward the line of trees, brandishing an enormous axe and roaring menacingly.
He never covered half the distance.
Without warning, an immense tree trunk slammed into the ground directly in front of the troll, and another immediately behind it.
Everyone on the field looked on, aghast, to see that the twelve-foot-tall troll was standing beneath a seventy-foot-tall tree. Or what might be a tree, but looked more like a giant, vaguely man-shaped figure made from four or five huge trees. A particularly perceptive onlooker might notice that this enormous composite being was knitted together with the trees' roots and covered with a profusion of other plant life of all sorts.
Where its 'head' might be, the foliage of three oaks came together to form a dense tangle of branches and leaves, and nobody could quite make out what was inside. But whatever the thing was, it had massive trees for legs, massive trees for arms, and was apparently the ringleader of this army of trees.
The troll looked up.
The tree-being looked down.
The troll let out a low, resigned growl just before one of the being's 'feet' ground it into the earth under tons upon tons of living timber.
That was all the other trees needed. They swarmed onto the battlefield, and wherever they found a troll, Red Archer, or zombie of Gaovulte's, what they left in its place was scarcely recognizable. The giant tree-being swung its long arms and smashed one of the animated stone statues to bits as Godbolt's minions scattered in all directions. A few daring souls attempted to stop the inexorable rush of the forest with a well-placed axe blow or a torch, but whenever this happened to succeed, it only enraged the trees all the more and redoubled their frenzy.
Priest looked at Ozzy. "Apparently," he quipped, "they're on our side."
"I'm still staying out of the way," Baxter insisted.
The seventy-foot tree-being strode over to the edge of the moat, reached down, and scooped Priest up with one of its branch-and-root 'hands'. The hand lifted Priest up to the tangle of branches at the being's head. He strained to see into this miniature forest in the sky when suddenly two of the larger branches parted to reveal a man sitting in a 'basket' formed from several leafy branches.
"I hope I'm not too far behind schedule," Phil Smith said calmly. "Just tell us what needs done."
"You love to make an entrance, don't you?" Priest said, shaking his head.
Phil smiled. "Well, me and my friends here."
