Shivana was jolted awake from the clamor.
The searing agony of the elemental storm eroding her flesh felt as though it had pierced her chest, sweeping through her heart as another scorching force, burning the blood in her ventricles and letting chaotic flames "flow" into every inch of her skin.
It had kept her from ever truly falling asleep, leaving her consciousness drifting endlessly between waking and dreaming, allowing her to hear many sounds.
Pain had simply left her no time to heed them.
Now that she had finally won a moment of rest, the raucous howls still lingered at her ears, impossible to shake away.
She wearily opened her eyes. The boundary between gray and white granted by [Darkvision] allowed her to make out vines clinging everywhere throughout the room, swaying across the ceiling as though they had come alive.
The goblins' shrill cries forced her to turn her head. The medical staff attending her had already been tightly bound by the vines, unable to move.
She could feel how weak her body was, but the situation left her no choice but to rise.
Yet as though sensing movement on the bed, the wildly growing branches tangled and intertwined like feral dogs that had caught the scent of meat, about to engulf her entire body.
"Roar!!!"
Houke stood before her, wildly swinging his two hand axes and chopping the binding branches into splinters.
But whenever he severed an attacking branch, new offshoots immediately sprouted from its broken tip. In the end, they wrapped around the orc's entire body in dense, intricate layers like bulging veins on the back of a hand, even growing toward Houke's mouth and nose.
Shivana instinctively grabbed the Great Axe beside the bed—
The axe handle was rough, even prickly in her hand, yet it