Last update, we got some slimes to join and then Rory said we could go into the Jungle, and when has Rory ever done us wrong? So, we consult our map screen and find Treepidation, the jungle. (All the area have such punny names, but I don't want to spoil them).
When we Arrive, Rory informs us that he's going to run ahead and just leave us to catch up. What a nice guy.
We immediately survey the local fauna. Slimes seem to be most common, but there are also Stump Chumps in the area, which are slimes except slightly more defensive and with less well-rounded. The the other creature in the area is a Swarm Trooper, the ultimate metal slime hunting machine. Swarm Troopers have a special trait that allows causes their basic attack power to be divided by 6, but hit 6 different times, which may sound like it does the same amount of damage, but it gives it 6 chances to hit metal enemies, and since metal enemies only ever take 1 damage, it doesn't matter how piss-poor its damage is.
As for the local flora, it's mostly medicinal herbs, which can be used in or out of battle to restore 30-ish HP, which isn't that much at higher levels.
So we pick a fight with the nearest stump chump, and the chump is dispatched easily, causing everyone in the party to level up.
We progress into the next zone to find Rory, making sure we're able to catch up.
Again, I have to ask you to imagine the screen shaking here, as I can't capture the shake in pictures.
Right after Rory makes that remark, "what the blazes is going on here" shows up.
12 yards tall and 4 lanes wide, it's 55 feet of vermiform pride.
The name of this giant worm is wormonger, by the way, and it's not much of a spoiler since the game would show us the name if we got into a battle with it during one of its slithers through the area.
After the thing passes, Rory remarks about the size of the wormonger, and the runs in the exact same direction it went. Not a bright one, that Rory.
The next area has a cave in it, which I was running for so I could show the cave fauna when this happened:
So I can to stand around for a while and wait for it to finish slithering so we could enter the cave. Inside there was only a single species, but damn, was there a lot of them. Drackys are excellent early game mages, and have decent health so they are too squishy. Not to mention, if you synthesize 4 of them together (through way of synthesizing two pairs of two together and then synthesizing the results) you can get a great Dracky, an excellent monster for early game that can tear through enemies as well as cast spells. Drackys are definitely a must-have of treepidation, along with a few other creatures, but we'll get to those later.
The next zone is up to its hypothetical knees in mud.
This zone, like the cave is populated by only one race, this time being the muddy hand. The muddy hand is a mediocre melee monster, but that's about it. Nothing's too special about them.
However, they did do a high amount of damage to the party, but they also leveled them up!
And, that will wrap up this update, with our party damaged, and the plot not even slightly resolved.