Zei and Lulu stand back while Kimahri and Wakka fan out to the right and left around the fiend. He side eyes Tōkan and says, "You should go show off."

"—I don't think now's the time for flirting—"

He rolls his eyes and gestures at Tōkan's sword with his chin and eyes while he unclicks his own staff from the harness on his back. "I've seen you fight. Do it again."

...he hadn't thought he'd done that well actually but he'll believe in the Zei that believes in him.

He takes point, then, standing between the creature and the two squishy magic users—

—and rolls to the side when one of the (sharp!) tentacles dives for him with no warning. Seems the creature's finally noticed them.

Zei casts a magical shield protecting him a fraction of a second before he'd have been hit but that's good reflexes, he's once again impressed and confused. The other two physical combatants get their own magical shields and then he starts buffing their combat capabilities.

The fiend can multitask pretty well, so all three of them are being harassed at the same time.

The two magic users are also being harassed but between the other three physically intercepting the blows and Zei's constant shields they're mostly fine. And they've both trained to not let their own casts get interrupted if attacks do go through—Zei is perfectly capable of healing any incidental damage.

Magic doesn't take hardly any time to cast but it does have a few seconds' recovery period and it does take energy. This means she can't be setting the fiend on fire all the time, but fire is still the most effective against plant fiends and the creature's reactions are appropriately distressed.

Fiends aren't really physical creatures, so any given blow doesn't actually leave lasting damage—which is not really something Tōkan had previously consciously noted, though it's obvious now. They work more under a "hit points" paradigm where each time they're damaged they lose some of their fundamental essence and once enough of it has been spent they can no longer hold onto their own forms and they dissipate.

But cutting the tentacles off is still a pretty good idea. Even if they'll regenerate next time you look at them, that's still a couple seconds' reprieve from that particular tentacle and between Kimahri and him they can actually pretty effectively hold the creature back.

That's not its only skill, though. For one, even though it's rooted in place, it can still "jump" in a manner of speaking, throwing most of its bulk into the air and then pulling itself down by the roots so that it can impact the ground hard enough to actually cause tremors. All three physical combatants are pretty good at keeping their footing, though: Wakka and Tōkan because of their underwater training-based skills at dealing well with miscalibrated senses of balance, Kimahri because honestly most of the time he's not actually on the ground—his style focuses on jumps and other air-based acrobatics that somehow always end up with his huge spear being driven into the fiend with unreasonable force.

Another more irritating form of attack, though, is the pollen. From the start of the fight, the ochu has been continuously releasing a mist of pollen from its "mouth". In addition to the sickly-sweet smell and the way it burns in their lungs, it seems to be attracting wasp fiends the size of hawks from the surrounding jungle.

When that starts happening Wakka has his chance to shine. His favoured weapon is a blitz ball, which, weird as it is, functions effectively as a boomerang, and he can do rather a lot of battlefield control using it at range.

And Zei can most definitely heal the damage caused by the pollen, quickly enough that it never gets worse than an internal itch. But between the somewhat cramped battlefield and the fact that he's constantly casting recuperative magics he's kept thoroughly busy.

And they find a rhythm. Even fiends as big as this aren't smart enough to require much creativity to defeat, this far away from major population centers, so they can just keep doing what works until it dies.

With the same lack of fanfare as most fiends, at some indefinable threshold after which it can no longer stay solid, it droops and melts into pyreflies, leaving as the only evidence it existed the crater it created and the holes into which it'd been rooted.

But also, something as big as that is bound to drop many spheres, and indeed it does, five red ones and a yellow one clattering to the ground with a glassy clink. Kimahri moves to collect them.

After making sure Wakka's dispatched the last extra fiends, Tōkan resheathes his sword and walks back over to Zei at the same time as the blitzballers and the Crusaders cross the bridge towards their party.

    "A summoner and his guardians," says Luzzu, looking at the crater with raised eyebrows. "Very impressive."

Zei ducks his head and demurs, "It's in the job description," echoing his own earlier words.

    Luzzu shakes his head. "So it is. Well, we will inform the villagers of this, they will be grateful for your help. Yevon be with you."

        As he turns around to walk back to Kilika Village, Gatta follows him in a cheerful march while singing, "Young Crusaders gather 'round! We'll beat Sin into the ground!"

Kimahri and Wakka rejoin the group, and after a few exchanged words to make sure everyone is okay and some minor healing they set off once more.

Lulu and Zei grab one small glass vial each, from one of Lulu's pouches. The vials are filled with a blue—well, it looks like blue mist, but it behaves more like a liquid—and they each drink theirs to the last "drop".

...it would be suspicious to ask, probably. And given that it was only the magic users who drank the potion, he suspects it's something to help recover magic energy or something.

Tōkan hangs back once again as they resume walking to lock steps with Zei. "So, why didn't you get Valefor?" He's mostly curious—the ochu was tough but with their numbers and coordination it wasn't really hard to kill, so Valefor would have probably been overkill, but overkill would have saved them some time. He's sure Zei had a good reason, though.

He did, yes.

"A few reasons. Valefor is not the best combatant for closed spaces like jungle clearings like this, most of her attacks are area attacks rather than concentrated ones and it would've been hard to coordinate with the three of you. But the main reason is that aeons can only exist in one place at a time—if I'm using Valefor, she will not be available for other summoners to use."

"—huh! So summoners just... share?"

"Mmhm. We can sort of—feel?—when we try to summon, if an aeon is available—but anyway they're best used as a last resort sort of thing, only when we really need them. If I call an aeon whenever I feel like it then someone else might have need of them and not be able to."

And all summoners are people who have been explicitly chosen by the fayth themselves to be the kind of people who won't do it frivolously. What an interesting system.

"Don't you have to train with them, though, to know best how they work and to have good tactical understanding of stuff?"

"Hmm, yes as far as that goes, but most of them have been around for hundreds of years and will just be much better than any given summoner at battlefield tactics. Most of what summoners and their guardians need to do is learn how to be what the aeons need, really."

"...huh. Can they speak?"

"Not in aeon form."

"So—how to be a game piece that plays well when the only clue you have about the overall game strategy is the behaviour of another piece."