"Ochu Lord?" asks Azym. "You mean there's a fiend that's been here for long enough to get a name?"

"So say the locals," he nods. "It's not very mobile, and there are many other paths past the river that don't go near it."

"Thank you for the warning, Luzzu, but I think we can take it."

"...that would be risky," says Lulu mildly. "You're sure?"

"It's in the job description," shrugs Zei. "And besides, we haven't really faced anything challenging yet, and a local big one sounds like a good test."

Azym reaches up and over his own shoulder to make sure his sword is still there. Not that it wouldn't be, he's been using it all morning, but he feels a little bit fidgety by being told that this fiend will be a challenge by the dude who can summon monsters out of thin air.

"If the Lord Summoner wishes to help," says Luzzu, now that he's sure the group understands the risks and isn't about to just barge in blindly, "we would welcome all of the aid you can lend."

"I do," Zei agrees.

"Very well. May Yevon guide your blades." And he steps aside to permit the party passage past the bridge.

The path narrows again past the bridge, and does indeed lead inexorably to a clearing where the fiend awaits.

It's bulbous and rooted in place, some sort of carnivore plant with long tentacles pointing up, the tallest of which is thrice as tall as Kimahri. It sways more than the breeze would permit, but does not immediately become more agitated as the party gets closer.

"Looks like it's right up your alley, 'Lu."

"Hmm," she nods, acknowledging the point. "I'm sure you can keep it distracted, then."

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

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

He rolls his eyes and gestures at Azym'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 Azym 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 Azym 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.

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, Azym 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.