Just to prove a point, the dragon proceeds to blast Siran with some more lightning, before hissing and fleeing the scene.

"You're ruining everything, you're delaying me, I have more important things to do than kill a pathetic worm like you," growls the dragon.

Which sounds like someone that's just trying to save face after getting their ass kicked, really.

"You're a fucking coward," he says, after a minute, when he has his breath back.

"I have more important things to do than your petty grudge match, you've delayed her awakening for years."

"Whose awakening?"

"None of your concern, ant."

Snarl. "I'm going to find you and tear you to pieces."

There's no reply.

He shreds the thorns around his sword with magic and picks it up.

Then he resumes heading for the palace.

The city awaits!

... It's mysteriously quiet and peaceful.

Good for it. No doubt something really horrible is about to happen. Siran is well past giving a fuck. He sheaths his sword and lets his clothes fall to pieces and weaves a new set with magic and walks.

He is unmolested until he reaches another bridge, this one over a larger, deeper canal. High buildings tower over the vulnerable looking bridge, suspiciously devoid of any thorns - this might be a good spot for an ambush, especially against him. What with the fire specialization.

...

He doesn't break stride. He doesn't even bother drawing his sword. He just walks onto the bridge.

He feels another sting, followed by paralysis.

Then the bridge explodes. Not a large, dramatic, fiery explosion, but precise, surgical. Each end of the bridge loses its structural support to hidden flowers that finally have stopped being impotent. He's dropped into the canal, where he is immediately engulfed by one of the stitched carrier monsters, to be dragged to the bottom and impaled on waiting thorns, stolen from the bridge.

But now that he knows to account for it, the paralysis doesn't actually stop him from doing magic.

He very deliberately does not use any fire. Ice, lightning, raw force - he does a lot of damage on the way down. The carrier monster might need backup.

It definitely does need backup, evaporating into thousands of insects that die very quickly to Siran's wrath, despite the tenacity of their bites.

But it has it.

Mud creatures swarm in around him to help drag him down, gnawing at his limbs with their needle teeth. They die in droves, but drag him further down all the same.

Eventually they get him on the thorns, and he is less responsive after that.

Once he's safely on the thorns, the mud creatures switch tactics, to stabbing him with as many thorns as possible.

Another carrier monster glides in, and he's further swarmed.

It hurts. A lot. He loses focus, overwhelmed by pain.

But as they hurt him more and more, he starts healing faster and faster. His body rejects teeth and thorns, first subtly, then with significant force.

They keep at it.

The perpetual drowning is like an unpleasant icing on the torturous cake.

It takes two hours. But he gets loose, eventually, his healing accelerated to the point where they can't even get a thorn into him properly.

His clothes are long gone. He can't see down here; he's going to have to find his sword by magic.

But it's been long enough. He's safe to use fire again if he's not stupid about it.

And pain-wise, after the last two hours, a little fire is nothing.

His skin ignites. Things touching him are vaporized. This includes enough water to produce a really memorable steam explosion.

He holds out his hand, and his sword leaps into it.

The things that were tearing him to pieces die in an expeditious fashion.

More attempt to swarm him, but this goes precisely as expected for them, in that they die. In an expeditious fashion.

Debris and boiling water rain down all around him as he walks out from under the ruined bridge. Mud cracks and bakes under his feet.

Standing on the far bank, he lets the flames subside.

"Are you fucking done," he growls.

Nope!

He is swarmed by a horde of floof bugs, with paralytic monster backup. They attempt to paralyze him and then slice him to ribbons.

The monsters' venom barely slows him. The bugs' threads don't even get deep enough to draw blood.

He walks toward the castle.

More mud monsters attempt to swarm him, to little use.

As he passes another bridge, more stitch-monsters beach and empty themselves of their swarm. These do about as much as the mud monsters, in that they do not.

They start attempting other tactics - floof bugs and climbing stalkers grabbing and entangling thorns and explosive flowers to throw them at Siran. Mud creatures attempt to physically hold him down. Stitch monster swarms attempt to invade his mouth and ears to eat him from the inside out.