Yet another contestant who was given more screen time was Phoebe Thistlebloom from the Faerie Foxglove Guild. While she may be a team player similar to Grayson Sterling, her methods were considerably more unique.

  Phoebe Thistlebloom was a woman in her mid-20s with wavy, brunette, shoulder-length hair. Her hair was kept tidy by a hairband with a small bundle of flowers of various colors attached to its upper-left side. She wore an elegant dress that was of a mixture of green, white, and pink—one decorated with laces and frills and possessed a bell-shaped silhouette where the skirt reached all the way down to her ankles. Held in her hand was a staff made of burgundy wood, a bundle of multicolored flowers attached to one of its ends.

  Overall, she possessed an aura of finesse and refinement—one that’s similar to most other noblewomen.

  Phoebe was part of a seven-person team when going into the trials, all of which had her as their designated leader. However, as soon as the Scavenger Hunt began, while the rest of the contestants were headed off to different directions, Phoebe had instead ordered her team to stay right where they were, which the team regarded with a bit of confusion.

  “Umm, Lady Phoebe. Shouldn’t we begin our search for the star runes?” one of Phoebe’s teammates—one who went by the name of Bernard—asked. He was a man in his late 40s with streaks of gray in his hair, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, wore a tailored dark-blue swashbuckler coat, and was armed with a rapier.

  “That won’t be necessary, Bernard,” Phoebe replied with a rather calm smile. “Instead, we’ll simply let the star runes come to us.”

  “What do you mean by that, milady?” Bernard asked.

  “Allow me to demonstrate,” Phoebe said.

  With a wave of her hand, Phoebe formed an orb of green light within her palm before tossing it onto the ground. Afterwards, the ground where the orb had landed began sprouting out a strange plant of some kind, one that grew and grew right before their very eyes. Once it grew into its true form, it appeared as a gigantic flower about as tall as a two-story building—one with purple stem and leaves, pink petals, and yellow pistil and stamen. The flower gave off a strong, sweet smell—almost like honey—that permeated through the air around it.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Now, we simply wait,” Phoebe said. “If my estimates are correct, it shouldn’t be long until we get our first star rune. Ahh, speaking of which, look.”

  The team watched with captivated eyes as they saw one of the 1-star monsters, a small yellow bird known as a honeybeak, flew up to the flower to try to eat some of its nectar. However, as soon as it sampled the nectar, it began falling off of the petals of the flower, landing right in Phoebe’s hand. The bird’s body appeared to have gone stiff—almost as though it had died—as it began disintegrating into pink particles, leaving behind a star rune.

  “Woah…how did you do that?” Bernard asked.

  “It’s simple, really. Out of all the star-marked monsters on the list, I’ve noticed quite a number of honeybeaks,” Phoebe explained. “Out of all the 1-star monsters, honeybeaks are perhaps the fastest of them all and therefore the most difficult to chase after. Not as fast as a zephyrtail, of course, but still fast enough to outpace most arrows. However, they also happen to have a diet consisting mostly of honey and nectar. It’s quite literally in their name—‘honey beak’. And so I thought, ‘What better way to lure out a honeybeak than with honey?’.

  “And so, I conjured this giant flower for that exact purpose. This here is an enlarged version of a honeymist flower, a species of flower whose scent is one of the strongest out of all the flowers. Unsurprisingly, the nectar of the honeymist also happens to be a honeybeak’s favorite food. There’s a saying that says you can catch more flies with honey; apparently, you can catch more birds with honey as well. However, I’d modified the nectar on this particular honeymist to contain a special poison which would kill the honeybeak as soon as it was consumed.

  “My plan was to have the flower lure all the honeybeaks from the surrounding area, have them consume the poisoned nectar, and drop dead—after which we’ll simply take the star runes off their corpses. That way, we should be able to gather enough runes for our entire team without even lifting a finger. Isn’t this solution elegant?”

  “Wow…that is quite ingenious,” Bernard replied, feeling amazed at the lady’s plan. “Although, it felt almost too easy. I was looking forward to seeing some combat.”

  “Oh, don’t worry yourself over it,” Phoebe said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m sure you’ll get a chance to have a fight soon enough, perhaps in one of the later trials. In the meantime, why don’t we sit down and have ourselves a cup of tea?”

  “Excuse me, did you say ‘tea’? How the hell are we supposed to have tea here—?”

  Just as he said that, Phoebe summoned a bunch of chairs and tables in front of her—furniture that were made from purple stems and roots growing out of the ground, shaped to look like chairs and tables. Then, with another wave, she summoned a small tea set out of thin air, complete with teacups and teapots.

  Bernard gazed at the whole set-up with baffled amazement. Was Lady Phoebe always this prepared in having tea wherever she went?