From his experience so far, Mike had come to understand the danger of Defiance left unchecked to know that if he had given the lady before him free reign in the domain of the proliferating forest, to the point of even doing as she asked, he was more likely than not to lose his authority to her. After all, he had gotten control of the proliferating forest by forcing it into something against its own final will by capitalizing a loophole in its nature; its love and personal protection of those creatures born under its branches. And given that the lady had just, more or less defied and tried to undermined his authority right in his domain twice, he was more than disinclined to offer his help, not because he personally did not want to or because he was a moral scum, it was rather because of the profound implications it would have on his authority as the wielder of the proliferating forest, negatively.
He just recently got the authority over the forest to lose it to a very, very proud lady with a misguided perception of the extent of the reach of her authority.
Thus, he sent her back to fight the very thing she had been running away from, re-exerting the totality and absoluteness of his authority in his domain, which extended all throughout the reaches of the proliferating forest, in one decree. Her citizens were not collateral damage; they were a part of her authority as an influence and were to be treated as such. His experience in his home world with scheming leaders trying to escape the consequences of their action by fronting the effects such consequences and punishments would have on innocent citizen had taught him to know better. One time the monarchial leadership of a long standing kingdom under the central government tried to escape death penalty on their entire lineage for annihilating a significant portion of another country alongside all its leadership, by giving the excuse that killing them would cause that already politically unstable region to spiral out of control.
Besides that, he wanted to see what personal abilities were, and how they were used by his fellow Elts, who possessed it, in actual combat. His life depended on it after all.
But there was one main reason why he sent her and her people in the direction of what they were running away from and not in the opposite direction….
'….what a spot fear can put people in, she would never have thought that her fear is what she is running away from.'
There was a great disparity between what she and her people were seeing as their adversary and what he was seeing.