Chapter 288: What Are You

The moving-wall swallowed us whole, spitting us back out again on the other side. The ground was covered with splinters and viscera, the scent-taste of the dead blasphemer’s panic and fear lingering in the air. It was enough to make some of the Great Core’s faithful flinch; not in [panic], but in sheer [revulsion].

I understood, feeling the same at the way bits of the blasphemers’ remains clung to my scale-flesh as I slithered across the floor and the terrible scent-taste took hold of my tongue. It was defilement. A tainting of the purity that the Great Core had bestowed upon us.

A spark of [Chrono Fire] burned that viscera to ashes, and I sloughed off what remained through a quick application of [The Golem’s Fading Heart].

“Let’s move,” The Unrepentant One told the others, standing tall as he made the Coreless’ not-quite-nonsensical noises and gestured towards the debris-laden tunnel. “They definitely hear this. We’ll have company soon.”

The Great Core’s newest faithful stepped forward [fearlessly], as they should. There was nothing that the blasphemers should be able to do to them. Not permanently, anyway. Under the light of the Great Core, with a trio of [Little Guardian’s Focus]es ready to wipe away their wounds, they were more than a match for any bad-thing or blasphemer we could find in our path.

I was glad for that, because the tunnel was just as dangerous for me as it always was. Just as it had the last time I’d slithered through, rivulets of null-water slipped between cracks in the stone at the tunnel’s edges, spilling into trenches that pressed against the walls and provided safety from its terrible touch. And while I could simply stay away from those edges, there was always the chance that a random blow could send me hurtling into that liquid abyss, prematurely transforming this life into nothing more than something that could have been.

I had come too far to accept a not-life that need not be. The Great Core’s faithful had become too numerous. They could not be stripped away so easily.

The faithful marched forward with confidence, far less wary of the null-water than I.

Content in that, and with the knowledge that my disciples would be able to intervene in case anything terrible threatened them, I remained at my place of relative safety on the-female-who-was-not-Needle’s shoulder. The tunnel was hardly narrow, but it was still far too small to hold our number easily; the faithful were forced to wash down it in a compressed wave, a snake that slithered its way down the blasphemer’s tunnels with fangs fully bared.

It wouldn’t be long until those fangs found a throat. Four throats, to be exact.

It started with a brief spike of [surprise] from somewhere near the front, quickly morphing into [disdain] and the kind of [fear] that came before a long-awaited fight - a terror and anxiety that stirred the blood. I followed it even as the snake that we had become began to slow, pressing my thought-flesh through the connections I held with the faithful at the head of the group.

My perspective switched, and I wasn’t viewing the world from my place on not-Needle’s shoulder any longer.

“-earthquake, huh?” I caught a strange Coreless laughing about something, looking at another that accompanied him. Two more were following quickly behind, a few steps away and looking decidedly more ill-at-ease. Each and every one of them was covered in the mana-enhanced ore-flesh of the blasphemers, the air itself already working around their body to repel any and all attackers. “Now, who the fuck are you lot? This is a restricted area, and you’re awfully armed.”

With a flex of his arm, the butt of his ore-flesh fang smashed into the ground. The tip of ore-flesh at the fang’s tip brightened, and a blast of sharpened wind stabbed into the ceiling. A hole formed, causing a few bits of rubble to fall down from above.

If I had been the one in charge of where I was looking, I would have eyed the new hole a little more warily, but I wasn’t. The faithful whose [Little Guardian’s Totem] I’d connected to wasn’t quite as worried about the dangers of null-water as I was. If it touched him, he wouldn’t be devoured quite so quickly as it would me, and he probably thought that the [Little Guardian’s Focus]es would heal him from any damage it could inflict.

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if it would. I didn’t understand everything about how the null-water worked. I hoped that I wouldn’t need to find out.

“Leave now, and I won’t have to do something to you lot that not everyone will live to regret.”

Whatever it was that the blasphemer said, it incited a wave of [rage] in the faithful close enough to hear it. I heard more than a few of them spit something out in return, bristling defensively and squeezing their hands around the shafts of their own fangs.

The blasphemer standing to the side of the first said something else, and the two laughed again. Meanwhile, the two behind them seemed a little more uncertain, glancing nervously at the head of the snake that was my gathered faithful.

I felt my borrowed mouth form a set of words. “We will not die, so it would only be you who would not live and regret. The Little Guardian is with us.”

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The first of the blasphemers paused. “Who?” he asked, shaking his head. “It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t think you understand the situation here. There’s a lot of you, sure. Maybe anywhere else, enough to matter. You could surround us, try to whittle us down.” He looked around. “There’s not enough room to surround us, is there? No, to me it looks a little different. To me, it looks like all I’ll need to do is raise my spear and…” he leveled his fang in the faithful’s direction, and its mana-enhanced glow brightened again.

He thrust. He swept. He thrust again.

With each motion, my faithful fell apart. They were wounded by winds, broken by the breeze, torn by the tempest. Without the protection of ore-flesh to guard them from it, each strike traveled through one faithful and into the next and the next and the next, penetrating deep into the flesh of the snake that my faithful had become. The air, already turbulent, misted with vapors of blood. I could feel it in my faithful’s lungs, taste it on his tongue. His own blood was there, too, spurting out from the gaping hole in his chest.

The blasphemer smirked. “If you line up like that, it just makes it easier on me. Don’t it? Fucking idiots.”

The other blasphemers, momentarily taken aback by the suddenness of the attack, finally joined in the assault. The air, already thick with blood, grew thicker. Thick enough that it became difficult to see, the ever-flowing wind refusing to let vast portions of it ever fall to the ground. Thick enough that, finally, the blasphemers stopped.

“This’ll be a mess to clean up,” one of them said, still obscured by the bloodmist. The faithful I was connected to could barely see or hear the blasphemer, between the red in the air and the groans on the ground. He started to rise, [Little Guardian’s Focus] sending healing energy flooding through his veins; cuts in his flesh began to close, his wind-mutilated form already mending. “I can’t believe there were so many of them. Where’d they even come from?”

“...I still hear that skies-damned hissing, too. It’s really starting to piss me off.”

“I think—”

My faithful threw themselves through the mist, droplets of red dotting their still-healing bodies. I started to jump between the surrounding [Little Guardian’s Totem]s, trying my best to get a good view of the fight. From one direction, I saw one of the blasphemers scream, tackled by no less than six faithful who managed to force their ways through the barrier of wind that surrounded him. They fell upon him with their own fangs of ore-flesh, striking between the gaps in the blasphemer’s protection. The fangs were slowed, the force blunted by what remained of the mana-controlled barrier of air, but that only made the enemy’s screams all the more prolonged and delicious.

“Juran!What are these things? They’re not human!”

Hearing the shout, I pulled my thought-flesh towards a closer [Little Guardian’s Totem]. Another of the blasphemers watched in horror as the previous found himself pinned by a wave of the Great Core’s Coreless, eyes locked on the meat that flowed into the gaps in the faithful’s flesh. He thrust his mana-enhanced fang in their direction, the sharpened wind passing directly through a faithful and forcing them to twitch, to cough out a ball of crimson liquid - but not stop in their assault.

Then, before he could pull his eyes away from the bewildering sight, the hole started to fill again.

He turned to run, leaving his other two companions behind.

They hardly noticed, busy with their own problems. My faithful continued to crash upon them in waves, stymied only by the narrowness of the tunnel itself. In the cavern outside, there would have been no hope for them at all; the blasphemers would have been fallen upon from every direction. Here, the faithful were more limited.

Not to mention, these final two blasphemers seemed stronger than the ones that had fallen or fled. Mentally. Physically. Magically. Whatever mana-enhancements their bodies held, they were enough to hold off the Great Core’s faithful.

For at least a few minutes.

Still, eventually, they both fell. There was no other outcome, not when the faithful simply stood up again each time they fell. The stone ran red with their blood. Rivers of ichor fled the battle, flowing to the null-water chasms that lined the edges of the tunnel, where they hissed out their last.

My faithful moved to strip the ore-flesh from their corpses, each [eager] to make it their own. It took some time for my disciples to step in and sort that out, choosing who among them would don the looted ore-flesh, but that mattered little. From the last time I’d been here, I knew something important. The blasphemers had nowhere to go.

There was only one exit, and it was already behind us.

Geral was still trying to put the infernal hissing out of his mind when one of the guards came back.

Running.

Screaming.

“To arms! To arms!” he shouted, face red from exertion and panic. “There’s an army of monsters in the tunnels!”

Geral paused midswing, his pickaxe raised overhead. For once, none of the guards cuffed him for it. They were all too distracted for something like that.

“Where are the others?” the more authoritative guard named Ilian barked back, stepping forward to greet the panicking man. “What happened?”

The returning guard didn’t answer for a long moment - or, rather, he tried to and simply failed. It was like the words themselves wouldn’t form, reduced to starts and stutters that proved more infuriating than meaningful. Until, finally, something coalesced.

“Th-they killed them. Fell over them in a horde. I-it didn’t matter what we did to get them off,” he stammered. “They refuse to die.”

Geral wasn't bothering to pretend at mining anymore. None of the guards were paying attention, too focused on the stammering man’s warnings. It was hard to parse; Geral was too far away, and the man was too overwhelmed with terror for it to make much sense to him, anyway.

That, and the loud, eerie hissing coming from elsewhere in the tunnels had never stopped.

Still, from what little he could hear…

It was bad. If anything, it was worse for him and his fellow captives than for their captors. At least they could defend themselves. At least they didn’t run the risk of being thrown in front of the enemy in an attempt to slow them down for a single moment.

There was a bit of a stir as the guards seemingly tried to figure out how to respond. Eventually, though, Ilianmanaged to take control of the situation.

“If it’s as you say, then we need to move quickly.” He raised his voice. “Gather the prisoners and get them moving; we’ll still need them to reach the rest of the xenlite quota before the deadline,” he said, then turned towards Geral and the other prisoners. “Though make no mistake, if you delay us, we will leave you to die to these abominations.”

Then, with surprisingly steady steps for someone confronted by the idea of an army of undying monsters on its way, he stepped forward and send his windspear hurtling towards the tunnel’s roof. It cracked, bits and pieces of stone shattered by the magical wind, and he did it again. Soon enough, null-water started to leak through, dripping onto the tunnel floor.

It flowed backwards, following the incline of the tunnel and moving towards the mine’s entrance - towards where the monsters were said to be arriving from.

“Undying or not, null-water is the bane of all, and monsters and demons in particular,” he said, forming another crack. “We’ll find our way back out when this disaster is dealt with.”