Chapter 296: A Timely Treat

I slithered about in a mad frenzy, causing the nearby faithful to look at me with varying degrees of [concern].

That concern only grew when the sounds of the ore-flesh beast started to reach us. Plant-flesh creaked. It crackled. It crumpled. The sounds echoed across the many-nest, even from so far away. I reached out with [Verdure Parasite] in the sounds’ direction, trying my best to stymie the approach of the dangerous group before they chanced upon any of the many homes that held the Great Core’s faithful. It wouldn’t do much, but it might slow them down just a little.

Just a little was all I needed.

My mind-self slithered down the connection to the only faithful that truly mattered at the moment.

“...to go now, Corinne. I have it.”

He stood in front of one of the other faithful, confident and straight-backed, and uncovered the thing that made him so important. In an instant, mana visibly radiated outward. It formed into whirls and eddies in the air, brushing against his skin. Those faint brushes threatened to turn into something more, but the Lesser Core that created them hadn’t recovered enough of its mana to truly become threatening yet.

It never would.

Before it could grow any further, the faithful plunged the Core back into a null-water container, hardly even flinching when a few droplets splashed his hand - though I could, through our connection, understand how much it must have hurt.

The now-ruined parts of his flesh reknit themselves.

“Is that what I think it is, dearie?” the elderly female asked.

“It is, but don’t think it was going to be kept here for much longer, anyways,” I felt the faithful’s lips form in reply. “I wanted to do this the right way. Get everyone here to understand the crimes being committed in the mines. Let them know that there was another way. That, with the Little Guardian, we don’t have to allow these things to happen anymore. That we could offer the Core in return for something better. But there’s not enough time. I know that we’ve already started spreading the word as far as we can, but the delegation from Virtun is already here and there’s not nearly enough xenlite ready for their tribute. It sounds like they won’t take that lightly.”

“I…”

I slid back out of the connection and into my scale-flesh before the old faithful could finish making noises, deciding that I had better things to do than watch the faithful’s each and every moment.

“...alright, little guy?”

The-female-who-was-not-Needle brushed her fingers across my scales, peering closely at my face. I hissed, tongue flicking out against slightly salty skin.

“...seems okay,” she murmured, turning me over slightly. I ignored it, too busy focusing on what I needed to do. “Is it the noises? What is that, anyway?”

The-female-who-was-not-Needle turned away from me, looking up at a tiny figure perched at the highest point in the area - one of the offsprings of the Darkwood Guardian that I’d made home to the faithful.

“Kala! Do you see anything from up there?” she called out, cupping one hand across the side of her mouth.

“It’s some kind of transportation artifact!” Needle’s voice called back. “Big! It’s ripping through one of the Groveways, and fast!”

The-female-who-was-not-Needle looked back down at me again expectantly. “I’m sure you’ve already seen this in those visions of yours, little one,” she murmured quietly. “Is it something that we need to worry about?”

I hissed again, catching the scent-taste of salt on my tongue.

Light sparked to life around me, forming lines in the air. Those lines became shapes, and shapes became figures. [Illusion Spark] was clearer than ever; stronger than every time I’d used it this way before.

The first figure I formed was the ore-flesh beast. It hovered in the air beside us, larger than me. Plant-flesh formed around it, vague shapes that I didn’t bother to make more obvious. As the ore-flesh beast shattered its way through the vague shapes of plant-flesh, I let all but the beast fade. Then, I shifted wisps of light into the suggestion of steam; that steam spilled from the cracks in its segments as they yawned wide.

Tiny Coreless stepped out from the opened shell.

It wasn’t hard to get their ore-flesh right; all I had to do was look at the ore-flesh that the Grateful One wore and copy that. Not-Needle noticed me looking, glancing back and forth between the ore-flesh of her fellow disciple and that covering the illusions of tiny Coreless.

“...Virtun, huh?” she muttered darkly. “That’s not good at all.”

I let the illusion lapse, then shifted it into one showing the faithful and his offering. It wasn’t hard to look through the eyes of one of the other faithful near him and get it right, even if so many Coreless looked the same to me.

“Is that supposed to be Ewan?” not-Needle remarked, slightly [horrified]. That emotion didn’t seem right, so I went back and compared the illusion with the real thing. The faithful’s illusion was missing a nose. I fixed it, filling the empty space in.

“Oh,” she said, [relieved].

Satisfied, I remade the image of the faithful - a Lesser Core in hand, mana whipping into a frenzy of wind around it.

I then caused the illusion to step towards me, offering the Core. In a snap of my jaws, the illusion of the Lesser Core disappeared. I then did the same to the images of the tiny Coreless, swallowing them one by one.

It was enough to make me feel satisfaction, the simple illusion of what would come filling me with a euphoria that was hard to shake.

It was instantly shaken.

In a disorienting wave of emotions, a vast swathe of [terror] flooded through the connection between myself and a good number of faithful. I immediately dismissed my surroundings, mind-self diving into the torrential waters.

I was one of the tiny faithful, cowering behind a protective section of plant-flesh. I trembled, both of my hands holding tight to the carving of a snake that was strung from my neck, failing to even cover it fully. Behind me, other faithful hid within the cover of plant-flesh.

In front of me, an ore-flesh beast rampaged through my home.

It tore apart the plant-flesh in its path, ignoring the vines and barbs and spores and thorns that assaulted it. Steam hissed from its many segments, hot enough to boil plant-flesh in passing, and each slither that it made - a winding motion that reminded me of my own, but twisted in a way that I found disgusting - knocked another section of the plant-flesh I’d grown for the faithful down.

I could hear someone cackling madly from inside of the ore-flesh beast, just barely audible over the sound of the beast itself. It sounded like the same Coreless from earlier, the one with the mana-enhancement that affected his voice. A mana-enhancement powerful enough to burst eardrums with a roar, and yet it hardly even sounded loud above the din of hissing steam and crashing plant-flesh that the ore-flesh beast continued to release.

I wanted to be surprised, but I wasn’t. I’d already seen the sorts of things that the Coreless could create with ore-flesh and mana combined. The ore-flesh beast was made of enough metal to create enough coverings to fit hundreds of Coreless, and it shone bright enough with the light of mana that I worried about what its full capabilities might be.

Still, the Great Core’s least thinking faithful did their best to defeat it. They failed, but they tried. I aided them as much as I could from so far away, spurring their growth with [Verdure Parasite], siphoning time away from the vast amount of plant-flesh that filled the many-nest. It wasn’t enough.

It was as if the ore-flesh beast was an Ascended itself, or at least strong enough to rival one. In bursts of superheated air and gouts of steam, it melted its way through all of my defenses - and what didn’t melt, it trampled.

If it only moved faster, there wouldn’t have been anything left for me to witness; yet, despite the ore-flesh beast’s inevitable motion forward, it was still forced to push through each and every bit of plant-flesh in its path. It did so easily, but not completely effortlessly.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Just close enough that it hardly mattered.

Because, plant-flesh or not, it moved forward with an inevitability that I both hated and craved. I wanted it more than ever, even as a part of me hissed for its immediate destruction.

Then, the worst happened.

I watched, my faithful’s little hands trembling in front of me, as the ore-flesh beast’s winding slithers put it on a nearly direct course for the largest example of plant-flesh that I could create - one of the offspring of the Darkwood Guardian that I’d turned into the Coreless’ homes. It rose tall and proud over the surrounding plant-flesh, powerful in a way that the rest could only hope to be.

In its approach, the ore-flesh beast was faced with a massive root that tore the surrounding plant-flesh asunder, destroying their fellow faithful just as it attempted to destroy the interloper. With a heavy thud, the great root crashed down upon a large segment of the ore-flesh beast.

It paused there - first for one second, then two. Three. Four.

By the time the fifth passed, something started to change. Steam filled the air, heavy and thick. It wrapped around the root that held it down, capturing it in its vaporous grasp.

Unable to do anything else, my faithful and I simply watched and waited.

Then, before our very eyes, the root began to boil. Steam rose from it in great plumes, desiccating the massive tendril. Its plant-flesh dried up, even as it released superheated water into the air - and as the wood dried, it became brittle.

Weak.

The ore-flesh beast smashed through, tearing it asunder.

Around my tiny faithful, the other Coreless gasped in [shock]. To see such a mighty example of the Great Core’s power fail before the beast, I was sure, was a heavy burden. One that might have shaken the faith of lesser Coreless.

I could only hope that they would prove greater than that.

However, I didn’t have time to pay it any more mind. Instead, I frantically empowered the massive darkwood offspring with [Verdure Parasite], forcing it to grow larger and more powerful than ever before. As the ore-flesh beast hissed forward, it smashed directly into the darkwood plant-flesh - and, this time, was halted in its tracks by something far, far larger than itself.

Screams came from within the darkwood plant-flesh, a number of faithful that had made their homes inside of it trapped within, visible only through the heady mixture of [fear] and [faith] that I could feel connecting to me.

As the ore-flesh beast pushed fruitlessly against the darkwood that blocked its path, roots pummeled its many segments. In the midst of the attacks, one of the beast’s legs flew free. It was only one of a great many, but it was enough to make me think that the Great Core’s unthinking faithful would prevail.

I was wrong.

The ore-flesh beast slammed into the Darkwood Guardian’s offspring again, causing both [faith] and [fear] to swell. It did it again, and again. Each time, it shone with greater amounts of mana, steam coalescing around the entirety of its ore-flesh like boiling scales.

Again.

Again.

Each time, more and more steam began to release from the powerful plant-flesh, as if the ore-flesh beast’s very touch stole all of the water hidden within it.

Then, with a deafening crack, it drove straight through. The ore-flesh beast tore through the carved walls, spilling into the open space that had been carved into the massive darkwood plant-flesh.

It came out the other end again scant moments later, and only extreme application of [Verdure Parasite] kept it from toppling over entirely. The nearby plant-flesh, those that remained, did its best to reinforce their dying sibling. It was barely enough.

The ore-flesh beast had hardly even seemed to pay attention to the destruction it wrought. It had simply needed to move, and so it had done so. What was in front of it barely even mattered.

I knew it couldn’t actually think, but still…

It was enraging; even as [terror] and [worry] and [fright] flooded into me, so powerful in its intensity and numbers that it was hard to imagine anything else, I felt nothing but wrath.

I pulled at the thought-light, willing it to display each and every gift I’d received from the Great Core - all the way from my birth to now.

Name: Paradox

Species: Snake, Ouroboros, Undead

Major Title: [The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail] [Little Guardian] [Reanimated]

Minor Titles: [Minor Mana Core] [Venomous Retribution] [Touched By Fire] [Ascended Seeker]

Innate Traits: [Venomous II] [Life-Death Inversion MAX]

Blooded Traits: [Paralyzing Venom IV] [Poisonous Blood III] [Illusion Spark VIII] [Clinging Grasp III] [Sound Shaping VII] [Chains Of The Creator I] [Anticoagulant IV] [Constriction I] [Spore Puppeteer IX] [Ascended Sense I] [Ambusher’s Vision III] [Streamlined Scales V] [Sting IV] [Enhanced Lungs III] [Weighted Blow III]

Resistances: [Piercing Resistance - Intermediate V] [Venom Resistance - Intermediate II]

Level: 85

Trait Points: 10

Core Skills: [The Endless Cycle] [Chrono Fire] [Verdure Parasite] [The Golem’s Fading Heart] [Transient Reanimation]

Lesser Core Skills: [Mana Manipulation XII] [Mana Venom XI] [Mana Fire VII] [Little Guardian’s Totem MAX] [Life Essence Manipulation IX] [Life - Invigorating Bite XIV] [Life - Vitality XVII] [Life - Vigor XI] [Life - Vigorous Spores IV][Little Guardian’s Focus XII] [Death Essence Manipulation IX] [Death - Venom X] [Death - Enervating Bite XII] [Death - Wither XII] [Death - Weakness X]

Level Rewards: [Traveler] [Mana-Life Conversion] [Mana-Death Conversion] [Mana Restoration] [Mana Blood] [Life Hunter] [Death Boost]

Temporary Buffs: [Soul Fragment XII]

Description: A growing Ouroboros, symbol of the eternal.

…there was nothing I could do.

Even with all of my advantages, the ore-flesh beast was too strong. Too sturdy. If it could survive the strike of a darkwood offspring with so little to show for it, if it could break through its walls - hollowed out to make room for those living in it or not - then there was little that I could do. There was little that the faithful or disciples could do either, even with how much more powerful they'd recently become.

I needed that Core.

It became harder to see as bits of liquid started to form in the little faithful’s eyes, shifting the world into a confusing mess of splotchy hues. The tiny faithful and I moved again, tugged away from his hiding spot by an older female. She pulled us close, ushering us in.

“It’ll be okay, sweetling,” she said. “The Little Guardian will be able to fix this. It’s just like everything else, isn’t it? We just need to have faith.”

I felt my head nod, new [faith] bursting to life at the place where little hands met a carving of a snake, flooding straight into me.

Inside my mind-nest, the seed twitched, absorbing the little one’s [faith] with eager glee, and then fell quiet once more.

I waited for a moment, to see if it would do anything else, but nothing happened.

Then, before I could decide on what to do, a stream of [astonishment] from the faithful near my real body pulled my attention away again.

Immediately, the scent-taste of mana in the air caught attention - and, with it, the eddies of wind that brushed against my scales.

It was here.

“...for the Little Guardian,” a faithful was in the middle of saying, a shining orb of mana caught within his open palms. It was beautiful; not the Core, that was disgusting. No, what was beautiful was the act of making such an offering for the Greatest of Cores.

An act deserving of a name.

Windgiver.

I accepted his offering - and all that it would bring with it.

Dungeon Core (Aspect: Wind) Integrated.

Core Skill Created: [Acceleration Gale].

My flesh tightened around me. My vision started to fade.

I called to the thought-light, searching for knowledge of what Windgiver’s offering had provided, and received a brief glimpse before my consciousness faded.

Core Skill: [Acceleration Gale].

Description: Wind Moves Ever Forward, Time Slipping Alongside It.

Condition Met.

Core Skill - [The Endless Cycle] Renewed.

Beginning New Cycle.