Chapter 300: Practical Allegiances

I watched through the perspective of the most recently named of the Great Core’s faithful as one of the enemy Coreless drove an ore-flesh fang through another Coreless’ foot. It sank straight through, and then even further, the fang lodging deep into the stone below the Coreless. The Coreless shrieked, and [horror] slipped through the connection I held with Windgiver and his [Little Guardian’s Totem]. Our shared vision widened. His muscles tensed. I held my breath, hoping that the faithful didn’t do exactly what it seemed like he was in danger of doing.

A step forward.

An intake of breath.

Another—

He stopped, and I let out a mental hiss of relief. As brave as it would have been for him to charge into the enemy Coreless, it would have also been stupid. The Great Core did not need idiot faithful. It needed the smart. It needed the strong. It needed the victorious.

There would be no victory in challenging the strange Coreless here.

“I suppose there would no longer be any need for a deal at all, would there be?” one of the enemy Coreless, the large one that the others seemed to defer to, said. I tried to gauge what the noises meant, but the Coreless that he spoke to didn’t wear any of my [Little Guardian’s Totem]s; without them, I was nearly as deaf as I’d ever been to the various meanings behind the Coreless’ odd utterances, even with all of my increased understanding as of late. I couldn’t find anything but calm satisfaction in the strange Coreless’ eyes, and nothing but terror and fear in the others - and while that told me something about the direction things were going, it didn’t tell me anything more than the fang to the foot had.

Still, I did my best to understand. If the Great Core were to achieve its deserved victory, then I needed to wrap my coils around every advantage that I could find - to sink my fangs into every small morsel of information I could gather, swallowing them whole one by one.

If this life was doomed to become a false-life - and, after seeing how fast one of the strange Coreless had moved, I was becoming more and more certain that it was - then I would need to make the most of it.

That meant information.

That meant understanding.

That meant observation.

And, eventually, it meant throwing myself into danger - because there was one particularly important morsel of information that I needed to sink my fangs into. What was the full potential of [Acceleration Gale], if I reached the next level threshold and chose to upgrade it as I had with so many other abilities? I was only a few levels away, and I was fairly certain that I would only need to defeat one or two of the strange Coreless to get there.

But for that, I knew, I would have to take risks. I would have to get close. I was fine with that. Because, after seeing the way that the ore-flesh beast had plunged straight through one of the nests that I’d created for the faithful…

…I had an itch in my fangs.

Still, I wasn’t going to do the same thing that I’d only just been thinking Windgiver would have been stupid to do. There was no reason to slither straight towards the entire group at once. There was no reason to force a false-life early.

Instead, I continued preparing for the fight that was bound to come. Plant-flesh bloomed to life in great multitudes, forming an ever-narrowing ring around the ore-flesh beast and its Coreless. It was slower than I would have liked, the speed reduced by the extreme amount of space that I was required to fill. With how strong the ore-flesh beast had proven itself to be, I couldn’t settle for a narrow strip of plant-flesh. It needed to be thick.

Unending.

Undefeatable - if only for the fact that, should one portion of plant-flesh be defeated, an endless number laid in wait behind it. There needed to be no escape for these strange Coreless, for they and their ore-flesh beast had done something that even the blasphemers had managed - harming not just the future faithful, but those that had already joined the faithful. And that was not something that could be forgiven.

I watched through Windgiver’s eyes as the strange Coreless entered the tower-nest, a fang still pinning their most recent victim to the stone below his feet. It was only after they all disappeared that Windgiver moved forward, hurrying towards the pinned Coreless. He reached for the fang and pulled with all of his might, grunting in exertion.

It didn’t budge; the Coreless remained there, pinned, attached to a fang that had become one with his flesh and the stone beneath it.

Still, there was an obvious solution. One that I had faith would eventually be reached. The Coreless’ foot was one with fang and stone - but the Coreless himself wasn’t. He simply needed to lose the limb. From there, he would have shaken off the malignant connection that the strange Coreless had formed. From there, with the Great Core’s mercy, he might eventually recover.

It was a blessing in disguise; I didn’t sense a [Little Guardian’s Totem] attached to the trapped Coreless, even despite the numbers that had begun to spread throughout this particular section of the many-nest. Now, the Coreless would have an opportunity - an incentive, even - to rectify his current lack of faith.

Just as I thought that, the connection I held with Windgiver surged with a measure of [horrified understanding]. He, too, had likely come to understand what needed to be done. Knowing that there was no other route things would take, I moved on.

With short slithers of the mind, I crossed ever-greater physical distances, searching for where the strange Coreless had gone. It wasn’t that hard. The strange Coreless couldn’t help but draw attention to themselves, and wherever they walked, the [Little Guardian’s Totem]s of the faithful responded.

It was only due to how much these Coreless repelled their observers that I even struggled at all; I was forced to follow them in fleeting glances, through eyes that shifted away the moment that it seemed the Coreless might look in my faithfuls’ directions. Still, there were enough faithful within the tower-nest by now that even that was enough. I followed them to a smaller nest within the greater tower-nest, a place set aside for the strange Coreless to rest and shelter.

When they didn’t come out again for enough time for me to be certain of my assumption, I finally allowed myself to return back to my physical form. The world appeared around me again; no longer was I surrounded with the trappings of the Coreless’ constructed nest, but instead found the plant-flesh that served as the faithful’s new home and defenses both around me. As I reoriented myself, the-female-who-was-not-Needle appeared in a sudden blur of motion, coming to a stop beside me.

Not as fast as the strange Coreless had moved, but close.

“I’m sure you already know this, but the seeds have been spread and begun to grow. I think we’re getting close to ready, little one,” she murmured, leaning over me and reaching out a hand. I took the opportunity to slither on top of it, winding my way up to my customary position on her shoulder and ushering [Acceleration Gale] to a gentle gust around the two of us. Instantly, the world slowed again; not as much as it had slowed when it was spread across a vast swathe of the many-nest, but enough to make a difference.

Not-Needle was no longer slower than the other Coreless had been. In fact, it wasn’t even close anymore.

“Tell me,” she continued, hardly reacting to the change in the motion of time around us, “Where do we go from here?”

Kynan brought his will to bear, teeth nearly shattering as they bit down hard enough to beat the screams of agony back.

His foot, though, continued to silently scream. It pulsed in time with the beat of his heart, a thump, thump, thump that beat back Kynan’s thoughts more effectively than the drinks he’d forced down after the death of his better half. Then, he’d tried to drown his thoughts and throw himself into a stupor.

Now, with the waves of agony that continued to rush in, he had to fight simply to keep those thoughts above water.

He took in a hissing breath, full of life and misery, and he thought - and, for as fast as his brain tried to work, he could only think one thing.

It was over.

Kynan’s dreams and ambitions had just been devoured by the monster that was his fellow man. From now on, he would be a cripple. And as much as people wished to claim that they were virtuous and empathetic, they did not wish to have empathy for those that led them.

Leaders needed to be untouchable; something more than their fellow man, the kind of person that the men underneath them could look to as an example of invincibility. It might have been different once, before the World Dungeon and its monsters arrived. But now, when potential death lurked in the guise of a magical monster around every corner, and humanity craved the illusion of invincibility more than anything else.

They wanted to go to sleep at night knowing that they were safe.

A leader without a limb did not make them feel safe. It made them understand, when they let their head fall to their mattress at the end of a hard day’s work, that it might be them next. That there was no safety for them at all.

There shouldn’t be, anyway. Normally, there wouldn’t be.

Kynan wasn’t stupid, however. He could connect the dots; it wasn’t hard to draw the lines between the initial monster in the mines that had started it all, a tiny snake that possessed powers over life and death, if the report from the sole survivor was to be believed, the supernatural growth of magically-aggressive plantlife throughout the cavern of Erandur, the sudden ability of his son and more than a dozen other citizens of the White Towers to regenerate from grievous wounds with remarkable ease, and a name that Kynan had heard being bandied about when he was fairly certain he wasn’t supposed to.

A name spoken with an almost religious fervor.

The Little Guardian.

Kynan hadn’t spread his suspicions about what it all might mean among the other members of the council. He’d doubted it would do them any good when they were still trying to appease the delegation, and Kynan was imminently aware of how advantageous it could be to have important information to oneself. In trade, it could be the difference between profit and bankruptcy.

Here, it could turn out to be so much more.

The thoughts on what it could all mean distracted Kynan enough that he hardly even noticed the appearance of someone else in front of him, more than a minute after everyone else had departed - abandoning him to his fate in their attempts to appease Vencar and his Skies-damned punishment.

“Ewan,” he croaked despite himself, teeth still aching from how hard he’d been forced to clench them.

His son pulled at the hood that covered his head, letting it down to reveal his face fully. He looked sad; enraged; aggrieved. Enough that, if the boy - no, the man - hadn’t been his own son, Kynan wasn’t sure he would have had the composure to resist throwing himself at the members of the Virtun delegation in a fury. Especially with the newfound ability to regenerate from injuries that he’d found for himself. But he was Kynan’s son, and he’d inherited some of Kynan’s practicality along with the remains of his lost mother’s idealism. It was one of the things that Kynan was proud of him for, that he’d managed to meld the two together in a way that Kynan knew that he never could.

If it weren’t for that, one more piece of his better half would have been lost when she’d died, because Kynan could have never been the one to hold on to it.

“I’ll get you out of this,” his son asserted, pulling at the blade pinning Kynan down with all of his strength. He grunted in exertion, body visibly trembling, but the weapon didn’t even budge. It was a good thing, in a way. If it had, Kynan would have no doubt been in unimaginable pain from the way it shifted about.

But there was no chance that it ever would. Kynan had, more than once, seen the effects of the particular enhancement that the Virtun warriors favored - the way that it shifted objects and themselves into another reality entirely, as well as the dangers when those things shifted back.

The blade was the stone was his foot, Kynan knew. There was no getting out of this situation. Unless he cut off his foot and resigned himself to being a cripple, he would be stuck here until he died of starvation or dehydration. Everything that Kynan had ever done and accomplished, wasted. Lost to the mad whims of a set of vindictive warriors, ones that possessed more holes within their brains than they did brains themselves.

His ability to walk, gone - and his ability to lead, gone with it.

Kynan stared off into the distance, catching sight of the city that he had spent his life neglecting. The city that, compared to the White Towers that he viewed as his true home, had seemed so unimportant.

It was all but gone; even now, Kynan could barely catch sight of the other near-hundred towers that formed the city itself, each one a sort of town of their own, each one with their own struggles and cultures in miniature. Instead, what he saw was a vast forest of overgrown plantlife, dotted with massive trees that rose higher and thicker than even those hard-to-spot towers themselves. It was hard to believe that all of it had sprouted within such a short time.

It was miraculous to know that it had.

There was really only one explanation for that, especially after Kynan had made a trip down to the Core chamber to make some last-minute checks before the Virtun delegation’s arrival. Imagine his surprise when he found out that his son had made a visit as well, and that - when he sent everyone away to retrieve the Core itself - he’d found that Ewan had taken it away.

Kynan wasn’t stupid.

He could connect the dots.

The Little Guardian, huh?

“I know what you did with the Core,” he grunted as his son continued to fruitlessly tug at the blade that had melded with his foot. For a moment, his son’s hand slipped in surprise, drawing a line of red across Ewan’s skin as it ran across the well-honed edge.

But only a moment, and nothing more than that. The wound healed all but instantaneously. It was quick enough that Kynan barely even noticed it. If it weren’t for the way that the blood stuck around, there wouldn’t have been any sign of it at all.

“...what?”

Kynan laughed as best he could through the pain. Ewan had never been a good liar. It was one of the pieces of his mother in him. Idealistic. Honorable. Even with all of the flaws the two of them had, and those flaws did exist, they both shared those two things that Kynan never could.

The two had never even truly met, and they shared more with each other than Kynan, for all of his efforts, could.

It was funny.

“I’m not stupid,” he said, finally bringing himself to heel. “There won’t be a carrot anymore, not when it comes to Virtun. It seems like we’re getting the stick, now. If it’s already happening, there’s no reason to bare my ass and take it. So I want to meet this Little Guardian I’ve heard whispers about. It must be something special, for my own son to offer it his home’s only Core.”

The last bit was said a little acerbically; as much as Kynan intended to switch his allegiances, he didn’t approve of what his son had done. Monsters were monsters, even when labeled with a cute name like ‘the Little Guardian’.

Still, the other option was to roll over and die, so he would have to accept the role he was placed in.

A fortnight. Two weeks. There was no way that the tribute they needed could be gathered in that sort of time. Kynan and the other members of the council had hoped that they could receive a more sizeable extension on their deadline. If they had to, they’d even hoped to redirect the Virtun delegation’s attention towards the strange happenings that were occurring elsewhere in Erandur - it wasn’t as if the ridiculously fast-growing plantlife was hidden, and the madmen should have been easy to distract with the possibility of an interesting curiosity. If they’d been lucky, the two problems might have even dealt with themselves.

Now, though, the White Towers were fucked unless something changed - and Kynan was more than practical enough to alter his allegiances in accordance to the clear writing on the wall.

“Now cut this damn thing out of me,” he grunted, teeth still aching something fierce, though that paled in comparison to the pain that was about to come. A pain that he’d push through, because he had no other choice.

“I have a meeting to get to, don’t I?”