Chapter 168: Chapter 168: The Lesser Core’s Lair

Motes of spore-flesh drifted by, as thick as ever, forming images in passing. Writhing figures of darkness and bits of reflected light, disappearing and reappearing in a disorienting cascade of imagined threats. Some stayed longer, while others lasted only a brief second. Even though I wasn’t really there, the constant movement nearly made me twitch in anxiety - because some of those images weren’t images at all.

They were real.

Puppet after puppet wandered through the flowing mist, pulled by threads of the Lesser Core’s making. They were gaunt and tattered, slowly dying under its influence, the hideous lines of green and black marking each and every one of them as corrupted.

Just like them, the disciple whose perspective I was riding wandered through the mist, forcing the fields of green to split in their wake. A hand - not-Needle’s, I realized after seeing it more closely - rose up as the mist came to an end, blocked by the gargantuan splintered fragments of a darkwood root. It brushed across the wooden surface, finding its end where the darkwood had been shattered by a heavy blow.

A powerful glow spilled from somewhere underneath the fragmented darkwood, where a Coreless lay crushed under its mass. Like my own disciples, they wore a second skin of ore-flesh, one that cast a powerful mana-light into its surroundings. The ore-flesh was battered and dented, bits of it crushed underneath the fragment’s enormous weight where it had come down on the Coreless’ stomach - the skin clearly not as durable as my own disciple’s ore-flesh. A gem was inlaid into its surface at the Coreless’ chest, colored as black as my own scales and yet glowing with the light of mana. It was all but shattered into pieces. Despite that, I could see it occasionally flare with an ephemeral darkness, shadowlike tendrils spreading from the cracks in its facade that cut through lines and etchings carved into its surface - and each place the tendrils touched burst into shadows of their own, gaining a hint of ephemerality before the gem guttered out again.

In those moments, spore-flesh slipped through as if the affected parts were hardly even there, cascading through the shadows with only a hint of resistance before sinking into mounds of dead spore-flesh below.

It was something far greater than what my own Coreless had managed; they had harnessed the power of mana to imbue their ore-flesh with hardness and sharpness beyond compare, but this...this was something different. Intangibility trapped within a gem, something that I hadn’t even thought would be possible.

If only it hadn’t been shattered. I doubted that it could be repaired, and I knew that I couldn’t do it myself. I didn’t even entirely know how it worked, let alone how the Coreless managed to create it in the first place.

All I knew was that I wanted it.

All I knew was that I couldn’t have it.

The thought was frustrating beyond anything a single hiss could convey. With how vulnerable I realized I was after nearly dying against Will, the assurance that came with something of the gem’s power would have been more than welcome.

The ore-flesh itself was a bigger mystery; not in its power, but in my inability to find its purpose. It, like the gem, didn’t possess the durability that the ore-flesh of the Great Core’s disciples did. If it had, it would be in far better shape. The lower section where the fragmented root had fallen was crumpled and damaged beyond reason, with only the upper half - which I noticed covered the entirety of the Coreless’ body, without even a hint of skin-flesh on display - remaining in decent condition. Still, I knew that it probably didn’t serve the same purpose as the gem itself; the light that it gave off didn’t match.

It would have to remain a mystery for now; without a way to touch it or see it in action, there really wasn’t anything that I could do.

Not-Needle moved again, my perspective moving with her, stepping around the fallen root fragment with no additional attention paid to the Coreless corpse - if there had even been any in the first place. It was hard to tell; her vision hardly wavered, unnatural in its solidity.

Then, behind the fallen fragment, I saw it. A massive pile of rubble formed from the remnants of a giant nest, parts of it shifted aside. The enormous darkwood tree burst upwards not too far behind it, the width of its trunk far surpassing the tower-nests. And yet it grew oddly, curving itself around and above the ruined nest as if shielding it from harm. A great many roots shot out from its edges, a few resting against the ground while most plunged down into the earth below. From what I had seen, many of the roots that dove downwards would burst back up through the surface elsewhere, forming the shifting maze that plagued the many-nest for all this time.

Through the swirling mists and between the shifted rubble, I could just barely make out where a giant set of moving-walls lay. Like most moving-walls that I had witnessed, they had failed in their purpose. One of the moving-walls had been opened, smashed aside entirely in a demonstration of its uselessness.

And behind it, in the gap that was created, I saw a glow - its radiance nearly outstripping anything else I had seen before. Green light burst through the gaps in the mist, the shining beacon that was the Lesser Core’s power bursting through.

Seeing it, I realized it was a good thing my body wasn’t connected to my mind.

I might have vomited in disgust.

Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately, I wasn’t sure - not-Needle didn’t move close enough to give me a better look. Still, my suspicions were confirmed. A large number of the corrupted, including two of my stolen disciples, had gathered to defend the Lesser Core.

I wasn’t surprised; by now, it must have known that I was coming. I’m sure that it was afraid.

I decided that I had seen enough for the moment. My vision shifted again, returning to my own body. There was a tugging in my scale-flesh, a hint of exhaustion that told me I might have pushed too far. It didn’t really matter much; with [Spore Puppeteer] to move me, exhaustion didn’t have that great of an effect. My flesh would move whether it wanted to or not, pulled by the many spore-roots infesting it.

The Grateful One was still moving, the spore-roots controlling Will forcing him to follow behind as they obeyed the thought-hiss that I had left them. A trio of corrupted Coreless were defending a lone Little Puppeteer, another corrupted already crippled behind us. Without anyone strong to lead them, they weren’t a threat.

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No, the bigger threat was something else - the lone disciple had moved closer while I was distracted, standing somewhere almost directly ahead of us. Waiting.

I threw myself into their perspective, trusting in my two protectors to keep me safe.

 

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I was looking down on the mist from above, ripped vines and grimy darkwood framing my vision, as if serving to highlight the snakelike section of clean air that cut its way through the spore-mist. My vision was astoundingly clear, making a mockery of my normal sight. In comparison, I might as well have been blind; details were crisp and clean, easy to pick out even from a great distance. I could even see the once-corrupted that we had gathered, each milling about in the safety of clean air.

A needle-spitter leaned against the dirty barrier, its unmistakable form allowing me to identify the disciple whose perspective I was riding. Needle. A hand came up to push another vine away, and my vision swayed forward with it. The spore-mist continued to swirl bel - my thoughts halted.

The spore-mist was below.

Needle wasn’t inside it. The [Little Guardian’s Totem] was still around her neck. She wasn’t corrupted.

But how?

Before I could think on it further, a section of the mist disappeared - cutting a path that led out. I saw myself on The Grateful One’s shoulder beside Will, four crippled corrupted laying on the ground. Needle moved, fast enough that I might have mistaken her for the-female-who-was-not-Needle if I didn’t know otherwise.

It was strange, though. She was in turmoil, the emotions pressing against our connection in a dizzying flurry. It was that same agitation that had made me assume that she had been corrupted. And yet, she wasn’t - so what was wrong?

Even now, seeing that a path through the spore-mist had been cleared and many had been freed, that agitation barely dimmed. There was [relief], sure, but far less of it than I would have expected.

Something really must have been wrong.

I threw myself back into my own body. There was a disorienting moment where I struggled with the change in visual detail, finding the world far less clear than it had been only moments ago, before the other Coreless arrived. A few of them all but kissed the ground, baring their teeth and whooping in what I thought was joy.

“Looks like we made it,” the male disciple said, his rod of darkwood tapping against the blessedly spore-free ground as he walked. “Great j-”

He cut off as Needle threw herself in front of us. She was panting, pulling in heaving breaths.

“Kala?” he asked, as [surprised] at her lack of corruption as I had been.

“Something’s wrong,” she said in between breaths. “I think I saw something; we might have less time to find the Core than we initially thought.”

His face fell.

“Explain.”

She took in a ragged breath, starting to speak.