Chapter 188: Chapter 187: Bit By Bit

 

The enemy attacked again, roots smashing against The Golem’s clay-form with enough strength to send tremors across his body. Another shard fractured, splitting from the stone that was his skin. It was bigger than some of the others; too large to lose without a fight.

The Golem lunged, breaking free of the plant-flesh that grasped his limbs, and fell upon the lost shard with a deafening crash. As always, sensation in his clay-form was a muted and delayed thing. It wasn’t quite there, closer to the phantom of a feeling than anything else; vibrations raced through solid mass in a rippling wave that made contact with the invisible tendrils that sprouted from The Golem’s Core-heart - then, and only then, did he feel the impact that came with the fall.

Tendrils stretched out, shifting solid stone into something more pliable with [Sodden Earth] and forcing themselves through the transformed substance. Tunnels of mud formed in direct lines, leaving tiny holes in his clay-form’s exterior and allowing a connection between tendrils and the lost shard. The Golem reclaimed what was lost in a flurry of motion, shifting the shard from stone to mud to stone again and pasting it back onto his form in the brief moments between.

Before The Golem could return to his feet, another tremor pressed against his tendrils. Another shard broke from his form.

He lunged again.

When he landed, the shard was already gone - stolen away by the roots and tendrils and vines that pressed in from all sides.

It was wrong. Everything was wrong. The enemy never died, not really; each cut was only a temporary respite, a brief moment where The Golem had just a little more space. And then they came back. They always came back.

Even worse was the way that stone was always just out of reach. The enemy coated the ground in an ever-thickening thicket, blocking his tendrils from reaching all but the smallest bits of stone. They stole the broken shards of his clay-form, binding his limbs to slow his attempts to recover them, hiding them away in a dizzying world of roots and trunks and stalks and vines.

Powerful as his form could be, The Golem was weak without the touch of stone; nothing more than a Core-heart and his tendrils.

And the enemy knew. They understood - and for once, an enemy might have been powerful enough to do something with that understanding. Powerful enough to strip his stone away, and to keep it away.

The Golem was in danger.

That didn’t mean that The Golem was weak - only that he might become so, once enough stone had been stripped away. To emphasize that point, he caught the next root that attacked from above, an outstretched tendril shifting that section of his clay-form into a series of spikes at the last moment. The Golem twisted and pulled, viciously rending through the enemy’s flesh.

It pulled back, limply hanging by a few small strips - and then, from the wounded flesh, it regrew. The damaged bits finally gave up, pushed aside by the new. They fell to the ground with a heavy clunk. The root came down again, others falling with it.

His clay-form cracked, and the flesh of the enemy pressed into the wounds, forcing them open ever wider. Mother raged at his failures, the sound cutting far deeper than a wound ever could; it spurred him forward, made him thrash and writhe, made his form shift and twist, forming spikes and spurs to hold the enemy back.

Still, they came. They grew. He fractured.

He feared.

The attacks came from too many directions, from too many enemies, and every attack he sent in return was made worthless only moments later. The enemy grew too fast. His clay-form was powerful, with fangs and spikes that tore through enemy flesh. It didn’t matter. His defenses were sturdy, with great walls of stone packed against one another again and again.

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That, too, didn’t matter.

Bit by bit, the edges of The Golem’s form failed. Stone scales broke under uncountable waves of undying enemies, whittled away little by little. Stone claws tried to shred the dense thicket below, searching for what more to replace the lost materials, but even that did little. There was too much stopping him, too much blocking him, too much binding him.

It was too much.

Mother whispered in his mind again, reminding him of the true enemy - the snake that cowered behind walls of plant-flesh. The one visible in the brief moment when he cleared a path. The one that he had come to find.

[PUNISH].

The command was insistent; demanding. The Golem rushed forward with greater urgency, cracks and fissures within his clay-form widening with each reckless step. Plant-flesh pressed into the wounds; his form reshaped at the touch of his tendrils, the blunt surfaces of the fissures’ sides turning razor-sharp and shredding the invading growths before they could press in too far and split his form further. Vibrations rippled across his Core-heart as the damage that he took increased in return for his recklessness. His tendrils trembled. It had felt safer before, when the enemy had been unable to affect his Core-heart. It couldn’t really be damaged like the heart of his before-form, not in any meaningful way. The Golem had lost that weakness when he Ascended. Only the many invisible tendrils that surrounded it, letting him affect the world around him, could be truly hurt - and even those would regrow in time.

The Golem hadn’t been afraid before, even when his clay-form had been shattered again and again by the female Coreless. The spikes she threw might have been deadly to most things, but they didn’t have mouths. They couldn’t swallow his Core. That had changed - the enemy he faced now could, if his clay-form was lost.

And the Golem feared, his instincts screaming at him to flee. He didn’t. Mother forced him onwards. His form cracked further, shedding stone in return for every step forward. He warped and shifted, forming spikes and spurs that cut plant-flesh down by the dozens. Eventually, those shattered too, their stone stolen away. The enemy was too numerous. Too much.

The Golem broke, ignoring the commands of his Mother for the first time since his Creator disappeared.

He fled.

The horde of plant-flesh couldn’t follow, but they didn’t need to. They were behind him, ahead of him, and more; they were above and below and beside all at once - reaching out with undying, ever-growing limbs, grasping his own and rending and pulling and breaking and -

The Golem, his clay-form stripped away and barely able to surround his Core-heart, fell through the air; he plummeted into the cavern from which he had emerged, the only place that might be safe from the enemy. Underground, where stone could be found in every direction.

It wasn’t safe. The enemy was there, too. Vines and roots hung from the cavern’s mouth, slipping down between its shattered edges. They wrapped themselves around his broken clay-form, shoving pieces of themselves between the cracks and growing fast enough to crack his form further. Below, the ground was covered in green and brown and gold and blue. Above, the largest of the roots sealed the exit.

The Golem hung, suspended in place. The last of his clay-form shattered, falling into the mass of plant-flesh below. Invisible tendrils wriggled in panic, a few of them already exposed to open air. They pressed against the vines holding his Core-heart captive, [Slime’s Gluttony] working to digest them bit by bit. There was nothing else he could do, suspended so far from the stone that he needed.

Above, the roots shifted slightly.

Something started to hiss.