My jaws opened wide, eager to usher in yet another satisfying mouthful. The soft-flesh tore underneath my fangs, two lines tracing their way down its surface as the newest offering found its way down my gullet.

Level 17 Little Puppeteer Consumed.

Transferred to Core.

Progress Towards Next Upgrade: 8/20.

A hand reached out to scratch against my head-scales; just like the air around us, it was coated in overwhelming hues of green. Yet, moment by moment, both of those began to change. The spores in the air began to die out and, with no new motes of spore-flesh to replace them, the mist began to die.

Even with [Spore Puppeteer] ensuring my safety, there was something reassuring about the way that the air began to clear.

The fingers scratching against me began to slowly become paler, the lines of green and black that crisscrossed its surface beaten back yet again by the healing of [Little Guardian’s Focus]. Not that it really seemed to matter; The Grateful One was as resistant as ever.

A new thought-hiss sent turned my head around, letting me check the mist around us. It had fallen back many slithers, but I was disappointed to see that there was still a barrier of mist between us and the once-corrupted that had been left behind.

We must have missed one of the Little Puppeteers somewhere; they were fairly hard to find. By the sheer volume of the spore-mist, we might have missed more than one.

I let out a hiss to voice my disappointment, exulting in the way that my tongue touched clean air. That, at least, was a welcome improvement. Even as safe from the spore-mist as I was, it hadn’t become any less horrid to feel - like little bits and pieces of a Lesser Core’s influence crawling and dragging against my flesh.

Disgusting; I wasn’t sure how The Grateful One was keeping herself from vomiting with those things inside of her. She must have had an abnormally strong stomach to withstand it.

She chewed on her lower lip, eyes fixed on the barrier of mist that remained.

“...should we go back and try to find the ones we missed or keep going?” she murmured, the sound low enough that it could almost be called a hiss if I was being particularly charitable. “What do you think?”

Unsure what she was trying to say, I just hissed, hoping to urge her onwards.

“Right, right. I have no idea what you’re saying, so I’ll just pretend that you told me to pick something,” she muttered to herself. At least, I assumed it was to herself - she wasn’t even looking at me anymore.

With nothing else to do, I turned my attention towards the [Little Guardian’s Totem]s that I could sense around me. It was unsurprisingly easy to find two of them; The Grateful One was still with me - and so, of course, her [Little Guardian’s Totem] was as well - while the male disciple that we had left with the once-corrupted had hardly moved.

Just in case, I let my perspective shift to his for a brief moment, making sure that the gathered once-corrupted hadn’t been reclaimed by the Lesser Core while we were gone. I had put in effort to free them from its influence; they were mine now, and they would stay that way.

Fortunately, they were doing fine. A few of the once-corrupted were pacing back and forth, possibly nervous or worried, but they never strayed very far from where the disciple continued to keep watch.

Two of the other connections were basically bundled together, all but resting atop one another in their sheer proximity, while another seemed as if it were roaming further and further away. Despite that, I let those three be.

The final stolen disciple was moving closer, the tether between their [Little Guardian’s Totem] and I growing ever-shorter. I flexed my will, throwing my perspective into the corrupted Coreless’ own. My vision shifted once again.

Erik’s lungs pumped, a puff of spore-laden air bursting from his lips. The world around him was a flurry of constant motion; slow whorls and spirals that were almost hypnotic in their continuous dance. If it hadn’t been for the danger they posed, he might have called the sight fascinating.

His father, well-traveled man that he was, had once picked up a book that told of something called ‘weather’ in the world above - when humanity built their cities under the open sky, before everything went wrong. To a young boy who had never known anything like it, the idea was something unimaginable. Rain; water that fell down from the sky, one day gentle and another filled with wrath. Thunder; a sound louder than the largest of monsters’ roars, formed despite the lack of a throat to shape the noise. Snow; falling flakes of white that rippled and eddied in the air, painting the world in their hues.

It was all something so difficult to imagine, akin to describing color for someone with no eyes to see. They might come to understand the basis of the idea, given enough effort, but they would never truly see it for themselves - they would never know it in whole, instead forced to live with a knowledge that had split itself into more easily manageable pieces, with others forever lost. A puzzle that couldn’t quite manage to come together.

The spore-mist’s ripples and eddies, the way that it filled the air and coated the ground in its colors, came as close to snow as Erik would ever see.

That, for all the terrors it contained, made it something worth seeing.

Breathing it in, on the other hand… I could have gone without.

It was a constant challenge to keep his emotions steady; letting himself lapse into fanciful thoughts of rain and snow was a way to ignore the helplessness that the spore-mist enforced. Even knowing that Elara was immune to the mist, that there was a path to freedom...the utter lack of that very same freedom rankled.

His legs moved on regardless.

Erik had done what he could, after falling into the mist - held his breath, hoped against hope that he would somehow manage to stumble out before falling under its influence, putting one foot in front of the other until his limbs wouldn’t listen anymore.

He hadn’t quite made it, but took solace in the fact that he moved far enough that he wasn’t an immediate danger when Elara fell. She would have to fight him eventually - or at least clear out the mist around him so that the [Little Guardian’s Totem] could finally free him - but he hoped that the extra time he managed to buy her helped.

His legs kept moving, pulling him further and further into the snow-like mist. It had been a while since they had turned him around, trudging through the ever-present clusters of dead and dying spores that riddled the ground. That, at least, was okay. The trail that was left behind Erik would make him easier to track.

His hands had long since found their way to his weapon and shield; he had hoped that the spores wouldn’t have the intelligence for that, but they forced him to move and react to his surroundings somehow. It probably shouldn’t have been surprising that they could do more than that, even if it couldn’t exactly manage everything.

The grip was off, hands not finding the exact places they should.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. That was a good thing. It meant that Elara, assuming she found him, would have an easier time beating him. The spores that had stolen his body hadn’t stolen his skills, even if they tried their best to form a close approximation. Still, it bothered him.

The grip was off, and years of training screamed at him to fix it. It was like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, or a thought that wouldn’t complete. Unsatisfying. Bothersome. Wrong.

It didn’t matter.

The grip stayed off, and his legs kept moving.

And then something slammed into him from behind with a sound of cracking bone, quickly swallowed by the mists. His legs buckled, the intelligence that was controlling them surprised by the impact.

Unfortunately, it didn’t do much more than that. It hadn’t been his bones that had broken. Erik’s armor - and his mana-strengthened body alongside it - were too durable for that. A set of tiny fangs tried to sink into the exposed skin of his neck, struggling to break the surface.

His body reacted.

Violently.