Kai placed his hand on the anxious spider sitting on his shoulder. He sent her feelings of calm and said, “he will be fine.”

A cheeky thought materialized in his mind courtesy of Ava, “Don’t lie to the bug, he’s definitely going to die.”

With a glare, Kai responded mentally to keep Lucy from hearing, “Then the failure to protect him will be ours.”

“Not much we can do when the thing sees through his ruse then instantly crushes him,” Ava responded, mirroring his look.

“You know as well as I do these drones are mindless, You must have tried making a link to communicate with them. They do not think. Neither does the boss, it should be easy to trick.”

Ava only clicked in response.

The spider trembled under his fingers as the drone dragged Jack across the fog barrier and into the boss’s domain. Even though he was confident the boss would not attack, he still tensed in anticipation in case he was wrong.

When the boss did not start preparing an attack, Kai relaxed a little. He could only wonder how Jack must be feeling right now.

Not dead, awesome.

While the bobcat drone was surprisingly gentle with its teeth gripping his leg, it was having a hard time dragging him across the ground towards the boss. It was scraping off some of the layers of slime he had on his back. Hopefully, that didn’t affect how long he could use Oxygen Repository.

He probably should have chosen a bigger drone to bring him in, but the first one he found was the cat, and felt it was almost poetic that the first type of drone he found was the same to finally bring him in.

With getting ‘captured’ by a drone and not being attacked by the boss for faking his paralysis, steps one and two were completed. Next was getting swallowed without breaking his neck or something else vital.

This step he was less worried about because the boss needed its hosts to stay alive so it could turn them into a drone. So he should be relatively safe for the entire time he’s inside of the thing.

Well, at least until he gets into the spout-like pod to be converted into a drone. But Nothing terrible seems to happen to the hosts until they are in the pod for a day.

Kai had brought back some pods with drones still inside to figure out how long he could safely be in there. At each step, the animal was still ‘alive’ but there wasn’t any sign of it growing a vine until after a full day, and then another half a day before it was considered a drone.

They let the few animals that hadn’t yet grown a vine go after a few days, just to make sure there wasn’t any permanent damage. The rest had to be put down, because they were either now an ‘Imperfect Titan Drone’ or because of what happened to those with a vine but not considered a drone.

The vine would keep growing larger, spreading its roots throughout the host’s entire body. While the animal couldn’t move you could see the pain in its eyes as the vine sucked the life out of it.

They didn’t wait around and find out what would happen if they let it keep growing, instead opting to kill the animal and burning the remains. Plus, it was just cruel to put the animal through that.

A particularly sharp rock jabbing into his side brought him back to his current predicament. Being dragged was probably his least favorite mode of transportation.

The drone stopped dragging him suddenly and then just started to walk away as if they didn’t just go on this long journey together. Just rude. He could feel the ground shake a little as the boss lifted one of its massive vine-arms.

He didn’t dare open his eyes to watch it happen in case he tipped off the boss. It also had the added bonus of possibly not freaking out at literally being eaten. Instead, he focused on his link with Lucy. She was acting as a sort of phone for him and Kai in case anything went wrong.

He thought his own level of anxiety about the entire situation was high but it couldn’t compare to what Lucy was feeling. He tried to push away his own worry to comfort her, letting her know everything was going as planned and nothing bad was going to happen.

Even when he had really bad days with his depression, when someone he really cared about was upset, it almost seemed like an override for his emotions. No matter how bad he felt, he could put it aside temporarily to comfort and be there for his loved ones.

It seemed to work in this situation as well because Jack felt almost no fear as the boss wrapped its vine around him and lifted him to its mouth.

A wet squelching sound came from the head of the flower as it opened its gaping maw to swallow him. When it placed him inside feet first, he was surprised to find that while the inside of the stalk was hollow like he assumed, the walls were covered in hundreds of long wiggling tube-like fibers.

As he was placed on top of these tubes, he felt like he was almost floating on water. When the boss’s mouth closed, though, the tubes began moving in a way that pushed and pulled him along the stalk’s interior.

Jack tried not to react to the tubes pushing him, but it felt like he was being licked by hundreds of tongues. This feeling was all the more unpleasant because he was only wearing shorts and his small amount of gear. Resisting the urge to fight against the creepy little things, Jack let them guide him through the boss’s body.

Even as the incline of the stalk became steeper, the fibers kept him moving at a steady speed, not allowing gravity to pull him down faster. While he didn’t need to rely on Oxygen Repository just yet, it was getting harder to breathe the further down he went.

After what seemed like an eternity of sliding down the center of the stalk, Jack heard another squelching sound as part of the wall opened up. The fibers stopped his descent and pushed him into this new opening.

Once inside, the opening closed, sealing him in a five-foot sphere made of thick spongy leaves. This had to be the conversion pod where it was going to turn him into a drone. Not that he planned on letting it do that.

To his great joy, the inside of the pod was completely devoid of the little tongue-like fibers. He was also happy to find that the walls of the pod seemed to let air freely pass through it. Guess the boss didn’t want to suffocate the hosts while turning them into drones.

The bottom of the pod had a tiny puddle of liquid that he immediately recognized as Ichor. The pool was very slowly growing in size, indicating that eventually the pod would be filled with the stuff.

Even though he was practically immune to even the boss’s stronger version of the ichor, he wasn’t too keen on bathing in it. Plus, he had a job to do, and to get it done he needed to get back into the stalk to go down to where his staff is.

Feeling around the area that had opened up to put him in the pod, he found a slight crack in the wall. But as much as he pushed and pried, he was not able to get it back open.

Well, if you can’t get the door to open the way it’s supposed to, you might as well make your own.

With quite a bit of difficulty due to the cramped area, Jack pulled the scimitar out of its sheath. Pressing the sword against the wall, it took just about all his strength to stab into it.

When there wasn’t a reaction to being stabbed, he used the sword to saw through the wall. It took nearly an hour, but he finally had a hole big enough that he could squeeze through. Part of the reason it took so long was that the area he was cutting was also healing itself constantly, causing a ‘two steps forward one step back’ kind of situation.

Hurrying before it sealed back up, Jack tried to go through the hole but was met with the tongues pushing him back in. It didn’t take too much force to overpower them though, and he made his way into the stalk.

Because of how the tongues were trying to push him back into his pod, it was like trying to move against a current. So to make his way down, he had to literally swim through the tubes.

As he swam away from the pod, Oxygen Repository kicked in, allowing him to breathe. With all his training with the skill, he was able to suppress the drowning feeling he got when using it. He also knew his current limit was about seventy minutes without air.

Going down, the area inside the stalk was gradually becoming tighter with less room to move around. Every now and then a wall would open and the tubes would try to push him into the new chamber.

As he got within ten feet of his staff, the tunnel was so small that he was having trouble moving forward. Swimming through was not going to keep working.

Pulling his arms against his chest, he wrapped his hands around one of the tubes on the wall. With the slime that was coating his hands and ichor covering the tubes, it was hard to get a proper grip on the fleshy objects.

Every time he tried to pull himself further down, his hands would slip, giving him no progress.

What was he going to do? There was no room to move properly. The tubes were constantly trying to push him back. Even if he could go further, would it get so small that he would potentially get stuck?

The walls were pressing against his body like a vice, and his lungs burned; craving actual air.

Concern radiated through the link with Lucy, asking if he needed to be pulled out.

The thought of giving up sent a cold spike into his pounding heart.

No.

He would not give up.

Running away would not be his only option.

He killed that crazy wolf and learned its power for himself. Something as little as a tight squeeze would not stop him.

Letting Lucy know he was fine, he used Focused Senses to feel the rapid beating of his own heart. As he willed it to calm down, the phantom feeling of walls closing in, and the burning of his lungs went away.

The combination of using his skill and interacting with Lucy actually gave him an idea.

Using Focused Senses and Hair Manipulation, he adjusted the follicles on his palms so that they would grow a quarter-inch of hair.

Wrapping his hands around the tubes on the wall again, he had the hair go through the layers of slime and ichor to press against the surface of the tube. While the hair couldn’t dig into the flesh of the plant, it provided enough traction that he was able to pull on the tube without his hand slipping off.

With that, he continued down the stalk towards his staff. Fortunately, the tunnel didn’t continue to tighten as he went.

Finally, when his staff was just a few feet away, his head broke through the wall of tongue-tubes into empty space.

Looking around the area, it was very similar to the conversion pods; a small sphere that he would barely fit into. The walls looked to be made out of the same hard material as the rest of the stalk, but they were covered in these extremely thin roots. At the bottom of the sphere was a small pile of vines, all of which had those thin roots growing into them.

Pulling himself fully into the chamber, he curled up to take as little room as possible, as well as to avoid stepping on the vines.

As soon as he touched the floor of the small sphere, the thin roots started reaching towards his feet. He watched curiously for a moment as they pierced through the layer of mucus, aiming for the skin underneath.

When a root touched his skin, it felt like someone pressing a blunt pencil against him. He could definitely tell they were trying to dig into his skin just like the vines.

He pulled his feet away and made sure to move them every other minute so the roots wouldn’t make any progress.

Using his bond, he located the vine with his toothpick sized staff in it. Instead of digging it out, he put his finger to the hole it was in and started extending it until he could easily pull it out.

Reunited with his staff, he already felt much safer even though he was basically in the boss's stomach.

Now, to get down to business learning Vitality Absorption.

With his other absorption and draining skill, he already had a solid idea of how it should work, but apparently, Mimicry needed him to actually watch the skill in progress.

The roots were all digging into the vines filled with the golden sap. To get a better look at what was happening, he pulled out one of his small knives from his pocket and cut open the side of a vine, revealing the sap and the multitude of roots inside.

Much as he expected, the roots were soaking up the sap and likely absorbing the vitality stored within. Observing the process, he could feel the balloon of Mimicry slowly filling, but it seemed to stop for an unknown reason when he could feel that he almost learned the skill.

Why did it stop? The mechanics made complete sense to him. He understood the process. It all made sense.

But there was something that actually bothered him when he thought about it. Was the boss only able to absorb vitality from the sap? Why not just absorb the vitality directly instead of making a drone?

Well, the drones make sense for gathering more creatures to absorb, since the Corpse Titan was stationary.

But he was mobile and didn’t need to use other creatures to gather vitality for him. Plus, as far as he knew, the sap seemed to be separate from the absorption skill.

Looking down at the roots reaching for his feet, he figured maybe if he saw a live creature getting absorbed he might be able to learn the skill.

Hopefully, only a small exposure to that function of the skill will be all that he needs and it won’t do any permanent damage.

As the roots started to dig through the layers of mucus again, he didn’t pull away and let them get to his skin. As a root pressed into his skin, it wormed back and forth until he felt a slight pinch as the root broke through the skin.

He immediately felt like something was wrong with his body. Like that feeling right before getting the flu. His heart started pounding in his chest.

With the confirmation that it could drain a live creature, he ripped his foot away from the roots before he felt any worse.

As he suppressed the urge to vomit, he received a notification.

**Skill Unlocked ** Through observation, you have unlocked (Class) Vitality Absorption with Mimicry. Would you like to learn this skill? Yes No