Chapter 288: What Are You
The moving-wall swallowed us whole, spitting us back out again on the other side. The ground was covered with splinters and viscera, the scent-taste of the dead blasphemer’s panic and fear lingering in the air. It was enough to make some of the Great Core’s faithful flinch; not in [panic], but in sheer [revulsion].
I understood, feeling the same at the way bits of the blasphemers’ remains clung to my scale-flesh as I slithered across the floor and the terrible scent-taste took hold of my tongue. It was defilement. A tainting of the purity that the Great Core had bestowed upon us.
A spark of [Chrono Fire] burned that viscera to ashes, and I sloughed off what remained through a quick application of [The Golem’s Fading Heart].
“Let’s move,” The Unrepentant One told the others, standing tall as he made the Coreless’ not-quite-nonsensical noises and gestured towards the debris-laden tunnel. “They definitely hear this. We’ll have company soon.”
The Great Core’s newest faithful stepped forward [fearlessly], as they should. There was nothing that the blasphemers should be able to do to them. Not permanently, anyway. Under the light of the Great Core, with a trio of [Little Guardian’s Focus]es ready to wipe away their wounds, they were more than a match for any bad-thing or blasphemer we could find in our path.
I was glad for that, because the tunnel was just as dangerous for me as it always was. Just as it had the last time I’d slithered through, rivulets of null-water slipped between cracks in the stone at the tunnel’s edges, spilling into trenches that pressed against the walls and provided safety from its terrible touch. And while I could simply stay away from those edges, there was always the chance that a random blow could send me hurtling into that liquid abyss, prematurely transforming this life into nothing more than something that could have been.
I had come too far to accept a not-life that need not be. The Great Core’s faithful had become too numerous. They could not be stripped away so easily.
The faithful marched forward with confidence, far less wary of the null-water than I.
Content in that, and with the knowledge that my disciples would be able to intervene in case anything terrible threatened them, I remained at my place of relative safety on the-female-who-was-not-Needle’s shoulder. The tunnel was hardly narrow, but it was still far too small to hold our number easily; the faithful were forced to wash down it in a compressed wave, a snake that slithered its way down the blasphemer’s tunnels with fangs fully bared.