Chapter 300: Practical Allegiances
I watched through the perspective of the most recently named of the Great Core’s faithful as one of the enemy Coreless drove an ore-flesh fang through another Coreless’ foot. It sank straight through, and then even further, the fang lodging deep into the stone below the Coreless. The Coreless shrieked, and [horror] slipped through the connection I held with Windgiver and his [Little Guardian’s Totem]. Our shared vision widened. His muscles tensed. I held my breath, hoping that the faithful didn’t do exactly what it seemed like he was in danger of doing.
A step forward.
An intake of breath.
Another—
He stopped, and I let out a mental hiss of relief. As brave as it would have been for him to charge into the enemy Coreless, it would have also been stupid. The Great Core did not need idiot faithful. It needed the smart. It needed the strong. It needed the victorious.
There would be no victory in challenging the strange Coreless here.
“I suppose there would no longer be any need for a deal at all, would there be?” one of the enemy Coreless, the large one that the others seemed to defer to, said. I tried to gauge what the noises meant, but the Coreless that he spoke to didn’t wear any of my [Little Guardian’s Totem]s; without them, I was nearly as deaf as I’d ever been to the various meanings behind the Coreless’ odd utterances, even with all of my increased understanding as of late. I couldn’t find anything but calm satisfaction in the strange Coreless’ eyes, and nothing but terror and fear in the others - and while that told me something about the direction things were going, it didn’t tell me anything more than the fang to the foot had.
Still, I did my best to understand. If the Great Core were to achieve its deserved victory, then I needed to wrap my coils around every advantage that I could find - to sink my fangs into every small morsel of information I could gather, swallowing them whole one by one.
If this life was doomed to become a false-life - and, after seeing how fast one of the strange Coreless had moved, I was becoming more and more certain that it was - then I would need to make the most of it.