The Corruptor had gone still.
It stood in the center of the room with its featureless face angled toward , but it wasn’t moving anymore. No more slow walking around the room. Just still, like sothing waiting to understand what had changed.
The barrier between us pulsed with a green glow.
It can’t feel through this. I thought. But it felt sothing. The noise from the door, maybe. Or the air that ca in from outside.
Maybe Kira’s anxiety bleeding through the walls? That one felt possible.
I didn’t have ti to theorize further.
I pulled the yo-yo from my pocket and let it drop, catching the string at its lowest point before it swung back. The familiar movent made feel at ease.
The Corruptor’s head froze still.
I focused on the hole I’d left in the door behind and extended the barrier outward until it covered the opening by a landslide. No Corruptor would get through that hole.
Then I walked forward, letting the barrier move with .
One clean Switch and boom, this ends fast.
I mapped the Corruptor’s head in my mind and set the ntal box.
Switch.
The effect was instant. The massive body swayed once, listed sideways, and collapsed with a floor shaking impact that made the whole room tremble. The head vanished from its shoulders, reappearing in my outstretched hand.
Then it dissolved.
The mont it touched my palm it lost its shape entirely, draining through my fingers as thick black liquid that pooled on the floor and spread outward in a circle.
I stared at my hand.
That was fast. I thought. Too fast.
A second passed. Then two.
The system notification I’d been expecting didn’t co. No kill confird, no system notification, nothing.
The black liquid on the floor had stopped spreading.
Then it moved.
The pool gathered itself like sothing waking up, contracting inward before the portion that had been the head launched itself upward directly at my face.
I reacted by pure instinct.
Shrink.
The barrier collapsed inward so fast that the dark liquid trapped inside had no ti to react.
For a split second it compressed, packed tighter and tighter as the space vanished.
Then it burst outward.
A sharp, wet sound echoed through the chamber as black droplets blasted out of the shrinking barrier, splattering across the floor before falling still.
The liquid had lost the strange viscosity it once carried. The faint sense of life inside it was gone too.
I felt a small amount of relief, but then the rest of the liquid on the floor surged.
It moved like water, rushing toward in a wave that swept across the floor in less than a second. I threw the barrier wide enough to protect before it reached , the green shell expanding outward, and the liquid slamd into it and spread across the surface like sothing searching for a gap.
But... then the liquid peeled away from the barrier surface. It gathered, reford and pulled itself toward the exit.
Toward the hole I’d cut in the silver door.
Damn this thing...
The realization arrived cold and imdiate.
Its main goal wasn’t to hunt . This thing was trying to escape!
I watched it pour through the gap in the door and I understood all at once. The laboratory sealed from the outside. The skeleton in the lab coat collapsed against the ward table. Whatever this Corruptor was, it had been in this room for a long, long ti. Maybe since before the person in the lab coat had died.
And all it had wanted, this entire ti, was to get out.
My friends are outside...
The thought hit like a physical blow. Kira, Finn, Phinyx, Coco. All of them standing right where this thing was heading. All of them completely unaware.
Quickstep.
I jumped through the door fra at full speed and didn’t slow. Now that I had reached 15 intelligence the spell beca much stronger.
The corridor rushed past behind . The white stone lamps blurred. I ran through the main corridor as the cold air hit my face. I saw the liquid moving ahead of , faster than anything that size had any right to be, pouring across the ground and assembling as it ran.
It was pulling itself back into its humanoid shape.
Limbs, torso, head.
Quickstep.
The gap between and the Corruptor shrank. My lungs were burning already, the spell squeezing my brain. I knew I couldn’t keep this pace long.
Switch didn’t kill it. Taking its head didn’t kill it. I was thinking for alternatives as I ran. It just reforms. So Switch alone isn’t the answer this ti.
The door I’d entered from was thirty ters ahead.
Twenty.
The Corruptor was almost there.
The cube was sitting in my hand. The runic pattern pulsed against my palm, warm and steady.
I thought about how I had gotten rid of the head, maybe it could work with the whole monster?
I looked at the reforming shape of the Corruptor ahead of and I understood what I needed to do, an absurd idea, but the only one I had.
Grow.
I decided to make the barrier big enough to hold the entire Corruptor, and I then deactivated the barrier.
Quickstep.
The world lurched. My vision went slightly gray at the edges from the back to back uses, the spell grinding against the limit of what my body could sustain right now.
Ten ters.
Five.
I focused on the cube in my hand. I focused on the dark mass at the center of the Corruptor’s reforming torso. I held both in my mind simultaneously, two boxes, one object and one location.
The exit to the canyon was a breath away.
Switch.
My mind started to hiss.
The cube was gone from my hand, and I now held a small piece of its oil like flesh.
The Corruptor staggered.
Its reformation stopped. The liquid mass that had been pulling itself into a shape froze mid motion, limbs half ford, body asymtric and still.
I had one second before whatever happened next.
"Activate."
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