The next room was an empty, stony room, like a basement, or maybe a dungeon. Nothing attacked, but Will didn't much care for the dark, dusty room. There was nothing of obvious value.

“What's the point of an empty room like this?” Will asked, rubbing a hand across an ancient wooden table, which scattered dust in all directions.

“Sometimes before a tough fight, the mansion gives you a chance to catch your breath,” Dio said, knocking on a shelf.

Sealed cans of what was probably food rattled from the shock.“It's not exactly comfortable, but it is safe.”

“Great.” Will said. “A boss fight.”

Skullcrusher snipped some of the pink flowers from Kevin, putting them back into a jar. They curled up and turned into bunches of what looked like Spanish moss, which is not from Spain and more closely related to pineapples than to moss.

Will watched with interest. “So, the parasitic plant controls the host, and you control the parasite? Like, a puppet of a puppet?”

“I suppose so,” Skullcrusher said. “It's not as easy to control as a summon, but I've always got some sprouts on hand. And, of course, it's rather potent against other botanical monsters.”

“Does it work on animals?” Will asked, poking one of Kevin's remaining flowers.

“No, just plants. But it can commandeer just about any plant, if given a chance,” Skullcrusher said proudly.

“Instant soldiers, just add water,” Will muttered to himself.

“It's an epiphyte, actually, so I don't need to add water,” Skullcrusher said. ”It gets all the water it needs from the air and its host.“

“It's an expression,” Will said. ”It just means, with minimal effort.“

”Fascinating,” Skullcrusher said. “You are from the coast?”

“Actually, I'm from the desert,” Will said.

“So, wouldn't adding water require a lot of effort?” Skullcrusher asked.

“No, I have... well, you know what, I guess it does take a lot of effort. But other people's effort.“ Will paused to shrug. ”All I have to do is turn on the tap. And then I put effort into other stuff, so it's simpler for other people, and that's I guess that's just society.”

“Society,” Skullcrusher agreed, nodding solemnly.

Dio finished poking through the assortment of canned foodstuffs and gestured through a set of heavy wooden double doors.

For a moment, Will thought that the doors were the same way they had entered the room, but that didn’t make any sense.

Sixteen seconds later, he remembered nothing in his life made any sense.

The wooden doors slammed shut behind Will, pushing him the last little bit of the way into the room.

It was similar to the first room, in that it resembled a fancy sitting room with walls covered in bookshelves.

This room was in disarray, though, with massive gouges carved into many of the walls and the plush furniture, which was bleeding stuffing onto the scuffed floor.

An armored figure was hunched over in one corner, inspecting the corpse of what was until recently a person-sized praying mantis. There was a nasty crunching noise, followed by the wet sound of tearing meat.

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The figure wasn’t examining the carcass. It was eating it.

As if attuned to Will’s disgust, the creature turned its head around like an owl’s, the shiny glint of its helmet not quite the same as regular metal.

It was a suit of armor, identical to the one the other ghosts wore, but this one was filled with living meat, a dark, reddish-purple flesh that was slick with an unidentifiable fluid.

It jerked rapidly, almost weightlessly, to its feet, and snapped its body around so that its head was correctly aligned with its body.

Will saw a flash of red emanate from the creature‘s core, pulsing through the visible cracks in its armor like ripples in a pond.

“It’s a tainted!” Will said, as the creature charged him. The helmet split open to reveal a maw of upsettingly-human teeth as it tried to bite a chunk out of his shoulder.

“It's wearing armor!" Glory said disbelievingly. "That should not be possible."

“I think they could do a barbershop quartet and it wouldn’t surprise me anymore,” Will replied as he kicked the creature in the chestplate, knocking it into the nearest wall.

The tainted knight scrambled away like a cockroach, clinging to the wall and narrowly avoiding a chandelier that Dio had thrown at it.

The creature twitched and jerked as it moved, as though it wasn’t entirely in control of its own movements.

It slashed at Rex with a hand that sprouted into a serrated blade of bone and sinew as it sliced through the air, and it seemed more surprised than Rex did at the development.

The creature was relentless, but still terribly outnumbered. Will managed to trip it down with a cut to its ankle, which severed the foot of the creature with unpleasant ease.

As it fell, Rex slammed it into the ground, pinning it and magically heating the metal of the creature’s armor.

The creature screamed in horrified pain, the sound identical to any terrified person, and its head snapped around as the creature cooked alive. In a final motion, its jaw unfolded like a moray eel’s, attempting to bite Rex’s head off.

It missed, biting a chunk of Rex's cheek out and splattering his face with something between saliva and blood.

Rex made no motion, but the spit hissed against his flesh, turning his lavender skin an unpleasant red. Rex gritted his teeth as he held the creature down, making sure it was well-done.

Then, as the body began to dissolve, Rex went limp. Glory picked him up by the shoulder and pressed a hand to his acid-burned cheek.

Will turned his attention to the floating soul of the armored tainted. It was a thin man, a calico cat if a calico cat could be a twink, with an expression of what Will was pretty sure was dour concentration on his face. People tended to have relaxed, neutral expressions while dead, but this one looked like he was having an intense dream.

He was also mostly blue, and seemed uncorrupted. Pieces of red were grafted to his fur like scraps of cloth in a quilt, which burrowed into his not-flesh in lines like the strokes of a pen. The red flesh pulsed like a quick heartbeat.

“That looks bad,” Glory said in Will’s mind.

“I agree,” Will said as he reached out for the soul. “This looks… artificial. Someone made this.”

Will touched the skin of the spirit, and his blank eyes opened. He looked at Will with a terrified expression, silently mimicking a scream as he vanished.

Will didn’t like that. Somehow, that was worse than hearing the monster scream.

“It’s like someone stuck pieces of a tainted soul to a healthy one,” Will said. He really wanted to wash his hands, and possibly the inside of his brain. “Do you think that’s how it was wearing armor?”

“Possibly,” Glory said. “Frankly, I have no idea. But that’s bad. Who would do something like that?”

“Maybe the guy controlling them in the first place. Even smart animals have limits,” Will postulated. “But people don’t. Much more useful as puppets.”

Will’s mind returned to the conversation he had had with Skullcrusher, about the parasitic plant he had taken over the potato monster with.

“Maybe it’s not controlling the body, but the tainted shell around it,” Will said. The body of the monster was fading into light, but Will managed to rend the helmet off the rotting knight.

For a moment, he was afraid that it would have the same face as his ghost, but it was just more rotting meat. One eye twitched rapidly, and it met Will’s gaze as it melted away, leaving nothing but dented metal.

He looked like he was sorry.