54.

Santi knew he had to kill the sorcerer as fast as possible. A battle of attrition was what the goblin wanted as its life stealing tendrils would slowly tilt the battle in its favor. His weapon shaped into a long spear, trying to give himself the most distance possible while retaining some control of it.

Cutting the distance was hard though, the room was cavernous and the goblin worked its way to the sides, always moving in a way to prevent Santi from backing it into a corner. The tendrils lashed out again and again, each time threatening him to slow him down or retreat. He couldn’t simply tank the blows, it’d leave him too crippled to fight in short order.

“Stop running, you little shit,” Santi hissed as he tried to put a burst of speed on. The sorcerer snapped its wrists, sending one tendril high and the other low. Santi dropped to his haunches and used the morph blade to impede the low tendril. The tendril wrapped around the blade and brushed an ankle. It was very similar to what he had done against the hobgoblin and its spear.

Pain and weakness radiated through his right leg as he pushed on and through it. It was similar to having sat on his leg for hours. The best he could do was drag it behind himself as he threw a series of fast thrusts at the smaller sorcerer.

The goblin continued to back up and to the side, kiting him. Santi was gritting his teeth and hissing in a mix of pain and frustration. Every second that the little bastard stayed ahead of him was another second for whatever was growing in that pod to mature.

It was becoming opaque as the steady red light began to increase in intensity, bathing the room in a bloody glow. With the added light he could see the corners of the large room where the webbing was thick enough to look like pools of ink.

Bones and flesh churned in the webbing, silent in their horrors as the glowing pod illuminated the nightmare he was in. Santi fell to the ground just in time, his eyes having been occupied by the corner of the building so he hadn’t seen the tendril snapping out for his neck. It was only his Air Current spell that kept him from being strangled.

Santi pictured those big throwers and the javelins they carried, the morph weapons obeying his thoughts instantly. Normally, one wouldn’t throw their weapon away in a fight, but Santi was desperate.

He rolled and pushed up with his feet as the morph weapon transformed into a javelin, finally releasing the thin tendril that had looped around his wrist. The distance was less than fifteen feet and the sorcerer didn’t have time to do anything as the silver javelin entered at its sternum and ripped out through its back.

The cloak of human skin gushed out a wave of yellow puss, but Santi was far enough back to avoid that fate again. Its long tendrils fell limp into coiled ropes around its feet as the sorcerer stared down at the javelin wedged in its chest. Its knees buckled and it collapsed to the ground.

Santi could still feel the morph weapon. Feel its hunger being tickled as it absorbed the life force and potential of the goblin. These types of weapons were dangerous. They could grow too fast and large and begin to consume their owner for want of better prey. Not an event Santi wanted to occur. As long as he kept killing strong opponents, the weapon would stay pleased.

His fingers brushed against the smooth surface and the weapon undulated against his fingers, like a pet happy for their owner's touch. The metal liquefied and ran up his wrist and arm till it sat impersonating a heavy bracelet. There was a noticeable extra heft to it now that it had finished its killing of the hobs and sorcerer.

Santi still had more to feed it though. He approached the glowing pod with trepidation, not really wanting to see what was inside of it. As he got closer, he could discern what was growing in its depths.

Thick bones and flesh. The flat ugly face of a troll. One yellow eye that tracked him as he walked around the pod. It sat on the ground and stretched up ten feet tall and eight feet wide with nearly six feet in depth. It was massive and growing a true troll. Not the pale mimicry that had taken their entire camp to kill. The real deal. A born Acolyte class monster to protect the nest.

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It was only half developed, if that. Santi used the razor whip form and slashed down the center of the pod. The thin membrane split like a rotten apple, amniotic fluid rushing out in a wave as the half formed monster was sucked out and spilled across the floor.

There was no kill notification, but Santi watched as that feral yellow eye grew clouded. Santi kept an eye on it for a second as he walked around the room, looking for what the nest had built itself around. At first he had thought it was the pod, but with its destruction and the continuance of the black webbing, he wasn’t sure.

He didn’t have the gear needed to light the building on fire, but it wouldn’t be hard to get it. Just a quick trip to the hospital and back. The aura of the nest urged him on, to ignore the thought out response of careful, methodical destruction. He could taste flames and blood, the thought of the building rising in a pillar of smoke a soothing respite to his turbulent mind.

There was something in the building that resonated well with his troubled heart and the rage inside of him. If this building had been used for slaughter it made sense, the goblins having quickly flavored the ambient energies with their own primal desires.

He carefully scanned the corners of the building, the bubbling webs that contained bones and flesh. Power swirled around the thick puddles of black silk, thousands of layers of gossamer silk laying over each other. The trickle of power was nowhere near as strong as the pod had been, but there was a hint about what was laying in here.

The repurposing of flesh and bone. The cycle of life and death and rebirth. All of it was flavored with the goblins' rage and bloodthirst. Santi had to run possibilities about what could be going on. There had to be some type of natural treasure of convergence of mana here to support the nest, but he couldn’t find it. At least not with the time he had left. The rest of the horde could come running back any moment.

“Fuck it. I’ll just burn it down,” Santi said out loud. He held himself still as the building seemed to grow heavier. The aura of bloodlust deepened to the point he could taste it. There was insanity brimming here, threatening to push him over the edge. The boost in willpower coming in strong to keep him up and on his feet.

In the corners of the room, webs parted from a chitinous blade. Eight legs emerged, one by one as the round bottom of a spider slipped into existence. Santi had to repress the urge to shudder as the cursed monster showed itself. Shadow and rot bleeding together to form a sickly scent of decay that mingled with the bloodlust.

“Regressor, I can feel the tides of time on your spirit,” the torso melded to the spider's body rasped. Horror flowed through Santi as he stared at the first intelligent monster seen so far in this integration.

“Yessss, tremble as you should, for you have disturbed my nest. The little one’s watched well and brought me much sustenance.”

“What the fuck are you?” Santi asked, turning to face the creature. It had the eight chitinous legs that scratched the concrete with every scuttling step. A round, black spider body, with thick gray-white hairs. At the top of the spider, flesh melding into the body, was a red goblin.

Except, it was so much more. Not sickly and thin. Intelligent eyes that took in everything around it. Every muscle looked to have been carved from marble. It looked more like a spray painted body builder than a goblin.

“This place was good for the tribe. Meat and bone. Power. There was something else though, something beneath the stone. The sorcerer was too scared to venture beneath the building, but I feared nothing. For that, I was rewarded.” The goblin was very effusive, a smile on its face as it radiated joy at its discovery.

“Despair, oh how rich despair lingered here. Thick swathes of it beneath the earth. The suffering of the beasts, the tolling of the bells, ringing for their demise as the sick suffered here. It’s not just you humans whose emotions can make curses. It blended well with the mana lines and the treasure. Now look at me! I have ascended! Cast away the shackles of mortality! I shall remake this world in my image and lead the tribes and shelter them under my webs!” The goblin was cackling while Santi had to resist the urge to roll his eyes.

Red Goblin Cursed Chimera lvl. ?

A second Acolyte monster in less than twenty-four hours. Santi had to start thinking he was cursed, because this was ridiculous. This time he had a real weapon and he had no plans of letting the gregarious monster escape.

“All right, so I normally don’t like to banter, but I think I can tell you what I think,” Santi said as he started to ready his spells, his morph blade turning into a long spear. The rich energy that emanated off the Chimera had caught the weapons attention and it hungered for it.

“Is that so? And what is it that you think something as insignificant as you could do to me!?” It straightened up to over ten feet tall, the top of its bald head threatening to touch the top of the ceiling.

“I was debating going with a standard ass kicking threat, or a bug specific threat. Couldn’t decide which one. See this is why I don’t do banter, there’s just to many options,” Santi said, while waving his arms around, the spear clutched lightly. The goblins two eyes tracked the tip of the spear as it traced lazy lines in the air.

Santi cast Gust and attacked.