Tilly’s world was fire.

Some part of him registered that he was running through actual flames, but something seemed wrong with the sensation. He could feel burning distantly but it was nothing like being exposed to fire back on earth. The heat was there, and so was the pain, but he recognized that he was resisting taking any actual damage from the contact.

His lungs had begun to spasm after the first few steps, and he continued to run forward blindly, despite the pain. He had squeezed his eyes shut in order to save his sight when he had begun his sprint and the desire to open them to make sure he wasn't off course was almost overwhelming. But he pushed onward, through the fire, trying to keep as straight a course as possible to stay on the cleared path.

Then as suddenly as it began, it was over. The unimaginable heat abated and he slid to a halt in the noticeably cooler hall. He took a slow breath in through his improvised mask and found the air to be hot and thin… but not deadly.

He tried cracking his eyes next and saw everything painted by the orange glow of the blaze behind him. The path deeper into the temple had a downward slope and this actually helped with pulling the smoke up and out in the other direction. Tilly wondered if his plan would have succeeded at all if the bear had not come charging out of the inner chamber.

He took the time to pull in another couple of shallow breaths, attempting to slow his racing heart. He could not believe that he had actually lived through that. He looked down at his body, to check for burns and was surprised to find his armor completely changed.

Earlier that day, it had appeared to be made up of different patches of the fur-covered hide. Now it looked like it was cut from some sort of yellowish leather and Tilly noted the presence of soft leather gloves and a deep hood now hanging over his head.

As he felt the material in wonder, it slowly changed back to its earlier form. Tilly shot a curious glance at the blinking icon in the corner of his vision but shook the thought from his mind. Now he understood how he had managed to withstand the blaze...

'I don't have time to mess around with blue screens.' He said, sparing a glance back the way he came.

He swallowed down on his sandpaper-coated throat and turned back towards the path deeper into the temple. He put min-maxing and nerdy upgrades out of his mind and moved forward in a crouched jog. He would have time to mull over his gains later, now he had a tree to kill…

Or not, it was pretty likely that even with the guardian gone, he wouldn't stand a chance against such a creature. He found himself wondering about that brief time he had spent in the infinite. He was beginning to think that no matter what the Administrator had said, he had died that day on earth. That life and its regrets were over.

He had another chance, and he would be damned if he wasn't going to lay it all on the line and actually try to do something from the start with this one. If he was going to go down, he wanted to show back up in that stupid glowing room, with a goofy smile on his face, knowing he had gone out doing everything he could to do what was right. He moved through the last hall and out into the final chamber.

The emotions now burning in his chest continued to give strength to his limbs even as they grew heavy with doubt at the sight of the overwhelming scene before him.

There again, was the altar of uncut stone with a flickering blue flame above it. Looming behind it was the bulbous, disfigured trunk of a tree, its roots and branches filling three-quarters of the chamber. Hanging everywhere were coffin-like pods that for the most part had hardened and become opaque, with the exception of one or two near the altar, holding the remains of some poor soul.

Tilly did a quick scan of the room and found none of the previously living creatures had made it through the temporary removal of oxygen, each one laying in its place against the roots, unmoving.

He really hadn't thought about what he would do when he got here, but he knew he couldn’t hesitate for long, every second spent closer to the time dilation equaled some exponential amount of time that his two companions had to hold on.

His eyes were drawn back to the flickering flame, being pressed in by the three thickest roots in the room. Each one straining towards it, attempting to pierce it with a jagged sharpened tip. The tree clearly wanted that flame, and it was only inches away from achieving its goal.

Fuck that.

Tilly threw himself forward with a yell, determined to thwart the Corruption any way he could. The fire in his chest roared in agreement, and Tilly felt the heat start to move in a completely new way, flowing down his arms into his weapons.

This sensation fell to the back of Tilly’s mind as he approached the center of the chamber at a dead sprint and felt the roots under him begin to writhe. Each step towards the altar pulled Tilly deeper into the time dilation, and as a result, what had initially appeared relatively frozen, began to move.

Tilly realized that the flame had not just been protecting itself, but locking down the core of the source of Corruption with its time dilation. As he entered deeper into the effect, he saw the three roots begin to creep toward the flame, and he felt the roots under him reach up to try to snare his legs.

Squeezing every drop of improved agility from his Dexterity he turned the snaring motion of the floor roots into a springboard and leapt the remaining yards toward the altar.

He swung each of his hatchets at one of the straining roots, and while his previously slow-moving targets had sped up in his perception, they weren’t quite fast enough to avoid the blades of his weapons cleaving into their fleshy bark.

The heat that had begun free-flowing from his chest exploded out from the head of each weapon, leaving a blazing trail of fire in their wake.

When the blades met the body of each root, they moved like a hot knife through butter, making a meaty sizzling sound. Each of these things seemed to be playing out in slow motion, and Tilly strangely found himself able to comprehend and think through it all as he moved through the air on a collision course with the top of the altar and the flame that rested there.

Every part of Tilly's body was committed to the momentum of his attack, and there was no way he was going to avoid crashing into the stone structure. Just as he was closing his eyes in anticipation of the impact, he saw the third root snaking around the flame and reached eagerly to pierce his side as he slammed into the altar. On the tip of its spear-like appendage was some sort of fleshy seed, and Tilly felt the entire thing stab into him just above his right hip.

The horror of this sensation was oddly not drowned out by the jarring impact of his body on the altar, which hurt, but was nothing compared to the roiling acidic sensation that was shooting out from the root lodged in his side.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The momentum of his tumbling crash was immediately halted as his body reached the flame. As soon as he came in contact with it, his vision flashed white and he found himself completely frozen in place mid-roll over the stone top of the altar with one of Corruption's roots lodged deeply in his torso.

His perception however was not at all frozen, and the acidic burning from the root tip continued to radiate agony. It no longer seemed to be spreading, but it hurt like hell, and he was having trouble with the mounting panic that felt like it would explode through his mind at any moment.

The flame stopped flickering and grew brighter.

Sacrifice acknowledged and accepted.

One Major Boon granted to Jonathan Tillman.

Eligible candidate for Origin’s Champion detected…

Do you accept the Mantle of Champion?

Y/N

The words each hovered in the air before him, similar to the system's blue screen, but at the same time, different, more primitive. Tilly was having trouble thinking through the feeling of panic at his body being violated by something so disturbing.

'What was that thing that had been thrust into his body?"

'What was it doing to him?'

He couldn’t take a deep breath to steady himself, he was just stuck and it seemed like he would be until he made a decision. Time itself took on a sort of ephemeral dreamlike quality, and he couldn't really tell how long he had been locked in place by the temporal blast. He only knew that everything was being held in place until he made his decision.

He wondered if he was allowed to choose his boon before answering the flame’s question about accepting the Mantle of Champion, whatever that meant.

Major Boon is available in two different forms at this point in the Temporal Spiral.

It was difficult to understand how he was receiving this information because the flame’s text wasn’t just appearing out of nowhere, it was just there. Like it had always been there and he was only now just noticing each new word. His mind began to bend as he tried to comprehend it, and he decided instead to just keep reading.

Option 1:

You have been infected with a mythic-level artifact, Seed of Corruption. You may choose to destroy the Seed, removing any of Corruption’s influence on your soul and suffering no ill effects.

Option 2:

This Temple and surrounding area is suffused with Corrupted Growth. You may choose to purify this growth and anything this growth has infected, leaving the Seed within you intact.

Tilly took that in for a moment before silently asking if he could get any more information on the Mantle of Champion.

Mantle confers all rights and responsibilities of a Champion of Origin, and cannot be removed or changed until the eligible Soul has ascended or descended from the Conflict Plane of Nephesh.

Seemed like legal jargon was all he was going to get there. At this point, the vice of pain in his side had become an almost familiar companion to his frozen existence, and he pondered his dilemma.

On one hand, the ability to just end the infection in this area would be extraordinary. He hoped his boys at the entrance were still alive, not to mention the village. To be able to choose a boon to instantly wipe out the infection was incredible. It should have been easy for him to choose the area purification.

But it wasn’t, Tilly was frozen in the middle of a hellscape of gnarled life-stealing bark and flesh-invading plant appendages. The thought of something like this growing inside him filled his mind with such abject terror that he just blanked out a couple of times. It was a while before he was able to settle on a choice.

The other notification held even more unanswered questions. He had no idea what the Mantle of Champion would do to him, and maybe if he was free of this seed, he could use it to do a lot of good for this area and its people… Of course, that was gambling with an awful lot of lives.

Not to mention, he was sure if he chose this option, the lapins with him at the entrance would die.

Maybe he could fight free of this chamber and maybe he could make it back to the village to make a difference for the people there.

But something about this option struck him as cowardly.

He just couldn't choose the death of the lapins over himself, and he couldn't choose whatever life of horror keeping that seed inside himself might lead to. So he stayed there, literally frozen in indecision for an indefinable amount of time.

Then a question broke through his gridlocked thinking.

'What would old Tilly have done?'

'He would have chosen to purify himself, and played the decision as if it was all about helping others.'

“There were no good options.” He would tell himself, and then he would have reluctantly chosen to free himself and fight clear of this chamber. All the while, griping about what a load of shit life had thrown at him again.

That same sector of regret rose up in him again, and for the first time in that frozen eternity, he felt the heat return to his body, roiling up and crashing against the wound in his side.

He was terrified of what keeping this thing inside of him would do, but something deeper than his fear compelled him to risk it for the chance of saving everyone he possibly could. He was still a Firefighter at heart, and it wasn't in him to leave someone else in the building so he could get out himself.

He mentally flipped the bird at the tree of Corruption and chose the area purification boon before choosing “Yes” to the mantle. That last one didn't feel like much of a choice, he was going to need all the power he could get.