Warmth filled my belly as the core released its life mana into me, its Concepts tried to worm their way into me, and I didn't resist them. The fear I had felt was quickly overpowered by a burning need to annihilate the filthy creature in front of me. In my time reading about different spells, I had finally learned the best aspect to fight creatures with the misfortune to become death corrupted, but I refused to use it.

Instead I switched my core to life, going for an Aspect that matched the three working Concepts it had contained. Regenerative, healthy, and strong were joined by flourishing, and blooming. I let loose a roar that shook the branches, the forest quaked. I had yet to unleash my aura, but I already felt the surrounding plants responding to me.

The creature blinked, and let loose a dry wheezing laugh. “Good,” it hissed. “You are the beast hero, I thought I was mistaken.” It extended a clawed, withered hand towards me, beckoning me. “Come, let us do as the Great Mother wills.”

I growled, certain that the being was trying to confuse me. I ignored its words, and fed mana into my aura with one goal in mind, to destroy the abomination.

The creature seemed to have the same idea as thick viscous death mana oozed out of its body. To my dismay, I immediately identified it as higher tier mana. The pressure it put on my senses by observing it made me recoil. Masses of tier one death mana billowed out as the creature's higher tier energy visibly boiled, losing its coherence in the tier one area.

Even with plenty of mana to burn, my aura made no headway against the swaths of mana the creature controlling the wendigo was throwing around. The situation quickly became more complicated as the monster seemed to tire of watching our mana burn away.

Its muscles tensed, and it sprang at me, arms held wide, teeth bared. I tried to dodge, but it moved too fast, its claws dug into me, burning my flesh as it swung its other arm around my neck. I felt it shoving its face into the thick mane that covered my throat. The monster's teeth failed to find my flesh, but I knew the thick layer of fur wouldn't protect me for long. Happily I sensed that my mana expulsions hadn't been wasted.

With a roar that was half pain from its mana coated claws digging deeply into my shoulder, half effort from hauling the creature's deceptively heavy weight along with me, I reared onto my hind legs. My Concept strengthened muscles strained as I launched myself into a bush that had responded to my aura by growing wickedly long thorns coated in life attuned sticky sap. The thorns bent to welcome my unwanted passenger, some of them pierced my skin but I barely noticed.

The creature screamed, and writhed uncontrollably as the sap acted like acid on its death saturated flesh. I threw myself away from the wendigo, as much as I wanted to attack my momentarily stunned opponent, I had difficulties of my own.

My shoulder was on fire, the flesh surrounding the wound where its claws had dug into me was dead, the mana that the creature had left behind was trying to infect the rest of my body. Unlike my previous encounters with death mana, my Concepts were fighting fiercely to keep it at bay.

They were losing ground, but that was only to be expected given the fact that the mana it had injected inside me was higher tier than I was. I focused on pushing as much mana into the area as I could. Several of my Concepts flared with renewed vigor as the mana flooded my shoulder.

Holy burned in my soul, it rejected the idea of any sort of corruption taking hold on me, and death mana was certainly viewed as a corruptive energy. I could feel the Concept struggling to truly manifest itself, and it didn’t take much evaluation to figure out why.

I had thought that I had accepted the Concept, but I hadn't, not really. What I had accepted was that people considered me holy because I had the direct attention of their goddess. It wasn't as though the Concept didn't have any power or influence on me, it did. I was fairly certain that my strong reaction to the children in town was almost entirely because some of Belua's Concepts were included in how the people of the world viewed the divine.

As things stood, the Concept was strongly skewed towards enhancing my connection with the goddess. Its struggle to fight the mana inside me told me that it had the capacity to be something more. I just had to put my own mental energy into a definition that I truly believed in, something I could embrace as a part of myself.

The problem was that I had a very odd view of the divine. It was possibly due to the fact that within my first few minutes of existence as an independent being, I was given a description of the method by which I would grow to be a divine being myself one day.

I didn't really look at Belua as anything more than a very old, very powerful person. That perception extended to Randy and Hash as well, despite their obvious power they were hardly perfect beings. I didn't worship them, in all honesty I pitied them because they were buried under so many Concepts that I doubted they were able to remember the people they had been anymore. Not that my own struggles with my identity after my split put me in a much better spot.

I flinched as I realized that my line of thinking had weakened the Concept's ability to act. I scrambled to stop thinking about the terrible reality of deific beings.

I had experienced enough elemental Concepts to know that they didn't necessarily have to reflect reality. They were the empowered ideas of the masses. I knew from Angela's life that even in a world where everyone carried around handheld devices that could answer practically any question a person had about the world around them, people were often enthusiastically attached to very incorrect ideas.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

I briefly tried to search Angela's memories for definitions, but quickly had to pull back. Angela's thoughts on the Concept of holiness caused it to lose even more of its will to fight off corruption.

Not much time had passed, but the wendigo had stopped screaming, I knew I didn't have much time before I had to deal with it again. I wanted to be able to fight off its mana, and I knew holy could be the key. The Concept itself was screaming it in my mind, so I did the thing that I should have done from the start.

I looked at the Concept itself, I tried to feel the ideas that it held, unsurprisingly there was a lot to unpack. The Concept I possessed was strongly influenced by its origin from the minds of Belua's people, but I could feel its connection to definitions that came from other gods and goddesses. At the center of those connections, was the Concept distilled to its most basic ideas.

The ideas about connections to the divine were obvious, and I had already accepted that. I didn't have to dig far to find the ideas that I wanted. I grabbed hold of them, greedily trying to accept what I had sensed as my personal truth. It didn't work. No amount of mental gymnastics could make me believe something I knew to be untrue, and attempting to do so gave me a burning headache as honest flared. The idea that holy things were incorruptible could not come from me.

I heard cracks as the creature broke the thorns of the bush I had left it skewered upon. If I didn't find a way to fight off the death mana inside me quickly, I was going to have to consider doing something that I felt might risk violating my contract.

I had one last idea to try, though it risked leaving me with less defenses against the mana assaulting me. I was determined to try it anyway. I would be faced with either giving up on this life, or trying to control something that terrified me on an instinctive level if I did nothing. I was fairly well convinced that Dux was no longer able to take control and pull me out anymore. No one had said as much, and I still had the ability on my list, but he hadn't intervened since before Belua changed my System settings to limit its ability to control my behavior.

Resolving to try my best, I reached into the core that was still supplying me with mana and crushed the Concepts it contained. I hungrily tore them apart, sucking up the energy that they were formed out of. I had eaten enough cores that the process was quick. My haste caused fragments of the Concepts to be lost and absorbed into my body. I didn't mind that, I would have liked to have kept them in their entirety.

I took the energy I tore out of the core’s Concepts and shoved it into the idea of inviolability that was associated with holy. As the energy sank in, my world went white, I felt as though a heatless purifying fire flared throughout my entire body. The System threw a series of terrifying messages in front of my eyes, considering the fact that I was about to be fighting again.

Conflicts Detected

Diagnosing…

Rebooting…

Pressures on my mind that I hadn't known existed disappeared, if it wasn't for the angry growling hiss of the creature that had fully freed itself, I would have relaxed. My instincts were gone, my class impulses were absent, my mind was entirely free of the clutches of the System. As I watched the wendigo dust itself off, and prepare to launch itself at me, I realized that I should probably be more careful about what I wished for.

I pushed myself up, grateful that it seemed that I had grown accustomed enough to the workings of my body that I didn't feel at all awkward without the System imprinted instincts, and turned tail to run. Survivor was my core Concept, I might have picked up heroic and protective, but there was nothing heroic about throwing your life away, and doing so protected nothing.

I had completely lost control of the mana being pumped out of my core with every heartbeat. I could still sense it, I even had an innate sense that the mana wanted to help me, but it may as well have been wild mana. I wasn't even sure that it would stick to the Aspect I had been channeling. I had even less control than I did before my class evolution, I didn't even know how to switch my core on my own if I needed to do so.

I got two steps when my body practically exploded, growing uncontrollably back to my true size. Trees fell, some were reduced to splinters as my body filled the space that they occupied. My heart practically stopped as I felt my tail pass through the border of the new mana beast's territory.

The response was immediate. A long thunderous bellow followed by a blood curdling shriek made the air itself quiver. Wind howled, and an unnatural darkness flooded out of the center of the beast’s territory like smoke, the trees it touched groaned ominously, some of them cracked and fell, all of them withered. Even without the assistance of the System I could smell the death mana mixed into the darkness. It did not flow past the line of its territorial border.

The being controlling the wendigo began to laugh.

It had been thrown some distance away when I had lost control of my size. I turned my head to look at it, curling my lip up in a snarl. The death attuned monster captured my full attention.

The creature was lying where it had fallen, its body was looking mangled. Multiple patches of flesh looked like they had been melted and burned by the life infused sap of the bush. The holes in its body from the thorns were releasing noxious smelling vapor, and the top of its head was smashed in from an apparent collision with a tree.

Whoever was in control of the wendigo seemed to find things riotously amusing. It looked so small and vulnerable laying like it was, a part of me was inclined to feel pity for it. I did not. The System wasn't assisting my ability to sense mana, but I found that I could easily feel the sickening presence of the death mana it was releasing into the air without help.

I wanted to smash it, I wanted to tear it to pieces and cleanse the area with fire. I moved to follow the impulse, but there was a good reason I had chosen to stay small when I fought. There were trees in the way, I could and did knock them down, but doing so took time, and the creature stopped laughing long enough to scurry out of my reach. I kept pursuing it, but I was much too slow, and its laughter only grew louder.

It was almost loud enough to cover the sound of hoofbeats coming from the field of darkness that had filled the mana beast's territory. The sound didn't matter though, I was distracted by my need to annihilate the source of the death mana that burned my senses. My newly empowered Concept, wouldn't let my mind go, I had been far too eager to give it the ability to act.

I didn't register the new source of danger until it crashed into me. It threw me through several thick trees despite our difference in size, and left two huge gashes in my side. The other mana beast snorted, and returned to the relative safety of its territory before I could get a look at it.

The entity controlling the wendigo continued to laugh.