Amrydor slowly awoke to the sensation of a heavy blanket covering his body; or maybe it was his body that was heavy? It was hard to move and he couldn't really look. As his mind cleared, he was able to sort out what his life sense was telling him, and he sighed.
While Klastoria's humanoid form hadn't moved, the portion of her body that had enveloped his hand and lower arm had grown during that nap, and it now covered almost all of him. Also, his non-magical clothing had dissolved, though thankfully there was no damage that he could discern to the semi-living armor that he had started using as an under layer for most clothing.
"Klastoria," he said softly, trying to not startle her.
The sli boss shifted, stirring the content of her body, which pressed and pulled on him in odd ways. This movent made him aware that she must have at least partially seeped under his armor as well. Amrydor did his best to ignore both the embarrassnt of that discovery, and the associated concern. "Hmm? Oh, there..." her voice trailed off as she took in the situation.
"Are you alright?" Klastoria asked, sounding nervous and possibly leaning toward panic. "Did I hurt you?"
"I'm fine," he said, "though it turns out you make a pretty good heavy comforter." he said, aiming for levity, and perhaps to calm her down. He really didn’t want her to panic and make mistakes. "However, I would like to be able to move."
"Right, sorry, of course." She started to withdraw from Amrydor, but that created a tugging sensation that felt like it was coming from inside of his skin, drawing a startled gasp from him, and she froze. "What? Oh no, what did I do? Amrydor, I, um, I seem to have soaked into your body."
Her statent confused him, but when he focused on the boundary of their life patterns, it made much more sense. There wasn't so much a boundary as there was a region of overlap. That didn't seem good. "Er, this could be a little embarrassing, but perhaps you should ask the cores for help?"
"No!" ca her startled, panicked-sounding response. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't an to shout, but please, don't tell anyone. I, I need to be able to fix this. I need to be better than this. The risk of eating you in my sleep was bad enough for both of us — I only asked because I really needed to find out — but this is sohow worse. I don't want anyone to know about this if they don't have to, please. Please?"
Amrydor's training helped him stay focused and outwardly calm as he spoke softly. "Klastoria, that's fine. I think we've finished the challenge you presented, so let's go ahead and do what you said. If you can resolve this, then now is the ti to do so."
Inwardly, Amrydor was much more worried. If Klastoria couldn't undo what ever she had done, then it would take intervention of so sort to possibly separate them. The only other option he could see would be to let her actually eat him. As much as he'd been willing to take that on as a risk of sleeping next to her like this, it was sort of the sa type of risk one took entering any combat, though he wouldn't have agreed to even that without the safety of the nexus. Just simply agreeing to let soone eat you was entirely different. Definitely a step beyond, and one that he really wasn’t comfortable with.
His words had helped soothe Klastoria, and soon she was carefully working on extracting herself from Amrydor. "I know skin is porous," she said, "since I had the bodies of so of our invaders to examine and eat after the second invasion, and I had wondered if I could do sothing like this if I was careful enough, but I didn't think it could be done accidentally."
Her sowhat disturbing chatter was clearly to help keep herself distracted while she tested how to retreat from his body. She was also sounding a little more like she had previously, when she'd been very matter of fact about what she was seeking.
What was strangest about this to him was that none of the sensations he was feeling from her movent actually hurt, not even the portions of the movent that were happening under his skin.
"Well," she said, "um, it looks like marking you clearly as soone not to eat also activated another idea I'd had been thinking about. One of my enzys has turned off your pain sensors."
Ah. Well, now he knew why nothing hurt.
That didn't make the process any more pleasant. Even without pain, the sensation of her oozing and weeping out of his skin could only be described as excruciatingly intense. Amrydor managed to not react loudly or retch, but the prolonged experience and his body's reactions made him also very glad that there were no other witnesses.
Unfortunately, there was one person who noticed. "Amry? Is sothing wrong?" Fuyuko asked over the nexus link.
Hearing her made Amrydor realize that he'd let so portion of his emotions leak, and he spent so ntal energy on clamping down on their empathic bond as he told Fuyuko, "A mistake was made, other person is fixing it, but embarrassed. Don't do anything, it'll make them feel worse; I'll try to explain more later. Need to focus now."
He could feel Fuyuko's concern as she sent her acknowledgnt, but he just didn't have the ntal energy to talk about anything at the mont.
While this was happening, Klastoria released her hold on her humanoid form and gathered the rest of her body into her natural sphere, letting her focus on her work. She'd stopped talking as well, entirely absorbed in what she was doing, and Amrydor had no desire to break her concentration, so he continued to suffer in silence.
Finally, with what appeared to be great physical effort, Klastoria finished pulling herself free with a faint snapping sound.
Her action sent her tumbling away from him, but it was hard for Amrydor to pay attention to her right now. He felt ravenously hungry — almost like he was hollow — and his body felt like it was extrely heavy. With a groan, he rolled onto his side, then got to his hands and knees to make it the few feet to where his pack was, so that he could start pulling out food and a canteen of water.
There were dry rations in his storage ring too, but those would have been too hard to eat right now. Fruit and bread made a good, easy start, then he started adding at and cheese, and just in case, added a few of his weakest healing potions into the mix.
After he'd managed to get enough food in his stomach to quell the hollow feeling, he could pay enough attention to realize that Klastoria didn't look like she was feeling well either. She was trying to reform her humanoid shape, but it seed like she was having trouble building and holding it. Well, if that had drained him this much, maybe she was having similar problems.
So he tossed her so of the food he was pulling out of his bag. The first couple of throws she just allowed to hit her and then sink in as they dissolved, but she almost imdiately started moving better, and the next ti he tossed her a fruit, she caught it in her hand. Then she grinned briefly and ate it whole in one swallow. Not a trick she could do with a real mouth and throat, but sort of funny.
After that, he kept tossing her food as he brought out food for himself, glad that he had made sure to stash so much food before he started this delve. He also tossed her so of the dried rations, as he figured she'd have less trouble eating them quickly.
Eventually, he was able to slow down how fast he was eating, and as Klastoria was staring at two fruits she was just holding, he figured she didn't feel like she needed more at the mont.
"Amrydor." Sothing in Klastoria's voice made him freeze, and he focused his attention on her. "You— sohow, you ate part of ."
"What? That doesn't make any sense. If anything, you ate part of ."
"Oh yes, I did," she said in a soft voice, "though fortunately for you, it seems that it was only a little bit, and mostly your fat layer." He reflexively wanted to protest the idea that he was fat, but his education had included enough anatomy to know what she ant; all animals always had a fat layer under their skin.
"However," she continued, "I've lost a lot of my mass. About twice as much mass as you have, or maybe, that you did have. And the taste of you lingers. This is a very dangerous thing, and I do not recomnd you move quickly. I'm having enough trouble as it is."
Amrydor's feeling of being in danger grew with those words, and what she said next did not at all help. "I may not have proper mories of most of my existence, but I know that before I was elevated, everything was about food, about not letting myself be eaten, and eating everything that I could. Those instincts, they are still there, and I can feel them demanding that I reclaim myself from you, and so much more."
That reminded him of a lesson that they'd been given a couple of days before his group had left the temple to travel to Azeria; the first generation of people elevated directly from non-sapient species tended to have dangerously strong instincts compared to those who had a few generations of distance between them and their more animalistic ancestors. Klastoria had been elevated from an even more instinct-driven creature than most animals were.
Her smile was predatory as she continued. "You could make it easy on both of us; you could give permission. I would even do my best to make the experience enjoyable for you. I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding of your biology suggests that if I play out the part of a girl with a boy, you'd find the results very pleasant and distracting. It wouldn't make much of a difference to , but I imagine that your reaction would at least be entertaining."
Part of Amrydor wanted to find that inappropriate, coming from an apparently older woman, but she'd been sapient for less ti than he'd been actively dating girls.
However, Klastoria wasn't done yet. "And as for the rest, well, I don't want to eat you like this." One of the fruits she was holding simply sank into her hand as it dissolved into her body.
"Instead, I was thinking more like this." He watched as she infused the other fruit with her essence, infiltrating it like she had done to him, but even more thoroughly. Then she slowly converted the fruit's flesh into her own flesh, while keeping the integrity of the fruit's structure intact. "It could be rather interesting, don't you think? I wonder how long I could keep you conscious like that, how much of your brain's activity I could mimic while maintaining the pattern using my flesh. And then, well, this."
The fruit was already made of her substance and at her will, it simply lded into her body.
"I am going to have to decline that suggestion," Amrydor said. "Perhaps we do need to get soone else involved if you are having problems with controlling your instincts." Simply allowing himself to be eaten was still not a point of negotiation as far as he was concerned, no matter how enticing she tried to make it sound.
Klastoria shuddered, a rather more thorough motion for her than for most people. "I'd rather die than risk the cores learning that I am this close to betraying them, to violating the rules that they'd laid out." Then she tilted her head thoughtfully, and Amrydor did his best to ignore the fact that she'd tipped her head too far; that motion would have broken a normal person's neck.
"There's an idea... if I bind myself with a challenge, I won't be able to act. Mm. About twenty minutes until dawn, and we reset. I think you might be able to do this in less than fifteen minutes. Amrydor, I offer you a challenge, as you are technically delving right now. With nothing but your bare hands, extract my core while I am in this form. I won't resist, but I don't intend to help either. It will be entirely up to you to do it. If you succeed, well, it won't be as valuable as a nexus's core, but no one has ever retrieved my core intact before. So sothing special, yes? And if not, then when dawn cos, and all my mass and strength is restored, I'll envelop and consu you. Slowly. The way I showed you with the second fruit."
Amrydor ignored that last part as he focused on her core. Visually, it appeared to be in the center of her humanoid form, but he could read the other layer of truth to the situation. She may have less mass than normal, but she'd still had to compress and fold away her mass to take this form. He'd have to counteract that sohow in order to actually be able to reach her core, as the distance from her skin to her core was much larger inside of her body than it appeared from the outside.
Still, he thought he could manage it in about ten minutes, if she wasn't resisting. It would be difficult, but with that much ti, he was fairly certain that he could use his own abilities to overco the way she had compacted her mass. It would actually be more difficult if she was in her original form.
The way that nexus-born creatures could be very casual about their own deaths, however temporary, was very strange, but it had been months since his group had first arrived at the Azeria nexus.
Maybe they were beginning to rub off on him. Amrydor probably should have just asked Fuyuko to get her parents to intervene, but he also believed Klastoria's distress at the idea of the cores finding out, and he didn't like the idea of doing that to her. "Alright, I agree to the challenge, but you should know that Fuyuko sensed sothing was wrong earlier, when you were separating us. She's waiting for to talk to her."
Klastoria smiled, and it was much sweeter than the predatory look from earlier. "I see. I take it you haven't told her much? Thank you; you're being kinder than I am. I can't ask you to hide anything from the princess, so use your judgnt when speaking to her. Now, shall we begin?"
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