Ren was confused…
What happened was difficult to categorize precisely. Selthia folded.
Ren's first interpretation was pain, that reading lasted approximately three seconds, which was the ti it took to register that the sound Selthia was making wasn't the sound a person made when sothing hurt. It didn't have the right shape for pain… It was involuntary and sharp, yeah… But broken at the edges. It seed to be the kind of sound that escapes when the body produces it before the mind can decide whether to allow it. A weird sound he also had never heard coming from soone with a doubled voice and this degree of mutation.
But he wasn't going to let himself be distracted just to process what it actually was... Not right now.
She straightened with visible effort, pulling herself back together. "Stop or I'll explode!"
"Don't pretend," said Ren, pushing his hands to the front as she kept backing up. "I figured it out a while ago."
Selthia looked at him from her position. Her expression was genuinely difficult to read, the first ti in this entire encounter that her face had stopped giving him sothing legible to work with.
But still…
"I figured out that you can't use complete abilities in this space." Ren kept moving forward, with the particular steadiness of soone who has reached a conclusion and tested it enough tis to be sure of it. "My mushroom's roots limit what your corruption can do in here. The rift… If you can't expand it further, your power doesn't scale even with that extre fusion. So all that escalation you've been doing, it's almost purely costic."
Selthia opened her mouth.
"Part of is still cryst…" she started.
"Not interested." Ren extended his hand toward another flow node.
"Wait, listen…" Selthia took a step back, but the empty library wasn't large and the wall arrived sooner than expected. She pressed against it. "There's a human part that's sep…"
He touched the node.
The sound Selthia produced this ti was even less compatible with suffering than the previous one. High-pitched, entirely involuntary, ending in a short exhale that she clearly had not planned to produce. It had a very specific quality to it that did not match any of the sounds a person made when sothing was genuinely wrong with them.
Ren considered this data point carefully.
"Wait… Every ti I tap here," he said, adopting the asured tone he used when testing a hypothesis in real ti, "the flow partially interrupts. It's a fairly effective seal, honestly."
He paused, arriving at the conclusion his observations had been pointing toward for the last thirty seconds.
"Maybe that's what pushing her out of here sounds like?"
"Ren." Selthia's voice had a new register. Not threatening… Sothing closer to the warning of a person whose patience is running out at an accelerating rate. "Stop."
"Why should I hear to you? You're the one who ca in without permission." Another touch. Another involuntary sound. "Besides, I'm only interrupting the flow. If it bothers you that much, just leave on your own and…"
"I said stop!"
Ren snapped his fingers.
"I'm not falling for your noisy distractions. It's ti to purge the evil." He paused. "Wei would say the correct pedagogical approach is repeated practice until the pattern corrects itself, so…"
What followed was, from Ren's perspective, approximately three minutes of thodical flow disruption utilized across several secondary nodes while Selthia produced a varied range of sounds that he continued cataloguing as manifestations of energetic discomfort.
From any other perspective it would have been categorized differently.
Selthia, who understood her own situation with considerably more precision than Ren did, reached a limit.
It wasn't a gradual decision. It was the kind of decision that gets made when the alternative is to remain on the floor being "purified" by a fifteen-year-old who is thoroughly convinced he is performing an exorcism, and who greets every involuntary sound she produces as confirmation that his theory is correct.
"Enough," she said. Very quietly.
The tone was unlike every one that had co before it. The cold analysis was gone... The dry humor she had been using as distance was gone. It was just the voice of soone who had finished having patience with a situation, stripped of everything else, carrying only what it needed to carry.
The corrupted energy that had been accumulating around the incomplete artifact since she first entered this space converged all at once.
Selthia deford when it hit her.
Not the way a tar activates a fusion, not with the deliberation of soone choosing a shape, selecting a form and stepping into it. This was closer to a directionless explosion: her body losing its boundaries and expanding outward toward every point of the interior space simultaneously, the edges of her dissolving into sothing that had no recognizable form left. What remained was a network, vast and dark, occupying the entire volu of what had been the library. Every wall. Every corner. Every inch of space between them.
Ren was at the center of it…
Having been so close to the epicenter, the threads closed around him before he could react. Not a grip in any conventional sense, a web of roots that resembled the ones in his own chest, but made of corrupted energy in its most concentrated form, wrapping him from every angle at once. There was no direction to run because every direction was equally occupied until the walls. He pulled.
He turned. He applied everything he had available in terms of strength and technique, trying to find a gap in the threads, a point where the tension was lighter.
The threads didn't give.
Then the corrupted flow started arriving again.
It wasn't an attack. It was forced feeding, the kind that was designed to produce a fusion, a monstrous unification of two similar forces, a tamorphosis built from the outside in.
Corruption entering his ethereal body from every point of contact simultaneously, converging toward the crack in his chest with that familiar pleasant sensation that Ren already knew and that remained exactly as difficult to resist as the first ti: the false freedom, the power without a ceiling, the promise that what was coming next was what should have always been.
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