The arrow left the string.
Kaelen couldn’t evade its trajectory – even with the newly claimed body and the still-downed sixty points in health, he twisted at the very end of the motion, the limb catching sinew instead of throat, and the force of the impact spun the possessed man into the cave’s wall with a dull thud.
[Warning: Host vessel HP: 289 → 241.]
A jolt of pain ripped through every nerve the wolf’s body had to offer.
Kaelen let it show; let his legs buckle, let his mouth contort into an undignified whine that never should have come out of his throat, and while the dramatic display of frailty was ongoing, the man’s mind already moved on, calculating how many more steps would be needed to escape the current encroaching danger.
“Interesting choice,” Nix mused from the back of the group, watching as Kaelen staggered.
“You are display-fainting.
Explain the tactical value.”
Watch and learn.
The one who gave the orders without raising his voice, the one whose armor was spotless while the rest’s carried random scuffs and dents, moved closer with the ease of a man who had done this dozens of times before and had probably done this same exact thing a hundred times more.
“Corin, careful,” one of the others warned, a woman who had already reloaded her compact bow.
“It’s still moving.”
“That thing has an arrow in its shoulder and a wound in its leg from something we haven’t faced yet,” Corin replied dismissively, drawing a short curved blade from his belt with a languid motion.
“Whatever this is, its core is practically a free drop.
Don’t waste your breath worrying about furniture that will soon be furniture that’s dead.”
Dying furniture.
Kaelen noted the expression with something close to disappointment as he took in the next few seconds of the scene.
[Ding!
System Analysis: Target identified as party leader.
Class: Scout (Human).
Assessed threat tier: Low.
Assessed value as vessel: High.]
Higher value than a wolf, in fact.
That was all the confirmation the newly arrived man needed.
Two facts, in the span of five minutes of borrowed legs and stolen skills: Firstly, that the current body, as strong as it was, did not have enough value to him here, now, as he was, and would soon be dead in the face of an overwhelming amount of foes.
Secondly, and more importantly, if he wanted to survive this meeting in any capacity, he needed to not win – needed to lose in such a way that his body would still be returned to him upon his departure.
Host recycling.
Even though this thought did not carried any weight but it fitted.
One day, this young man would remember this day as the day he’d taken his final walk – as the day his body had died, not given away.
It would haunt him for weeks to come, if the look on the other man’s face was anything to go by, as it was obviously the best day of Corin’s life – the day he’d managed to get both of his hands on something worth as much as his entire body and the equipment he wore.
He let the wolf lunge – a clumsy, poorly aimed movement, all limbs wrenched together in the desperate attempt to reach its target, and the one named Corin neatly ducked out of the way, barely using any effort at all, and severed the beast’s neck with a single practiced motion.
[Warning: Fatal damage sustained.
Host vessel HP: 0/1.] [Vessel death imminent in 3…
2…]
Kaelen felt the wolf’s body hit the ground, and somewhere behind the sensations flooding up from the now-dying muscles, he registered the dissonance of feeling where that impact had happened.
Not the place of the fall, not the place of impact, but rather the other end of the limb, already disconnecting in a strange echo of the body’s own nerves sending an impulse to the spine.
The body on the ground was already dead and dying, and another, far better, one waited in the wings.
“Rookies,” Corin said, smiling at the slight widening of the newcomers’ eyes as he knelt to open the small pulsating sphere of midnight-blue currently located somewhere inside the recently-killed wolf’s ribcage.
He barely even waited before prying his fingers inside, pulling out a glob of the strange liquid that made up the thing’s core.
A monster core, something Kaelen would eventually learn to consider common loot around this rank, but at the moment simply a free prize that he had, unfortunately, not managed to catch for himself.
“This is the part where you learn beast cores don’t fight back once the host is-”
The man’s voice died in his throat as the dead wolf’s skull, already slackening in its own fluids, opened its jaw just a fraction of an inch, and something, something inky and gelid and black as the pupil of one’s eye, stretched out from within, sliding down over the man’s thumb and up the wrist as he unknowingly let the sleeve ride up.
It did not leave much of an impression.
Not outwardly visible – a hair-thin strand, nearly invisible against the skin even at this distance, gone the moment it touched the hand.
[Ding!
Devoured Tier-1 Shadow Wolf: Permanently retained skill [Shadow Fade].]
Once again, Kaelen felt the memories of this body flooding into him, taking something of themselves and of this very moment, binding it to the part of a mind that had just left it for good, embedding them somewhere behind his own thoughts as a part of himself, permanently.
The skills of a lifetime of night-hunting ghosts and demons, of bending shadow around fur until the light passed right through without a second thought, now belonging to him, his own and inseparable from him just as the health points listed in the corner of his vision never had.
It was no time to bask in the glory of his latest acquisition, though.
[Ding!
New High-Tier Human Vessel Detected.]
[Initiating Advanced Neural Hijack…]
[Infection Progress: 6%…]
It was not fast enough.
Perhaps that was what the man Kaelen had once been, long ago, meant by desperation – the way the voice in his ears, which might well have been Nix, or might not have been, might have simply been the manifestation of some deeper, universal force with no mind or will of its own, hurried.
He’s going to notice in about two seconds.
A slow itch crawled at the inside of Corin’s hand, and he absently scratched at it even as he turned to smile at his colleagues.
“This is the part where you learn beast cores don’t fight back once the-”
The words did not come.
Nowhere in the world could they have come, because the moment the sword that had killed the monster finally bit down on a hilt of flesh, a heartbeat away, something in Corin’s mind faltered.
[…20%…
31%…
41%…]
“Corin,” the archer said carefully, lowering her bow until its tip hovered a scant centimeter from the back of the man’s neck, “you’re not yourself.”
“I’m tired of doing this,” Corin corrected cheerfully, even as another shudder climbed up from deep inside him, and the fingers of his not-free hand curled and uncurled in slow imitation of a bird’s wing.
[…60%…
67%…
72%…
78%…]
Corin blinked slowly, his gaze unfocused as though staring at something only he could see.
“…It’s not a good time,” Corin answered.
“…That monster wasn’t empty-handed when it died,”
[…91%…
98%…]
“…I think I need to sit down for a moment,”
[Ding!
Infection Progress: 100%.]
…and the world went completely sideways, as light burst out from the edges of his vision.
[Color shift detected: Infection-induced eye change in progress…]
It was almost too late, and Corin’s eyes widened as something – something huge and writhing and full of teeth, but somehow not, somehow never had been, but that still carried with it the promise of the same feeling of sickly hunger, slid in through the pupils of his eyes, blacking them out from the inside, replacing the familiar brown with a sickly, almost glowing stripe of cyan that fanned out from their centers in slow, rippling waves.
The sword clattered from Corin’s grip and landed with a hollow echo at his feet, and behind him, the rest of his team paused in the middle of turning and unsheathing their own weapons.
The next words were already leaving his throat, but Corin did not realize it until the last syllable was out.
“…What the hell?”
It seemed that the world had stopped turning, too…