The moon hung high in the sky, home sweet home. I brushed open my hut’s door and went to get myself a drink. Yes, I needed to clean up the battleground, and yes, I needed to gather up the pestilence before my life gets any harder, but a drink outranks those temporarily. The door slightly creaked as it moved ever so slowly, I probably need to grease that. The darkness soothed my tense nerves, I don’t like to admit it but the feeling of radiation trying to dig deep into my bones combined with the harsh wail of the sentry’s Jericho trumpets have brought up some not so pleasant memories. You’d think that after all this time and all my battles I’d have come to terms with my first ever war. But It seems that some memories die hard.

I stared into a particularly dark corner of my little hut, and in that darkness, the small figure of a little girl emerged… reminding me how alone I truly was. I jerked my head away with a sigh. I stepped over a passed-out cultist laying in the middle of the floor and headed to the cellar. Thanks to my previous encounters with Clurichauns I know damn well not to leave my cellar door on the outside. Little bastards will stop at nothing to get their prize once tempted. I brushed by the second cultist, a rather large fellow who was tending to the girl I just sent here and headed down into the earthy depths.

I grabbed the first bottle I found and downed it in one go but unfortunately, it did nothing. I sighed and grabbed another bottle before heading back out, brushing past the rather shocked large man and stepping over the passed-out cultist before heading back out into the cold woods. I rationed this bottle, making sure it would last me a while. I stopped and stared off through the trees as bright flashes of orangish-red light began to appear and disappear intermediately in the corner of my eye and my ears began to ring. I closed my eye and sighed, I guess without the constant pressure of war and battle old memories have a chance to come to the surface.

I tuned my senses spirit jumped back to the battlefield and stared at the literal piles of flesh hungrily. It looks like I will have a feast once I finish. I drew a bowl from my cloak and packed it with snow. With a wave of my hand the snow in the bowl melted, which was subsequently followed by the surrounding snow quickly melting and seeping into the ground. Snow is classified as a very clean substance, which means that it can absorb a lot of corruption. Almost instantly the water in my bowl became inky black as the water underground did my bidding. Taking my dagger, I began to stir causing the already viscous water to toughen up. Once it was as hard as a rock, I turned the bowl and knocked it out. One down, only ninety-nine to go.

It's times like these where I wish that I was less paranoid of attracting attention or had more materials. A full-power cleanse would extract all the corrupt magic, but that would also alert all the druids on half the planet. Not to mention that brute force would probably oversaturate things. I stared in annoyance at all the bowl-shaped bricks at my feet, I have absolutely no idea of how to dispose of over one hundred bricks of solid corruption. Know what, I did my part. I tossed the bricks off in a surviving room of the underground facility and moved on. I looked down at my bowl in disappointment, its fine wooden edges were now cracked and bleak and its brown coloring was now a depressed hazy grey. I guess this task was a bit too much for it.

I raised my arms to the sky and called for the pestilence. Worms, ants, moths, locusts, spiders, and much more came running at my beckon. It was almost disturbing to see how much the pestilence had multiplied from the two original worms. Talking about the queens, two massive spiders shyly came out through a tunnel made by a mass of beetles and gave a court bow putting a foreleg to their chest and extending the other foreleg out to the side. With a slight awkwardness, they raised their abdomens into the air to give the appearance of a lowered head. I got to say, WHAT HAPPENED, how did they come into possession of intelligence surpassing that of a rabbit, much less what seems like human-level intelligence. That’s not supposed to happen, the pestilence has consumed literal angels and demi-gods before along with entire realms, and one little flesh sentry was the thing that gave them intelligence. Know what? I choose to not care about it right now.

I could sense the nervousness of the spiders as I towered over their bowing form, well, I guess they're my problem. I kneeled to get closer to their height in an attempt to hopefully not seem so threatening to them. Suddenly a light blew blur jumped out of my cloak and hid behind the larger of the two’s legs. The crystal spider began to frantically wave its forelegs around seemingly trying to communicate something, but the spider just carefully pushed it, well I guess her, forward. I scratched my lower jaw in thought, I hadn’t noticed it before, but this strange little spider is probably a queen as well. Which would make her the first-ever, natural-born one.

How the tables have flipped… before being thrown out the window and beaten to splinters by a mass of hammer-wielding mice. My carefully constructed worldview was quickly having its base dugout. Something must have happened in my prolonged slumber; I built the pestilence from the ground up. I should know every reaction, every property, and every instinct. It's one thing for this world to be bizarre, it's another thing for the pestilence to act like this. Yes, mutations are a thing, I even promote it, but it should only occur while it's active, not during induced hibernation.