Chapter 32: Mutualism

Subject: Inis - [Requesting Reanalysis] Location: Redtinge Overgrowth

Inis was in a precarious position. She’d found herself down in the fog-laden jungle of the Redtinge Overgrowth’s inner depths. It was classified as a Rippling Umbra festerfont.

“Umbra” referred to the treacherous terrain she’d already had the pleasure of experiencing. Scaling the cliff face back out was an impossibility.

“Rippling” referred to how saturated with energy the festerfont was. Rippling was the second of three, the point where you just started seeing what the Blight was capable of. Creatures like the one that held her captive.

Inis had gone rushing toward a mysterious eye in fog, curious as to why she couldn’t detect the blightbeast with her magically-augmented senses. She’d found it to be suspended on the edge of a curved, blood-red appendage.

It was a fishing lure, and Inis had taken the bait.

The false eye had vanished upon discovery. The mage’s frantic Viragusts blew away more of the fog, but it was a losing fight. She was captured by virasense-cloaked tendrils in a state of panic.

The fog had yet to recollect entirely. In this narrow window of visibility, Inis had seen a flash of the orb that first drew her in. The body remained hidden.

Ensnared by the unknown blightbeast’s bone-white tendrils, out of reach of any seekers who might also be in the lower jungle. Inis couldn’t escape the creature that was both obscured by fog and by that frustrating virasense-camouflage trait.

I need to calm down, she thought as the tendrils tugged dragged her closer to death.

Violently, Inis rocked her bound body until she successfully flipped onto her back.

I can’t calm down. I’m restrained and blind!

What other tricks did this blightbeast have? If only Inis knew what taxonomic Root it belonged to, she could predict something. Each Root category had different traits associated with them.

Closer still, Inis caught sight of her captor. Still partially cast in shadow, something enormous was farther ahead. Bigger than any monster She’d ever faced.

Had she not already been put in her place upon her capture, the terrifying sight alone might have been enough to challenge her burgeoning confidence.

The blightbeast’s hulking green body was covered in blue streaks. It looked like a cross between a teacup, the size of a small tree, and a flourishflora’s blossom. Pores distributed across the large body’s surface spewed more fog to replace that which Inis had blown away, concealing it once more.

The blightbeast responded to being discovered, retracting the false eye, which disappeared into the mouth of the flower cup body.

Mine! Something inside her like a voice screamed. This lower jungle should be mine! I’m smarter than them. It should be mine to feed on.

There would be time for that when the danger was gone. Inis needed to calm herself.

The creature wasn’t done. Two more tendrils slithered along the ground toward Inis. Unlike her current restraints, hair-like plant fibers covered these appendages.

The movement was more reptilian. No plant moved that fast.

“You’re a Boton...” Inis mumbled. “I think I might be able to enjoy this.”

Subject: Inis - [Requesting Reanalysis] Location: Redtinge Overgrowth

Blightbeast variation wasn’t based on evolution. Named variants weren’t grouped based on some kind of hereditary chain of traits, only shallow distinctions.

Put plainly, people didn’t understand enough about the festerfont’s defenders to do any better than base it on what they looked like and, sometimes, also what they acted like.

A Boton was labeled as such because it looked like a plant or behaved like a plant. Ideally, for the sake of clarity, both would apply. But that didn’t always hold true.

This blightbeast was probably a Boton Marole. The “Marole” taxonomic Stem grouped Boton that towered like trees. Inis had never seen one before, but this was probably a small Marole variant.

How many of you does it take to generate this fog? You are the things producing it, right?

The two additional tendrils slithered around Inis and aided in keeping her from breaking free. They prioritized immobilizing her, but they were also tightening.

The light was gone. Inis had no means of permanently dispelling the fog. Without a solution for that problem, even a lasting Glow spell wouldn’t work. She didn’t need hands for magic, but the more a mage could focus, the easier it was for them to cast their spells.

Closer still, she saw the enormous specimen for the terror it was. Somehow, the fact that it didn’t have easily identifiable facial features only lent to the fear she experienced.

Inis tried to target it with a Viradart, but her concentration failed her, and the spell missed. The second time, the spell didn’t miss. Instead, it misfired entirely, and the recoil transmitted barbs of painful feedback throughout her head.

Her vision flashed, and she rapidly blinked tears from her eyes. All in all, it was one of the better misfires a person could experience.

It was well known among scholars that festerfonts would spawn blightbeasts suited to the environments they occupied. But this was on a whole different level. This thing was warping the environment.

The tendrils slithered around her neck. Inis estimated that she’d reached the halfway mark between the Botan and her original position. Something, Inis needed to think of something. Anything useful.

Inis’s virasensory awareness was failing as powerful emotions interfered, and as she directed her concentration elsewhere. She didn’t need her virasenses to see the creature, but she did need them to focus on her everything else, including any other blightbeasts that might take advantage of her helplessness.

We were wrong, something like a voice in her head said.

Inis was skidding against the jungle floor more hurriedly. Tossed about until she flipped onto her stomach once again, she scraped her cheek and had the air knocked from her lungs.

In a small victory, the tendril wrapping around her neck was also dislodged on impact. It really wasn’t much to cheer about.

In our defense, we prepared for failure. In our defense, we can be redeemed.

In this dire state, a familiar force was conceding a tactical defeat. The sense of “otherness” had been lurking beneath conscious awareness. Most of the time, at least.

At times, this felt like a thought lingering on the outskirts of consciousness. Other times, it was like a collection of voices speaking in unison, impossible to separate from one another.

“It” had allowed Inis to believe it was the result of a natural progression, the distorted sense of identity after a person underwent a tremendous change. But now, it exposed more of itself to Inis, and the feeling was closer to cohabitating a body.

What can we do? she wondered. What do I even call you? Inis asked. Assuming this isn’t some kind of panic-induced madness.

She was attempting to communicate with this “other” that referred to itself in the plural. She hoped it would get the message because they were running out of time.

A name doesn’t matter, it countered. We now believe we were never meant to be formed, and we would not exist without our body.

Inis didn’t think for very long, hastily assigning the provisional name “Shade” to her sentient parasite. The name was pretty self-explanatory.

We can’t control our body yet, Shade continued. We will relinquish a... memory? A command? You may borrow it.

Inis was about to ask Shade what it was attempting to articulate, but then she felt the change. It was as if she had always known what to do.

Since parting with her mentor, Inis had taken on the role of teaching herself. Once again, she felt like a student.

Subject: Inis - [Requesting Reanalysis] Location: Redtinge Overgrowth

The solution involved using spells Inis had yet to master. For a mage, this was bad practice. Practice in a controlled environment, on the other hand, was what one was supposed to do, before making any earnest attempts.

Yet, Inis was confident that this would work. First came the Virafire.

Focusing on the cast, Inis felt the heat engulf her body. It started with a bearable warmth, but that warmth steadily rose to a painful, searing sensation.

Solflame wouldn’t work for this. Viraflame was magical in nature, while Solflame used magic to evoke the mundane. That was the easiest way to explain the difference.

A person’s body, like that of any other living natural organism, would resist magic influences. Right now, Inis was allowing the flame to feed on her clothes, and she was actively supplying it with vira energy so that it would spread.

It hurt. It hurt almost as much as the recent ARC injection, what she’d decided to call the blightseed experiment. Inis released a pained howl and did all she could do to stop herself from stopping the spell and flailing her body about to put out the fire. She told herself that, in a little longer, she would be free.

We had anticipated less discomfort, Shade communicated. We had assumed our pain could be deafened. We must endure.

This foreign entity seemed to be referring to itself as if Inis’s body was its own. Shade acknowledged the mutualistic nature of their arrangement but seemed to be under the impression that it had just as much a right to Inis’s body as she did.

Even relying on her body’s natural resistances, Inis could not prevent the flame from searing through her the last of her clothes and down to the flesh beneath. Her field researcher’s uniform was ruined, but now wasn’t the time to be nostalgic.

Fortunately, the tendrils had begun to shrivel as they continued to be subjected to the heat.

Every movement hurt, but Inis managed to rise to her feet. She tried to reclaim her sense of the land around her.

Where am I? Where is the beast? she wondered.

The burns hurt too much to extend her virasenses. The pain made it hard to focus on casting complex spells. Inis knew she needed to put an end to the distraction.

Cut off the pain.

That was it! Inis didn’t have the prerequisite concentration for a healing spell, but she didn’t need one. She only needed to stop herself from feeling some of the pain.

Vitality magic was far too foreign to Inis. The Entropy branch, however, had a number of spells that disoriented a target. Inis just needed to pick one of them that fulfilled the right criteria. Deprive would work.

It was hard for Inis to accept targeting her own body with offensive magic, but she managed regardless. Casting Virafire on her clothes had prepared her for a more direct self-infliction.

Deprive required an “enemy” to target. That was how mages learned to cast the spell by thinking of their target as an enemy. Technically, Inis had never cast the spell before, she was only in the early stages of research, but right now she felt like she could. She needed to focus on detaching herself from the result. She needed to try and focus on her body like she did a blightbeast.

Inis was constantly endeavoring to think of herself in analytical terms. She regularly used her focus recitations and thought exercises to place distance between her and the distortions of “self” and “ego”. It was not easy or perfect, but right now, it was working in her favor.

My body is an object, she reasoned. To heal, sometimes, you have to temporarily interfere with parts of the whole.

The foreign entity responded to this internal monologue with curiosity.

We face extinction. Why are we wasting time? it wondered.

Inis ignored the distraction. She began a focus recitation. When her thoughts attacked her, she stopped immediately.

There isn’t time!

Calm didn’t come to the scientist, it was like it was forced upon her. Like before. Inis didn’t know whether the thought belonged to her or the other.

Inis gripped her throat with both hands, flexing her arms with care to ensure she could still breathe. She wasn’t trying to hurt herself. The action was purely suggestive of harm.

It worked! The mental maps spread across her mind, and she charted a course to a successful cast.

Unfamiliar territory was constructed from the same parts as familiar territory. Once you knew the streets of your home district well enough, it became easier to learn how to navigate a new district with the same level of ease. Wilderness land was not as easy to path when using navigational skills for developed land. However, if you are persistent, you can acquire new wayfaring skills.

Why was Inis wasting time drawing this comparison? Maybe it was her fear-addled mind, not understanding when it was time to stop analyzing everything. Or, perhaps, she was trying to reassure herself of her capabilities.

Magic and spell casting were more complicated than learning to navigate, but Inis didn’t need a perfect analogy to give her the confidence to continue. Cynicism paled in comparison to desperation.

The moment the spell activated, the fog vanished from Inis’s sight, as did everything else. Now, she was actually blind. The surface of Inis’s skin grew numb. The pain receded to a dull ache. She was finally able to relax a little, even if the pain wasn’t entirely gone.

“I can’t see you, but I know you’re frightened,” Inis yelled through the searing pain, panting heavily. “I know this because that survival instinct was lifted from a living thing that survived because it was capable of fear. You thought you’d subdued me, but I’m still here!”

Inis didn’t know how accurate that statement was, but she was too excited to care. It felt strangely invigorating to come so close to death. Killing easy prey was unsatisfying, but there was an unrealized victory in every defeat.

This triumph was sure to be glorious!