“So this was the important task the two of you had to attend?” Adra’s amused voice broke into the pleasant haze my mind had been in, a haze caused by Sigmir’s closeness and her kisses. It took me a second to realise just what she meant, how we had to look. Sigmir had taken off her armour and most of her clothes, leaving her dressed in undergarments and her cloak, leaning back against a tree with me straddling her lap while we were making out.

Sure, I had healed her beforehand, but I had a feeling Adra was just amused by what she had interrupted, not truly peaved, so I answered in kind.

“Why, yes, could there be a more important task?” I asked back, pushing myself up a bit, so I was looking her straight in the eye.

“I hope you were cautious when dealing with the carcass, its magic was still active, poisoning Sigmir and Ylva. Lenore and I dealt with it.” I continued, which caused her grin to evaporate.

“I’m not sure. My magic-senses are a lot less precise than yours, so I don’t know if what I’m feeling are remnants from the fight or if there’s still something active back there.” she admitted, looking less amused by the moment.

“I’ll take a look. Lenore, would you join me?” I said, as I was getting up and got the staff out, so that Lenore could use it. I had a feeling that we might need it before everything was said and done.

“Love, you can either rest for a few more minutes or get dressed and follow us.” I continued, before giving Sigmir a quick kiss and walking back to the clearing.

The first thing I noticed was the smell, it was even worse than earlier, the normally clean smell of blood had a certain, fetid undertone to it, which made me wonder just what had been going on with the Wolverine before it had died. I had met undead with a better, healthier smell. Other than that, I noticed that there was no live around the carcass, the new sprouts and leaves had died off, leaving a detritus of death plants strewn around it. It looked almost as if the carcass was causing the plants to die. Adra and Rai had removed its claws and some of its teeth, placing them nearby but, more importantly, they had removed the two shuttles I had used to kill it. They had placed them, alongside the other four shuttles, in the shadow of a nearby tree. They were still bloody, but at least they hadn’t been damaged by the remnant warmth of the carcass.

As there was no way that I’d try to use my senses to get a better idea of what was going on, not after the nausea the wolverine’s tracks had caused, I asked Lenore to take a look and share her senses with me.

It was a little disorienting, the vision of my left eye was suddenly replaced with the sight from her left eye, only that she was sitting on the staff that I was holding in my right hand. The perspective was just close enough to make my brain try to incorporate both into an image, as if they were coming from my eyes but that only managed to make me feel as if the ground was trying to slip away beneath me. I was just able to hold myself up with my staff and quickly closed my right eye, only taking in what Lenore was showing me, which was enough to make me wish for another bout of disorientation, just so I wouldn’t have to see what she was seeing.

The mana from the wolverine was still there, slowly seeping into the ground, causing effects similar to what I had witnessed in the bodies of Sigmir and Ylva. The carcass was somehow poisoning or corrupting the earth beneath. It wasn’t the same corruption caused by miasma, it was different, yet with subtle similarities.

“Could you use you Blood Magic to produce a drop of Astral Power enriched blood?” Lenore asked me, her voice full of curiosity.

Looking inside, I noticed that the time on Sigmir’s lap had been enough to restore most of my Astral Power, so I sent back my assent before pulling out my Athame and pricking the tip of my finger. I had learned early that, if I used the Astral Power that was stored in my hair, I could create enriched Blood without the horrifying pain that having your literal life-force drawn out was causing, otherwise, I would have declined. I was still unwilling to use it regularly to store up some enriched blood, partially because of the Miasma and partially because I wasn’t sure it wasn’t harmful to me, I was just somewhat skittish in that regard.

With a flick of my finger and a bit of magic, the drop containing a small dose of Astral Power sailed over to the wolverine, lading in one of the grievous wounds we had cut into it. The effect of the blood was a lot more obvious in Lenore’s sight, the activity in the carcass suddenly skyrocketing as if someone had poured fuel onto a fire. But the carcass itself remained dead, making me wonder if it was some sort of zombification.

“We harvest and purify some of that, using it as a weapon, like a poison.” Lenore suggested, causing my brain to halt for a moment. Her mental voice sounded a little strange as she suggested it, so I thought about it. For another moment. My gut-reflex wasn’t just to say no, but to say Hell no. Just looking at the stuff was giving me the creeps and carrying it with us would make me almost certainly sick. It might have been useful, but the sheer revulsion I was feeling convinced me that it was a bad idea.

“No. Somehow, I think that’s a bridge too far.” I rejected her idea and felt relief flood through our bond, making it obvious that she just had wanted to suggest it before I came up with the idea myself and talked myself into it.

“How do we get rid of it?” I asked, not wanting to let the carcass rot as it was, poisoning the soil and surrounding area.

“Against the corruption in their bodies, my Death Magic worked quite well. It might work here as well.” Lenore suggested, sending an image of her idea to me. It looked quite doable to me, so I agreed and centered myself, to do my part of the casting. It wasn’t a simple spell, another combination of multiple elements, two from each of us. Complicated wasn’t quite doing it justice, but I had a feeling it was good training. At the same time, I wondered if some sort of priest or cleric would be able to deal with the stuff a lot easier, just from other games I had played in the past. Cleansing corruption and stuff like that was normally the job of clerics, priests and paladins, the servants of some god or a “divine light” type of thing. Titania, the character I had played before coming to Mundus, would have been able to cleanse it with a single spell, I thought slightly nostalgic.

Shaking off those thoughts, I focused on my part of the spell-casting. What she had in mind was a spell that essentially combined two different, albeit simple, spells from me with one larger, more complex spell from her to create what she had in mind.

First, I created a small magic formation, purely one of ice and kept it going as I slowly channelled Astral Power into it, causing a stream of cold wind, carrying small but razor-sharp shards of ice with it. Once I had that going, I managed to split off enough of my concentration to create a second spell within the larger framework of Lenore’s spell, adding the runes of magic and devouring to her spell of wind and death.

I felt my runes slide into place, getting accepted and incorporated into her casting and the wind streaming from the formation in front of the crystal changed. There were strange black shadows moving in the wind, adding an unreal quantity to it. They looked like smoke but not, like a trick of the eye but I knew very well that what I was seeing was real. There was a small part of my mind that made a mental note to look at the effect more closely, it seemed that there was a good synergy.

But I had my job to do, slowly, I moved the already created and channelling formation into the framework of the small, adding the razor-ice shards to the wind, creating a spell that was greater than the sum of its parts. And a lot more complicated.

Both, Lenore and I were needed to control what we were doing, Lenore kept the spell going, while I used the connection we shared and the Ice and Coldness within the spell to guide it, causing it to swirl around the carcass, the razor-ice and the sharp wind slowly grinding it to dust while the combination of death and darkness-magic destroyed the remaining essence.

It took far longer to grind the carcass down than it had taken to kill the Wolverine, long enough to cause me to slip into a trance state where I was barely aware of the world around me.

But after a good twenty minutes, I noticed that we were grinding the dead soil, digging a bit of a hole. Nothing was left of the carcass, only frozen dust that we scattered with a tired gesture.

“We can leave now.” I told the others, feeling weary to the bone.

But a short glimpse to my notifications helped to cheer me up.

My Ice-Magic had gone up to seventy-nine, my Blood Magic to fifty-eight, my Darkness-Rune Mastery to sixty-eight, my Darkness Magic to 50 and my Astral Meditation to fifty-two.

In addition, a short glimpse to my experience-bar told me that I might just get the next level when we turned in the quest. The gains made the exhaustion I was feeling a great deal more bearable.