Ch.36 Q'ill?

Malpetios woke up inside the Statistics Temple, the cold and emotionless feeling coming from the south. "The Exchange Market!?" His face became pale, hurrying to it he saw something strange in the unknown Earth-like world stage. Four dots of different colors were shining, blue on the bottom left, grayish-green slightly right bottom, brown right middle, and red top right.

The light from these dots seem to be trying to pass into my mindscape but failed. Suddenly a feeling of peace and comfort ran thru me like I was looking at.. at Q'ill, the dots feeling so close to me like they were my closes friends. I felt so happy to see them again and sped up reaching the stage, diving headfirst to the closes grayish-green dot.

Before I collided with the dot an even deeper sense of closeness radiated from the other three, as I stopped inches away from the dot I continue to the next closes one.

This continued till the first dot suddenly changed shape into Q'ill with grayish-green colors instead of her usual red, I felt happy to see her and ran to her only to stop halfway as the other dots also morphed into Q'ills of different colors. I was caught in the middle of all four of them, extremely confused I asked her, "Q'ill? why are there so many of you?"

Grayish-green Q'ill said, "Little one don't be fool by them I am the real one come to me my sweet child," she opens her arms welcoming me to her embrace, as she keeps cooing me like a baby.

Blue Q'ill said after her, "My child, it is me, is time to stop playing, come back home with me," she reaches out a hand for me to take, not taking any other action.

Brown Q'ill said smoothly, "kiddo you seem confused, snap out of it, and come here let's talk about what you've been up to, haha." While she was sitting down tapping the area next to her in invitation.

The last to speak was Q'ill in her usual colors. "Dear, are you alright? You can't be thinking these are me hehe, your so silly."

I was convinced she was the real one, I felt silly thinking otherwise as I flew to her. The fake Q'ills said other things and the feeling of closeness got stronger but they were just so different from Q'ill in the way they talk and act.

This was the real Q'ill her gentle smile, her playful yet motherly scolding when I do something wrong, and her eyes full of happiness that I can live normally, after what I went thru as a co-core... at that moment I stopped.

I was dull-headed and full of happy thoughts, but as I stared at Q'ills eyes I saw, nothing, two deep bottomless pits staring back at me emotionless and cold. A familiar feeling of wrongness once again came to my mind as I finally realized that I was inside my Mindscape and Q'ill can't enter here yet.

"You are not Q'ill!" I said as I snapped out of my haze.

The fake Q'ill looked surprised and said, "you can remain independent from the system? No that can't be the system will always fully fuse before allowing a core to open its entrance." The fake Q'ill went back to soothing the Prismatic Core, noticing that her imprint was still active inside him.

To her annoyance, now that it was fighting back the other competitor's Imprints cached up with hers, becoming a stalemate again. "Tsk..." she clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction as she stopped the act and fully focus on controlling the imprints.

Her competition started to gloat at her, "hehe, how sad for you Fire, looks like you lost your edge, you even used your body's memories to your favor, just how useless can you get te-he." Hearing that, the faerie's eyes turn cold and said, "You don't think you are in deep enough trouble Wind, or maybe I should send more of my pawns to play with you."

The faerie call Wind did not stop her provoking eyes and condescending smile, but she did stop talking, the other too simply watched the show as they fought over control of the Prismatic Cores' will.

Malpetios on the other hand was losing his mind, even though he could now hold on to his last shreds of control, it needed his full concentration. He yelled at the system trying to cling to hope, only to be led down miserably.

[Acessing the Host's current situation... No harm toward the Host was detected. Searching Host soul... completed. A large number of will fragments are attempting to fully merge with The Host, it is recommended for the Host to accept the merger.]

He could only curse the living shit out of the system. Does this look beneficial to me, losing my mind in pink clouds?! "DAMMIT, SOMEONE SAVE ME!!!!"

While the four Q'ills look at me like an interesting test subject, a flash of prismatic light sprong out of the forest quickly approaching me, the four of them look troubled but did not stop fighting over me, letting the flash get close to my body.

I look down at the thing that ran to me and... it was cute... like really cute, it was a chibi Rainbow Lily with cute little chubby vines wait, WHAT THE FUCK AM I THINKING!!

At that moment the pressure from the Brown Q'ill stopped, relieving a lot of the strain on me, only to burst like a balloon turning into a mass of brown tentacles all aimed at me! "BOSS FUSION!!!" as my body scattered into rainbow petals the tentacles skewered my body, if I was any slower I would have suffered a lot of damage.

My petal fragments enter my Rainbow Lily's chibi body, and I was finally able to find peace the call of the other three Q'ills no longer affecting me. Seemingly aware that it was useless to continue, they also burst into tentacles, this time however the transparent silhouette of a three meters tall diamond, with many smaller diamonds orbiting around it like moons could be seen at the center of all four of them.

I scream in my mind, the sound coming out of my chibi Lily with a cutesy, 'yip', and ran like crazy to Mister Muscles. The tentacles were chasing me at a faster speed my Lily could run, nearly catching me many times, however, they would fight among themselves allowing me to escape if any one of them got the upper hand.

I nearly cried the moment I saw the black cracked ground around the cave holding Muscles, as the tentacles fought each other, I sprinted with all my chubby vines could muster, making it to the cave, the tentacles chasing me a second later only to stop at the edge of the black ground.

"What? How can this be, how can there still be lingering wills inside a mentally stable Dungeon? And this aura is so strong, It feels like a rank eight creature." Fire was not willing to go inside the cave first, and she could see none of her competitors wanted to go in either.

With the connection to this Core so broken, it was difficult enough to force their way in here using their imprints as a backdoor, barely making it past the entrance. They were yet again in another stalemate, their projections were only the weakest of rank six, facing a rank eight will, would require all of them to work together with one or two casualties being unavoidable.

Fire stared at the other three in annoyance, a rather easy mission turned to a mess again, and again due to no one willing to take a loss.