“Wake up! Wake up!”

Kala’s shout was like a needle piercing Elara’s ear - light, at least compared to the battle that swirled around her, but no less noticeable for it. No less painful. The sound forced her to whirl around, catching sight of the archer, her fingers frantically pressing at the little snake latched onto her shoulder. His scales twitched and bounced with every press of a finger, but the snake himself didn’t ever respond.

Elara’s heart leapt into her throat, joining the bits of her stomach that were already eager to escape her nausea-stricken body. She fought them both down; if it wasn’t with the ease that she normally would have, at least it happened. With her head still swimming, trapped in murky waters that drowned any attempt at focus that she put forth, Elara had to be grateful for what little she managed.

Even if she should have been able to do so much more. Been so much more. Her crippled left arm swayed at her side, the ash-fused limb dead to the world, a reminder of yet another thing that had gone wrong. They were adding up.

Elara turned back around; there was nothing that she could do about the Little Guardian as long as the Core’s aura existed. Which meant that it needed to go away. One problem with that: they had already been trying and failing on that end of things. Even with all of the crystals that they had shattered, the Death Core’s mana hadn’t really dropped very much. There was still a long way to go.

Did they even have time to finish things before the Little Guardian died? Elara’s grip loosened around her crystal-laced blade, letting it dangle from between her fingers; she watched Valera and Doran cut further into the great gleaming crystal at the Corpse Amalgamation’s center, plumes of purple-black mana filling in the wounds they left behind, not even letting it shatter. They were forced back soon after as the monster tried to counter, a trail of melded-together corpses swinging at the empty air that they had previously occupied.

The two experienced Seekers quickly moved in again, resuming their work - and yet, again, it didn’t feel like enough. The damage that they inflicted went away as fast as they were created and, while that still cost the Death Core mana to repair, it wasn’t going fast enough. Not if the Little Guardian was going to live.

Elara’s fists reflexively clenched; one hand tightened around the hilt of her blade again, while the other did…nothing. Still unresponsive, crippled and mutilated by its accidental fusion with an undead and the following battle between life and death mana as the…Elara’s eyes widened, the motion sending painful pinpricks of light into her concussion-dilated pupils. She didn’t mind, caught in a revelation.

Because the [Little Guardian’s Totem] around her neck had treated the undead as part of her when she accidentally fused with it, her arm and the undead’s flesh overlapping and becoming one - and then tried to heal both, annihilating it in the process. Even the parts of the thing that had been outside of her had been turned to ash, as if the [Little Guardian’s Totem] healing effect had been confused into thinking that the parts of the undead that stretched outside of her flesh were just another strange limb. Only complete separation had stopped the wave of destruction.

Elara thought about it. Gulped. Thought about it some more, as much as she was able. Her head still pounded. Still swayed. Her stomach still rioted. Her vision still blurred.

But this…this was something. A chance to potentially save the Little Guardian, who had saved her. Who had saved her city. If she had to sacrifice part of her body for that chance, well, her arm might’ve already been ruined anyway, right?

Elara dropped her blade. It hit the ground in an odd clatter, a strange mixture of ringing steel and chiming crystals. Moved towards the giant crystal at the monster’s center mass, where Doran and Valera fruitlessly attempted to destroy it. She warned them back, her voice feeling distant to her own ears. Raised her crippled arm with the help of the other, working hand resting underneath her elbow as a support.

One that it sorely needed. Even now, she couldn’t afford to let any sensation attempt to get through. Which meant no pain, but also less control.

She had her doubts that it would have worked properly, anyway.

And with what she was about to do, the last thing she wanted to risk feeling was pain. Because, if she was anyone else, there would be an unimaginable amount of it.

Elara took the final step, arm held out in a straight line before her - and the moment that it pressed against smooth crystal, she let her armor’s ability activate. It didn’t last long, only working for the briefest of instants, but it was enough.

Enough to push further forward. Enough for her to flicker back into the material world. Enough for arm and crystal to become one.

Elara shouldn’t have been able to feel anything in the arm. Even in her unfocused state, she had made sure that she wouldn’t. Found the little pieces of her body, so small that she might never have been able to see them with her eyes. Plucked at their strings, commanding them to be quiet. To ignore what was coming next. To not let Elara feel.

So why did she?

Why did her arm feel like it was infested with living ice, like creeping tendrils of cold wriggled and writhed across her veins? Why did the muscles of her arm try to twitch, the motion stopped only by the confining hold of the crystals that it had melded to?

Why did it feel so wrong?

She shuddered, legs wobbling. Her stomach roiled. Her vision started to close in, darkness spilling from the edges.

And then there was light. Warmth. Heat.

Fire.

The [Little Guardian’s Totem] was like an inferno pressed against her chest, searing her skin, each lick of its flame burrowing deeper into her flesh - and then spilling outwards, pushing towards the ice-cold of death that had infected her ruined arm. The two forces met - heat and cold, life and death, each waging a war within Elara’s tattered limb.

Her body seized and spasmed as the two forces tugged and pulled at one another, her flesh a battlefield in which they destroyed and renewed and destroyed again.

Until one of the two began to prove victorious.

Erik grunted and fell to one knee as another blow violently shook his shield, the reverberations climbing up his arm in a relentless wave. It wasn’t often that he was forced to fight something so big; it was even less often that he was forced to do so for so damn long. He just knew that, underneath his armor, his skin was probably a mottled mass of bruises. He had been slammed back into solid stone too many times in the course of the fight for anything else to be the case. Enough that any of the others would have risked being flattened, even in their armor.

Knowing that another attack would be coming soon, Erik braced himself, digging the bottom of his shield into the ground. His toes flexed, knees bent, and weight centered.

And the attack never came - but a scream did.

“Elara, what are you doing? Stop!” Valera shouted, voice distraught. The sound was fearful enough that Erik’s heart immediately began to race. Throwing caution to the wind, Erik let his guard falter, twisting his shield enough to take a better look at the world around him.

In what had to have been only a few moments since he had last checked, things had changed.

The first thing he noticed was the monster itself, frozen in place. The final defender of the Death Core. After Elara’s sword had somehow ripped its way to the beast’s center mass, revealing the collection of crystals hidden within - along with the largest of them all, which Erik assumed to be doing the vast majority of the work in holding the amalgamation of corpses together - Doran and Valera had gone on the attack. One that hadn’t been doing very well, Erik had noticed with more than a little trepidation. He, himself, knew that there was little he could do. His job was to defend; if those two were struggling to make an impact, Erik would do more than that.

He would fail.

And yet, to his great surprise, it wasn’t either of them that had forced the corpse-formed monster to pause. It was Elara, the smallest of them all, who didn’t even have a weapon specifically enchanted to be unnaturally powerful. Her arm had been thrust inside the crystal at the monster’s center. Fused with it.

She spasmed in place, her legs wobbling,

And thick lines of gold were spreading from the place where arm and crystal met. They split again and again, stretching outwards like golden branches of a tree, bits of purple-black light roiling fruitlessly around each new bud. Trying to hold them back, to stop a new branch from sprouting - but failing. The tree grew. Branched out endlessly across the giant crystal’s surface.

The crystal shattered - and, for a moment, the Core’s last and greatest defender fell still.

A wave of darkest light, thick like a fog and just as choking, shot from the Core’s pedestal. Wrapped itself around the shattered pieces of the monster’s greatest crystal, each fragment lost somewhere within the confused mass of undead that its destruction had dropped loose. Started to pull the pieces back together again, forming the crystal anew.

And then Elara, that brilliant, foolhardy, possibly suicidal, idiot girl, magically shoved her hand back inside it.

Lines of gold branched out from their connection, and she spasmed in place.

The crystal shattered again. The wave of purple-black light appeared. The crystal reformed. She shoved her hand in again before the amalgamation could recover, and the cycle continued - though her spasms began to slow. Less violent.

And Erik didn’t think that was a good thing. Elara wasn’t moving as fast anymore, not reacting as quickly to the crystal being reformed. Whatever she was doing, however she was doing it, it was killing her.

The pounding of feet pulled his attention away. The ringing of metal against stone. The scuff of a Core being removed from its pedestal.

Valera held it within her grasp, her face visibly pale. Sweat dripped down her face, beading at her forehead and spilling down in tiny rivulets. Her breath came out in heaves.

Still, she was grinning - because, as Erik belatedly noticed, the Death Core’s aura was all but gone.

The smile disappeared when Elara fell to the ground in a limp heap, dropping down amidst a tangle of moving corpses. Erik’s heart seized; he rushed forward wading into the crowd of scrabbling limbs and snarling heads, shield and hammer both knocking anything in his way aside. Doran beat him there, his strong arms easily ripping the downed girl out from the press of bodies. Thick streams of ash drifted down from her left arm, spilling out in a distressingly heavy cloud.

The group retreated back as one, ignoring the all-but-manaless Core and its floundering minions in favor of their wounded companion - and hopefully moving far enough away that they would have a little time before they couldn’t be ignored. Erik’s fingers desperately scrabbled at her helmet, digging into the joints and pulling it free, while the others watched with bated breath.

Elara’s face was pale, her lips blue, her eyes closed.

Valera stifled a sob, her body blurring as she moved to press an ear against those blue lips. She froze. The Seekers, one and all, froze with her.

Then, finally she moved. Sobbed. “Oh thank the Skies, she’s still breathing. She’s still with us.”

It was only then that Erik felt his heart start working again, the first beat landing in perfect time with a sudden hiss and a harsh cough. Elara sat up suddenly, and a tiny snake - apparently awake now that the Death Core’s aura was gone - nosed its way towards the mana-depleted Core in Valera’s hand, climbing down from Kala’s shoulder.

When Valera held it out, Erik didn’t bother to object. None of the others did, either.

Even if Orken’s Council had decided they wanted to keep the Core, none of the Seekers would have been willing to give it to them. That thing was just far too dangerous to keep around. Far worse than the Nature Core before it, and that had already spelled ruin.

It went the way of its predecessor, dropping down a tiny snake’s gullet.

By the time Erik heard the sounds of the defeated Core’s former minions gathering at their backs, the Little Guardian was already shedding his skin.