Ichor Cell-Chapter 35: The Core III

Drip.
The sound of Alex’s blood dripping echoed loudly through the cavern.
The guardian stalked closer, circling him like a spider with its prey. The weight of its attention pressed against him like a physical force.
Alex tried to move again. His arms rose to rest on the intruding object, but nothing else did. The spike through his chest effectively crippled him, rendering his healing useless. It pulsed faintly, glowing with the same green light as the veins that crawled up the spider’s carapace.
He felt it before he saw it—the spike was
alive.
Thin tendrils were unfurling from it, sliding through his flesh like worms. The pain was dull at first, buried under shock, but as the roots anchored themselves deeper, the agony bloomed in waves.
“Shit…” he rasped, blood bubbling on his lips. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He tried to rip himself free, but he was stuck fast. Each attempt sent new flashes of pain up his spine.
The many-legged monstrosity moved closer. Its bulk blotted out the ceiling, turning the world around him into a shadowy blur of chitin and teeth.
‘I might die here.’
He grimaced. For the first time since arriving to this world, Alex truly felt fear for his future.
‘And if I don’t die… Well, that might be even worse. Maybe immortality really is a curse.’
“Not… like this,” he muttered. His voice came out in guttural bursts, blood bubbling from his lips.
He could feel himself slipping. Every heartbeat pumped more blood out of him, pooling warm around his feet. Although his body was making more by the second, he bled out faster than he produced it. His head spun.
The guardian stopped a few meters away. Its chest expanded slowly, the vents on its sides opening again to spew that green mist.
Alex swallowed, throat dry. He couldn’t even bring his hands up to cover his face. He could only stare as the light inside the monster’s chest brightened to a blinding green.
“Come on…” he grunted, tugging desperately at the spike despite the agony it brought him.
Nothing.
The guardian reared back, preparing to strike…
Then something blurred across the edge of his vision.
A figure slammed into the spider’s side with enough force to make it stumble, its pollinizing breath hitting another stretch of glass, turning it into a writhing garden. One of its legs buckled under the impact, gouging a trench into the floor.
“Who…?” Alex blinked through the haze, before his eyes suddenly widened.
There—crouching right where the guardian had been—stood Duran, the splintered handle of his axe in hand. His entire body was wreathed in flickering red flames that licked along his arms and shoulders, casting his face in a hellish glow. The fire burned erratically, twisting and snapping like it was alive, yet it didn’t seem to harm him. Instead, it looked like it was powering him up.
The guardian retreated, studying its new opponent. It chittered almost curiously at this glowing human, its many eyes expressing curiosity.
“Come on!” Duran shouted, his voice was deeper, more guttural, like his throat was getting fried. “I’ll keep it busy—just get that thing
out!
”
Alex tried to express his confusion, but only managed a wet grunt. The blood filling his lungs made speaking impossible.
Duran didn’t wait for an answer. He rushed the spider, axe flaring red as it cleaved through the air. The blow landed with a thunderous crack, biting deep into one of the guardian’s legs. The creature reeled, ichor spraying in thick arcs.
He pressed the advantage, swinging again and again, each strike leaving trails of light that hung in the air. The sound of metal meeting chitin rang out like hammer blows.
Alex could only watch.
‘What the hell?’
he thought, his mind struggling to process what he’d seen.
‘Since when can he…?’
Shaking his head, he clenched his jaw, forcing himself to focus.
‘I can ask later. Now, move!’
He flooded mana into both of his biceps, flexing with all his might as he
pulled
.
“Fucking…” He gritted his teeth. “Move!”
Pain shot through his chest. His vision went white, and for a moment, he thought he’d passed out. When it cleared, he looked down to see the spine exactly where it had been, the skin around it slowly wriggling and twisting as it forced its roots deeper inside him.
This story has been taken without authorization. any sightings.
The sound of battle roared ahead of him. Duran had driven the guardian back several steps, his flaming axe tearing chunks from its armour. The spider shrieked, slamming two limbs down at once, but Duran ducked and countered, cleaving one clean off.
The severed limb hit the floor with a crash, more bright green blood gushing out of the stump. For a second it looked like Duran could truly win.
But then the guardian let out a shriek of rage.
Roots sprouted from the ground in tangled knots, thickening and twisting as they grew upwards. They connected to the beast’s stump and tangled together, glowing with that same green light. Within seconds, the missing limb reformed—this time from pure wood.
“...you’ve got to be kidding me,” Duran muttered, staring as the newly grown leg flexed experimentally.
The monster crouched low, its many eyes flaring green. The guardian had stopped studying him, and had ascertained that Duran was no more a threat than Alex had been.
The floor beneath Duran shattered—not from an impact, but from
growth.
Roots erupted from the fissures, thick and glistening, stabbing towards him like spears.
‘Ah, so that’s how it got me.’
Alex thought absentmindedly amidst his attempts to free himself; his mind was fading in and out of consciousness, blood loss making him delirious.
Duran weaved between the roots, trying his best to remain untouched. He cut one, then another, but they just kept coming. He didn’t have Alex’s inhuman grace, or his incredible fighting talent.
All he had were speed and power, and even those were limited compared to the behemoth he was fighting.
A roar split the cavern as the beast unleashed a storm of motion—its limbs blurring, the roots moving with impossible precision. The whole room seemed to come alive, responding to its command.
Duran fought back fiercely, the red flames around him surging brighter with every swing. His axe carved through the overgrowth, cutting through everything in its path unimpeded, but the vines kept coming. They wrapped around his arms, his legs, his waist, tightening like snakes.
He ripped himself free with a shout, bursting through the tangle in a shower of sparks. For a heartbeat, he looked unstoppable—a crimson streak cutting through the web of green.
But he was slowing.
The guardian sensed it too.
It lunged, slamming three limbs down in perfect sync. Duran caught one with his axe, dodged the second, but the third slammed into his side. Bone snapped audibly. He flew backward, crashing into one of the ridges.
He staggered up almost instantly—blood dripping down his side—but the flame had dimmed.
Alex’s hands slapped helplessly against the spike. “Damn it… come on, please…”
The spike pulsed again, glowing brighter as if mocking him. The roots growing out of it were shifting, reaching his chest. He could feel them writhing beneath his skin, fighting for control and doing untold damage to him in the process.
He coughed out another mouthful of blood and got desperate.
He forced mana into his chest. The pressure built quickly, filling his torso until it hurt.
He pushed harder.
His chest saturated, refusing to accept any more mana.
He pushed harder.
Blood welled out from the wound, pouring down his front and staining it red. Veins burst in his chest from the overload, dragging him ever closer to death.
“Fine,” He rasped. “Let’s see who gives first.”
The guardian hadn’t advanced on Duran.
It had learned its lesson with a severed limb; why approach a dangerous prey when you could kill it from a distance?
It spread its limbs, anchoring itself to the floor. The lines etched into its shell pulsed in a quick rhythm—one, two, three—and the air rippled.
A forest erupted around it.
Dozens of sharp, spear-like stakes burst from the ground, slamming into the glass and fanning outward. Everything in front of it shifted into a living maze, thick with branches and spines.
Duran tried to retreat, but one of the roots shot up behind him, impaling his shoulder and pinning him in place. He gritted his teeth and hacked through it, freeing himself just as another came from the side.
He barely dodged that one. The next he didn’t.
A spike tore across his forearm, ripping muscle and sending his axe spinning from his grip. The weapon clattered away, lost in a wall of writhing wood.
“Come on!” Duran roared, punching the nearest vine hard enough to snap it. He caught the top half as it fell and swung one-handed, the flames bursting back to life with renewed fury.
The strike landed clean, severing all the stakes around him, but the victory was short-lived.
The spider lunged before he could recover, stabbing downwards and from the sides with several limbs. Duran managed to defend for a short while, but he eventually slipped up as a blow caught him across the chest. The impact sent him flying again, this time into one of the ridges at the edge of the crater.
He didn’t get back up immediately.
The guardian advanced on the fallen ghoul, its wounded limbs knitting back together as it moved. The veins flowing along its surface were visibly dimmer now; even a creature of its might would get tired of throwing around attacks like that eventually, but it was looking less and less likely like that would matter.
Duran groaned, forcing himself to his knees. His eyes glowed faintly red through the haze, his jaw clenched tight. The strange fire sputtered weakly across his knuckles, but it wasn’t enough.
“Not yet…” he growled, pushing to his feet. “I already died once. You don’t scare me.”
He staggered forward, lifting his arms once more-.
The next thing he knew, he was hurtling through the air, his body noticeably lighter than before.
‘Well,’
He thought bitterly,
‘I did the best I could.’
Alex watched in horror as Duran vanished into the depths of the tunnel, the guardian’s blow having sent him through the exit. A second later, a mangled arm, still gripping a wooden stake, landed on the ground. He could feel something tearing inside him—muscle, bone, his heart. He didn’t care.
He’d been pinned, burned, broken—but he wasn’t dying here.
Not until he’d killed this thing.
The guardian started crawling back towards him, the ground shaking beneath its weight. It had stopped paying attention to Duran completely now, all its many eyes fixed on Alex. The roots emerging from the ground pulsed in rhythm with its mana, converging on him like veins of a living organism.
Alex stopped paying it any attention, his full focus redoubled, tripled, quadrupled on forcing as much of his mana into his chest as possible.
His veins bulged, glowing faintly beneath his skin. The air around him distorted, heat rippling off his body. The spike holding him down began to creak, the wood splintering as the pressure inside his torso reached its limit.
He screamed—raw, guttural, primal.
The spike shattered.
Chunks of wood exploded outward, blood and splinters spraying in every direction. Not only the spike, but the plants, the roots, and every other foreign object was expelled from his body in a violent explosion that did more damage to him in one moment than the root had in the last minute.
And yet Alex was free.
He raised his head, meeting the guardian’s gaze with bloodshot eyes and a smile that looked as far from happy as one could get.
“Now it’s time for the real round two.”