“So we have to… kill a small sun?”
The eight Thantir Decaylings were currently sheltered inside a large, icy dome, with walls at least 30cm thick. Akah was doing his best to make sure that the walls remained intact as they were steadily being clawed away by the horde of blackened monsters outside. Everyone else was quietly discussing their next plan of action.
“Is it actually a sun though?” Elksia asked. “Because it’s just bright, not hot.”
“She’s got a point. Plus, if there’s a corrupted… something in it, something that’s breeding all the corruption out here, it has to be hollow in some way!” Tenuk added. “No way it’s actually a real sun.”
“How are we even going to get to it though?” Tahvra butted in. “Akah can’t fly, Tenuk has to shapeshift wings onto himself and Elksia and Elkay also use wings to fly but that sun is going to be hot, maybe too hot to approach!”
Phovos didn’t seem too concerned about that. “Eh, I guess I could create a floating platform or something. Or maybe Eksi can use his stupid-strong telekinesis to just lift the wooden platform we’ve been using as our base up to the sun. But Akah can use his ice powers to keep us all cool, and, frankly, the sun isn’t even that hot anyway, we’ve all been fucking freezing the entire time we’ve been here.”
“So…” Tahvra thought for a moment. “So we float up there with Eksi using his telekinesis, then what? Have Akah cool the star down so we can enter? Or have Teekay teleport us all in or use Phovos’s weird portals-”
“Uh, I can’t use my portals right now…” Phovos frowned. “These trial bands we are wearing are definitely stopping me from doing a lot of Life Goddess things. Can’t access my normal little hammerspace either, best I can do is create a new, empty one.”
“So we put everyone in your hammerspace apart from Teekay, Teekay teleports you in, you release everyone and we just… kill whatever is inside?” Tahvra continued, not really bothered by Phovos’s statement.
“Oh, right, you want me to BLINDLY teleport into something that is certainly pure corruption?” Teekay didn’t like the sound of this plan at all. “You’re just begging for us to all get corrupted! And that… thing… will only let Elkay in anyway because he’s a freak! No offence, babe.”
“None taken…” Elkay muttered.
“Alright, I have a thought!” Tenuk suddenly interrupted. “Who the fuck says we have to go inside that sun? Can we just… I dunno, destroy it from the outside?”
“It… it’s a sun, Tenuk…” Phovos tutted. “We can’t just destroy a sun.”
“We totally could!” Tahvra interrupted. “Stars exist on this very thin line, where the heat and exploding molecules inside fight against the force of gravity, keeping everything in equilibrium! If we cool down the star then apply external pressure via… I dunno if you can alter gravity, Phovos, but maybe Eksi’s telekinesis could also work?”
“Maybe…”
A loud, angry grunt interrupted the conversation.
“Akah, are you alright?” Elkay asked as he quickly mimicked some of Akah’s ice powers and started helping him keep the ice dome in one piece.
“No, not really. Getting a little tired, if I am honest. Also, we are somewhat being buried alive in corrupted corpses.”
Eksi glanced around, scanning the environment with his telepathy. “Holy fuck, you’re absolutely right, there’s, like, 5m worth of bodies on top of us! We gotta fucking move, and now! Make sure your butts are on this stupid wooden platform, I’m getting us out of here! In the mean time, Akah, why not show these cunts why your codename is Shattershield?”
Akah smiled, ever so slightly. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the sphere, which slowly began to crack and shake. After a brief moment, the entire dome exploded, and with quite a bit of force, scattering bodies cross quite a distance.
With the coast now clear, Eksi waved his arms, and the wooden platform swiftly moved into the air, faster than he intended. Several of the other Decaylings grabbed onto the ledges for dear life as the platform raced towards the dim sun in the centre of the strange, forest sphere they were trapped inside. Several corrupted beings tried to fly up and attack them, but Teekay shooed them away with bolts of electricity. As they approached the sun, things did definitely seem to warm up, and both Phovos and Elkay lost their fur, Phovos replacing her fur with tiny scales, while Elkay seemed to exude a thin layer of cooling slime. Quite a few of Elksia’s feathers seemed to disappear too, and she made herself more draconic, while Tenuk ditched his organic plating and head horns, making himself completely reptilian.
“Ugh, not again…” Elkay tutted, trying to wipe the slime off himself and failing. Much to his dismay, Tahvra wiped some slime off Elkay’s arm and patted it on Eksi’s and Teekay’s neck and back, in a bid to cool them down, since neither of them had ways of doing so. Teekay stared menacingly at Tahvra, but Eksi was too busy concentrating to care.
“So, by my calculations,” Tahvra chirped, ignoring Teekay completely. “This sun is about… hm… smaller than I thought. 50m across, maybe? Best friend Akah, can you make an ice sphere all around it?”
Akah blinked. He admittedly hadn’t been paying attention to the discussions from earlier. “That is… quite an ask. I will try my best, but, well, it’s a sun, and ice melts in the sun.”
“I can help, I guess?” Elkay suggested. “I know you wanted my telekinetic help, but I think I would be better off assisting Akah.”
“Alright!” Tahvra was not swayed at all. “Phovos, can you do… gravity stuff?”
Phovos nodded. Without any sort of hesitation, she stood up and held her arms in the air, concentrating hard on the sun. However, nothing seemed to happen at first. Not until Elksia also stood up and copied Phovos’s actions. The Time Drake muttered to herself as she began to speed up time, forcing Phovos’s gravitational manipulations to happen more quickly. Combined with the cooling effect of the ice sphere Elkay and Akah were trying to make, the sun did slowly start to shrink down.
All of a sudden, a hideous screech filled the air. Black, inky tentacles exploded from holes in the sides of the sun and swatted at the Decaylings, trying to stop them from damaging what was clearly the home of the source of the corruption. Teekay though wasn’t going to let this slide, and he fired bolts of lightning at the tentacles, dissuading and distracting it from his friends. Tahvra joined in, throwing small, sedating quills at the flying corrupted entities that had risen up to try and protect their mother.
The screeching continued to get louder as large panels opened up in the middle of the sun, revealing its contents. What had once been an elegant Life Goddess was nothing more than tentacles, teeth and black slime, occasionally punctuated with speckles of purple and green. More tendrils stretched out, trying to knock the Decaylings’ floating platform from the sky, but Eksi generated a telekinetic shield around them, protecting them all from harm. Tenuk couldn’t really do much, so he used his own, far weaker telekinesis to slam one of the panels shut, slamming it into the face (or one of the faces) of the mother corruption.
This sudden lack of concentration from the corruption allowed Phovos and Elksia to work faster. The sun’s size steadily decreased, and, slowly but surely, the sun began to crush itself under its own weight. The corrupted mother inside screeched and screamed, shouting something unrecognizable, before being completely and utterly smothered by the fake star it had called its home.
A blinding light erupted from the remains of the sun, stunning the Decaylings. Eksi found he couldn’t hold his focus any more, and he lost control of the platform, causing the Decaylings to fall. There were some vague attempts to try and catch themselves, but as they’d all been blinded, no one knew where anyone else was.
However, it seemed to take forever for them to hit the ground. The vast, corrupted sphere the Decaylings had been trapped inside wasn’t that large. But they still seemed to be falling, far further than what seemed possible.
Eventually, everyone hit the ground. But the ground didn’t hurt them. It wrapped around them, softening the blow, sucking them into it, before abruptly spitting them all out into a dark, shiny room, lit up with floating candles. Standing above the eight Decaylings was a colossal, shrouded entity with a cloak of shadows, holding a scythe twice its height.
“Little ones, we need to talk…”