Panic was an emotion Elias had mastered and suppressed. What he felt now was a cold, high-speed cascade of critical failure alerts. The child—his Primary Objective—was compromised. The variable of her independent action had overridden all his strategic victories.
Still in his Wraith Walk, he analyzed the situation with a terrifying, detached clarity. The Goblins were opportunistic scavengers, not guides. They would lead her into an ambush, take her doll, and leave her for dead. The plague was magical in nature, not biological; his Apex Dweller resilience wouldn't have prevented it, and conventional remedies would be useless. The infection was nascent, a faint aura, but it was spreading.
He had to intervene, immediately and decisively. But his body was miles away in his compound, sitting in a vulnerable trance. He couldn't fight. He couldn't speak to her. He was an impotent ghost.
He focused on the goblin with the source-wound. The creature's mind was a chaotic mess of simple, greedy thoughts: shiny doll, trick girl, warden hoard. Elias poured a sliver of essence into a focused Soul Whisper, not of terror, but of pure, concentrated avarice. He projected an image into the goblin's mind: a single, gleaming gold coin, lying on the ground just a few feet away, partially hidden under a mossy rock.
The goblin's beady eyes widened. It forgot Elara completely, its greed overriding all else. It broke away from the group and scrambled towards the illusionary coin. This created a momentary distraction.
In that split second, Elias withdrew his Wraith Walk, his consciousness snapping back into his body with the force of a physical blow. He gasped, the air rushing back into his lungs. There was no time to prepare, no time to gather his minions. He snatched his iron spear, grabbed a pouch of medical herbs and reagents out of pure, desperate hope, and bolted from his compound.
He ran. His Physical Conditioning and the ambient power of the Crucible had made him strong, but he was not superhuman. He pushed his body to its absolute limit, his metal-and-bone armor clattering, his lungs burning. The forest was a blur. His mind was a frantic map, calculating the fastest route, a path he knew intimately from his endless ethereal and corvid surveillance.
Every snapped twig, every sharp breath, was a countdown timer against the plague's progression in her small body.
He arrived at the Whispering Falls not as a silent, terrifying spirit, but as a crashing, physical force, bursting through the undergrowth. The sight that greeted him was what he'd feared. The goblin, having found no coin, had turned back to the others, arguing. Elara was crying, scared by their sudden change in demeanor. One of them had its grimy hand on her arm.
They froze when he appeared. Their chittering died in their throats. They saw not the ethereal Warden of legend, but a physical incarnation of death and fury, his chest heaving from the punishing run, his hidden eyes burning with a cold fire.
His new Intimidating Presence trait rolled off him in palpable waves of menace. The goblins, creatures of low cunning and high cowardice, were paralyzed by it.
Elias didn't waste a moment. He pointed his spear at the goblin holding Elara. "Release her," he commanded. His voice was not a whisper; it was a guttural roar of pure command.
The goblin flinched and let go as if her arm were red-hot iron.
Elara's head snapped up. Her tear-filled eyes widened, not with fear this time, but with a dawning, desperate hope. "Warden!"
"Behind me," he ordered, the same command he had given her once before. She scrambled behind his legs without a second's hesitation, her small hands clutching the back of his armor.
Now, it was just him and the three terrified goblins. His mind worked furiously. He couldn't just kill them. He needed information. He needed the source of the plague.
He used his Harvest skill in reverse. It was designed to rip essence from the dying. But with his Reaper of Souls specialty, he wondered if he could use it to read the resonance of the plague itself. He focused his will on the goblin with the festering wound, sending out a fine tendril of necrotic energy, not to harm, but to sample.
[Skill: Harvest used for diagnostic purposes. Analyzing magical contagion signature...]
[Contagion Identified: Gutter-Rot.]
[Source: A shamanistic fetish or totem. Requires prolonged proximity to a potent source to become a carrier. Symptoms: Slow decay of living tissue, parasitic life-drain, eventual catatonia and death.]
[Cure: Destruction of the source totem. Alternatively, a powerful counter-ritual involving life-aspected magic.]
Elias possessed no life-aspected magic. Destruction was his only path.
He leveled his spear at the infected goblin. "The sickness," he snarled. "Where did it come from? Where is the totem?"
The goblins, terrified beyond reason, only chittered and shook their heads. Words were failing. He needed to use a language they would understand.
He grabbed the lead goblin with his free hand, lifting the squirming creature off the ground. He looked it in the eyes and used Soul Whisper, projecting not an image, but a feeling: the cold, slow, inevitable sensation of Gutter-Rot consuming its own body from the inside out. He showed the goblin its own death.
The creature shrieked, a high, thin sound of pure mental agony. "The Green Caves! The Rot-Totem! Great Shaman Grolnok!" it squealed, the words tumbling out in a torrent of terror.
Elias had his target. He tossed the goblin aside, where it landed in a whimpering heap. He had no more use for them.
"Leave this place," he commanded the goblin tribe. "Do not return. The forest to the east is forbidden to you now." It was a royal decree, backed by the implicit threat of absolute annihilation.
The goblins didn't need to be told twice. They fled, disappearing into the woods like frightened rats.
The crisis was averted. The information was secured. But the problem remained. Elara, his Primary Objective, stood behind him, shivering, the faint, sickly yellow-green aura of the Gutter-Rot still clinging to her. She was infected. He had found the name of the disease, the source, the location. But he was now a doctor with a diagnosis and a prognosis, standing beside a patient who was fading by the second.
He turned and knelt, the metal plates of his armor groaning. He looked at the child, the source of all his illogical actions, the anchor of his lost humanity. The plague was magical, feeding on life force. And he, the Reaper of Souls, was a master of life force, albeit from the other side of the equation.
He had no cure. But perhaps, just perhaps, he could offer treatment.
He placed his hand gently on her forehead. The gesture, which had once been so awkward, now felt strangely natural. He focused his will, drawing on the vast well of necrotic energy within him, and began to carefully, precisely, use the principles of Harvest not to take, but to prune. He began siphoning away the parasitic Gutter-Rot energy from her aura, like a surgeon excising a tumor.
The sickly yellow-green aura flowed into him. It was a vile, corrosive energy. It didn't harm him—his necrotic nature was antithetical to it—but it was disgusting. He was filtering the poison through himself.
Elara shuddered, then let out a soft sigh. A little bit of color returned to her cheeks. The plague was not gone. Its roots were still there. But he had stalled its advance. He had bought time.
[System Alert: Gutter-Rot progression halted temporarily. Host's necrotic filtration can delay onset of major symptoms for approximately three cycles.]
Three days. He had three days to find the Green Caves, confront a goblin shaman, destroy a cursed totem, and return, or the child would die. He had saved her from the immediate danger only to place her at the center of a new, desperate race against time.