Explode Or Conquer

"Try not to disturb him, Felli."

Tearia placed her hand on Felli's shoulder as she announced it to everyone in the room. Yulrin and Vandor just shrugged their shoulders as they all found a spot to sit down around the room. Some of them pulled out books and others continued their training while they waited. The girls gathered nearby Xilo and sat down staring at Xilo. Energy dripped from his palm like a drop of water breaking through the ceiling. Felli felt her heart stir around inside her chest as she watched Xilo. "Not again." Felli quickly tried her best to cut these kinds of thoughts off before they escalated.

Still as a statue Xilo let the woman in his mind guide him. Sinking his energy deeper into the core, Xilo was strengthening his grip on it. "Hopefully this works." If it didn't Xilo knew they were going to be in for a load of trouble. An hour passed by, then two, when he got to the third hour of it all, the exhaustion had caught up. His breathing quickened as Althea continued to let him exhaust himself. "He's doing well." She hated to admit it but she kind of felt like a Mother praising her child for doing a good job. "I think we almost got it." Noticing Xilo's condition Althea dropped a bit more of her own energy into it to help him out.

"Just a little longer Xilo, you got this."

"What do we do once I'm done with this?"

"That'll be the difficult part, once you start trying to control it, it'll fight back. You'll have to use your surplus of energy inside of it to threaten it. Whether that be trying to blow it up or outright attacking it is up to you. This core has a bit of intelligence from what I noticed. It's only at the level of a small child though so you should be fine. Once you tame it, cut off its control of the Astral Zone and take it for yourself. Oh and be careful you don't explode from its energy overloading your body."

"Hold up, did you just say explode!?!?"

"Don't panic, once you're in control a lot of energy will flow into your body, deal with it however you want. You could strengthen yourself, give it away or just waste it. I'd much prefer you get stronger with it, if you wanted my suggestion."

Listening carefully to the woman's words, Xilo calmed himself down and continued.

"There's always some kind of danger."

"I'm glad you're catching on."

Xilo felt an urge to scold the woman next to him however he managed to hold it in. "Another time." Rolling his eyes, Xilo went back to concentrating as time went on. Hearing the woman telling him it was time Xilo stopped dropping energy. Gripping his hand, he got rid of the darkness hiding his energy and went on the attack. The second the core noticed a forgein presence it's cyan shine turned to red as its danger levels went up. The first thing Xilo tried to do was block off any of its attempts at attacking the outside world. Putting a giant layer of his energy around the outskirts he used that as a barrier to lock everything in. Multiple small tentacles tried to break past them, only to be stopped.

"Good, that's working. Now to take care of the rest of the problem."

With the few options Xilo had he created ice shards with his energy that dug into the core's energy. Slicing it apart Xilo didn't want to go down the explosion route. "There's a chance it just chooses to die." If that happened then everyone here would be dead. "I think Xelfia's rubbing off on me." Choosing the brute force route Xilo sliced up more of its little tentacles of energy. "So many." They were all converging on the forgein energy inside of it. Hundreds of tentacles slithered their way and grabbed at him. Whenever one touched him a sharp icicle sliced through them freeing him. "Gross." Touching another person's energy like this that he wasn't familiar with felt extremely unpleasant.

"Like thousands of bugs are crawling on my skin."

Doing his best to ignore it, he felt a bit of his energy disappear. "It looks like it's getting serious." Tentacles would converge in a small area and break off bits of his energy before consuming it. Isolated Xilo couldn't fight back against the sheer number. "Looks like the timer has begun." Getting more aggressive, Xilo started to shred any tentacle he could get near as he forced most of his energy together. A sword sliced through the endless sea while Xilo made sure to keep an eye on his shield. No matter how many he cut down though they just kept coming back. "This is going nowhere." Struggling to breathe, Xilo kept trying.

"It's not working."

"Keep trying, I'm thinking of a way to help you."

Sweat was pouring down Xilo's face like mad.

"I don't think we can do this alone."

Going over every scenario she could in her head Althea could only come to that conclusion.

"Looks like we need the others. It's a lot stronger then I had initially thought"

Thinking that to herself Althea watched as Xilo fought with everything he had. "Can he even split focus right now?" That could potentially spell disaster for them if he wasn't careful. "Then..it's up to me?" There was no one else to do it, the only problem was that she couldn't just simply talk with them. "They've never heard my words before." She had tried to talk with them a bit in the past but they never heard her. So if the girl's couldn't hear her she would have to chose one his new friends.

"Will they even trust me?"

Hearing Xilo groan in pain Althea stopped overthinking it as she picked one of them and gave it a try.

"Please work."

She had twenty different chances, surely one of them would work.

"....Right?"