Dust (Part 2)

That dust spiraled through the air and gathered to form five humanoid colossus, more than 20 feet tall with bright yellow eyes. Aside from the eyes, the creatures had no definitive features or shape. The entire dust cloud was what constituted their bodies, and the creatures promptly identified the two as invaders and used the sand to try to drown Nicola and Tuatha.

"Oh gods! A sand golem." said the Tuatha in panic. "It's supposed to be impossible to artificially create them! Their core can move inside the body like a slime, or be outside hidden and controlling the mass of sand, where the hell could this thing's core be?"

Nicola didn't care if that was possible or not, the only things that worried him were that it was right in front of them and that they both still hadn't reacted to the attack.

He threw himself to the side, using his tails to grab the wisp and bring it with him. "Come Tuatha, react or we will be buried here, literally!" Nicola screamed making the wisp wake up from his dream of trying to understand the structure of the golem.

"Don't use fire!" He said as he raised his open hand in the air to reinforce his command.

'Sand golem, my ass. Nicola thought. 'Golems have no life force while this thing is alive. The obvious answer would be to burn it, but if it were me, I would have filled the air with something volatile.

'Even well-dispersed flour is highly flammable and if this thing is what I think, the resulting explosion could kill me.'

He was right about almost everything. The creature in front of him was alive and flammable, but it wasn't an explosion that the real threat posed. It was a fungus-like creature he was facing and the dust was actually his spores.

Setting it ablaze would have caused a small explosion strong enough to send them flying everywhere, killing them both in a matter of seconds. The creature was able to move each spore individually and was using them to flood Nicola's respiratory system, making it impossible for him to breathe or cast new spells.

The spores were also able to feed on their host and drain its fluids to increase their numbers. Surviving such a multifaceted attack was nearly impossible. Unless, of course, it was someone like Nicola.

The Darkness Heavenly Essence was activated and darkness swept through Nicola's body, who quickly activated his sin of pride by creating a black armor around his body, making the darkness generated by it feed on the spores and turn them into food.

"These things are not golems, they are alive. Use the darkness, Tuatha!" Nicola said while releasing a series of pulses of black magic that slaughtered their grain-sized opponents. The fungus made a deep, lingering noise that Lith interpreted as pain.

The creatures retrieved all of their spores, condensing them into physical form.

'How would a living creature still be guarding this place for so long?' Nicola thought. 'They seem to be some kind of fungus, maybe they were the ones to blame for the deaths of the people on the village above.' He tried to understand why they would be guarding this place for so long.

"Perhaps I'm looking at this question from the wrong angle. Why would a seemingly immortal creature bother to defend this place?" The ancient kingdom no longer exists, and if Mogar's fungi are like Earth's, killing something like that is almost impossible." He said.

"I don't know, but we're screwed. Especially if the spores share a collective mind. One of them is enough to regenerate the entire creature from scratch." Tuatha replied.

"Shouldn't care. Unless it's tied to this place, of course!" Nicola replied.

His train of thought was interrupted by the creature using earth magic to make a shower of stalactites fall from above. The two had no problem dodging, but the creature grabbed it and used that as clubs.

The spores organized into tendrils capable of freely attacking Nicola and Tuatha from all directions. The pseudo arms had no bones or joints, so they could change their trajectory at any time, forcing Tuatha to dart away before becoming trapped.

The spores spread through the air, intensifying the poisonous mist that covered the entire hall. Nicola had distributed some detox pills to Tuatha and had even thrown out the prototype armor he had developed for the wisp.

As a wisp he didn't have a physical body, the only part that mattered in his body was the core that held his soul and energy, so Nicola remembered the old tea bags made of metal, spherical and full of holes, that were used on Earth, it was ideal for creating a wisp armor. Nicola developed this armor and created some coupled weapons, such as a chain that had a blade at the end and some wands that could be controlled with the mind.