All this happened in an instant. There was a sudden rushing in my ears, and I suddenly found myself sitting down, hard, the core dropping from my grasp.

“Jeremy? What’s the… Look at the core!” It was Belinda’s voice, and she stooped to grab the core from the ground, holding it up. In the light of the moon, we saw that it was no longer black. The darkness had sloughed off from the core, and it now shone with a rich, dark brown sheen, like polished wood.

“You cleansed it of the corruption!” said Astrid. “That’s amazing! How did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I feel like a million dollars now! Wow!”

I’d somehow gotten a massive boost from cleansing the corrupted core, and I jumped up, feeling like I could have sprinted a marathon. Belinda handed me the core, and I slipped it into a pocket of my jacket.

“There’s a few more things I want to harvest from this creature,” said Astrid. “I can take the tail, for one thing, and also its tongue. On a regular cobra, I’d take the heart, but with this… Belinda, what’s wrong?”

In the midst of Astrid’s monologue, Belinda had suddenly doubled over, putting her hands at her temples and letting out a pained hiss. “It’s the psychic signature that led me here, coming back stronger than ever. We need to have a look in the cave, there’s someone in there!”

“All right,” I said a little doubtfully, looking at the entrance to the cave. “One of us should stay out here.”

“I’ll stay here and harvest the few usable bits from this monster,” Astrid said.

Selena spoke up. “I’ll stay with you. None of us should be alone right now.”

“Ok,” I said. “You two keep watch out here. Belinda, let’s check it out. We won’t go far.”

Belinda, who had retrieved her flail from the carcass, came along behind me. Astrid had given me her torch, and I shone its bright beam into the mouth of the cave. It went back a little way then turned a corner. With my magitech rifle in one hand and the torch in the other, I stepped carefully up and approached the corner.

The floor was covered in bones. They were mostly animal bones, but there were a fair few human bones mixed in there as well. Around the corner, the cave opened up into a broad, high chamber. The smell was foul. This was the den of the Putrefied Cobra.

I shone my torch around, seeing cocoons like Astrid had described lining the walls and piled up in the corners of the cave.