Chapter: 805
Jay thought he probably should have just left the eggs inside Lamp’s skin suit. They would have done nothing but become crushed by its skeletal feet, stomping around inside the skin.
(Destroy the eggs. Lamp - put your skin back together if you want.)
Jay stepped back as the skeletons began to stomp again, outside of the splash zone. The eggs popped and squirted bits of brown and gray everywhere, but none of them survived the onslaught of bone feet.
Next, Jay studied the leftover bodies.
Their blood was turned to a green fluid, but it didn’t flow through every part. Their heads seemed to be useless to the parasites and didn’t hold any green fluid at all.
“No wonder their eyes looked deflated.”
The decapitated bodies revealed more though. The stomach and lungs had been repurposed for the parasites.
The stomach broke food down, but was rerouted into the lungs where there are more eggs waiting; fed with both nutrients, oxygen and blood.
“Disgusting…” Jay prodded it with a stick.
Jay guessed that the knight, or whatever this was now, had died when the spine was severed. There were cuts through the other parts of its insides, but only one in each of their spines.
“I guess the worst part about them is the armor.” he thought, surprised at how easy they were to kill - well, theoretically easy.
Jay didn’t want to look too closely in case something jumped out, but as he poked the spine, it felt squishy and spongy at the center.
Usually there was about 1cm (0.39inch) of squishy matter - the spinal cord, but here the squishy matter was about 8cm across (3.14inch).
Having worked as a butcher, he knew this was shockingly abnormal, and only caused his curiosity to grow.
He poked and pulled some more, and soon he pulled something out of the spine.
Half of a disgusting severed worm was extracted. The tail end.
“So they live upside-down in the spine. The head must be deeper down the torso somewhere. Eugh.” Jay threw the stick away.
He had seen enough.
“So, the eggs enter someone’s body, grow into worms while eating their spines and then control people.” he nodded, assembling a picture of the parasite.
It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that it somehow pumped eggs from the lungs out of the hand. Jay guessed that it had grown too weak to effectively be used in battle due to changes it must have undergone.
Still, he was satisfied with knowing this much, and knowing your enemy was half the battle.
When the skeletons slid their blades through the armor gaps, they at least wouldn’t have to thrash it around randomly anymore.
They now had a target - the spine.
“It’s no wonder the sneak attacks didn’t work. They probably slid the blades just to the side of the spine, missing it completely. So the options are to destroy the body completely or sever the spine, though it’s obvious which is the better choice.”
Jay had the skeletons check the armor next, flipping one face-up so they could check for gaps in the armor, so that they could know exactly where their blades could penetrate.