'This is going to take a while.'

With that thought Ethan decided to take his focus away from his roots but willed them to continue growing on their own as they did earlier and it worked. The roots, his roots, were growing on their own without his direct focus and he felt that the roots elsewhere were still stagnant in their own growth due to the nutritional energy flow being sent towards the extending roots to hasten their spread.

Taking his focus back to what he wanted to do before his earlier conversation with Mr. Rajesh, Ethan thought about what he wanted to do now.

'I need to test out [Create Spores] and understand how it works. Maybe I can create something that makes people loyal to me? Spore Lords can do mind control right? Ah but he's always been a great guy to everyone, mind controlling him feels wrong. Maybe I can somehow make him not freak out when he inevitably opens the door?'

Closing his eyes Ethan began to concentrate on his ability, he didn't need to say any words or incant some mystic mumbo jumbo. This was one of the perks of being a bloodline warlock, he just 'knew' how to activate his abilities and magic, almost like an instinct. It's said that babies when in water will automatically roll over on to their back or dogs will automatically begin to paddle even as pups, these sorts of instincts only usually appear so strongly in the young as they act without mental attention however Ethan's new age was 0, you could say he had just been born and this was to his benefit.

Imagining what he wanted the spores to do, he tried to create them and he succeeded after several tries and around ten minutes. He felt the top of his head begin to itch and he wanted to scratch it but he had no hands to scratch with anymore. Ethan suffered through the itch that he couldn't scratch for a few more minutes before it ended, leaving Ethan feeling more tired to the point he yawned and smacked his lips a bit to moisten his noticably drier mouth.

'Is that it? Is it done? Where is it?'

Fom Ethan's perspective nothing happened aside from a bit of an itch on his head and feeling tired however from a third perspective Ethan's previously bald mushroom cap was covered in light white fluff, similar to a ready to seed dandelion.

'Well fuck, that was absolutely pointless. Nothing happened! Maybe I used it wrong? No, I definitely didn't use it wrong, I felt like it was working. This lame fuck ass ability! I'm dead! I'm so fucked, I have like one actually usable ability but my roots are so damn slow! I'm entirely defenseless!'

Ethan was pulled out of his thoughts by a loud crash and several screams from elsewhere in the apartment building.

'This is not going to go well at all.'

Whilst he was inwardly panicking about the cause of the noises, he heard a different sound coming from behind him, where the window was and it sounded like a really large bee. At first the sound wasn't that loud, like a regular bee but the sound grew closer and louder, twice as loud as big fat bee at least.

'I fucking hate bees.'

*BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZ* 

*CLONK, CLONK*

Something was trying to get into the gap in the window but was hitting the glass and deeper in the apartment building beyond his increasingly feeble looking front door, complete with four locks and multiple chains for safety, there was an eruption of distant pandemonium.

*CLONK, CLONK CLONK*

*CRASH, BANG*

'UUURRGGHH!'

The sounds of unknown things came from behind and in front of him, at this point in time he wasn't ashamed to admit he was feeling a bit scared.

'Oh Christ, it's a madhouse, everythings going to shit so fast and I don't get any time to think!'

The buzzing grew louder and with a slight clacking sound, like someone stepping on those thin fried potato snacks sold in a bag or a dog with long nails running on tile flooring, whatever it was had slipped through the gap in the open window.

Then Ethan saw it fly right past him, barely missing him and landing about two feet in front of his face, a small, almost fluffy mist of white trailing it.

*BZZZZZ, Splotch.*

The banging outside of his apartment grew louder and he saw the shadows out of the corner of his eye beyond the thing that was now in front of him and the barely registered rushed footsteps and hushed voices of people running past his door towards the stairs heading up to the roof, but Ethan's interest was too honed in on the creature in front of him for him to have spared a thought to these things.

'My God, it's so hairy.'

This thought echoed in Ethan's mind and it took his entire being not to follow up with a mental yell of "That's what she said" an almost knee jerk response crafted through years of online banter, the joke that never fails to get a response when it's unexpected and it makes sense.

In front of his mushroom body, suckling at the gore pile with it's tubular mouth appendage, was a huge fly, around the size of a fat cat. The way the huge insect moved around as it's fat, barbed black tongue struck out from the tube to lap at the gore, the remains of Ethan's body from his transformation and how it moved almost like a slideshow because it was so fast completely creeped Ethan out. What was worse were the multitude of hairs poking off of the thing and it's large round insectoid eyes that slightly reflected everything in the room with a tinge of multi-coloured fluorescence like a dark mirror or a pool of black oil. 

*BZZ*

The Fly completely ignored Ethan and continued to lap at the gore. Buzzing it's wings from time to time and using it's forelegs to clean any gore off it's tube mouth that didn't get pulled in properly by the worm like tongue. The gore wasn't just being sucked up, the barb on the end was hooking into it as the tongue shot out with decent speed like a frog's tongue would to catch prey, only the barb was ripping the flesh out in small chunks before pulling them into the tube mouth and all the way up to what could only be described as the head.

'This thing is fucking ugly and that tongue is nasty. I bet if that tongue hit a living person in the neck it would be game over completely. It must be some type of monster and it must be a low level one since it's so small and it eats leftovers, basic ecology says those who can't hunt scavenge, the bottom feeders. It's not attacking me so maybe it has no interest in fungal creatures?'

Ethan stopped his roots moving towards the puddle of water in the direction of the door and found some roots close to the legs of the Fly with his eyes. He started moving towards the fly and it did, with the same stagnation of growth affecting the other roots as it did earlier.

*BZZ*

'That's it, go on, keep going. You're going to be my first monster kill!'

Ethan urged the extremely slow roots to grab the legs of the Fly with great excitement. He hoped to immobilise it at first and then force his roots inside the creature somehow so he could suck out the insides.

'Just because you're not trying to kill me, doesn't mean I'm not going to try to kill you. Disgusting thing!'

Meanwhile the sounds of fighting and shouting continued from outside the sounds of crashing grew louder, something was coming up the building and it was trashing whatever it found along the way, it probably would've killed anyone it saw too but most of those people had already ran as far up the building as they could trying to survive, the sounds of fighting were the few who either didn't run or couldn't.

Watching the roots inch closer to the oversized black Fly with bated breath, Ethan could hardly contain his excitement. It was similar to how one feels when they're playing High Risk Jenga and all the easy pieces have been taken out.

After several minutes one of the roots happened to be ahead of the others due to Ethan's as of now terrible control and said root touched the hairs on the creature's back leg.

*BZZZZ*

The Fly was startled and immediately took off into the air committing itself to flying in laps around the apartment trying to discover a way out or what might've touched it.

'FUCK!'

*BZZZZZZ* 

The Fly continued flying in circles, triangles, figures of eight, you could probably list any shape or pattern and the annoying Fly must have flown it at some point on one of its many laps around the room. It took some time before the Fly calmed itself down enough to land again but this time it landed in a different spot though luckily Ethan could still sit it to his front-left side.

'Let's try this again.'

As Ethan was preparing his second attack in a misguidedly hopeful attempt to level up, he noticed the Fly wasn't eating the gore anymore, instead it went entirely still before it shook which was followed by a sound not unlike the sound of someone's stomach rumbling when they're hungry crossed with the wet, gross sound made by someone vomiting the last bit of vomit out, came from the Fly's tubular mouth and head.

The Fly's head tilted up and whilst the mouth tube aimed down and something came slowly from the head. The object was a yellowy-off white sphere made of rubber and it was being pushed down the tube, followed by another one then another one and finally one more.

When the final sphere came out of the head the first had just plopped out of the mouth and lay atop the gore mound, accompanied by a thick greeny-yellow bile which seemed to encase all four spheres before becoming like a rigid gelatin.

'Eggs. It's laying eggs. It just laid eggs. That means maggots are going to pop out and then there will be more. Considering magic is real now, this seems oddly natural.'

The Fly finished laying eggs, looking a bit smaller now than it did before and after lapping it's black tongue a few times with it's barbed hook tearing some more chunks of gore away from the mound, the Fly took back into the air.

'If I remember right, flies only live for a day and during that day they mate and lay eggs, but those flies don't have mouths because they don't eat right? I could be wrong, but if I assume that's true then the fact this one has a mouth means it's not gonna die quickly enough that eating doesn't matter.'

Pondering what this means Ethan observed the Fly continuing it's laps around the apartment with the incessant buzzing that accompanied it getting more irritating by the second. The sound was made worse by the fact the Fly kept stopping on the walls and ceiling for a few seconds to skitter along the hard surfaces before resuming. 

The Fly came close to the window a few times but each time managed to just narrowly miss escaping with another bang on the window.

Naturally the window being behind Ethan, he was unable to see what it was doing and could only suffer the noise, as if it were a terrible form of torture that existed only to be annoying.

'If I leave these eggs alone they're going to hatch and then I'll have five of these fucking things flying around banging into stuff.'

The thought reminded him of a pest control TV show he watched once where they opened a house and a swarm of flies came flying out, all he could remember was they looked like a cloud and the sound was really loud.

'I can't let that happen. If they eat my old body then what will they eat when it's gone? Me? No. Definitely can't let that happen.'

Some more roots began their crusade to entanglement once again as they headed towards the eggs by Ethan's will.

Whilst Ethan was consumed with the control of moving his roots he hadn't noticed the buzzing had stopped, the Fly having successfully left through the open window now that it was slightly smaller than when it came in it wasn't as much of a struggle.

The first root reached the outer gelatin like substance encasing the eggs and Ethan found it was surprisingly sturdy, his roots couldn't penetrate the goo looking substance.

'It looks soft but it's not.. Or maybe my roots are just that weak, if I can't break it maybe I can suck it up?'

Thinking that Ethan tried to will his roots to suck up the Gelatin like it was a liquid which it certainly looked like. Perhaps to no one's surprise it didn't work, the only result from the attempt was an almost inaudible sucking noise similar to that noise from the straw that the one person who insists they still have drink left in their paper cup whenever they eat fast food, you know the one.

"Hmm..."

'Is there nothing I can do?'

Ethan was frankly annoyed that he couldn't even kill some unborn Maggots and was inwardly cursing the system and 'God' for not giving him a stronger transformation.

'I have no idea what to do with these eggs, I guess I could-'

*BANG*

Ethan's thoughts were interrupted as his apartment door was smashed from the outside with a loud bang something hit the door. Silence reigned for a moment and a startled Ethan looked at the apartment door, his tension high.

*SMASH*

A second time something outside hit the door, there was a small cracking pattern and a wood chip from the inner side of the door came spinning past Ethan, almost in slow motion as Ethan glanced at it, with his mouth in a firm frown, his eyes moved back to the door in time to see the third strike hit the door.

*BANG*

*CRACK*

The third hit smashed more of the door away creating a fist sized hole about a third of the way up the door and something partially came through the hole, it looked like a rock or a stone. The stone left the hole in the door and Ethan saw light green, quickly replaced by a yellow eye with a horizontal pupil.

'Oh shit. That's not the eye of a normal person. Not at all.'