Gloo

During a massive war in the Barren Lands, the Second Regiment of the Moniyan Empire was almost completely wiped out. Among the sea of ​​corpses scattered all around, a Moniyan soldier had managed to survive; but he lost all his comrades and had to return alone to his native country.

Dark clouds shroud the Barren Lands year after year. Without the sun, moon, and stars to guide his path, this lone survivor became lost and lost in the Shadow Swamp.

The land and water found in the forests of Shadow Marsh are corrupted by the Abyss, leaving the place damp and putrid. The man's extreme hunger and fatigue, along with the endless forest around him, plunged him into darkness and despair.

As he was about to pass out, a strangest sensation made him regain consciousness: a sticky sensation spread down his back, then he lost all control of his limbs which ran wildly on their own.

He would describe this moment in his memoir as feeling like he was just a wooden puppet, like those played by the Moniyan children. He was manipulated by an invisible force, rushing nimbly through the forest at incredible speed.

The man was about to lose consciousness when the body he no longer controlled stopped. Coming to his senses, he looked with wide eyes at what was before him...

There he saw the ruins of a great temple surrounded by vines, weathered by wind and frost but still grand and imposing. These ancient temple ruins stood out like a sore thumb in the surroundings of Shadow Swamp.

The strange feeling running down his spine faded when he stopped, but that's when he saw something small jumping into the nearby bushes, seemingly hidden.

Could this thing be behind all this? The soldier was determined to get to the bottom of this and moved in the direction the figure was taking. A loud rustling sound emanated from the vegetation, and it seemed as if some sort of violent struggle was taking place inside.

And as the soldier advanced furtively, reaching out to push aside a branch, there appeared before him a small creature the size of a charcoal briquette; he prepared to catch it and study it more closely, but before he could act, countless others had appeared from everywhere. They piled up neatly, and in just over ten seconds, the creature no bigger than a lump of coal had transformed into a mighty beast. This struck fear into the heart of poor soldier Moniyan who fainted on the spot. But when he awoke once again, he found himself no longer in the swamp, but on the border of the Drylands and the Empire.

Back in the empire, he regaled everyone with this tale. The citizens of Moniyan had great respect for this veteran, but considered his story to be mere hallucinations of a man consumed by fatigue after having narrowly escaped death.

After all, even the most erudite scholars of Moniyan had never heard of such a creature. There was little the soldier could do except write his experiences down on paper, as the evidence that would be discovered later might prove his sanity.

As luck would have it, he didn't have to wait that long. This dream came true while he was still alive and healthy.

When the Elvish text "Azrya" reached the Magic Academy, a student of the Moniyan Empire read records within a faction called Gloo - records directly consistent with the experiences of that Moniyan soldier he had read about before.

The curious student sought out the dean of Ulturia School, Eudora, who, after reading through the soldier's writings, confirmed that they did indeed describe an encounter with Gloo.

After hearing it from Eudora, humanity became aware of the existence of the Gloo, special beings with special ways of life. Thanks to a mysterious secretion, once just one of them had attached itself to a living being, they could then begin to completely envelop it.

Additionally, their gel-like outer covering acted as a conscious organ that allowed unique neural networks to function between individual “Goos,” forming the larger “Gloo” sensation. Among these beings, some would occupy higher roles within the network, commanding all others when they combined into a single form. By merging into different numbers[,], they were able to control their size and shape at will.

The Goos were shown to be intelligent and pure beings, proud of their shared "group wisdom" which was mainly used to play pranks on neighboring Elves. When she heard about Private Moniyan's bizarre adventure, she realized what had happened: a group of Goos must have wandered too far away, and so they clung to him as a larger organism to hitchhike home.

Since his birth, the Goos had never ventured outside of Azrya, instead guarding the forests and the mysterious old temple. They had never initiated any sort of battle, at most taking the form of a terrifying beast to frighten away any outsiders who accidentally entered their territory. Even the Elves who lived nearby knew little about their species.

Perhaps Goo's greatest intelligence could be seen in the fact that they resided in the depths of the forests, living in peaceful harmony with the rest of the world.

However, the Abyss changed everything.

Taking refuge in the ancient temple, Goos strove to maintain his rationality and faith, to avoid becoming like the nearby Dark Elves who had fallen into his clutches. But a deep, dark corruption spread within them and their forest as the Abyss wielded its power.

Eudora was by no means unaware of Goo's predicament. At the end of Soldier Moniyan's writings, she left a few sentences.

"The Abyss is a catastrophe. It divides factions and breeds pure hatred. But maybe, just maybe, it is a chance for us: a chance for all the souls of these lands to come together once more, to become one."

When the destinies of all people are linked, where will sweet Gloo go next?