Kali screamed and kicked and yelled, but it all fell on the deaf ears of a running Eodum. Eodum had heard the roar from the clearing, Eodum had felt the crash of energy, and Eodum felt the rumbling of the giant worm behind it. Right now, Kali's struggles were the least of Eodum's worries. Right now, it was worrying about not dying.
The rodent jumped between the branches, using one tentacle to hold Kali close, it was forced to create more to be as nimble as it could. The brand new limbs fired out, gripping each branch tightly to swing above the forest floor. It made it about sixish minutes of running before a fatal twist of fate had Eodum grab the branch of a rotting tree.
With a wet-sounding tear and crack, Eodum felt itself hurtling to the forest floor with the mechanical energy it built up pushing it horizontally quite a ways. A single step on the ground, Eodum barely evaded the worm jumping from the ground below. Dirt, stones, leaves, and sticks were flung in every direction as the ravenous worm violently ripped itself from the ground. It sailed on the air before plunging back into the sea of dirt.
Kali let out a yelp of surprise as the bottom of her foot and shoe had been grazed by the worm as it tore through everything in its path. A poor tree ws upturned by the bulge in the ground while the worm ripped up the unfortunate plant's roots. Eodum could only keep moving as it had the feeling that the worm behind it had the advantage of being more powerful.
The rat could maybe beat it if it did that strange thing with the blackhole in the void, but the destructive and terrifying hunger it felt was more than enough a deterrent to keep the rat from powering up. That decision could change however because the worm hadn't shown all it could yet.
After a minute more of the chase, the worm bellowed a roar so deep that Eodum and Kali could feel it reverberating in their bones. The worm had started to slow down, but the danger Eodum felt told the rat that the monster hadn't run out of stamina quite yet. As if confirming Eodum's thoughts, the worm's body started squeezing together and condensing.
The worm's mouth pulled closer into its body before firing back out towards the duo. A clear liquid glob left the worm's mouth, and every part of Eodum's body told it to dodge. Following them, the rat dove out of the way just in time for the glob to soar overhead. Little parts of it broke off and landed on the rat's fur, and suddenly, gasses started coming from the now sizzling parts of Eodum.
The main blob of acid from before landed on a nearby, unsuspecting fox, and with a screech muffled by the liquid, it started dissolving until there was nothing left. The dirt below also started disintegrating, and soon the acid had fizzled into a most likely toxic smoke. The toxicity of this was confirmed as when the smoke reached above the canopy, eight song birds fell from the sky, hitting the ground with a sickening crack and thud.
Eodum would have watched more carefully if only its fur wasn't also disintegrating. In the new barren spots on Eodum's coat, there was now introduction of the rat's skin to the outside world. Underneath the beyond black fur was an even somehow darker shade of black as the skin. Small specks of glowing colors, much smaller than their counterpart on Eodum's fur, were dotted distances apart. Occasionally two of the star-like lights were close enough to appear in the same barren spot, but that was a rarity only seen in two of the thirty something holes.
The holes, for the most part, were small, but the melting and dying cells of Eodum's body still screamed in pain. This was compounded by the fact that the acid was still eating away, and Eodum could still feel that searing, agonizing torment. The health that Eodum lost wasn't that much, worrying but not a lot to cause problems, but there must've been some pain-inducing aspect to the acid that. Eodum barely had the capacity to register the screams that sounded behind it, "DODGE!!!"
Lethargically, Eodum jumped out of the way again. Another blob of acid ripped through the air, an unpleasant burning smell soon following. Eodum expected another wave of torment, but not a single droplet landed. Instead, someone else's cries and screams bounced off of the forest trees.
Eodum turned to see Kali, or at least, most of her. She was mostly there, though raw bits of flesh peeked out from behind dissolved clothing. Then, there was her arm. Her left arm was normal except for the raw flesh and missing hand. Blood dripped down landing on the ground and sizzled on impact, signaling the presence of acid mixed in with the blood.
Her hand was gone all the way to the middle of her forearm, and even that seemed to be rapidly decreasing in size. Warped bone peeked from mutilated muscle and skin, the barest bit of fat seemingly softening to the point of dripping down her arm's new stump. Rapidly shortening tendons peeked out of her arm before burning out of sight into her trembling body. Another wave of blood spurted out from the wound, covering her other arm as she clamped down on it.
As she squeezed tighter and tighter, the bone seemingly creaked beneath her terrifying grip. Less blood started cascading from the wound unlike the tears of pain and fear that streamed down her cheeks. Her cries, however, again fell on deaf ears as Eodum focused on the worm. This time, it was scrunching up even more, and just as Eodum prepared for another orb of acid to fly at even faster than before, the worm leapt, a rushing brownish-pink bullet towards a startled and surprised rat.