A thin tendril of sludge shot out, snaking towards Nevin. Reacting on instinct, the crimson threads wove into a shield and met the attack, and Nevin felt a strange.... Affront? Indignity? Some emotion like those shot through him, almost as if he was insulted. The sludge washed against the protective barrier - but didn't take it in, didn't eat it. It tried, sucking against the shield, but Nevin's threads were more than they could handle.
And Nevin knew he had a weapon against this thing. His crimson threads weren't absorbed by the sludge, and he could defend and attack with them. So he lashed out, his arm swinging out a lasso of threads that wrapped around one of the sludge-arms. With a mighty pull, he yanked backwards, tightening the noose of the lasso. Slowly the coil of crimson cut through the sludge, until with a heavy plop and thump, the arm fell off.
For a moment, Nevin felt victorious. He had broken this thing's power - but before he could even finish exulting in the minor victory, the abomination of magic and despair stepped on its severed arm, and the sludge was immediately reabsorbed into itself, and the arm regrew. His effort, undone, the damage erased.
Disbelief, anger, despair. The alchemist's gut curled into a knot. He had hoped that severing the sludge would render it inert to the creation - he hadn't expected it would be smart enough to recover it, and so quickly. He would need something else, some other way of defeating this monstrosity. The only question was, how was it vulnerable? Poison hadn't worked, nor had ripping a limb clean off.
It came to him, as he rolled out of the way of a trio of tendrils that tried to coil around him. The totem, that was the source of the vile magic, and it was somewhere at the center of this mass. He had to get that, get it out and destroy it. But that meant getting close, so that his threads could reach into the sludge and find the totem.
So the next time the disgusting sludge shot for him, Nevin wrapped his threads tight around his clothes, protecting him as the abomination grabbed him. It hoisted him into the air, and drew him in closer, and the blood mage knew that it intended on shoving him into its chest to consume him. It wasn't smart enough to realize that if it's arm wasn't eating him, it wouldn't be able to either. But that was fine by him.
Three feet - two feet - one foot - there. He was close to the imposing wall of sludge, and the stench this close was completely disgusting, and he found his head swimming as he struggled to breathe through the putrid odors that made his bile rise. Hopefully he wouldn't have to bear this long, as he thrust his crimson tendrils into the sludge wrapped around him, sending it back into the creation's body.
Searching, twisting, winding, the threads ran through the body, darting back and forth as they sought out the source of the corruptive filth around them. Nevin was beginning to worry - if he had to he could entirely encase himself in his threads, but at that point he didn't know if he would even be able to breathe to survive. Just as his head was about to be shoved face first into the purple-red ooze, he found what he was searching for.
His tendrils wove together and wrapped around the totem, and with a mighty heave they ripped the statuette free of the sludge. It froze, stiff and almost in shock, and then began vibrating. Nevin fell to the ground as the sludge-thing released him, its arms blindly groping about, trying to find the totem before it ran out. But it was too late by then - Nevin had rolled away, taking the totem with him as he moved further, and he stood up as the sludge beast collapsed, the filth beginning to dissolve.
But even as that sludge disappeared, more of the gunk was forming around the totem, shimmering into existence around the statuette. With a snarl, Nevin completely encased the thing in crimson loops, and tightened them inexorably, smashing the disgusting magical artifact to a fine powder. When the vile feeling of dark magic no longer flowed, he slowly released his crushing grasp, and a brown-white powder ran to the ground, all that was left of the thing.
His tendrils retracted into his skin, and Nevin adjusted his clothes as his chest heaved with exertion. The surrounding area looked absolutely demolished, chunks of earth just gone, and most of the remnants of the Goblins camp had also been absorbed during the fight. But of the abomination of magic, nothing remained but the powder of the totem.
