You take deep breath, extinguishing your green fire and calm down. You were started to get excited and scared at the same time. You wanted to run away but you always wanted to face the challenge head on. These two emotions clashed visciously. Eventually, by a thread, your sense of bravery won.
Opening you eyes again you can focus your magical senses and feel that the thing inside of there was some sort of "leader". All of the fungal corruption in this forest which covered nearly every single living thing originated from inside this temple.
Perhaps if you were destroy the creature within, the corruption would be atleast halted.
You go inside the stone temple, the combination of decades old dust and purple mushroom spores which glowed slightly as they floated nearly made you gag heavily. The smell was even worse, it was like a mixture of a rotten body and twenty years sweat in a boot. You had to effectively cover your nose with your long tongue as a makeshift was to cover your nose.
This temple despite it's "owners" being active within here, it was still old and worn down. Parts of the wall had collapsed and filled in with fungal matter, the floor which normally would've been a cold stone material was made of a magenta flesh like material which seemed to try and suck you in whenever your moving, making a audible pop whenever you took one of your paws off the material. You made sure to not let it get its chance and kept moving inside the temple at all costs.
The thing that made the movement you saw from outside is nowhere to be seen.
You head left into another room and find it even worse there, the fungal matter had covered nearly every square inch of space, you turn back, it wasn't worth going in there.
You head straight and then you hear something behind you.
Turning around, expecting to see another of the animals you were horrifically shocked that you were wrong. Even more grotesque and ugly than the Corrupted animals before was quite simply put... a monster.
Ooze dripped from every pore, nearly dozens of mutilated limbs coated in toadstools and mushrooms sluggishly reached out to you, it smell of pure rot and feces, even worse than what you had smelled before.
It's face was human, at least originally, half of it was horrifically covered in the corruption, it's one viable eye buldging and purple, it moaned giving you a clear view of its rotten teeth and the knowledge that the fungus wasn't just on the outside, instead they grew inside of him, taking nearly every available space to grow.
In its chest, oozing purple ichor was a beating heart, purple, putrid, budging out and beating irregular beats. The sight nearly made you vomit as you saw the horrific thing look down at you, it's one eye looking at you with a mixture of agony and rage.
This is the hive mind, something in your head told you. At its core it's still an intelligent human, it's controlling all of the other infected animals.
Before you can make any other moves, the corrupted human makes a deep, aninmalistic gurgle before using speed that defys biology and slams one of its fists to the ground, nearly causing a shockwave and instantly crumbling all of the worn stone and fungi below it like they were a cracker.