Ren made his choice… He would not forge the prison.
He was never going to sacrifice his very first contracted beast, the humble creature he had genuinely resented at the very beginning of his journey. It had started as a mere Spore when he was just a ten-year-old boy frantically trying to brush the fungus out of his hair out of embarrassment, ashamed because it was universally classified as the weakest entity on the registry while everyone else paraded magnificent, awe-inspiring monsters.
Yet today, that tiny mushroom was irreplaceable.
And his attachment today had nothing to do with its utility on the battlefield anymore. It was anchored in their shared history, the crushing guilt of forcing the symbiote into hibernation by his mistakes, and the countless lethal encounters where it had been forced awake and silently kept him breathing without ever failing.
The mushroom had been there long before Ren meant anything to the world.
He was not going to lose it now.
