“Off to the coral.” I insisted, pulling Jun along while her gauntlet tendrils fought her every step of the way. I ducked below a chunk that had been torn off and shoved Jun into the corner, keeping her out of harm’s way while she got her new function under control. My hands pressed into the slightly sharp coral and I pulled myself up just enough to get a good look at the eel, orange bolts of electricity dancing inside its circling pattern as it built up an attack.

{Analysis, please.} I said instead of initiating my interface, testing how mundane the tasks were that The End would go along with.

//ANALYZING: COMPLETE. CLOUD DWELLER EEL, ELECTRICAL FIRE VARIATION.

//A massive eel that lives among the lowest clouds in the sky, consuming the electrical impulses that would normally become lightning. This specific specimen has a Skyfire core, which grants it its orange colouring and the ability to wield flames along with electricity.

Core Mastery: 9.

Core Function: Lesser flame and electricity manipulation.

Battery: 25 Speed: 8 Power: 29 Resilience: 4 Recovery: 6

“It’s stronger than both of us.” I warned, wincing as Jun’s copper tendrils slammed into my hip. “Can you be a little more careful with those?”

“Sorry. Sorry.” Jun hissed, waving her left hand through the air as she plucked at her interface. “I know I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t know what it is. It’s so… frustrating.”

I knew that frustration all too well, but I also knew that it was something Jun would have to work through on her own. Each function had its own unique quirks, so I couldn't help her if I wanted to. All I could do was give her the same support I gave my old friends, and hope that she’d reciprocate like they’d done for me.

“If you just want a quick fix, try unequipping your gauntlet.” I suggested. “Armor specific functions all cancel out when they’re unequipped, and those tendrils might be close enough to cancel out too.”

“I don’t want to cancel them out, I want to get a hold of it.” Jun hissed, then bit her lip with a sigh. She peeked above the coral log and shook her head. “But now’s not the time for that, is it?”

If Jun could have seen my face at that moment, she would have been very confused. It should have been a very simple choice; we were in danger, so dealing with anything that might increase that danger should have been priority number one. Instead, I was considering forcing her to deal with her function in the heat of the moment. The human mind had a tendency to work faster under pressure, but faster didn’t necessarily mean better. And, I reminded myself once more with a look at Jun’s pink and white skin, that there wasn’t a human mind in her skull.

“Keep working at it, but be ready to unequip it.” I eventually said, though it was with far less certainty than I’d wanted. And from the way Jun looked at me, she could hear it in my voice. “The eel still hasn’t attacked us, which is strange in its own right, but that could mean we’re in more danger than I thought.”

With a nod that was far more nervous than it had been moments ago, Jun resumed her tinkering at a fever pitch. The eel’s movements were starting to scare me, even if it didn’t seem to be directed at us. My instincts were telling me that the thing it was building up wasn’t for one single target, but to rain havoc down on everything around it. But the damn reason why it was so agitated still eluded me.

“Abyss below!” Jun shrieked, her right gauntlet reforming in an instant as she grabbed at empty air. “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

I bent down in confusion to try and see where she was being attacked, but couldn’t see anything on her armor. And there was nothing on her face except a small trickle of milky white liquid that was dripping from just below her bottom right eye. Her hands were clasped right up close to it, and I cursed as I realized what was happening.

My sword shifted into a dagger that I drove between Jun’s hands, piercing the empty air in a geyser of vibrant red liquid that looked closer to fruit punch than blood. It rained down in a massive area, far more than the space between her hands should have allowed, and it revealed just how potentially fucked we could have been.

Freakish fish that crawled along the ground with the bodies and sharp teeth of piranhas, but placed in a sucker-like maw that wouldn’t be out of place on a lamprey or leech. A single needle showed in the mouth of the dead one that had unlatched from Jun, a ring of wounds under her eye showing up as she removed the fish from her face. She called her helmet without waiting another second, jumping to her feet and placing her sword between herself and the mass of fish that had surrounded us.

“What the fuck are they?” I muttered, shifting my left gauntlet into another dagger and my stance to hide my new weak spot. If only the system hadn’t limited us to the exact number of copperbound gear we already had, I’d’ve taken another sword. But the restriction was there, so I had to work around it. “And how do they have so much blood?”

The one little fish was still exuding a massive geyser that somehow showed us where each and every one of its brethren were in its radius, and none of them were attacking. As if the one that had attacked had broken formation, and now they were considering if an attack was a good idea at all since they’d been revealed.

“They’re needlemaws, and they’re needlemaws.” Jun muttered, raising a hand to her helmet where it had bit her. She didn’t say anything more, as if simply stating the thing’s name had explained why it had more blood than an entire bloodbank.

Thirty tense seconds passed with the crackling of the eel’s power growing in the background as the needlemaw’s blood continued to rain down around us. The utterly comical amount of blood the thing’s corpse was spewing didn’t seem to be pooling anywhere, and I chanced a look down at my feet to confirm. Aside from the stain on my armor, there wasn’t a single drop of light red blood to be found.

{Uh, identify again, please?}

//DID YOU NOT HEAR YOUR FRIEND? THEY’RE NEEDLEMAWS.

I groaned and shifted nervously. {Not you, too.}

//NO, OF COURSE NOT, I’M JUST HAVING A LITTLE FUN AT YOUR EXPENSE. BUT IN TRUTH, YOUR SYSTEM DOES NOT HAVE INFORMATION READILY AVAILABLE ON THESE PESTS. SO… YES, ME AS WELL, I SUPPOSE.

It seemed completely arbitrary what my system had information on or not, but If I had to guess, it would have something to do with the fact that Jun recognized these pests. I’d never run into them in my old life, and I’d never run into anything that my system couldn’t at least give me a little information on in my old life either. So maybe it could only analyze things that were already native to this world, and the needlemaws weren’t originally from this planet, just like Jun and me?

And if that was true, then where the fuck had they come from?

The geyser finally seemed to be dying down, and I watched in horror as the needlemaws at the farthest reaches of the blood faded out of view. If it died out completely, we would be flying blind once more against the horde. I nodded to Jun and lunged, trying to spear one of the needlemaws with a dagger, but it darted away with terrifying agility. Even as I transformed the dagger into a spear mid thrust, the needlemaw still managed to twist and contort itself so as to only take a glancing blow across its side.

A gratuitous amount of blood drained from the wound, but it wasn’t the revealing geyser that the fatal wound had given us. Jun tried without success to cleave through a group of needlemaws that had gathered on the fallen chunk of coral we were sheltering behind, the little buggers dodging fluidly while keeping their beady red eyes locked on Jun’s helmet. As if the first wound was a beacon they were drawn to. But Jun had to know these creatures better than I did, right? And she wasn’t panicking at the potential that it had injected something into her.

“Do we need to run?” I asked, shifting my dagger back into armor and backing up a step. “Are they going to swarm us?”

“Yes they are.” Jun ground out, her arms shaking as she held her sword. “My blood’s not working quite right, but I think my armor’s working hard to get it out of my system.”

“Do you see a debuff?” I asked. “It’ll tell you what’s wrong with you.”

“I already know what’s wrong with me; I got bit and stabbed by a damn needlemaw!” Jun snapped, stumbling over her own feet and forcing me to dive to keep her from tumbling over. “Thanks. I’ll tell you what a bite does once we’re safer. Maybe if we kill one more we can use it as a deterrent to make a run for it.”

With the way the lamprey’s cousins twisted and bent to avoid my previous attacks, I wasn’t confident that I was fast enough to deal a killing blow. I had a terrible idea how I could circumvent that, but there was a very good chance that I’d end up with a pharmacy’s worth of needles sticking into me.

So I did the logical thing; I tried to get Jun to do it. “If you shift your armor pieces into daggers or short swords, you should have enough speed to kill one of the needlemaws before they jab you.”

Jun laughed humorlessly and shook her head. “I can’t swap these damn things’ forms anymore. I don’t know why you still can, but I can’t.”

They were supposed to become ‘static in form’ when out of the floodforest, weren’t they? But mine hadn’t for some reason, which meant that if we wanted someone with an absurd speed stat to kill exactly one needlemaw, that burden fell to me. Though falling one step wasn’t that far, it was one hell of a step to fall from.

“Alright.” I grudgingly accepted, calling for a small square of my interface under my fingers and readying for a very strange transformation. “Try to keep them away from me.”

With a few swipes and presses of my fingers, I was covered in knives. My gauntlets and boots were the only parts to remain armor, while everything else suddenly shifted into strapped-on daggers that pressed tightly against my clothes. My speed shot up by 15 along with my recovery, and I said a silent prayer that a needlemaw wouldn’t have enough resilience to survive one hit.

I surged forwards with a single step, shifting awkwardly to place myself between the one needlemaw that had reacted and the rest of its kin. It didn’t even manage to turn before I sank a dagger into its back and followed through, charging to Jun as the needlemaw began spewing blood like a broken fountain. Not the utter geyser of the first one, but enough to cast a protective net over Jun and myself if we huddled semi-close together.