“Do I have any bites?” I asked as I settled back in next to Jun, grabbing her by the shoulder and trying to lead her as the dying needlemaw writhed on my dagger. “I didn’t feel anything, but sometimes you don’t feel mosquito bites, and maybe these things are a nightmarish cousin of them?”

Jun didn’t seem to be paying attention to me, and when I followed the tilt of her helmet, I found out why. And it bothered me far more than it should have.

“Yes, I have a gut. And no, I don’t know how the armor makes it look like I don’t have one.” I grumbled, my health stat mocking me from the safety of my interface. I called back my armor with a self conscious motion and shoved Jun forwards with maybe a little too much force. “You need to walk on your own. We’re between a rock and a hard place right now, and I need you to help get us to safety. …Jun? Are you even listening to me?”

“...Yeah? Yeah.” Jun shook her head as if trying to clear away a headache. “I’m listening to you. It’s… hard to push through the foggy thoughts.”

That had to be because of the needlemaw injection. I nodded in sympathy and switched my weapon over to one that granted me speed and resilience, but no amount of resilience would be enough to survive a direct hit from the eel’s concentrated firestorm.

I pulled Jun over a half-mile of brightly coloured gravel before she got her footing, but that only brought us ever-closer to the eel. The only reason I hadn’t changed directions and ran as far as I could were the absurd numbers of needlemaws that I caught shimmering on the horizon. It would be like wading through autumn leaves, but each and every one of those leaves were hiding a hypodermic needle.

The closer Jun and I got to the eel the less and less sure I was that I’d chosen the lesser of two evils. The simple fact that we’d moved over a mile now and we still hadn’t reached the eel spoke of how giant the thing actually was, and the crackling of lightning mixed with the popping of fireplace logs grew louder and louder by the minute.

Jun let out a quiet whimper as a bolt of burning lightning crashed down not fifty feet from us. “Maybe we shouldn’t be–”

The eel’s storm broke loose. It was overwhelmingly loud for a split second, like a jet plane flying through a thunderstorm exploding into a raging fireball, and then it was eerily quiet. As if the world was holding its breath as destruction rained down from the monster in the sky, a molten rain of lightning and fire that sheared through the coral and popped the needlemaws like overfilled balloons.

Thunder followed. I couldn’t even begin to describe the detonation that blasted me off my feet and sent me skidding along the brightly coloured gravel, but if I had to try, I would describe it as the sound the end of the world would make. But I’d seen the end of the world, and it was far quieter than what I’d just experienced.

The moment I stopped receiving damage I tried pushing myself to my feet, but I was met with a warning of extremely low armor integrity and an equally low battery. If I hadn’t grinded for a full copperbound armor set, I would’ve died on the spot. Instead, as I struggled to get a look at the descending eel through a sky dyed red with needlemaw blood, my death had been pushed back a handful of seconds.

“Fucking hell.” I wheezed, but the words were hollow and rang in my ears in a barely discernible echo. The eel was in no hurry to end me, slithering through the sky towards a point off to my left instead. That had to be Jun.

“Run. Please.” I said with all the force I could muster, but it wasn’t enough to project my voice to her. I opened my interface in a panic and slotted in the spine of enmity, hoping that the +2 to all of my stats would somehow let me move, but all it did was make the pain a little more bearable. “JUN!”

No response. I ground out a curse and struggled to raise my head, then my shoulder, and finally pulled myself into a half-sitting position. I double-checked to make sure that I hadn’t missed any notifications telling me that I was a meat smoothie inside of my armor and that taking it off would be a terrible idea, but I couldn’t find a single one. Not even one telling me that I’d taken a debuff that was causing this sluggishness, but then again, my armor was running on fumes. It could have even hurt more than it helped in the state it was in.

I dismissed all of my armor and felt the absolute rain of needlemaw blood paint me a temporary red. The smell of ozone and clean-burning fire assaulted my nose, the destruction the eel had caused leaving the huge coral reef in shambles. Chunks of the stuff now littered the path, strewn haphazardly about like colourful debris after a storm. I caught myself when I went to run my dagger up my arm to trigger my old core, a reminder that I wasn’t the powerful man that I used to be.

Jun had never had the chance to be powerful. I couldn’t just sit back and let her die. But what could I do? I had a single dagger, no armor, and a core function that didn’t serve a single purpose in combat.

And then a droplet of blood snuck its way into my mouth. A litany of notifications assaulted my vision, and my head involuntarily snapped towards a piece of charred off-white coral. The blood urged me to consume it, and I scrambled against the rainbow gravel to get my grubby hands on it. It pulsed like living flesh, weakly struggling against my hands as I pushed harder and harder until it moved no more and a perfectly clear liquid seeped out onto my hands.

The blood mixed with the liquid, solidifying into something that was the thickness of hand sanitizer and smelled the way the burnt shell of a marshmallow tasted. Somehow the eel’s power had been infused into the dying coral, and now the two had somehow mixed with the needlemaw’s strange blood to produce the fluid that I held in my hands.

I brought it to my mouth without a second thought, the thick liquid coating my tongue in a hard shell that tasted the way a burnt out fireplace smelled. And almost too late, I remembered my ribbons from //ENDLESS. One swift activation of my interface and swipe over to my inventory later, I was met with a prompt and a countdown for 56 seconds.

//CONSUMED SUBSTANCE MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS FOR //ENDLESS. QUANTITY IMBIBED: 28ml. ESTIMATED DURATION AND STRENGTH: 9.3% AND 74% OF MAXIMUM RESPECTIVELY.

//IF TRANSFERRED INTO //ENDLESS, BOTH VALUES WILL BE SET TO 100%, REGARDLESS OF IF THEY WERE HIGHER OR LOWER THAN 100%.

//ACTIVATE //ENDLESS TO CONSUME: [Y] OR [N]?

There was literally no reason not to press [Y], but from being around Poe for so long, I knew that setting the values to 100% could, in fact, be a negative. Her Soul Bottle core didn’t give her any innate bonuses to making consumables, but it greatly incentivized her to devote her time to making the best things she physically could. Though it had been close to fifteen years before she ever saw a single number over one-hundred.

The three ribbons manifested over my shoulder, but one of them had transformed. It was the soft glowing orange of candlelight through a paper lantern, and it felt infinitely more solid than the other two. I pressed my curiosity down and consumed the ribbon with a single thought, feeling an intense bloodrush like what I’d felt from tasting the raw needlemaw blood but with a burning edge that kept it from distracting me from what I needed to do.

//ENDLESS ACTIVATED; SCORCHED BLOODCORAL CONCOCTION CONSUMED.

//SPEED AND POWER INCREASED BY 10, THEN AGAIN BY AN ADDITIONAL 10%.

//BLOOD IS SET ABLAZE, BURNING AWAY IMPURITIES AND INCREASING CIRCULATION.

It didn’t say anything about the desire for violence I felt under its effects, but then again, most potions didn’t list the side effects. And sometimes the side effects were more valuable than the intended use. And in this case, it was shoving any of my reluctance down into my gut so I could focus on saving Jun and not dying.

I ran a finger down my dagger as it transformed into a greatsword, forcing in a sucking breath that might end up being one of my last. I’d taken so many potential last breaths that they’d stopped meaning anything to the me that had lived beyond fifty, but this was a first for this me. I’d have to get used to it again, and I wasn’t looking forward to that in the slightest.

My eyes locked on the leisurely descending eel, only now noting that it wasn’t in the best shape. Lightning-bolt-like scars that glowed orange now marred the thing’s body from head to tail, leaking orange mist that felt important. Its own attacks had injured it, so there was a chance that its leisurely pace wasn’t born of arrogance.

If I struck now, before it managed to recover enough battery to properly defend itself, I might be able to defeat it before it could put up a fight. I hissed out the breath I’d been holding, feeling it coat my tongue and teeth in a slightly-too-hot film of thin liquid, and pushed off.

With my sword, spine, and the potion backing me, my offensive stats were barely higher than when I’d been fully armored. But as I felt the wind whipping in my hair, the embers of scorched coral burning against my skin, and the popping of the green pieces of gravel exploding into luminescent shrapnel, I truly remembered how I’d survived so long before I’d lost everything for a second time.

It wasn’t anything grand, like somehow becoming infinitely stronger than any of my peers. No, I’d been around the middle of the pack with my small circle of friends. Hell, I’d never landed a single punch on Vim when her core was running. But compared to all of them, compared to everyone I’d ever met in the new world, I had one thing over all of them. And as my sword bit into the side of a very surprised eel, the line that split my face gave it away in spades.

I would not die again. And I wouldn’t let any of my friends die again.

Never.

Again.