//SHIFTING POINT OF VIEW FROM [SEBASTIAN CORMIER] TO [JUNIPER KERATILY].

//ERROR: CHOSEN BOND NOT DETECTED. INTERFACE UNABLE TO PROPERLY SYNCHRONIZE. PERSPECTIVE WILL BE SET TO 'LIMITED OMNISCIENT'.

//CONTINUE: [Y] OR [N]?

//[Y] SELECTED. INITIATING TEMPORARY SHIFT.

For the fifth time since coming to the all-world, Jun was convinced she was going to die. A pack of needlemaws this size would’ve caused a quarantine back home, and those needlemaws couldn’t go invisible. Their injecting bites didn’t make everything feel as if it were being slowly frozen and thawed at the same time, a strangely painless sensation that made it hard to even think.

The floodforest had almost killed her three times. One flood, one encounter with a lichenthrope, and a pit she’d fallen into that had taken her almost a week to dig her way out of. That was when she’d learned that the armor made sure she didn’t starve or die of thirst. She’d wandered about, avoiding all the metal and moss monsters she saw, until she finally found what she’d lost hope in ever finding.

Someone else. But that someone else hadn’t been as helpless as she’d been. It had killed a lichenthrope without batting an eye, and it seemed terrifyingly comfortable in the blue and white armor it had worn. At that moment, Jun had been convinced that whoever was in that armor had been sent there to kill her. The addles of an isolated mind.

But Seb hadn’t killed her. He’d taught her more in a few weeks than she’d learned in years of frustratingly vague training, and he’d treated her like an equal. An equal that knew way less than he did, and couldn’t teach him much of anything in return, but an equal nonetheless. When she learned that he was an unknown alien, she felt the safest she’d felt in months. Even now, surrounded by needlemaws with her thoughts coming both too slow and too fast, she didn’t feel hopeless.

Everything had gone wrong. Everything had gone orange. And when she blinked, Jun had found herself separated from Seb and unable to move. Everything hurt, which was a terrible sign, and notifications from her black slate of an interface informed her that her armor and battery had been completely drained.

“Seb?” She wheezed, hearing her voice echo around in her helmet without making it outside. Her stats had been much higher than his. He couldn’t have survived the eel’s detonation. “Please don’t be dead.” She whispered a plea to whatever god might be listening. “I still need you.”

Seconds passed, and it became obvious that no god had been listening. The eel let out a muffled shriek as needlemaw blood rained down, dyeing the blessed sky in disgusting red, and began a slow descent towards her. She tried to move, but nothing was responding. Her toes didn’t wiggle, her arms didn’t lift, and she couldn’t wrench control over her head enough to get it off wherever she’d landed. But it was elevated above the rest of her body so she could perfectly see the eel inching closer and closer to her, a jagged pain in the back of her neck radiating numbness through every inch of her body.

The eel kept coming. She kept struggling against the invisible restraints that kept her paralyzed. It glowed with inner fire, lightning crackling against its skin as it slithered through the air. Jun gulped and tried to turn her head, but had to settle on closing her eyes instead. She’d survived for so long just to die when she could taste the new life she’d worked so hard for. The years of schooling and training, the months stuck in the floodforest, and the weeks of hope with Seb.

She began to feel the static and radiant heat of the sickening creature, and Jun struggled harder than she ever had. She choked back a sob, still trying to put on a strong facade in the face of death. She still had so much she wanted to do. Carve a name for herself in the all-world, gather enough influence to get brought back home, and prove all those muck-loving abyss-dwellers wrong.

The eel screeched once more, but it didn’t sound the same this time. She risked cracking one eye open in morbid curiosity, expecting to find that half of her body had gone missing, but instead found her hope reignited.

Seb dug his greatsword into the eel’s side in a spray of sparks and embers, his fleshy skin burning under the onslaught of heat and electricity. She couldn’t see his face with the angle she had fallen at, but she could see that he wasn’t wearing a single piece of armor. Two ribbons fluttered over his shoulder, and his skin seemed to have an inner candle-lit glow, but he was extremely vulnerable. And he’d still come for her.

Jun gathered as much strength as she could manage, and put every ounce of it into one single shout.

“SEB!”

The man turned his head, a calm smile on his lips as the eel’s internals burned him to a crisp. It never went away, but Jun could see the relief spread over his strange features when he realized that she was still alive. Nobody had ever been that happy to see her. Not her parents, not her friends, and certainly not anybody in the training programs where working together was about as promoted as sending her fellows to the hospital.

“Thank God I made it.” He laughed, his sword disappearing from one hand and reappearing in the other as he pushed off the eel. The thing whipped its body around to smash him into the ground, but his sword was suddenly a shield that absorbed some of the impact and let him skip across the ground to lose the momentum the eel had just given him.

Jun had tried so many times to do the same thing, switch her sword into something in the middle of combat, but it was simply impossible. Like seeing through the waters of Eyestealer’s Abyss or climbing Cloudscrew Ascent. Her mind couldn’t grasp the simple string of commands in the short time no matter how many times Seb explained it, and her hands couldn’t work her interface like they needed to.

But Seb made the impossible look simple. His shield shifted into a sword once more as the eel charged, seemingly forgetting that it could take to the sky, spitting sparks and embers in a torrent that Seb unflinchingly weathered. A chunk of the eel’s jaw splattered to the ground as Seb ducked under its bite, letting the creature’s momentum carry his sword through it until he swung it to the side in a burst of orange blood.

The eel went down in a burst of gravel, and Seb jumped to the side while ducking behind his shield to block the shrapnel. His fingers twitched and his shield shifted into a spear moments before the eel launched itself in a ragged attempt to take his life, what remained of its jaws snapping shut on empty air as Seb’s superior speed carried him to safety. The smile never left his face, radiating confidence that didn’t fit at all with his situation. He was unarmored, barely armed, and severely burned from the eel’s retaliation. But it never felt like he was on the back foot.

A deep cut split one of the eel’s eyes in a burst of milky red fluid when Seb flourished his spear, the other following shortly after as the eel’s attacks grew more savage and desperate. But Seb didn’t take a single hit, dodging each and every bone-shatteringly dangerous impact by the smallest margin and retaliating with vicious strikes. The coral landscape was demolished piece by piece as Seb led the eel away, brightly coloured scenery shattered into vibrant shards that rained down along with the torrent of needlemaw blood.

Maybe if the eel hadn’t wasted all of its battery on the attack that devastated the needlemaws, Seb would have been in serious trouble. Jun had never seen anything like this before, not even in training, and she couldn’t bring herself to wonder any further than that thought. Why the needlemaws had attacked, why they were invisible, why the eel had so thoroughly destroyed them; all questions that Jun asked herself for a quick moment until she found she had no answers to any of them.

Seb made quick work of the now blind eel, carving chunks of its flesh away until one blow stilled the eel from the head down. He must have severed its spine, and a few bloody strikes stilled the eel for good. The head thumped dully to the ground and began leaking bright orange blood, the sound of static electricity constantly snapping and popping embers ringing out into the distance as it soaked into the ground. Seb shuddered and looked down at his hands, a web of burns tracing up his forearms and dotting his skin wherever the embers and shocks had reached him.

Only then did Jun feel utter relief wash over her, barely overcoming the constant pain as she closed her eyes. But a notification against the blackness ripped her back to the moment, confusion written across her hidden features as she mouthed the words she couldn’t quite understand.

//HELLO, JUNIPER. SEBASTIAN HAS SOMETHING TO OFFER YOU.

//I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU ACCEPT IT.

Jun’s breath caught in her throat as the message melted away to a request that had come from Seb. It read: “//CREATION has activated, and Sebastian Cormier has designated you as the recipient. Accept the gift: [Y] or [N]?”

She couldn’t move her hands to accept or reject the offer. “I accept.” She spoke softly, unable to muster any more strength into her voice. Hopefully the system would accept a voice command.

//POINT OF VIEW RETURNING TO [SEBASTIAN CORMIER].

//SYNCHING…