I tried so damn hard to open my eyes. But the state of prolonged death my armor held me in wouldn’t let me. Because… well… I was dead. Nothing much I could do when that was the case. I could still somehow see the passive parts of my interface; my battery and integrity percentages, along with the slew of error messages that were just that. Errors.

After The End had suddenly told me to find the human Embodiment of Endurance, it hadn’t sent a single message. But that didn’t keep me from watching each and every message like a hawk for the purely capitalized error that I knew was one of The End’s messages in disguise. I was so focused on them, in fact, that I didn’t even notice when the absolute darkness around me began to bleed away into something real.

Jun’s voice warbled and shifted from indecipherable to strangely clear, yet I understood all of her words somehow. “His armor almost killed him?! How is that even possible?” She asked with a touch of desperation in her voice. “Isn’t it supposed to keep us alive no matter what?”

“It actually did kill him, unfortunately. But it is also keeping him alive.” Another voice that sounded exactly like Jun’s said, but the cadence was slower and more deliberate. As if Jun had aged, but the sound of her voice hadn’t. That had to be her grandmother, unless Okeria was a master impersonator. “I’m not quite sure what he did to his armor to get it to this state, but these pieces have no limiters on them. Whoever gave them to him was either a desperate amateur or a sadistic master.”

‘Desperate amateur’ was closer to the truth than I would’ve liked to admit.

“I’ve done all I can for now. He’ll be up in a handful of minutes, but he won’t be anywhere near fine.” Jun’s grandmother said. “I’m sorry to make you wait, Grand Warden, but I need to go help the citizens. They don’t deserve anything that Endra might do to them.”

Okeria snorted from somewhere to my left. “If ya think Endra’s gonna go anywhere but here, you’re flat wrong. I’ll hold as long as I can, but if we aren’t here when ya get back, ya know the path.”

“Yes, I do.” Jun’s grandmother confirmed. “Protect them, Warden Perek.”

“My conscience won’t let me sleep at night if I don’t.” Okeria said cheerfully, but there was an undertone of deadly seriousness to his words. I heard whatever was above us open and shut within a heartbeat, and suddenly I felt the world shift.

“Now don’t go moving him too quickly there. He’s not even close ta being fine, little miss.” Okeria chided Jun, unless there was another ‘little miss’ that had joined us. “We don’t want ta undo anything the left eye did ta your friend.”

“Left eye? Rootia’s a left eye?” Jun asked with reverence. “How… I didn’t think anyone in our family was that powerful.”

Okeria made a small noise down in his throat. “Well, ya gotta go pretty far down in your roots ta find anyone as good as the left eye. She’s the one that made a name for ya, after all.”

Made a name for her? Did that mean this woman was the one that… well… introduced the godblood into Jun’s family tree? She had to be absolutely ancient if that was true. But whatever the truth was, I didn’t get to hear it because Jun didn’t ask any more questions. She just kept jostling my body in silence with the rare grunt of effort. It felt almost exactly like I was being drugged and kidnapped, which was an experience I had the misfortune of knowing exactly what it felt like from my old life.

The sound of clicking and moving earth brought Jun to a dead stop. “What is that?” She wondered aloud as the sounds got louder and louder, until it felt like they were right above us.

A clang of something hitting metal echoed through the tunnel we were in, and Jun screamed in terror.

“RUN!”

Okeria’s cry was followed by the shriek of shearing metal and an insectile cry. It hadn’t been even an hour since I first heard that horrible sound, and the voice that followed it was gut-wrenchingly worse.

“GIVE HIM TO ME!” Nia cried with only the slightest of warps as Endra used her stolen voice. “I KNOW YOU HAVE HIM!”

“Don’t stop running no matter what.” Okeria ordered, and I felt something brush against my side that hurt like a spike of ice. But I was already feeling more alert than ever. “It’s gonna be terrible when that wears off, but the two of ya will be alive. All we gotta do is make it to the entrance.”

Something whizzed past me, and Jun yelped in pain. But she didn’t slow down. “The entrance to what?!”

“Can’t say yet, sorry.” Okeria answered quickly. “Ya just gotta trust that I’ve got the three of us surviving as priority number one. It’s only a little further. Mind the gap.”

I felt Jun tense up, then I suddenly felt weightless. The feeling lasted a good handful of mercifully comfortable seconds, then shifted into the stomach-dropping vertigo of free-fall. Which lasted a good dozen seconds, then ended with a bone-shattering impact that felt like Jun had just shoved her shoulder straight through my stomach.

I retched the contents of an empty stomach into my helmet, then felt them splash back onto my face. It was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever done to myself.

“Was that you?” Okeria asked through panting breaths, and I had a feeling the question wasn’t directed at me.

“No.” Jun replied. “Seb’s waking up. Are we there yet?”

A massive quake shot through the tunnels, and all I could imagine was the massive centipede-thing that Nia had used to fight Addia’s chosen barreling towards our small group through a too-small tunnel. Okeria’s stifled curse told me that he’d had the same thought, and Jun’s not-so-stifled curse right after told me that it might not’ve been just in Okeria’s imagination.

“I KNOW YOU’RE DOWN THERE!” Endra cried, hatred and desperation mixing in her voice. She really wanted me. Or maybe it was the corpse I had stashed in my inventory. “LEAVE THE HUMAN AND I WILL MAKE YOUR DEATHS SWIFT.”

“Human? Did I just hear that monster say ‘human’?” Okeria asked, which was the moment my vision chose to slightly return. Jun had me over one of her shoulders, and I was looking straight down at the ground as she ran.

“...Could you pretend that she didn’t? Please?” Jun asked warily. “Seb isn’t a bad guy, I promise.”

Another quake made the ground split beneath Jun’s feet, and something started crawling out of it. A large number of insectile somethings.

Okeria grumbled to himself, then sighed. “Even if he was a right bastard, I don’t think I’d give him up ta Endra. He’s not the one who killed Persephonia and stole her voice.”

Another quake, and the bugs on the floor doubled. They were all the same many-legged creatures I’d seen Nia use, but so much smaller. Jun stomped down and splattered a group of bugs into a burst of bright orange. Then another group. And another. The floor was more bug than dirt at this point, but it seemed as if the huge bug wasn’t chasing any more.

“Seems like Endra found out that shoving a massive bug down this little hole isn’t the best way ta give chase.” Okeria chuckled. “That’s really good for us, as long as we don’t drown in these little critters.”

Jun shifted my limp body on her shoulder, then muttered something under her breath that I didn’t catch. But she never stopped running. Endra’s screams grew quiet. The bugs became fewer and fewer in number, until eventually they seemed to disappear altogether. As if Endra had given up, but I knew that couldn’t be true. If she’d given up on me so easily, then Nia meant so little to her. That Nia had only been a pawn, and nothing more. It was insulting.

“Did we lose her?” Jun panted between heavy footsteps. “Can we stop and take a break?”

“No can do.” Okeria replied. “We’re close, and I won’t feel safe until we’re in the comfortable embrace of the hazard.”

I could feel Jun’s disbelief though how she tensed up. And the disbelieving noises she made.

“You think a hazard’s gonna stop Endra from coming to get Seb?” She spat, then gestured back at a relatively empty tunnel with the arm that was holding me. “She has a massive bug-thing that’ll kill us the second we stop moving!”

“But what she doesn’t have is a core.” Okeria said ominously. “We don’t have time ta be talking. Keep moving.”

Jun grumbled in annoyance, but sped up nonetheless. “What does Endra’s lack of a–”

Her words were cut off by a massive black spire that burst through the ground, barely splitting the difference between us and Okeria before it retreated as quickly as it had come. Endra very much hadn’t given up on killing us.

“Nevermind.” Jun squeaked. “I’m trusting you now.”

I saw Okeria’s watermelon-coloured boots fall behind Jun just as another spike shot through the earth, and heard a grunt of effort from behind us. “Keep moving!” Okeria ordered, the crackling of electricity beginning to fill the crowded space that was the tunnel. “I’ll hold Endra off for a minute. Get ta the hazard and hunker down!”

My neck had recovered just enough for me to lower my head, looking behind Jun to see Okeria facing off against a half-buried bug that was still quite a bit smaller than the one Nia had used. And he held something I’d seen comparatively few of in the new world, compared to my life on Earth.

Two long rectangles of white-silver metal floated above a handle of the same metal, all inscribed with electric blue patterns that evoked images of flowing water. A thick swarm of small metal spheres clustered around Okeria’s right wrist, erratically clattering together as tiny forks of lightning raced through the swarm. He held the weapon in one hand and one-half of the bug’s mandibles in the other, saying nothing as he slammed the hollow tips of both rectangles into the thing’s mouth.

Chitin couldn’t stand up to the power of a function-empowered shotgun blast. The thing sounded like the combination of a lightning strike and a sonic boom, peals of electricity arcing off the ends of the twin rectangular barrels as the bug’s neon orange insides were splattered against the tunnel walls. The bug screeched one last time in defiance of death, and Okeria responded by slamming the mandible down through the insect’s head.

The sickening crunch of the bug’s death was oddly cathartic. Okeria shook his head and glanced down the tunnel, then turned back to Jun and shifted the double-barreled shotgun in his hands to a single, thinner barrel that reminded me of an oversized revolver. Minus the chamber, hammer, and overall shape of it. But the feeling was the same.

He deftly plucked four metal spheres from his wrist, pressing them to one of the wave-like markings on his gun’s barrel. They shuddered and melted into a liquid before following the patterns down to the underside of the weapon. That must be how he reloaded.

“I told ya to keep running. And looks like the human’s got his eyes open.”