I bent down over the rock and wiped my hand across its surface, a thin dusting of red-brown coating my fingers as I pulled them away. A quick attempt to pull it into my inventory gave me the exact same results as Jun, except mine came with an error message.

//ERROR: OBJECT IS UNDER THE CONTROL OF ANOTHER CORE-BEARING BEING. CANNOT TRANSFER INTO INVENTORY.

That was about what I’d expected; anything living or owned by someone else couldn’t be taken into someone else’s inventory. ‘Ownership’ was a very broad umbrella in this new world, however, and it didn’t always mean what it meant back on Earth. Simply purchasing or finding something didn’t instantly make you the owner of it, but in some cases it did. I’d found a gemstone on the floor of a cavern once, and the moment I’d brought it out to trade, the merchant took it into their inventory and ran like the wind.

But then I’d gone back to that cavern and found a deposit of that same gemstone still buried deep in the rock. I’d worked a dozen of them out over the course of two days, and when I brought those to the market, they’d been stolen again. But the thief couldn’t put them into his inventory, and I eventually caught up to him and got my hard-earned gems back. That had taught me what the system considered ‘ownership’; actually working for something instead of just finding it.

What that spelled for this exact moment was that we probably couldn’t get these stones into our inventory unless we killed the Slyk. If it was actively fighting us, and we broke off a piece of it, there was a good chance that the system would now consider that piece of stone to be ours. But because the hazard was rendering it completely helpless, we could never ‘earn’ anything from the creature.

Though that didn’t mean we couldn’t weaken it. I pressed my thumb to the middle of the stone and pushed down with all of my strength, but it didn’t so much as budge. The clay smell was just that, then. A smell and nothing more. I was tempted to remove my gauntlet and feel the stone against my skin, but I was still recovering and didn’t know what kind of shape my hands were really in right now. I could’ve been fully healed, but there was also the chance that I looked like human lasagna under my armor.

So I made Jun do it. “Come here, Jun. I want you to try something.”

She turned away from the rapidly dwindling pile of stones and tilted her head at me. “That sounds ominous.” She said slowly, but walked over to me nonetheless. “What do you want me to try?”

“Can you tell me what this feels like?” I asked while pushing the stone closer to her. “My hands might still be messed up, so I can’t.”

“You could check your hands first.” Jun pointed out with a sigh, looking down at the stone with her shoulders tensed. She let out a long sigh and muttered something about how I forced her into this, crouched down and dismissed her gauntlet before pressing her fingers to the stone.

She instantly shuddered. “Oh, that does not feel right. Why is it so wet when it’s powdery and dry?” She muttered, lifting her fingers to study the dust that came with them. “It’s like powder that’s been forced into that shape, but it's also really solid. The hazards are weird.”

“So it feels wet yet powdery, and your hands come away feeling completely dry?” I asked as Jun’s hand was once more covered by her armor. She nodded in confirmation. “Okay, that tells me absolutely nothing yet, but I’ll mark it down for later. Sorry for making you do that.”

“No problem.” Jun sighed, standing up from her crouch while dusting off her knees. “Hopefully I didn’t just give myself rock disease for the sake of your curiosity.”

My curiosity went tragically unsatisfied. I tried everything I could think of on the rock short of eating it, but nothing I did so much as scratched it. I slashed it with my sword, smashed it with my hammer, shaved off a corner with my dagger, and even wrapped it with the Floodforest’s Gift and crushed it. Each and every time my weapon or function came away coated in red-brown dust, and each and every time the rock didn’t lose any visible mass or take any damage whatsoever. In the end I chucked it off the side of the ship and watched it plummet to the platform below where it shattered into a million pieces.

“Well fuck me I guess.” I grumbled, staring down at my own failure and the ground’s absolute victory. I turned to see how Jun was faring and saw only a single rock remaining from the pile she’d begun with and her tendrils tightly wound into armor. “Did you run out of battery?”

She shook her head. “This one’s a lot heavier than the others, and before you say something, it’s not just because it’s bigger. It’s a lot denser than the others. Try putting it in your inventory and you’ll see what I mean right away.”

I shrugged and walked over to Jun, oil squelching under my boots as the puddle expanded worryingly far now that it didn’t have as many rocks to soak into. I tapped my knuckles against the rock and tried to pull it in, but I didn’t get a single message in return. Instead, I felt an electric shock surge through my gauntlet.

“The Slyk has to be inside this thing.” I said as I traced my hand down the rock. The static felt stronger in some places than others, as if there was a wire inside of it that carried the charge. But it fluctuated even if I didn’t move, breathing like a living thing while my hand was pressed to it. I tried to follow the strongest sensation, tracing it from one end of the stone to the other, but I could never find the end.

The spark rounded a corner, and I shook my hand with a wince as I pulled away. If the spark was the main body of the Slyk, and it controlled the oil with its core, then the rock had to be its shell.

“See?” Jun said with a smile in her voice. “Not like the others, right?”

“Not at all.” I agreed. “Should we call Okeria up here to break this?”

Jun considered for a moment, then shook her head. She let her armor unspool around her and wove the tendrils together into a large, conical mass that she stuck her sword through the middle of. She gestured for me to stand back then pressed the mass up against the stone, took a few steps back of her own, and charged.

I watched as Jun slammed into her tendrils shoulder-first, a spray of oil accompanying the strangely quiet impact before the much louder sound of rock on metal filled the air. Jun grunted in effort as she pushed the stone one step at a time, her feet sticking to the oil instead of slipping on it.

“Help me with this.” She ground out, stepping a little to the side so I could join in on her push. I sidled in to the best of my abilities and pressed my shoulder against the mass of tendrils, feeling the spark inside the rock through them as I joined my strength with Jun’s. Oil sloshed under my feet in what should have felt like a wet, slick mess, but held my feet in place as if it was concrete. I strained and pushed against the inside of my armor for what felt like half an hour, the rock creeping along the deck at a snail’s pace, until Jun and I realized just why it didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere.

We were pushing the stone through a living puddle of oil. A puddle of oil that locked our feet in place and gave us better leverage. A puddle that was very much still on the other side of the stone, resisting us in equal measures from the rock pushing up against it.

“Well don’t we look stupid.” I laughed, walking over to the other side of the rock and leaning down to get a better look at the oil that had piled up under it. I gently swept a hand through it to get it to disperse, but it was hard as a rock. “It’s completely fucked on this side. See if you can get your hands under that side so we can flip it.”

“Will… do!” Jun said, her words accompanied by a frenzy of tendrils retracting into her armor. “Uh, now I’m out of battery. Let me recharge a little first.”

I chuckled to myself and shook my head, then stepped around the rock once more to see Jun lying flat on the ground in the middle of the oil slick. “I haven’t seen you completely out of battery since the eel almost killed both of us.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” She groaned, turning her head to the side and shimmying out of the oil. I knew how difficult it was to move with unpowered armor, but when I tried to extend a helping hand, Jun shook her head and brushed me off. “I need to get used to this. Just in case it happens during a fight.”

“No point to that.” I said, slowly walking out of the range of the oil’s furthest reaches while Jun shimmied along. “If it happens during a fight, you’re better off completely removing it and hoping that you stay alive long enough to re-equip it. It does literally nothing for you if your battery’s empty.”

Jun sighed and sat up, dismissing the top half of her armor the moment it was out of the oil. “Speaking from experience again?” She asked and reached out a hand for me to grab.

“Yup.” I confirmed, pulling her up and out of the oil. She dismissed the lower half of her armor next, shivering as the wind blew through her strange pink-white hair. “Not a fun story to tell, and I’ve got an unfortunate amount of them. Fighting for your life tends to make you forget about the other things that could end up killing you.”

I stood there in silence next to Jun while she stared at me in what I could only assume was pity. So I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “How much longer until you have enough battery to go back to work?”

“Ten minutes.” Jun said flatly and without consulting her interface. She crossed her arms and leaned closer to me, then tilted her neck towards the far side of the boat. “Let's get as far away from Okeria as we can. We need to talk about something I just remembered.”

“Sure.” I said warily, following Jun as she made her way past the rock. She walked briskly and with purpose, as if our destination was far more important than another part of the boat’s flat top. “What did you just remember?”

She turned to look at me without stopping. And for the first time since I’d met Jun, I saw distrust in her eyes. “When you killed the eel, something talked to me through my interface.”