The End made a noise through my interface that sent a shiver up my spine. It felt like the last gasp of a thousand dying men condensed into a single sigh, my hairs standing on end as my adrenaline kicked into overdrive. I thought it couldn’t speak through my interface.

//I CANNOT PERSONALLY INTERVENE, AND I CANNOT SEND ANYTHING TO AID YOU.

//ALL I CAN OFFER IS ADVICE, AND A VERY TEMPORARY INCREASE TO YOUR RECOVERY.

//FIFTEEN MINUTES AT MOST, AND THAT IS IF YOU DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY COMBAT WHATSOEVER.

I shook my head and tried to still my ragged breathing. That voice… that sound… it was beyond terrifying. It was primal. {How did you just sigh through my interface? It scared the fuck out of me.}

The End didn’t send a message for a moment, then something like static crackled to life near my right cheek. It came from the crack in my corrupted helmet, and it sounded like the background hum that accompanied all of my waking nightmares. It shifted to the quiet staticky hum of an old TV turned to a dead channel, and my own voice echoed inside of my helmet with a cadence I never used.

//THIS IS CERTAINLY A NEW DEVELOPMENT.

//THOUGH IT IS QUITE INCONVENIENT TO SHIFT MY FORM TO SPEAK DIRECTLY TO YOU, AS I CANNOT MEET WITH ANYONE ELSE WHILE HOLDING YOUR SHAPE.

Hearing my own voice in The End’s cadence wasn’t anything new to me, but it was always unnerving when it happened. {Neat. So you’re going to boost my recovery, right?}

//…I THOUGHT YOU’D BE A LITTLE MORE EXCITED ABOUT THIS.

//WE CAN SPEAK PROPERLY NOW!

//THIS SHOULD BE A JOYOUS OCCASION!

I sighed and pressed my fingers to the side of my head. The End was sounding more and more like a very attached grandparent, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. {Sorry, I’m just a little preoccupied with everything else. We can talk when I’m done with the signaleech and all these slyk control nodes, okay?}

//YES.

//YES, THAT SOUNDS QUITE GOOD TO ME.

//YOUR RECOVERY INCREASE SHOULD BE GOING THROUGH ANY MOMENT NOW.

//REMEMBER THAT IT IS A ONE-TIME THING, THOUGH.

//DIRECT AID FROM AN EMBODIMENT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, AND THOUGH I CAN JUSTIFY IT THROUGH MY CONNECTIONS, IT WOULD NOT STAND UP TO SCRUTINY.

A sensation of blissful warmth slid its way down my throat to settle in my stomach. It grew from a small ember of comfort to a blazing hearth of safety, and a new buff appeared in the corner of my eye.

‘Comfort in Stagnation: Recovery increased by 200% as long as the recipient does not exert themselves’ it read, and I knew exactly how The End had gotten this particular buff. It seemed as if The End still had major reluctance at visibly helping me, but I didn’t really know how much Embodiments typically helped their chosen. Even if The End wasn’t technically an embodiment, it seemed to be bound by the same rules as they were. Maybe I could find some details about that in Nia’s inheritance.

{Tell Stagnation I said thanks.} I sent, receiving a confirmatory hum from my own voice as the static in my helmet faded away. The End had returned to normal, and I was mostly on my own now.

Time to find those other control point-pods. I was damn sure Okeria could hold out for another dozen or so minutes while Wipe-Away whittled down the signaleech, and that would hopefully give me enough time to clear out the thirty-two pods that remained in the huge, sprawling, catacomb-like warehouse.

I shook my head. Maybe Okeria would have to hold out a little longer than a dozen minutes.

The hunt for slyk pieces went a little better than I’d expected, but it still took quite a long while. I’d collected another eight at this point, each of which felt more than slightly different from each other, just like their brethren. The piece of remembrance held in one hand and each shard held in turn in the other, I felt a range of emotions that I’d never felt in such a short time before. And a few emotions I’d never felt myself, even if I counted the two lives I’d lived together.

Pieces five-through eight felt so strongly I almost lost myself in each one. Unrestrained joy at simply existing ground down into a disdain for everything it had once taken joy from, and a final joy in death that matched the first joy in life. A longing so deep and hollow that it absorbed everything else and tarnished it with spoiled memories. The loss of something so close and dear that it left a hole that simply couldn’t be filled, shattering the one who lost into a completely different person. Unbridled lust for life and love that burned so bright and deep that it carried over even in remembrance, a legacy filled with so many lives created and made better.

I didn’t have the strength to take on the emotional toil after the eighth. My mind wasn’t in the greatest place after feeling so much loss and regret, even if I kept telling myself it wasn’t me feeling those things. Pieces nine through twelve sat inert in my inventory, staring up at me everytime I opened my interface to check the map for piece number thirteen. Reminding me of my own emotional and mental weakness. Reminding me of all the people I’d lost. Reminding me of all the mourning that I’d never had the chance to do.

Just because they still existed in this life, the people I’d known were gone. Even if I found them now, I couldn’t retrace all the paths we’d tread in that life. I’d try to fix them. To make them… better. I twisted my face into a sickened frown at that thought. If I’d told Dee that, he would’ve slapped me in the face and walked away extremely hurt. Vim would’ve burst out into indignant rage, and there was a real possibility that that could’ve been the last straw in our friendship. And Ali…

She wouldn’t have said anything. She would’ve looked up at me with hurt tearing at the edge of her eyes, then turned away before I could see her cry. Because she wasn’t broken. We’d worked like hell to get where we’d been, lost friends and family, and spent literal decades building up what little we had. To hear that that was wrong… to hear that that was pointless… to hear someone say that they could take everything we’d gone through and do it better…

It just wasn’t right. I was the only one who could remember who they were, but there were so many people now who could help them with their new lives. I had to be fully prepared to never see them again, even when I went back to help humanity out.

I vigorously shook my head and glared at the fourth shard. “I already came to terms with this shit, so stop making me doubt myself.” I muttered, slowly jogging across the top of the shelves so as to not exert myself and accidentally end the buff The End had given me. “When the signaleech is dead and gone, I’m going to take a whole day to do absolutely fucking nothing.”

The thirteenth pod wasn’t that far away now, but it was quite a bit lower down on the second shelf from the ground. I glanced down at the ground below for a traveling spark of electricity to confirm that I was in the right place, nodding and closing my interface when I saw what I was looking for. I bent down with a grunt of effort and lowered myself down shelf by shelf until I was about halfway down, then stopped when I heard the tapping of stone on stone coming down the aisle on the opposite side of the shelf I was on.

I held my breath and pulled myself back onto the shelf. The clicking and tapping grew louder for a few moments, then paused. I counted five seconds before they resumed, and that just so happened to be exactly when Wipe-Away activated yet again. It was an impossibility that that was a coincidence. The signaleech had come for me.

My slightly oil-tainted weapon was in my hands before I took my next breath. I opened my stat screen to check how much I’d drained from the signaleech, and came face to face with a hidden part of Wipe-Away that made things a whole lot more complicated. My stats were exactly double their normal values. And every time Wipe-Away triggered, it stole 1% of the signaleech’s current integrity and battery reserves.

In what made absolutely no sense to me, the stolen integrity and battery reserves had become something of an overshield and overbattery. They showed their maximums as 143% health and 106% battery respectively, which dropped to 102% for a split second when Wipe-Away triggered before spiking to 108% the moment after. It wouldn’t amount to much if the signaleech got a few good shots in, but these extras would really help against the battery stealing effect of this slyk’s oil.

I backed away as the scrabbling of legs grew ever closer, but still nowhere near loud enough to be immediately dangerous. Based on how massive the thing was, it had to be at least half the warehouse away from me, if not more. I’d see the signaleech way before it was close enough to hurt me. Unless it hit me with that wave-web of oil that it had done exactly once against Okeria and I, but I had a feeling that the signaleech wasn’t going to risk the safety of these pods to hurt me. Or maybe it would, and I was only a few seconds away from getting blindsided and utterly destroyed.

Hopefully that wasn’t the case. I shifted my weapon into a spear and summoned the shield Okeria had made for me from my interface, putting it between myself and the approaching sounds while I steadied my breathing and tried to stay as calm and non-exerted as possible. I still had a little while to prepare, and I was going to make the most of it.

I was ready for anything. Up until two glowing electric eyes appeared on the other side of the shelves in a splattering of oil. “WHAT THE FUCK?!” I yelped, jumping back and off the shelf as a single massive leg shattered the safety out from under me. “How’d it sneak up on me?!”

My feet slammed into the ground and I started running backwards as fast as I safely could. I grimaced as I watched the notification of my recovery buff wavered and shimmered under my movement, but since it was still there, I technically hadn’t exerted myself yet. Although I definitely would in a second, since the signaleech had managed to sneak up on me somehow.

A second leg followed the first as the signaleech contorted itself through the spacing in the shelves, pulling the portion that I could see through like an oily black baloon being blown up through a pinhole. The two eyes I could see focused on me with a hatred that had only grown since I’d last seen them, dripping copious amounts of oil from the parts of its head that were missing.

Wait. What?

I narrowed my eyes and took a better look. No, I hadn’t been seeing things. The signaleech only had two eyes and a single mandible. It pulled a tattered abdomen along with only two legs, leaving a trail of oil everywhere it went since it didn’t have all the… muscles? Connections? It didn’t have whatever the slyk needed to properly carry its own body weight, like a child dragging everything they owned behind them in a sack made of blankets while they ran away from home.

But a quarter of the signaleech was still fucking massive. It screeched at me and slammed one leg down into the warehouse floor, using the other to grab onto a piece of shelving behind it to stretch itself thin.

“The fuck is it–” I started, but the slyk answered my unasked question by letting the shelf go. “Oh, god damn it.”

I fell to my knees and tried to cover as much of myself with my shield as I could when the slyk catapulted itself into me, but I was suddenly crushed between slyk and shelf when my feet instantly lost to the signaleech’s impromptu weapon. Warnings covered my visor as I felt my battery being sucked away, the sound of crackling electricity and a mind-shattering shriek of victory accompanying the notifications that would spell my doom if I couldn’t get out of this within the next few seconds.