Mortician took my hand and led me along the pitch-black ground. They absolutely radiated joy as they walked backwards while looking at me, eventually turning around and slowing down so they walked beside me.

“When you removed the last of the splinters from that trawler, we found ourselves here somehow. By our calculations, this part of the hazard is completely inaccessible to any living creature that is not on the same level as an Embodiment.” Mortician explained like a tour guide, gesturing to the massive slyk monstrosities that drifted by like they were penguins at the zoo. “This sea is a combination of all the dangerous slyk oils as one. If you were here in actuality, and not simply projected by a combination of our will and the mind-prison you are in, you would be dead a hundred times over.”

“Yikes.” I chuckled, still unable to get over the slyk the size of small cities that populated this place. “So how are you surviving this place? Or are you ‘projected’ here just like I am?”

“We have absolutely no clue!” Mortician laughed. “The giant slyk scared us half to death when we materialized here, but after watching them for a while, we are certain that they mean no harm. Or that they absolutely do not care that we exist. It is the smaller ones that we need to be aware of.”

I almost tripped over my own feet at that. “When you say ‘smaller’, what kind of scale are you using?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. The largest we’ve encountered so far that was interested in us was the size of the loneswarm you encountered on the first trawler you entered.” Mortician said matter-of-factly. “Even that was hunted by a razorleaf before it could attack us. Unfortunately, we did have to kill the razorleaf for its oil and rock to bring you to us.”

Mortician shook their head and sighed sadly, looking over their shoulder as they did. I followed their gaze and saw a flat sheet of rock the size of a small house’s roof on the ocean floor, cracked open on the back and leaking slightly discolored electrical oil.

“You did that? So quickly?” I asked. When Mortician beamed and smiled, I felt a little pride in them. Just as much as I was scared of them. “Did it fight back?”

“Of course it did. It was not a fighting slyk, even though the name would suggest otherwise. The razorleaf is much more of a scavenger; it crawls along the bottom devouring the leftovers of weaker slyk that fell, and those that are weak to its unique body-dissolving oil.” Mortician said. “I am immune to that oil.”

“That’s what I guessed.” I chuckled grimly. “So, Mortician, has The End talked to you in a while? Aside from the times both of you talked to me at once.”

“Only a handful of times. The End is quite busy, even if it makes all the time in the world for you, and it seems it takes far longer to converse with us compared to you.” Mortician said without a hint of jealousy or annoyance. “It asked us not to use you as an in-between whenever we wished to talk with it, stating that we will have a direct line to it once you save us from this place.”

That sounded about right. It also reminded me that I had a chance now to alleviate a little bit of my burden. I opened my interface and swiped over to my inventory. “Here; see if touching this does anything for you.” I said as I offered Mortician one of the slyk shards. “Maybe it’ll do something now that you’re out of the trawler’s network.”

Mortican looked between the piece of slyk in my hand and me, then nodded seriously and reached to take it. They held it in their hand for a few long seconds waiting for something to happen, then closed their hand around it and grunted.

The shard disappeared.

“We did it.” Mortician said in disbelief. “...We don’t know what we did, but we did it! Would you give us another?”

I had no reason not to. “They’re all yours anyway.” I said with a smile at Mortician’s antsy excitement. I summoned two more shards and placed them in Mortician’s shaking hands, then backed away as they let out a low hum of concentration and tried to take the extra shards in.

That was when I noticed a notification on a tab of my interface that I hadn’t noticed before. I swiped over to it and saw a mostly blank screen with three names printed on it. Mine was first, written in blue-white letters that matched my armor. Jun’s was second, written in the black and yellow of her armor. And finally there was Mortician Slyk, written in the strange colour of slyk oil.

Under both Jun and my names there were bars for our current health, armor integrity, and battery numbers along with a percentage at the end that didn’t seem to be assigned to much of anything. Jun’s integrity and battery fluctuated between seventy-five to eighty percent, indicating that I was indeed missing the slyk onslaught, and mine held steady at one-hundred percent. But under Mortician, who was officially called ‘Mortician Slyk’ by the system, I saw a fraction.

1/281

It swapped to 2/281 as Mortician let out a happy little noise, one of the two shards I’d given them gone from their hands as I looked up to see them. I had no idea how I was seeing this, but it felt like a major invasion of Jun and Mortician’s privacy. There was a difference between seeing Jun’s interface over her shoulder and sneaking a peek without her even having it up. I pressed on Jun’s name and watched as her interface appeared before me, and I instantly closed it. Yup, major breach of privacy.

“Mortician, do you know how I did this?” I asked, beckoning them to come see what I saw.

They tilted their head to the side, looked down at their hand, and walked over to me. They looked over my shoulder, and just as I remembered that they shouldn’t be able to see my interface, they reached out and pressed on their own name. A ripple of oil shot out from their chest, splashing onto my interface and soaking into it before I could so much as react.

“God damn it, I’m starting to get used to the weirdness.” I muttered to myself, waiting for my interface to go back to its blue and white self before I did anything else. When it did, Mortician’s progress had gone up substantially. “Did you just transfer all of your shards to yourself?”

I looked over my shoulder when Mortician didn’t respond only to see that they were just as confused as I was. “We do not know what we just did. We simply wanted to touch our name.”

A curtain of oil appeared in front of Mortician, and they jumped back with a yelp. The curtain followed their every move, no matter how they ran or ducked or juked. Just like an interface would. “Envoy! It will not leave us alone! Help!”

Maybe the shards had done something to Mortician. “Mortician, how were you talking with me before if you didn’t have an interface?”

“We are connected, Envoy. Our thoughts become words and are sent to your interface, though we do not know how it works. Help?”

I shook my head and laughed. “I don’t think you need help, Mortician. I think you just got yourself an interface.”

“...we don’t have a core. How can we have an interface?” Mortician reluctantly asked. They prodded at the wall of oil before them as it solidified into a screen, then hummed in confusion as it showed a repeating picture of a wave coming in and out. “What is it doing now?”

If I didn’t know any better… “I think your interface is trying to load. But since you don’t have a core, which makes no sense seeing as you’re alive and thinking, it has nothing to connect to. You’ll have to–”

The waves disappeared, and an interface full of information appeared before Mortician. “Well fuck me, then.”

Mortician turned and tried to look over their interface before giving up and speaking to me through it. “Does this mean we now have a core?”

“Probably. Come stand next to me and I’ll walk you through this.” I said, beckoning Mortician to take a spot next to me. They eagerly walked next to me, and for the next ten or so minutes, I helped them get used to all the new workings of their interface. It wasn’t any different from anyone else’s interface, but when we got to their core, I really didn’t know what to make of it.

Jewel of the Oilsea

Core Mastery: N/A

When all shards are reunited and all significant slyk have been sampled, this core will be completed.

An incomplete core. I’d never seen anything like it, and didn’t like that there was another caveat to making Mortician whole that I hadn’t known until now. Hell, I didn’t even know how many ‘significant slyk’ there were. If I had to somehow kill that fucking massive monstrosity of a slyk that was still swimming above us, I wouldn’t be getting Mortician out of here without an army.

“What is considered a significant slyk?” Mortician wondered, their eyes locked on the same slyk that I’d just been worried about. “Because with that ‘analyze’ function you just taught us, we are suddenly much less confident in our abilities to escape this place.”

I glanced over their shoulder and felt all the blood drain from my face. I ordered my own interface to analyze the monster above us, just to make sure Mortician’s wasn’t fucking up somehow, and found that it reported the exact same results.

The exact same terrifying results.

//CORE BEARING SPECIMEN: SLYK STINGPREY

//One of the slyk titans of the deep oilsea. Do not engage. If enraged, the stingprey will latch onto the seafloor and stir up debris. Do not engage. It then creates an undersea storm that will kill everything within. Do not engage.

Core Mastery: MAX

Hazard: Inapplicable.

Core: Bituminous Core, Stingprey Variation.

Core Function: Hidden.

Battery: 3082 Speed: 983 Power: 5914 Resilience: 6640 Recovery: 1717

Jesus fucking Christ. Just… no. Fucking no. That thing was a hundred times stronger than I was at my absolute peak in my old life. Fuck, it was more than a hundred times stronger. I needed to change my assessment: if I had to kill that thing to make Mortician real, I’d have to get The End involved. Nothing short of that would do it.

Wait.

One of the slyk titans?