Mortician frowned as they took in the loneswarm sample. The vial merged with their interface just like the signaleech sample had, but as the process finished, another one started up in its place. Their interface shimmered and darkened until it was a shining oily mirror, reflecting the rocky parts of Mortician but not the rest of their own oil. Three different coloured sparks rushed in from perfectly equidistant points on the edge of their interface, racing towards the middle where they crashed into each other in a burst of oily colour.

Within that violent clash, something solid stirred. A flash of a clump of strange, angular crystals was outlined by the muddled electric colours, blinking rhythmically for a few seconds before it darkened to a simple outline. Mortician and I stared at their interface waiting for something more to happen, but the outline faded away to be replaced by the normal text and tabs of an interface.

“I didn’t expect much of anything, yet I’m still disappointed.” I said with a chuckle. “Seems like we’ll need to collect all twenty-two before much of anything happens. You’ll have to wait a… lot longer, sorry.”

“We know.” Mortician sighed, pressing a finger to the tab that would have led them to their core. An oily black screen came up in its place. “The main problem will be finding another nineteen species of slyk that the system considers to be important. You found two individual species on two different trawlers, but you do not have the time to check each and every one for new slyk. Which is not even considering how many repeat slyk you might find.”

I wanted to disagree, but I found myself reluctantly nodding along. “The only real hope we have is that there are non-titan versions of however many titans there are. But if we have to get samples from the stingprey and all its monstrous friends…”

Realization stopped me in my tracks. “Samples. Not cores; samples. I’m so fucking dumb.”

All we needed was a vial worth of that stingprey’s oil. The thing wasn’t even completely covered in rock, so all we needed to do was find a way up to it and hope that it wouldn’t care if we took the tiniest amount of oil. Like remora on a shark, but even less so. I swept my hand through the oil to see if my armor would count this place as underwater, and much to my surprise, it did. Both the glittering flow and devastating break bonuses were active, and in their powered-up forms.

Mortician watched me with great interest. “Did you come to a realization?” They asked. “Will it help us now? Or is it something you need to talk to Juniper and Okeria about?”

“It should help us now, but there’s one big caveat.” I said, shifting my weapon into a barbed harpoon and pointing it at the slyk. “We need to get up to that so you can sample it.”

“Up to the monstrous slyk which could easily kill the both of us if it wanted to? Are you sure you want to risk yourself for this?” Mortician asked. “We can wait until you are strong enough to at least survive an encounter with the stingprey.”

I shook my head. “As long as we don’t disturb it, we should be safe. ‘Should’ being the key word here; I don’t actually know if it will be fine with us riding on its back.”

Mortician looked at me as if I had two heads, but I could see the cogs turning away as they thought it through. Eventually, they nodded slowly. “We… really want to be with you and Juniper in reality. If you are willing to risk your own safety to bring that to light sooner, we are extremely grateful.”

“I am.” I confirmed. But I was still no closer to getting onto the stingprey. “So, do you have any idea how we’d get up to it? This oil isn’t very good for swimming.”

“No, it is not.” Mortician agreed. “What we need to do is use the unique properties of the slyk oil to our advantage.”

They pushed their hand through the air, then closed their fingers hard. It didn’t look as if anything had changed, but then they pulled themselves up off the ground from the handhold that they’d made. They hummed to themselves and tensed their body, grabbing the handhold with both hands now, and flung themselves upwards with the strength of their arms alone.

A quick scrabble to create another handhold, followed by two swift kicks to make footholds, and Mortician was a dozen feet above me. “How long are those holds going to last?” I asked.

“Not long at all! The strength and pressure needed to harden the oil here is so much greater than anywhere else you’ve been, so keeping it hardened is quite a struggle.” Mortician said. “We have maybe another fifteen seconds before this hold fails us. Have you changed your mind?”

No, I had not. I mimicked Mortician’s motion and felt a small patch of oil harden between my fingers, tested it to make sure it wasn’t going to sink the second I put any weight on it, then used the extra leverage to jump as high as I could. The feeling of oil rushing over my armor was strangely smooth, but with little bumps that reminded me I had a speed limit down here. If I pushed off too hard, I’d end up smashing my head against an obstacle of my own making.

I kicked my feet out and clasped my hand in empty space, letting out a sigh of relief when I found myself standing on pretty much nothing. The stingprey was still overhead, but if we didn’t hurry, it would eventually meander away at a speed I physically couldn’t keep up with. Mortician made another smaller leap to stand next to me, ready to follow me anywhere.

“This might take a while, so let’s get on it. The stingprey’s too big to give a shit about us, so we’ll be fine.” I said to them as much as to myself. “I hope to God we don’t need to kill this thing.”

It took quite a bit longer than I’d expected to get to the stingprey. By the time we reached one of its massive scythe-like limbs my own limbs were screaming at me in agony, and my battery stores were running strangely low. I hadn’t exerted that much effort, nor had I used any battery consuming functions on the way up, so my armor had to be protecting me from something. Maybe the pressure was far greater than I’d thought. Or something.

Mortician pulled themselves onto the rocky back of the stingprey before I did, cautiously looking around for any signs of danger before they waved me on. I appreciated the gesture, but if the stingprey was dangerous, there wouldn’t have been anything we could’ve done. We’d both be dead within seconds.

The massive limb swung down just in front of me, forcing me to jump backwards and scramble to make another handhold before I free-fell a good mile or so straight down. A reminder that even if this thing didn’t care that we were on its back, it could still kill us for being annoyances. Or completely by accident.

Two more jumps and I stood next to Mortician, short of breath and with aching muscles. “Well that was a hundred times more exhausting than I expected.” I said with an attempted laugh, but it came out as a pathetic wheeze. “But we’re here now. And not dead. So that’s good.”

“Very good.” Mortician agreed with a serious nod. “How do we go about sampling this creature?”

I shrugged. “You just had to touch the oil to your interface before. So we need to find a gap in this thing’s rocky armor where you can do that again.”

We walked the back of the slyk titan for a good few minutes before we found anything remotely close to what we were looking for. Even then, it wasn’t the wellspring of oil that I’d expected.

One of the slyk’s rocky plates had a chunk taken out of it the size of a semi-truck. It was a jagged slash that looked like it had come from another equally large monster as this one, but something told me that this was a very old wound. The rock was so thick that it didn’t even hit the slyk’s oily inside until the very bottom, where a tiny pool of crackling oil sat. Not even a bathtub’s worth, and we weren’t the only ones looking for it.

Two slyk that looked like large rocky ants mixed with spiny sea urchins walked in constant circles around the pool, never once breaking away from their guided lines as they did. I opened my interface to analyze the creatures, and they came back underwhelming but with one strange addition.

//CORE BEARING SPECIMEN: SLYK CARVURCH

//A low-threat slyk that carves out rock formations for other slyk to inhabit. These individuals are quite weak, but they are protected by all other species of slyk for the necessary role they perform. A part of the greater slyk hivemind, the being within the hazard which controls the creation of new slyk.

Core Mastery: 55.

Hazard: 13.

Core: Bituminous Core, Carvurch Variation.

Core Function: Plasma Cutter

Battery: 40 Speed: 12 Power: 22 Resilience: 8 Recovery: 40

“The greater slyk hivemind.” I muttered as I closed my interface. “Figures that there’s something out there making all these things. But why are they up here?”

“It does seem strange.” Mortician agreed. “If these slyk are specifically created to cut rock, then would they not be near deposits of stone? This part of the oilsea is severely lacking in that.”

Both of our questions were answered when the sparking pool of oil overflowed with electricity. It arced out and touched both of the carvurch, momentarily stopping them in their tracks before they let out twin shrieks and skittered off towards the walls of the stingprey’s wound. I watched with curiosity as their mandibles dug into the much larger slyk’s stone like it was butter, carving out chunks that they then turned around and threw into the pool. Before the stones burst into tiny pebbles and sunk into the pool.

Which grew ever so slightly smaller. The carvurch resumed their circular march around a now smaller pool, and I got a fairly good idea about what was going on.