Before any of the carvurch fully powered up, I needed to do something. Scales crept up the blades of my daggers as I lunged at the morphing carvurch before me, swiping low to try and cut off the rocky bit of it that the chipspeck had latched on to. My dagger cut through it like butter and left behind a much shorter scale-slash.

It did absolutely nothing to stop the carvurch. Because the rest of the chipspeck swarming it were still attached. It had been a longshot to hope that removing the one that struck its head would’ve stopped it from being controlled, but I had to try the easiest path. The carvurch reared its head up and tried to cut through my chest. I swung my daggers down, just barely brushing against the buzzing mandibles as I created two slashes to keep the carvurch at bay.

I stepped towards its face and planted one dagger in its head, vaulting over it and trailing my weapon behind me. The carvurch screeched loudly and tried to swivel on me, but its mandibles were still caught on my slashes. An already weakened neck meant that the force ripped the thing’s head from the rest of its body, and I quickly brutalized the rest of it until I got my hands on its core. Only then did my core notify me that I’d killed it.

“These things are a whole lot more dangerous than the normal carvurch.” I warned, scanning the room as more carvurch drew strength from the chipspeck mass. The sound of Mortician fighting was my answer. “Do you need help?”

Mortician grunted in reply, throwing a carvurch to the side and ducking out of the way of another. “We could use some help, yes. We should attempt to take out the chipspeck mass.”

Six carvurch buzzed to full power, joining Mortician’s six for a cool dozen. “Not right now; one of us will get seriously hurt protecting the other. When we’ve halved their numbers we’ll go for the mass.”

“Halved?” Mortician groaned theatrically. “That could take… minutes!”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. Mortician giggled to themselves as they grabbed a handful of buzzing mandible and didn’t so much as flinch, their entire body glowing bright for a second as the electricity ran through them. It didn’t cut their hand at all, and it broke in two with a simple twist of their wrist. I decided they would be fine, even with the powered up carvurch.

I jabbed a dagger up to spear a carvurch that had jumped at me, their jaws closing fruitlessly just a few inches from my face. The others closed in on me at once, mindlessly charging in without a care for their fellow slyk. Their electricity bit chunks out of each other whenever it brushed against the rock, sending sprays of oil out that hung in the oilsea like beads of kitchen oil in water. I slammed the one I’d been holding up down on the closest one, sent my two slashes out at another, and swung aimlessly into the air to make more slashes. The daggers’ slashes took far less effort to make and control, and by the time another slyk managed to get to me, I had eight under my control. I could’ve probably pushed for one or two more, but eight seemed like more than enough for the powered-up fodder.

The carvurch didn’t let up. I wove through the mass of rock-bugs with the grace of an out of practice dancer, parrying electric attacks as I went and striking out at exposed flanks whenever I could. The carvurch weren’t built for combat, and no amount of power ups would change that. The first victim didn’t even fall to me; it was run through by a carvurch that didn’t understand that trying to charge me through its friend wouldn’t end well. Oil and stone flew everywhere, like the gore effects from a cheesy horror movie, and the carvurch’s core flew across the room in the spray.

“So that’s what happens if I don’t block right.” I gulped, instinctively pulling my slashes in closer to me for protection. One of them pressed against my forearm, and instead of cutting me to ribbons, it just stayed there. The mental weight of controlling it dipped ever so slightly, and as I moved my arm, the slash moved with it. “Huh. That’s interesting.”

A buzzing alerted me that a carvurch had gotten away from Mortician just before their actual warning reached my ears. I pivoted on one foot and slammed my slash-empowered arm down against one mandible while pressing a dagger into the other. The carvurch tried with all its might to chomp down on me, but it didn’t have anywhere near the strength for that. I cut it from head to thorax with two slashes in an X pattern, then swept forward to snatch its core before it could hit the ground.

“Sorry! We didn’t notice it getting away from us!” Mortician called. “Have three of yours died yet? Because that was the third of mine to die!”

“Only one of mine’s dead, but we’re tied in kills. I’ll change that quickly.” I said without turning to look at Mortician. My eyes were locked on the strategy-less quintet of carvurch before me, all of which were passively fighting each other to get at me. One of them was quite a bit more aggressive than the others, which was obviously because it was the only one that still had all of its limbs. They were beyond terrible at the whole ‘fighting as a unit’ thing.

I held a closed fist out in front of me with a dagger pointing towards the ground and almost designated the lively one as a target for wipe-away. Luckily for me, I finally used my brain and remembered that I could target anything with my weapon’s function. Including the thing that was making the carvurch attack us. The thing with piddly stats that I could actually overtake.

The chipspeck mass rippled with motion the moment I designated it as the target for wipe-away. Thousands of chipspeck burst from the main body in a flurry of strange motion, flying pointlessly about in the cavern without even attempting to attach to any of the carvurch. I dodged away from the slyk for a whole ten seconds just to see what would happen when a single tick of stat drain went through, and was rewarded with a message that I’d never seen before.

//ATTENTION: THE TARGET DESIGNATED BY //WIPE-AWAY HAS REACHED THE MINIMUM VALUE OF (1) IN STATS (SPEED,POWER,RESILIENCE) AND THEY CAN LOWER NO FURTHER.

So I couldn’t lower the mass’ stats to 0 and kill it that way. I shrugged and turned back to the carvurch which was now surrounded by a swarm of chipspeck; it would’ve felt like a cop-out anyway to win that way. I stepped into a slash that took the slyk’s head, then dug my hand around its insides until I killed it for good. Six down, six to go.

As I tried to move on the next group of carvurch something exploded on my helmet. An impact that knocked my head backwards and filled my vision with crackling light came into being when I touched a cloud of chipspeck, and I almost fell flat on my ass from the blowback. I caught myself before I went head over heels, steadying my breathing as I frantically scanned the area for the chipspeck.

There were so goddam many of them. And not a single one of them moved at all. They hung in place without swaying, planted like tiny mines in the oilsea. A carvurch skittered towards me and through a cloud of chipspeck, triggering a few dozen tiny flashbangs as it did. Something that was only a step away from a corpse fell a few feet short of my feet, pathetically trying to inch forwards without any limbs to carry them and a body that was half of what it had been.

This had to be the chipspeck mass’ last resort. I shielded my eyes from the other carvurch that tried to move through clouds of chipspeck, the explosions popping in my peripheral vision still bright enough to make me wince. I cut down the crippled carvurch with a clean blow, then turned to see that Mortician had finished with their half of the task.

“Don’t touch the floating chip-SPECK.” I warned, warping into a cry as Mortician walked right through a cloud of the bastards. Unharmed. They tilted their head to the side, looking around as if they didn’t realize what they’d almost done to themselves.

“Did we do something wrong?” Mortician asked with mild confusion. “The chipspeck are extremely weak. They could not harm… us…” They trailed off to the sounds of exploding chipspeck and dying carvurch. “Oh. That did not happen when we touched them. Though we now understand your urgency.”

I let Mortician lead the way through the clouds of chipspeck, absorbing them into their body as they went. I had absolutely no way to tell how they were doing it, but I wasn’t going to question this simplification of things. They bent down and finished off a carvurch as I did the same, following in the path of safety that they left behind. The chipspeck mound couldn’t do much of anything to defend itself, but it certainly tried.

Chipspeck spilled out of it and clustered around the cavern once more, looking for carvurch to empower but finding none. There had been strangely few of the slyk in here with the mass proper for reasons I couldn’t comprehend. I shifted my daggers into a shield just in case something ambushed us, but let Mortician do whatever it was they were planning as they continued towards the mass.

More and more chipspeck left the mass, most of which flew directly at Mortician with dying flashes of electricity. I realized what they were trying to do when it was far too late to do anything about it if they’d succeeded.

“Are they trying to control you?”

Mortician considered for a second, then nodded. “That makes far more sense than what we were thinking. It has not worked, if you were wondering.”

I was indeed wondering. “What were you thinking?”

“We thought they were trying to empower us for some odd reason. We feel no different, though, so that cannot be what they were attempting.” Mortician theorized. They stepped within arm’s length of the mass, took one look at the buzzing exterior it held, and plunged their arms inside of it. “If something shows up to attack us while we do this, please kill it for us.”

“That was always the plan.” I said as I turned my back to Mortician, holding my shield in front of me as I readied for whatever was inevitably going to try and stop us from killing the chipspeck mass. Moments passed in tense silence.

A silence that broke with a wet pop and Mortician murmuring in interest. “Sebastian, it would appear that we have found another of the important slyk oils.”

They walked away from a dead mass, holding a core in their hands that looked like a ton of chipspeck stuck together. It even writhed like it was still alive. I checked my notifications and found that I’d gained a copy of it as well, but Mortician forced it on me anyway.

“You’re sure?” I asked hesitantly. “You’ll need these when we get you a physical body.”

“Then you can keep it safe for us. Or you can use it on yourself or Juniper. We will be happy no matter what is done with it.” Mortician said confidently. “Chipspeck are apparently important enough to count towards our core, even though the carvurch were not. How strange.”

Strange or not, it was a boon. “Four down, three to go until the next step. Let’s go deal with the other chipspeck masses.”