My mind instantly raced to the little key I hadn’t touched since I found it, sitting uselessly in my inventory waiting for me to find its purpose. This was the closest I’d come so far, yet it was also the only thing of use I felt within the creator. It felt like pure instinct came alive; more what I’d expect to find if I entered the mind of an animal, not a human-level intelligent being. Which brought on the question; what happened to everything else that died when the Celaura did? All the unique species of plants, animals, and even the bacteria that were so unlike anything else?

“Is that what you are?” I wondered aloud, and the feeling of the creator suddenly made so much more sense. “You physically can’t think like we can. You can’t understand Mortician, or what you’ve made. All you know is that it’s trying to run away from you.”

A low growl ripped through my mind, setting my survival instincts on edge. There was no intelligence here, and that confirmed it for me. I tried to channel The End like I’d done when I first met Mortician, just in case I’d been wrong, but as I felt myself give in to whatever power I had as an Envoy, I felt nothing. This wasn’t a creature that understood the idea of being forgotten. I couldn’t do anything for it, and it couldn’t understand anything I could give it. A pure animal creation, the desire to breed and leave descendants. A true creator, yet nothing more.

“I’m leaving.” I decreed, pouring power into my voice as I spoke. The slyk creator didn’t even flinch. “I don’t know if we can kill you, but if you insist on attacking us, we won’t hesitate. Your end will bring Mortician to us.”

I swept my hand through the darkness and pushed. “Goodbye.”

Jun’s hands grabbed onto my waist through the oily darkness and pulled, ripping me away from the creator’s domain and back into the nexus. I blinked away the light that assaulted my eyes and shook my head until sounds stopped being so muffled, then turned to look at the woman looming over me.

“Did you find anything?” Jun asked, extending a hand to help me up when she saw I was ready to do so. “Is the creator like Mortician, or are they like the other slyk?”

“Definitely closer to the other slyk.” I said while accepting Jun’s hand. “I couldn’t feel any real intelligence inside of it, but I did feel a whole lot of danger and primal instincts. More than a creator, I’d call it a broodmother or a spawner. That fits better.”

Jun nodded, then pulled me out of the range of the thrashing tendril. “Does that make this easier or harder for us?”

“Good question.” I chuckled. I’d both been dreading and looking forward to talking to the creator, and the knowledge that it was just a mindless creature was a relief. And a major disappointment. “It doesn’t change anything if we were always going to fight it. Now the question is how we’re going to fight it, and how I’m going to get to that locker inside of it.”

“Locker? The one that matches the key you found?” Jun asked. “It’s inside of the creator?”

“As far as I can tell.” I confirmed. “And I didn’t feel any other slyk pieces, so they’re probably all inside of that locker.”

Jun whistled and shook her head. “That’s not good. Even if we kill it, that doesn’t mean we’ll find the part of it with Mortician’s pieces within the hour. So we’ll have to find where the locker is inside of the creator before we kill it, and probably loot it while it's still alive. Somehow.”

“Sounds about right.” I agreed with a nod. “We can’t avoid a fight any more, not that we ever could, so get your battle clothes on. Holding back will get the both of us killed.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Jun said with grim conviction, summoning a stylus with a gesture of her hand. She scribbled two symbols on her arm; the strangling sprout and the compressed moon. The collar around her neck that was //MIMICRY pulsed once with battery, then fell dark and silent. She must’ve seen the question in my body language, since she answered it without me having to ask.

“I can write the symbols without powering them, remember?” She said simply, and I kind of remembered something like that. Not fully, though. “I’ll need some better weaponry and armor when we’re done with this, if we can get Okeria to make some good stuff for us. Or if you can spare some potential to corrupt some armor for me.”

“I don’t have to spare anything. We’re partners. If I didn’t have to use so much of it on myself to be useful at all, I’d’ve given you more to begin with.” I said, summoning my weapon as a spear and priming my armor with signaleech oil. Scales crept up my spear as I activated floodpetal-scales, and then I was as ready as I could be. “When we’re done with this, I’ll make you something good. As long as you provide the materials.”

Jun nodded happily, flexing her fingers without summoning a weapon of her own. “It’s a date.”

We waited a handful of heartbeats while the tendril thrashed around uselessly, then suddenly froze and stood perfectly straight, like a black icicle growing the wrong way up. The colours inside flickered and shimmered in a pattern that almost felt like primitive communication, calling to others that we couldn’t see, then blinked out completely. The oil fell to the ground in a thick, half-liquid heap and didn’t move for the minute or so we stared warily at it.

“That was something.” Jun whispered, as if speaking too loud would call the creator to us. Which was what we wanted, but was also pretty damn frightening. “What do you think it just called in? More infesters, or something on the level of the signaleech you and Okeria fought?”

The squelching and grinding of oil on stone delivered the answer Jun was looking for. Infesters rose from the ground all around us, beginning the slow work of using snail-slyk to trap us. The creator obviously hadn’t seen me annihilate one of the buggers just a minute ago. Or it was just trying to buy enough time to attack us itself. Either way, our fight started with slaughtering an entire platoon’s worth of infesters.

“I’ll take this side, you take that side.” I told Jun, gesturing at all the infesters in front of me before waving one hand behind my back at the ones on her side. “Yell if you need help.”

“Same to you.” Jun agreed with excited anticipation in her voice. “I’ll just cripple all of mine so you can trigger your core function on them. No sense wasting cores, you know?”

I nodded, a motion I then remembered Jun couldn’t see. “Sounds good. But keep yourself in peak condition; a few cores isn’t worth making the fight against the creator a hundred times more difficult.”

“Will do. Don’t wear yourself out.” Jun said in time to a spray of pebbles hitting the back of my legs.

I instinctively turned my neck to see her punch a hole into an infester, then summon her sword inside of the slyk in a spray of rock and oil. The thing around her neck flared the symbol that made things heavier or lighter, and she yanked her sword free in a spurt of oil that lingered in the air far longer than it should’ve. Jun spun to meet the next infester rising from the ground, slashing a long gouge into its side that shone with the compressed moon’s light and pulled the infester lopsidedly onto the ground. I didn't know how she was using her function without inscribing the symbols onto the infesters themselves, but I wasn’t about to ask that in the middle of a fight.

A fight that I was a part of. I turned and slammed my spear into an infester that had managed to get close to me, splitting it halfway down and leaving a long petal-scale slash hovering in the air. I activated wipe-away on it and then commanded the slash to return and dig deeper into the infester, wreaking havoc in its insides until I saw the glimmer of its core. I dove in and wrapped my fingers around it, ripping it free from the surrounding rock and dismissing the notification that came alongside it. I didn’t bother using the signaleech oil to fuel myself once again, considering that these infesters were weak enough to fight with just one function. I scooped up and squirreled the solidified experience away, shut off wipe-away, and moved on to the next infester.

Saying what I did to the infesters was a dance was a great oversimplification, and in all honesty, a flat-out lie. I moved from one to another, splitting them down the middle and extracting their cores before they could mount a defense. These things would’ve stonewalled me if I still had the gear I’d had before I entered this hazard, but now that I had improved weaponry and armor, they didn’t pose a ghost of a threat. About four minutes after we’d started I killed the last one of my infesters, then turned to see that Jun was in the process of dealing with the last two of her own. Not wanting to bother her, I pocketed the last core and experience and moved on to deal the finishing blow to whichever infesters she’d left alive.

Which was, unsurprisingly, all of them. I bent down and repeated what I’d done to my own infesters, and much to my surprise, saw that the infesters still seemed to be under the effects of Jun’s function. I didn’t know she had enough battery to maintain one etching for this long, nevermind on multiple enemies. The infester died just like the rest, along with its brethren. No sight of the creator as of yet.

“That was a good warmup.” Jun huffed, dismissing her sword and crossing her arms with a nod. “So what’d you think? I know I can’t do it exactly like Nia could, but I think I’m getting the hang of this function.”

I didn’t really know how Nia used her function, since I only learned how it worked post-mortem. But Jun had easily held her own, which had to count for something. “It’s pretty damn impressive, especially since you could barely use it a few weeks ago. How’d you get the effects to stay on the infester after you cut it?”

Jun summoned her sword by the blade and handed the hilt to me. I took it as I took in the blade itself, countless tiny symbols of the compressed moon and strangling sprout covering the entire blade. And two twice-eyes on the hilt.

“I inscribed my sword with a whole lot of symbols.” Jun explained. “It can apply the effect of an inscription to things it cuts, so I don’t have to fiddle with my pen every time I want to do something.”

I was about to ask how the hell that worked, since it didn’t seem like that was the intended use, but the ground pulled away from us before I could say anything. Jun and I shared a silent look before scrambling away from the oily sinkhole that had opened up just before our feet, a black abyss sparking with rainbow veins that absolutely radiated danger. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that the creator had found us.