“Don’t hold back.” I warned Jun, but the message was just as much for me as it was for her. This was our final fight here in this hazard, and Mortician’s existence was on the line. I swiped twice through the air to add two more petal-slashes to my arsenal, then fell into a defensive stance.

Jun took a similar defensive stance, except hers was more fitting for the two-handed sword she wielded. “I don’t think I can do anything else.” She said with confidence, her back foot slowly shifting as she spoke. “Do you think we can actually kill this thing, or are we going to try to take Mortician’s pieces and run?”

A good question that I couldn’t answer until I saw the creator in its entirety. The black abyss that it currently sat in didn’t let me see much of anything, and a quick analysis came up completely blank. Which meant it still wasn’t really here yet. Whatever was in that sinkhole was such a tiny piece of the creator that the system couldn’t get a hold on it.

“Not sure yet, but I’d bet on ‘grab and run’ if I were you.” I replied, finally allowing my oil-based armor functions to activate. “Stay safe.”

“You too.” Jun said calmly, loosely shifting her sword in her hands. The blade fit her hands perfectly, but she didn’t seem perfectly comfortable wielding it. I’d have to help her find what kind of weapon best suited her, which in hindsight, I should’ve done a long-ass time ago.

“It’s coming.” Jun stated, interrupting my thoughts to bring me back to the moment.

I sharpened my mind to a razor-sharp point and directed it at the emerging creator. Too-long legs scrabbled against the edge of the sinkhole, trying with mild success to pull itself free of the pit. I didn’t have to see more than that to know what I was dealing with. My hands tightened around my spear, and I had to remind myself that this thing wasn’t the same one responsible for all the fucking mess I was in. This massive too-long legged centipede wasn’t what Nia had used to fight Addia’s chosen. It wasn’t the one Endra had sicced on us to try and keep us from getting to this hazard in the first place.

It was the creature that inspired it.

The rocks shifted next to me. I didn’t have to turn to see Jun’s reaction to the creator, but I definitely heard her growl. “Seb.”

“I know.” I replied, my own voice harder than I’d expected. “Nia was here. She used this thing for inspiration.”

And now we had to fight it. Something strong enough for Nia to borrow from. But that had to be years ago, from when she wasn’t anywhere as strong as she’d been at the end. We probably didn’t stand a chance, but my will to fight had been stoked just a little too hard to back down.

“I’ll take the legs. Go for the main body when you see it.” Jun ordered, surging forward with a burst of speed that my eyes could barely follow. Some combination of her etchings, I’d guess.

I nodded to myself and followed Jun, planting my spear in one leg and sending out the three slashes to help Jun with her part. I gripped the spear with all of my strength and heaved, sending myself flying through the air over the middle of the sinkhole. I called two of the slashes back to me, staring down into the abyss below for the seconds it took them to reach me. Balancing on the slashes was slightly more difficult than I’d expected, but the desire not to fall into the waiting clutches of the creator kept me aloft until I got the hang of it.

The slyk-ified version of Nia’s monster curled itself into a tight spiral inside of the abyss, lines of coloured electricity giving it the impression of an extremely strange spiral seashell. The only rock I could see on the entire thing was in its legs; the rest of its body was pure electrically-controlled abyssal black oil. I activated //ENDLESS’ ribbons and set the creator as my target for wipe-away, now as ready as I could possibly be for whatever the creator threw at me.

The creator’s legs clicking were the only sound it made as it rose out of the sinkhole in relative silence, the crack of Jun’s attacks dying off in the distance without much of anything to echo against. It emerged until it had enough space to unfurl its body, a massively long thing that only grew larger as oil funneled into it from somewhere deep below. I could feel my oil-empowered weapon function draining stats from it, but unlike the signaleech, it didn’t react in the slightest. It was too strong to take notice.

I tried one last time to get a better look at the thing’s stats, and much to my surprise, something came up. It was clad in capital letters and slashes, and so much of it was redacted that I could barely understand it, but I could see enough of it to know that it was a monstrous threat. Yet… not quite as monstrous as I’d expected.

//HAZARD SPECIMEN: SLYK CREATOR

//THE DREDGED SWITCHPORT’S MANIFESTED BODY. PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT WILL LEAD TO DEFEAT. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE RELATIVELY LOW STATS. IT WILL QUITE LITERALLY FIGHT FOREVER.

Core Mastery: REDACTED.

Hazard: REDACTED.

Core: Inapplicable.

Core Function: Inapplicable.

Battery: inf. Speed: 84 Power: 183 Resilience: 126 Recovery: inf.

Inf. Did… did that stand for ‘infinity’? This thing had infinite battery and recovery. How the fuck were we supposed to fight something that started regenerating the moment we hurt it, and would never run out of that regeneration?

We weren’t. I grimaced and shook my head, glaring down at the creator with an idea forming in my mind about how I was going to get at Mortician’s pieces. The thing had some damn high stats, even for the ones that weren’t literally infinite, so I really only had one chance at winning. Opened my inventory and swiped over to the last potion Keratily had made for me, sitting there uselessly in the face of all the risks it carried. But I was already part slyk. My bond with Mortician made sure of that, and there wasn’t much else this potion could do for me. But maybe it could do something to the creator.

The creator’s eerily silent approach continued as Jun hacked away at its rapidly regenerating legs, its oil solid and featureless as it barrelled towards me. A rainbow of electricity crackled along the creator, peeling off of it in all directions and crashing down against the pebbly ground below. I summoned the potion to my hand and let it drop, slowly tumbling through the air to meet the creator halfway down.

Lightning struck the glass sphere and instantly vaporized the potion. I blinked in surprise and couldn’t help but laugh; I hadn’t expected much, but I hadn’t expected it to do literally nothing. The creator’s rising spiral continued unabated. I took a deep breath and readied myself for what was about to come.

“Here goes everything.” I said with more confidence than I expected, dismissing my spear from the creator’s leg along with the slashes it had made. There was no longer anything holding me in the air, and as I plummeted, I resummoned my weapon as a shield and placed it between me and the creator. I held my breath and called on the petal-scales to create a V-shaped wedge under my shield, then braced for impact.

Sparks and oil flew as one when my shield impacted the creator. I yelped in pain when a bolt kicked me in the arm, threatening to throw me away like last week’s trash when I was so close to Mortician’s life. I tried to push on, but I didn’t have the leverage for it. The oil was hardening too quickly, and the creator was too in control of its body for me to sink in.

More electricity knocked into and screamed past me, trying its damndest to remove me from its host. A bellow of effort and anger erupted from my stomach, petal-scales dancing around me as I pushed my soul into the attack. Yet it still wasn’t enough. I wasn’t heavy enough. And then with a sudden lurch and a moon-shaped light on my shoulder, I was.

The creator split under me like warm cheese, but it was only a temporary measure. I looked behind me to see the damn thing already reforming, closing me inside of the slyk in a pocket just large enough that I wasn’t assaulted from all angles. I expected the resistance to amplify the further I went, but it seemed that the opposite was true. The creator got less and less solid the further in I got, until I was moving so fast that my stomach started rising in my throat.

“Oh God, oh god, oh gods.” I mumbled to myself, gripping tighter and tighter as I flew through the creator at pass-out speeds. My vision started fading to black, a tightening curtain of darkness that cut off all the rainbow bolts shooting through the creator. “I can’t die like this. It’s so… pathetic.”

Just as the darkness closed around my eyes, and I felt my conscious mind slip away, I stopped. Hard. My head slammed against the ground and rebounded hard enough that I sat up, flashes of light and darkness warring for control over my body. I knew that I wasn’t in good shape, but I had enough battery and recovery to keep myself thinking while my armor did the repairs. I fumbled around with both arms for a wall to steady myself, and found what I was looking for in spades.

I was closed in on all sides in a room just smaller than my wingspan. I blinked to clear my eyes until I could see a dim flickering light above me, casting an untrustworthy beam down on me and the lone other occupant of the room. I waved away what I later learned were pieces of teeth floating in my helmet, leaning in to get a better look at the thing that lay before me.

A single standalone locker with the numbers ‘281’ carved into the metal. Not stone; metal. My eyes were drawn to a small lock keeping the thing closed. I could’ve easily broken the thing with my bare hands if I wanted to, but something was telling me that I had to properly open it. I fumbled with my hands until I opened my interface, drunkenly swiping until the little key was in my hand. It was difficult to keep myself steady enough to get my left hand around the lock, and even harder to fit the key into its small opening.

But I eventually prevailed with a soft click. The bottom of the lock completely fell away from the U-shaped bar, bounced once on the ground, and knocked against my knee a completely different thing. I stared down at the square of rusted and disfigured metal that had been pristine just a moment ago, which continued to rust away to nothing as I watched. The entire process took less than ten seconds, and then the lock was gone for good. I looked up to see that the bar had rusted away as well, leaving only a single pull between me and Mortician’s final pieces.

Not wanting to waste another second, I reached in and pulled open the locker. The hinges glided perfectly for a moment, squeaked in protest the next, and ground away to nothing in a cacophony of rust by the time I fully opened the door. It withered away to nothing in my hand, but I barely noticed. I was completely fixated on what was inside the locker.

A toddler-sized black bag slumped against the wall. A cracked picture of two people who looked like two-eyed mammalian Staura, one holding the other up on their hip, both with smiles as wide as their faces would allow. And a note scrawled in old blood that I could, somehow, unfortunately, read.

“Help me.” I read, my throat growing thick as I couldn’t help but imagine what was in that black bag. I reached in to feel, to confirm what I already knew. Tears welled in the corners of my eyes as I felt a small lifeless body withering away in my hands.