Narissa. That wasn’t a name I’d heard before, but it wasn’t hard to know what it belonged to. Keratily was a chosen. Doubt didn’t cross my mind even once. Nothing she’d done or said fully matched up. There were cracks in all of her stories. I’d chalked them up to her being so caught up in her own head that she’d truly believed she was in the right, but… what if she wasn’t ‘saving’ her own kind? What if she was recruiting them against their will?

Just like Endra had done to Nia.

“OUTTA THE WAY, KIDDOS! THIS IMPACT’S GONNA BE MESSY!” Inopsy screamed as his meteors burned away at the world around us, oil bubbling and boiling while pebbles popped and cracked. “OR STAY THERE AND GET FLATTENED, I DON’T CARE! I’M NOT YOUR MOMMA!”

Jun stared up at the sky with less disbelief than I’d expected. “Did… he didn’t always talk like that, did he?”

{No, he did not. That’s his angry voice.} Okeria chuckled. {Ever since Nia found him, he’s tried ta stay ‘normal’ whenever he’s around people. This is what he’s really like now.}

“We don’t think we like the loud one.” Mortician murmured, finally standing up straight and walking to stand to my left. “But… his voice… he hurts. His pain is inwards, and he wishes to inflict it on Keratily.”

“I say we let him.” Jun muttered, taking a few steps forward to kneel at Okeria’s side. She knocked on Keratily’s crystal with her knuckles. “Any idea how we’re supposed to break this?”

I shook my head. “Not without breaking Okeria’s head along with it. How far down into the ground do the crystals go?”

{Dunno, sorry.} Okeria replied with a thunk of the crystal on his head. {I’d guess at least a few feet? Or else I’d just pull up the pebbles they’re stuck ta and run like the wind.}

“Huh. That’s a really high number.” Jun said to herself, running her finger along the crystal that encased Okeria’s head. “Five-hundred and nine. Is that how hard Keratily’s crystals are?”

“Since when can you see numbers on things?”

Jun gestured over her shoulder in Mortician’s general direction. “Since they helped me corrupt my core. If I’m right, I just got a crazy powerup. Even if I’m wrong, I’m still quite a bit stronger.”

“Damn. Nice.” I whistled. “So what scale do the numbers you see use? 1-10? 1-100? Well, obviously not, since you’re looking at a five-hundred. And how could they all be on the same scale, anyway?”

“...Huh. You just gave me an idea. What’s the scale your people use for… I think mineral hardness is the word?” Jun asked.

“I only know the Mohs scale, which is from 1-10, but there are probably others. I don’t remember what the 1 was, but a diamond was a 10.” I replied. “Does that help?”

“Maybe? Maybe not.” Jun said with a shrug. “But if it does work, then my core’s a whole lot stronger than I thought it was. Alright, crystal, let’s see if I can change my point of view…”

Jun stared intently at the crystal as Inopsy’s meteors crashed into the world around us. But not into us. Either he was protecting us, or Keratily was. It was a little sad that I had more confidence in the crazy man than in Jun’s ex-grandma.

{So… are ya wondering who Narissa is?} Okeria asked.

“Not really. According to Inopsy they’re one of your Embodiments, and I don’t really care about anything beyond that.” I replied, summoning my weapon as a spear to try and dig Okeria’s crystalline restraints out of the ground. I stabbed the empty air as hard as I could, then drew back to leave a stab of petal-scales for me to work with. “If Endra is endurance, and Addia is addiction, then Narissa’s gotta be something like… narcissism, right?”

{Well, yeah. Whoever named all of our Embodiments ain’t the most creative person this side of existence. It gets easy ta know whos an Embodiment and whos not when ya notice the pattern.} Okeria replied. {I shoulda expected something like this. But then again, I never really had a reason not ta take Keratily at face value until ya came along. Just had ta shatter most everything I thought I knew, didn’t ya?}

“Sorry I exposed a psychopath for who she was.” I said curtly, jabbing my floating stab through the rock and oil to try and cut Okeria out. It sunk six feet, a dozen feet, two dozen feet… it just kept going. I hit my control range long before I even glimpsed a bottom. “Good lord, Keratily put you in deep. How the hell are we supposed to get you free?”

“We’ll have to break him free. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to cut off his hands and feet.” Jun said seriously enough that Okeria could only whimper in response. “It was dangerously easy to get the crystal’s number into something smaller. It went from 509 to 9.2, and when I forced my core onto it, that went down to 8.2. Still hard as Keratily’s heart, but we have a little bit better chance at breaking it.”

I nodded and called my spear stab back to me, tentatively pressing it to the crystal under Okeria’s hands. It still didn’t budge a single inch, and in that moment, I wished the scales lasted between weapon shape changes. I could’ve used a spear impact like a chisel with my hammer, but that wasn’t possible. Not with my level of control over the function, at least. Instead, I settled on whacking at the crystal with all of my might.

All I got for my exertion was a tiny chip of pink crystal the size of my pinky nail. I leaned in closer to examine the minuscule damage I’d managed to inflict, but Keratily’s damn crystals had already regenerated in that short second.

I sighed and shook my head, leaning on my spear for balance. “Damn. Looks like we’re going to have to–”

An explosive impact cut me off, sending a tidal wave of oil and pebbles surging over us before I could even react. Jun yelped in surprise while Mortician let out a strangled cry, a barrage of pelting stones cutting us off from Keratily completely.

Inopsy shrugged off a curtain of oil, shifting into a careless wave when he saw me. “Hey, kiddo. Good to see you again. Wish the circumstances weren’t so abyssal, but there’s nothing we can do about that any more. Oh, and Juniper’s here too. And… someone I don’t recognize? They one of yours, or one of Keratily’s?”

“One of ours.” I said quickly, not dropping my guard at Inopsy’s casual demeanor. I hadn’t forgotten how… unpredictable the man was. “Okeria contacted you?”

Inopsy nodded without taking another step forward. “I was waiting for you outside the hazard, in case Endra decided to kill you, but then I got Okeria’s message. Keratily’s as dangerous as Endra, just in a different way. Drowned woman didn’t let on she was a chosen the entire time I’ve known her.”

“But aren’t you a chosen too?” Jun pointed out. “Aren’t you just as bad as she is?”

“Careful with your words, kiddo. Not all Embodiments are trying to take over the world.” Inopsy said seriously. “But more than one are. Endra’s started a cascade that’ll crash over in a few years, and we have to stop it before it gets out of hand. Not sure how we’re going to do that, but it starts with getting all of you to Rainbow Basin. I’ll either kill Keratily or find out I’m too weak to do that, then meet you there in a month or so. Try not to let Okeria die; he’s kind of important. Good luck!”

A sharp keening cut through the chaos. A noise like lights in an empty warehouse coming on all at once followed, and it hit me like an ethereal punch to the gut. I grunted and almost lost my balance as far too many warnings popped up on my interface, telling me that I was in the process of losing armor integrity and battery at an extremely dangerous pace.

“Oh my, this is very unpleasant.” Mortician whimpered, taking the effects of Keratily’s attacks much worse than I had. They groaned and fell to their knees, cradling their stomach like an elementary school kid who really didn’t want to take a math test. “This wasn’t what we were expecting pain to feel like. Memories can only do it so much… justice.”

I grunted in agreement, wrapping my hands around one of Okeria’s trapped feet. If Keratily’s crystals were still under her control, there wasn’t anything I could do. But if she’d just created them, and left them in the ground to keep Okeria here, then maybe I could pull them into my interface. Or turn them into potential.

Jun leaned over, completely unfazed by whatever Keratily was doing to Mortician and I. “Looks like she’s still not hurting me. Maybe I can take advantage of that.”

Inopsy planted a hand on Jun’s shoulder. She tried to brush it off, but from what I could see, he didn’t even budge.

“Sorry, kiddo; not letting you get hurt for Percy’s sake.” He decreed, gently pushing Jun towards the rest of us. “Keratily’s siphoning away our battery and integrity to make herself stronger. But it only works as long as we’re all inside of these four pillars. I’ll protect you until you can get Okeria out, then you need to run. I can’t fight her fairly otherwise.”

“I thought you would’ve left when you said ‘good luck’.” Jun muttered as Inopsy turned his back on us. She pressed her fingers to the crystal under mine, then paused. “Have you tried whatever you’re going to do yet? Because I don’t have enough battery to safely do what I want to try.”

My interface blinked twice, then informed me that it could not remove the crystals from Okeria due to something it called ‘spatial anchoring’. That was one alley I couldn’t go down, but it still left me with one thing to try. I swiped over to my core’s sunscreen and shoved it down onto Keratily’s crystal.

//WARNING: THE MATERIAL YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO CONVERT TO POTENTIAL IS LINKED TO ANOTHER’S CORE FUNCTION. CONVERSION HALTED.

Well, that was that. “Just tried it, and it didn’t work. We might have to go for the nuclear option.”

{But I like my feet and hands.} Okeria argued. {Can’t ya, I don’t know… try something else?}

Mortician muttered something incoherent and rolled over to Okeria’s other foot, babbling to themself all the while. They were getting hit much harder thanks to their lower reserves, if I had to guess. They raised a hand with fingertips that gleamed like polished gold, clumsily bringing it down to grab Okeria by the ankle. Keratily’s crystal disappeared wherever their fingertips touched, and then one of Okeria’s limbs was suddenly free to move.

{Well I’ll be! And that broke her stranglehold on all my functions ta boot! Thanks for that, and stand back.} Okeria said, raising his leg as liquid metal pooled under his chest. Blue sparks arced off of the strange looking metal, causing pebbles to burst into shrapnel wherever it touched.

Okeria knocked his crystal-encased head into the ground, and more of his metal burst free from the space between oil and pebbles. It scythed through Keratily’s crystals like they were butter, stopping just short of doing the same to everyone else sitting around him. He tried to stand with chunks of crystal on three of his limbs and one weighing down his skull, but settled for rolling over and motioning helplessly. Like a baby who wanted to be picked up.

{Well, I solved that problem. Now all we gotta do is get outta here before Keratily decides she wants ta kidnap Juniper more than she wants ta fight Inopsy.}