The chittering grew louder. I vigorously gestured for Jun to step back, threw the cruel world’s partition between Mortician and Danday, and readied myself for two possible outcomes.

One; Danday is way too strong for us. We have to leave the hazard, and then we have to fight whatever’s waiting for us. Including Danday, who’d follow us if he needed to.

Or two, which was the much better option; we stand a chance. Danday isn’t as monstrously powerful as the aura he’s emitting makes it seem, and we can fight him for as long as physically possible. With any bit of luck the hazard would remove the battery restriction when he destroyed the barrier, and we could fight…

{Kill the pixy!} I nervously shouted. {Then attack as soon as the barrier goes down!}

Jun aimed her weapon at Danday as the barrier warped around him, holding weakly as he slowly walked forward. {As soon as it comes into my field of view, it's dead. And I’m ready to fight or run, whatever we need to do.}

The vote to leave ticked up to one. Jun tilted her head to the side and just barely looked over at me in question, which I returned. I hadn’t done that. And from her confusion, she hadn’t done it either.

Leaving only one person who could’ve made that vote. {We are awake.} Mortician confirmed groggily. {But whatever new powers we’ve gained are not ready for combat. We will support you as best as we can without drawing attention to ourselves.}

The pixy zipped into the upper right corner of my vision. I summoned my weapon to my hand as a sword, with the mental command to shift it into a shield on the tip of my mind if Danday charged. Everything seemed to slow down as the pixy shattered into a thousand shards of bone, clicked to the ground in a burst of strange power, and destroyed the barrier Danday had gotten about halfway through.

He charged Jun. Not a moment of surprise at the destruction for us to breathe. I activated all of my functions that I could, along with endless’ consumables, and threw myself into his path with sword raised to block.

My mind screamed at me to run. That it was the only way I could live. The hard bite of oil slammed into my brain, and a bladed fist slammed into my sword. It sheared away a layer of petals in a flourish of violence, and the follow up blow slammed into my shoulder with the force of a runaway pickup.

//INTERVENTION ACTIVATED.

The bladed gauntlet instantly stopped. A burst of cerulean light mixed with oily white expelled it from the wound, and the world’s shortest timer told me how long I had to capitalize on Danday’s surprise. Three bullets slammed into his helmet at almost exactly the same time, and from how they made him stagger back, Jun had empowered them somehow.

His recovery was slow. Jun’s doing. I grit my teeth and ignored the blazing pain in my shoulder as I activated wipe-away on Danday and charged, slashing the air around me three times as I went for a little extra firepower. The slashes converged on him with a simple gesture, crashing against his armor with the same destructive power as a lazy wave lapping away at a beach.

He grunted and raised his arms to block my attack, his huge bladed gauntlets almost completely blocking him from view. And completely blocking off my sight of his helmet. I could use that. My weapon shifted into a hammer midway through my swing, the petal-scale slashes falling away as the weapon that controlled them changed. Danday must have noticed something was wrong, because I saw him start to shift, but my hammer slammed into the center of his left gauntlet before anything happened.

“Drown me!” He cried as his gauntlet’s blade shattered.

The surge of stats disappeared as quickly as they’d come, and I pulled the impact from the hammer back to me to serve as an impromptu shield. Jun followed through with a few more shots, but none of them landed on Danday. They all cracked against a translucent grey barrier that floated a foot out from him in a perfect sphere.

“Damned shields.” I spat as I shifted my hammer into a spear. It crashed against the shield with a little more success, sending a few shards tumbling through the air that disappeared before they struck the ground. My retreat was covered by a wide spinning slash as I carved crescent moons of petal-scales into the world around me.

{It already regenerated.} Jun pointed out as she fired a few more shots. {Do you think it's connected to his core?}

I shook my head. {Not in the way you’re thinking. It’s probably a function he put into his core, like my petal-scales or your god-pen. Whatever his core function is, he hasn’t shown us yet.}

The wave of survival-related dread washed over us once again, and I let out a reflexive whimper as it coursed through me. It was as harsh and vivid as the grating winds of a desert storm, and it ground away at my thoughts with the hope of replacing everything with the sand of survival. Maybe… maybe this was his core. Maybe Endra had done something to it, like Tarel did to Garrett, and replaced his original core with one crafted in her image.

Or maybe that was why Endra had chosen Danday in the first place.

Weight slammed down onto my slashes. Danday’s gauntlets screeched against the strange metal, shearing off petal-scales by the second as the man grunted with effort. Some sort of luminescence bled into his bladed gauntlets, growing with a strange brown intensity until obvious striations of the stuff shot through the remaining blade. And the one that was missing.

It hovered in the air where the blade had been damaged, and with a sound like clashing steel, the shards zipped in from wherever they’d fallen and knit themselves together. Danday’s power redoubled with an additional blade, and I took a flowing step backwards to avoid the follow-through when he crushed my slash.

Unfortunately, his attack didn’t stop there. Twin sickles of the same brown light scoured long paths in the dead ground, one aimed squarely at me and the other at Jun. She mumbled something unflattering about the situation and sidestepped hers with ease. I was about to do the same when I realized I’d put myself in a pretty unoptimal path.

If I moved, the sickle would slam directly into the cruel world’s partition. Meaning I’d take the exact same damage as if I didn’t dodge at all. And there was a chance the trinket would get pushed back, even though I didn’t have any evidence to support that theory, which would end up hurting Mortician for my poor planning.

So I blocked. I raised my spear and shoved it in the path of the sickle, which was attached to Danday’s gauntlet with a chain of brown and soft white light. The impact pushed me back a few feet and stole the wind from my lungs as my spear crashed into my chest, but my armor quickly worked to get me back into prime shape before Danday could capitalize on his successful attack.

“You’re putting up a better fight than I expected.” Danday said through a mass of insectile chittering. “It really is too bad everything played out like it did. I would’ve loved to meet you two on the battlefield in a few dozen years, when you would’ve been strong enough to take me on at my prime.”

Danday recalled his sickles with a motion reminiscent of curling a barbell, then sent both of them out at Jun without a breath of hesitation. She dodged one and emptied three echoing bullets into the second, then shattered it into chunks of bladed light with a fourth that split into two the moment it left the barrel.

She took another step back, putting her even further away from danger. “This isn’t your prime, then?”

“Not even close.” Danday said sadly. “Endra’s taken a little too much from me. Skies above, I could’ve given Inopsy a real fight if I wasn’t so… burdened by these drowned things in my head.”

He smacked the side of his helmet with his bladed gauntlet with obvious disdain. I winced at the ringing impact, which only served to quiet the chittering for a fraction of a second. “My core was wonderful. But now I’m stuck with a version that’s almost as bad as when I first got it. And since my mastery got hit so hard, I can’t even equip my actual armor. This is just a replica of the real thing.”

Danday let that hang in the air for a moment for some reason. I used that time to create two more slashes, and even then, I only sort of got what I thought he was insinuating. He had more powerful gear, but he wasn’t using it. So it had to be somewhere. Quite possibly in his inventory, which would mean it was free to scavenge when he was dead.

None of this fully added up. There had to be another trap in there somewhere. I could understand someone like Nia using her last breath to spite Endra, but I didn’t know anywhere near enough about Danday to say he’d do the same thing. His history might’ve told us more about him, but we hadn’t done any research before we went to the hazard. Probably a horrible move on my part, but it was done.

More brown light gathered around Danday, coalescing into the shield around him that took on the same tint. I pulled my slashes in tight and readied for whatever attack he was going to launch, moved to put myself between him and Jun, and took a deep breath.

“If you can handle this, you’re probably got me.” Danday said ominously. “And if you can’t, well, it won’t be your problem for long.”

{I know it’s obvious, but watch out.} Jun said as I heard her draw her knife. {I’ll pull us out of the hazard if it looks like we aren’t going to survive.}

Danday bent down low as protrusions appeared on his shield. Bladed protrusions. The chittering cacophony rose to a fever pitch as the shield grew slightly larger, then collapsed to fit tightly around him. It seemed like the more he used his battery, the louder the chittering got. Like he was losing the ability to hold it back.

Danday twisted unnaturally, his arms cracking and pulling in close as the rest of his body struggled to follow. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Before I could understand what was happening, a viciously rotating bladed shield sheared through my slashes. It slammed into my chest in a burst of metal and blood, notifications lighting up my helmet like a forest fire at all the damage that was being redirected to the cruel world’s partition. By the time I brought my spear down on Danday’s attack, my armor’s integrity was at half. By the time Jun’s bullets damaged the shield enough to get him off of me, my integrity was at a quarter.

Blood and other vital things dripped down onto the dead ground. I fell to my knees, struggling to do much of anything but stay awake, and gurgled out a confused noise. Even through all the pain I brought my spear up in a wonderful arc of petal-scales that sheared through Danday’s chest and right shoulder, leaving a massive gash of sheared metal and plant-matter that dripped differently coloured vitals into the same puddle as mine.

He laughed hysterically as he jumped backwards. A golden shield appeared around me a few seconds too late, followed by a frantic apology from Mortician. I blinked slowly and shoved the butt of my spear into the ground, forced myself to my feet, and glared daggers at Danday.

“Looks like I survived.” I said humourlessly.

He nodded seriously and started building another shield. “This time, yes. But how about the next time?”