I closed my eyes and braced myself against the hydra’s inevitable attack. It slammed into me with the force of a drizzling hose. Something dripped against me, but there were no notifications to tell me of any new status conditions. I cracked one eye open and stared down at the hydra, whose mouths dripped oily blue-white like an overexcited dog. Not a moment later I found myself staring up at the roof as the hydra knocked me over and rubbed its heads all over my armor.

“Looks like it loves you.” Jun chuckled as she walked up next to me. She smacked the side of her helmet, then shook her head. “Can you hear me, Seb? Send a message if you can.”

{I can hear you. Just can’t move.}

Jun nodded and bent down over me. “Did you use the can’t-move blessing?”

{What gave it away? The fact that I can’t move, or the fact that I can hear you right now?}

“A little of column A, a little of column B.” Jun shrugged. She flicked her wrist and summoned her copy of the hydra’s core from her inventory. “So what’s with the hydraling?”

{I corrupted the function the core gave me.} I replied, but I couldn’t see Jun any more. There was too much hydra-slobber on my visor. {Are you going to consume yours?}

I didn’t get an answer for a few seconds. “I just did.” Jun replied, then paused again for a little bit. “I didn’t get a function that lets me summon hydras, though. But I did get something that… could be powerful? I guess it depends on if the wording’s right, or if I can twist it a little.”

A hand appeared over my visor and wiped away the hydra-slobber. Jun grabbed the hydra and shoved it off me, much to the thing’s dismay, but it didn’t try to jump me again while she helped me back into a sitting position. It just sat there patiently, blowing out little bubbles of blue-white that floated into the air like… well, like bubbles.

“How long’s left on your blessing?”

My eyes darted to the corner of my visor. {Four minutes.}

Jun whistled in appreciation. “That’s one powerful blessing. I had to pump up my recovery numbers with my core to get what it gave you. Well, I guess that’s why it makes you sit still while it works.”

She turned to where I knew Mortician was and put her hands on her hips. “Mortician, did anything happen up there when the hydra died?”

“Nothing that we have seen!” Mortician called back. “We are checking the manual as we speak to see if the monster’s death revealed any secrets!”

{Check the summon spheres, too.} I sent, then added a little more after a thought. {We still have one symbiotic seed to put somewhere.}

“Right, we had almost forgotten about that! We will check!” Mortician said, which was followed by the sound of heavy footsteps.

Jun nodded to herself, then looked down at the hydra. Then at me. “Did its drool do anything to you?”

{Not that I could see. Let me check my interface.} I swiped through my interface, then tried to shake my head. {No, nothing. No buffs, no debuffs, and no big differences in battery or integrity. If it did something, my interface isn’t telling me what it was.}

“Too bad. Poor thing’s basically useless.” Jun bent down and rubbed one head right between its eye sockets. The other snapped at her, but one flick on its neck curbed the defiance. “Maybe it’ll be stronger if you pour more petal-scales into it?”

{It’d be bigger, that’s for sure.} I tried to laugh. Still two minutes to go. {It’s supposed to be able to regenerate itself, but that’s more of a… frontline thing, not a damage dealer. We really need to go back to the floodforest so I can upgrade my functions.}

“Once we’re done with Scalovera.” Jun agreed. She pushed the hydra aside, which had decided to try and kill her with cuddles since it couldn’t hurt her otherwise. “I should probably try to fit this function into my core. But I don’t want to mess up any of those node-stars I made… hmm. A fifty node-long function is not what I expected to get out of this…”

Jun trailed off as she opened her interface and swiped over to her core subscreen. She turned so I could watch from where I sat, and the first thing I noticed was that she had more than enough empty space to fit the function. Depending on what shape it was, of course. But a lot of it was taken up by one or two empty nodes between ‘stars’, and she didn’t want to move those because they still hadn’t burned in yet.

I watched her fiddle with her core until control over my muscles finally returned to me. I gasped in relief as the built-up tension melted away, but didn’t push myself to my feet right away. My legs splayed out in front of me, and the hydra that had been pushing against Jun’s legs ran over and planted itself in the space I’d just made for it. It was almost cute the way it was so excited for no reason, but the fact that it was metal and shark-y made that cute connection impossible. For now.

“Down, sharky.” I chuckled and pressed both of my palms into the hydra’s noses as I stood. Or whatever noses were called on a shark. “Don’t use up all the battery I gave you on being excited.”

Much to my surprise, the shark-hydra listened to me. It leaned back and sat on its… haunches, I guess, and stared up at me with its strange not-quite-eyes. At least it was listening to me. I carefully stepped around it and walked over to Jun’s side, looked over her shoulder to get a closer look at her interface, and pulled her into a one-armed hug.

She leaned into it with a soft contented hum. “I think I found the right way to get this function in, but it’s a real pain in the butt. It’s just a big, annoying, flat rectangle. Oh, and before I put it in, take a look. If you think it’s not worth dealing with, I won’t even bother.”

Jun pressed and held on the rectangular function until its description came up. All of the numbers seemed strangely perfect, so I doubted her core had applied itself to them just yet.

Bioluminescent Essence

Core Mastery Requirement: 42.

Node Length: 50.

Shape: Rectangular.

Create a barrier of liquid light at a chosen location. The barrier can be called to a static location around the user, and the user can deploy up to (1) at a time. Depending on which stat node the user has the most slotted inside of their core, the effect of the barrier changes.

Battery: The barrier is much larger, and constantly damages enemies who touch it.

Speed: Allies and allied projectiles fired through the barrier have their velocity increased by 30%. Enemy projectiles fired through the barrier, or enemies that touch it, have their velocity decreased by 30%.

Power: Allied attacks that move through the barrier have their damage and effects increased by 30%.

Resilience: Enemy attacks that move through the barrier have their damage and effects reduced by 30%

Recovery: The barrier obscures vision for enemies, and sharpens vision for allies.

“If you’ve got the space for it, I’d say it’s definitely worth it.” I said without too much deliberation. And with Jun’s abundance of stat nodes, it would be effortless to have an equal amount of all five. Maybe that would give the barrier all of its effects at once“Why’d you even ask me, anyway?”

Jun shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I just like having your input before I make big decisions, no matter how obvious the answer seems.”

“Aw. Love you too.” I gently knocked my helmet against Jun’s. She responded with a happy little giggle that widened my smile. “Something has to have changed since we killed the hydra. We just need to find out what that ‘something’ is. Any idea where we should start looking?”

Jun pointed down the hall. “The throne. It’s so out of place that it has to be important somehow.”

I found myself agreeing with her suggestion. I withdrew my arm and shifted my weapon into a dagger that I pressed to my hip, then made my way over to the ruined throne. The hydra followed us with a wet scraping, like a child dragging a bucket full of water along a sidewalk, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at it to keep quiet. It wasn’t the thing’s fault that its body was hilariously not designed to move on land.

“You know you can just dismiss it, right?” Jun whispered when we got to the throne. “It’s a function, not a real living thing.”

Right. I totally hadn’t forgotten about that. Not at all. I chuckled sheepishly and cut off the function, and the hydra dissolved into petal-scales. But not all of it. The two spheres of oily blue-white remained. They clinked against the ground like huge glass marbles, and with every bounce, they shrunk and grew increasingly solid. By the time they stopped bouncing, they were no larger than my eyes, and so solid with power that they didn’t even seem like the same things.

“Weird.” Jun murmured and bent over to pick up the marbles. “They feel inert, but not? If that makes any sense at all.”

It didn’t but when she handed them to me, I couldn’t come up with anything better. It was like holding an egg that was nowhere close to hatching, but that I knew would eventually. I rolled them around in my palm with a frown, then tried to send them to my inventory. No luck. So I pressed them to the bottom of endless instead and stuck them in place with the strength of my will.

They held fast, and a few vigorous arm motions confirmed that they’d stay that way. “That’s weird as hell.”

“Yes, it is.” Jun agreed. “Do any functions summon things that don’t go away after?”

I shook my head. “None that I’ve seen. But I did corrupt this one, so maybe that’s why it's being weird.”

Jun leaned in to stare at the marbles for a second, then shrugged and refocused on the throne. She climbed up to it and tapped her fingers against the stone, then withdrew them and stared down at the two long streaks that looked like they’d been there for centuries.

“More weirdness.” She muttered, then wiped her entire hand down the arm of the throne. The dust and wear scoured away like magic, revealing brilliant red stone engraved with gold and black markings. “Alright, that’s definitely not me doing this.”

I watched as she backed up and stared at the throne with small bits of it that looked like they’d been pulled straight from the past. She turned and tilted her head to me, as if to say ‘now it’s your turn to try the weird stuff’.