I met up with Jun right as she closed the portal that led to the outside. She tilted her head when she saw me walking up, but nodded with conviction when I stood next to her.

“We’re going to talk with it?” She half-asked, half-observed. “It’s been a while since we actually saw it face to face, hasn’t it?”

“It has, yeah.” I agreed with a small smile. Everything we’d built up was about to burn down, and we needed to be the ones standing on the ashes. “Maybe we can convince it to give us the smallest amount of its power, like what happened at the end of the Oilsea.”

Jun shrugged and asserted her clearance once more. “If it hasn’t done anything even with Embodiments actually dying, then it isn’t going to do anything to help us. Just like all the gods back home–they’re more than happy to give advice and little gifts, but they never helped with the things that we really needed.”

I stepped through the portal with a nod, waited for Jun to come through, then summoned my weapon and the small version of the cruel world’s partition. She donned her armor and snapped her gun to her hip in preparation before she went on ahead. Putting herself between me and whatever was waiting for us on the trip to Acasiana’s hazard.

“So, Seb… I was wondering…” Jun started once we were in the streets of Rainbow Basin. Aside from distantly barked commands and a general din of panic, there was only silence to fill the streets.

I sped up slightly to walk beside her while she kept her words in her throat. “Yeah?”

“What do we do if this is actually the end of the fight?” She asked as her gaze followed a plume of smoke that rose off in the distance. “What if we scare Endra so badly she goes into hiding, or goes after someone else? We aren’t actually important for her plan now that she’s been exposed, so what’s stopping her from cutting her losses and starting over somewhere people support her ideals?”

Words of encouragement bubbled to the tip of my tongue. I wanted to tell Jun that that was actually a positive, and that other people could deal with all the shit the Staura have brought on themselves from so many years of being fucking idiots. But they wouldn’t leave my throat. Something about the thought of Endra running free… I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with whatever she got. Eventually she’d take the fight back to us, either out of spite or because we were the only ones left.

So… what if Endra did go into hiding? Was it our responsibility to chase her out? Was it solely my responsibility as an Envoy of The End? I’d already devoted one life to struggling to survive, and I wasn’t going to let humanity live like that again. But I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself. I wasn’t a good enough person for that. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go, but I could barely see beyond the next few days.

“I honestly don’t know.” I sighed. “Part of me wants to wash my hands of Endra and let her be someone else’s problem, and another part of me knows nobody else would actually try to solve the Endra problem but us. Then there’s the fact that the Staura on this planet seem to be a bunch of fucking assholes, especially the ones who’re still in power after the war that broke Nia…”

I shook my head and quietly laughed. “I guess I just want to live. Thrive instead of survive if that’s possible. But I don’t think I’d be able to live comfortably knowing that Endra could be anywhere out there. Not when humanity’s still so vulnerable. Not when I can actually do something about it.”

Jun grabbed my hand and pulled me a little closer. We walked in silence for a few minutes, and for the first time since we came to Rainbow Basin, I had a moment to just… stop thinking. Let myself enjoy the moment and not worry about what was next.

But all silences had to be broken, and if anyone was going to break them, I would choose Jun one-hundred times out of a hundred.

“The all-world is huge, and there’s so much more to it than just Staura and Humans. If we need to make Endra run, then we should corral her to somewhere that’s interesting. Maybe we could visit the homelands of the Maqdim and convince their endurance Embodiment to kill Endra instead of humanity’s.” She suggested. “Or we could just get so powerful that the rules of the world don’t apply to us.”

“Just like they don’t apply to The End.” I said sarcastically. “The more I see powerful people, the more it feels like they have less freedom than the weak. I mean, the Embodiments can’t even come to the all-world. Okeria was stuck in Rainbow Basin, and the moment he left, Scalovera swooped in and took it back.”

I swiped open my interface and gestured at the twin symbols that decorated my stat sheet. “Nia and Acasiana were some of the most powerful people I’ve ever seen, and they both got tied down because they were targeted for their strength. Both by Endra, and Nia specifically by the military she never left for some reason.”

Jun stared on ahead for a few moments. I couldn’t tell if she was considering what I’d just said or completely ignoring me, but a harsh realization brought me right back down to reality. This wasn’t her world. All the fighting she’d ever known had been by my side, and she’d never gotten the chance to see the all-world without a veneer of looming danger. She’d been a target from her weakest point all the way to this very moment. So my words had to sound hollow, yet leave the wrong kind of impact.

“Seb… sometimes I forget that you’re technically a lot older than me. Even if you say that your memories feel like a really long movie you watched, you still have them.” Jun looked down at her one free hand and sighed. “I don’t have anything like that. So please don’t compare us to people I can’t even imagine. It… really drives home just how wrong all of this is.”

She balled that hand into a fist, then turned to look at me. Her posture was far looser than I expected, and it spoke of a woman who didn’t know anything but the deranged reality she lived in.

“If I hadn’t met you… I wonder how all this would look from the outside. The thing that saved your life, the fact that you’re not even the same species as I am, and everything that was supposed to be kept a secret from me. It’s all so horrible, but if I didn’t know it… finding out later would be so, so much worse.”

I grimaced and nodded in agreement. “It’s always worse the more of your reality that gets ripped away by whatever revelation you have.”

Jun snorted out a laugh. “Good thing I didn’t have any reality to get ripped away, then. I trained for this pretty much my whole life, and all they told us was to expect the unexpected. Be ready for everything you see to be a lie, and not to trust anything until it gives you a reason to. You were the first thing I trusted. And I’m so happy you were. So…”

Metal creaked as Jun gripped my hand even tighter. “Jun?” I asked with concern.

“Please don’t.” She whispered. “Don’t talk about everything we have like it’s something you have to be done with.”

I was too stunned to reply. The conversation replayed in my mind over and over again, and as it did, my words took on a new meaning. I hadn’t meant them that way, but I barely had to change my point of view to see how Jun had taken it. About how I wanted to be weak, and how I wanted a life of ignorance and powerlessness. A life that wouldn’t have led me out of humanity’s lands. One that wouldn’t have sent me to the embrace of The End.

A life without her.

I stared ahead at the empty streets of Rainbow Basin and warred with myself for what to say. In the meantime I gripped Jun’s hand right back, and she didn’t shy away in the slightest. She inched closer and closer until our shoulders were touching, and I couldn’t hear anything through her helmet. That quiet was what eventually broke me down and led me to a decision.

It was our quiet. The comfortable quiet where we could just sit and do our own things while still enjoying each other’s presence. A kind of comfort and familiarity I hadn’t found in my old life, and one that I hadn’t even realized I’d found in this life. I didn’t have to worry about leaving Jun behind. I didn’t have to worry about her getting killed, since I was far more likely to die in battle than she was.

She was the presence at my side that completed me. If I told her I wanted to go to the depths of hell to dig Endra a grave deep enough, she’d grab a shovel. And if she told me she wanted to give Keratily a taste of the suffering she’d inflicted on her family, then I’d be there to drive a knife into the old woman’s cold heart.

“I wish I could give you more.” I laughed weakly as the edge of Rainbow Basin came into view. “That’s what I meant, Jun. I don’t want you to have to live a life like this, where you only know the shitty side of the all-world. There’s beauty in this place behind all the danger and hatred, and I couldn’t even recognize it in my old life. But this time, I want to share it with you. All of it.”

I turned and offered Jun as sincere a smile as I could make. All I saw was the reflection of my own visor.

“Seb… did you see the same oilsea as I did?” Jun asked. “Did you see the floodforest? Everything around Rainbow Basin?”

She let go of my hand and walked ahead, then turned on her heel and began walking backwards with her hands spread wide. “I want to experience this entire drowned world with you. All the good, all the bad, and everything in between. I want us to come out the other side holding hands and reminiscing on all the adventures we had. I want to cry with you over the friends we lost. I want to celebrate with you every time we get a little stronger. And when we finally kill Endra, I… I want to seriously talk with you about how we’re going to bring this world to its knees.”

I almost stumbled over my feet at Jun’s proclamation. She hadn’t said it in the way of a tyrant or a conqueror–no, she’d spoken with the exhaustion and disillusionment of someone who’d run to somewhere that was supposed to be better and found only more of the same. It resonated with me at a level I didn’t even know possible, and it dredged up some memories of very similar feelings I’d had when I tried to make things better in my old life.

“That’s going to be beyond hard.” I laughed as I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. She was the presence at my side that completed me. And I was hers. “How do you propose we take on the entire world when we don’t even know who lives on it?”

Jun shrugged and fell back to walk beside me. “I have no idea. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We need to do better than what Okeria did for Rainbow Basin. Not just drive out the poison, but make sure it's dead and gone so it can’t squirm back to infect the waters again.”

Damn, did I love this woman. I grinned from ear to ear and burst into a sprint when I caught the first glimpse of what could’ve been an attacker in the distance. The world bled away as my oil surged through my armor for a boost, and I didn’t have to look to know Jun was right there next to me. We still had one more stop before I was fully confident, and one primordial to grill about everything it’d been doing for the last few months.