I took a step back as she took a step forward. The crystal she cradled like a beloved child pulsed with an inner light, and the sheen spread from her visor to the rest of her armor. It was beyond dumb of me to expect Keratily wouldn’t have any other defences in place.

“Annette. Stay back.” I warned as I moved my hands away from my weapon. “Keratily has her crystals in you. Push back.”

She didn’t respond right away. The crystal on her visor produced a strange distortion, and I had a horrible feeling my words and actions weren’t getting through to her. Which meant I had to be ready to fight.

Oil coated the inside of my visor with a thought, completely cutting me off from the world around me. My armor outlined Annette in a bluish haze through the otherwise lightless coating. It was the only way I could think to fight her without getting caught up in one of her illusions.

“Damn, Keratily already got to you.” Annette hissed in frustration. Warmth barraged my body, but no light made it through my oil. “It was really stupid of me to think there weren’t any traps. Stand still–I’ll get those crystals off of you.”

I took a step back. Warmth sheared against my armor like a blade fresh out of the forge. It wrapped around my arms and legs, attempting to completely immobilize me, and shot off a barrage of small damage notifications that would definitely add up if I couldn’t find some way out of this. A way that didn’t involve any unnecessary risk to the only woman who could help us deal with Keratily, I mean. Just killing her would’ve been utterly moronic, easy, and exactly what Keratily wanted.

“Just… give me a second.” Annette said with mounting frustration. “These crystals aren’t melting right. All I did to the others was shine my light on them, but these… I can’t even get them to soften. It’s like they’re a hundred times stronger than the ones Inopsy was encased in.”

Words bubbled at the tip of my tongue. But Keratily’s function looked like it was automatic–it had only reacted when I tried to talk to Annette. If I stayed silent, she’d just keep working at destroying my armor while thinking it was coated in Keratily’s crystals. I had more than enough durability to endure this for a while, but that too greatly benefitted Keratily.

I needed some other way out of this. A way that involved tricking Annette into melting the crystal that had grown from her faceplate. She needed to up her firepower, but not in a way that would put me in any kind of mortal danger. And it had to be specifically concentrated on her head, which made it dangerous to attack her. Time she spent healing was time Inopsy had to keep fighting Keratily off.

{Okeria. Do you still have eyes on me, or is Keratily’s crystal stuff messing with your drones?}

{No dice. The picture’s there, but it’s so distorted and unusable that I’d just be feedin’ ya info that could be completely wrong.} Okeria said quickly and distractedly. {Things’re kickin’ off everywhere else, too. Do what ya need ta do so we can add your firepower back ta our arsenal. Oh, and don’t use the me pill while you’re there. I don’t know how it’d work with Keratily siphonin’ battery from ya.}

Shit. That was one option down. I tensed my arms and pushed oil between me and my armor in an attempt to lessen the mounting pressure Annette was forcing on me. It helped a little, but with every second she didn’t get the outcome she was looking for, she put a little more force into her functions.

I grit my teeth and forced as much battery as I could spare into my hydra. Weight slammed into me and shoved me off to the side, but instead of Annette’s ribbons disappearing like I’d hoped, they just elongated and loosened a little. She cried out in surprise and washed my companion in light, battery falling away in massive gulps for every second her light remained.

That should’ve done it. The entire room warmed a few degrees from the embrace of her light, which should’ve included all the crystals, but her ribbons didn’t relent. They still held strong and forced her ‘helping’ function onto the surface of my armor. But… why?

“Fucking hell.” I hissed and pulled the battery from my hydra. It shrunk down to a suitable enclosed-space fighting size, and Annette’s oily outline stumbled forward at the sudden lack of a mass to lean on. “Why didn’t that work?”

Annette lurched towards me with that damned crystal still stuck to her visor like a fungal growth. Even the crystal she’d been cradling was unharmed, if the way she carried herself was any proof. Had we seriously underestimated how durable Keratily could make her crystals to that extent?

“Sebastian? Are you alright?” She asked worriedly. “It’s so pink in here that I can barely see. Did I get the crystals growing from you? And what were those weird noises you just made?”

Those were swears. And I offered her a few more while I shifted my weapon into a shield and wrapped myself in a sphere of petal-scales. It fucking sucked that the only person who really knew how to destroy Keratily’s crystals was out of commission, and the one who might’ve known had gone radio silent.

One more check couldn’t hurt. {Inopsy. Come in. Annette’s compromised, and I need your input on something.}

I waited a few seconds while static cracked in my helmet. Notifications streamed down on me as Annette started hacking away at my petal-scale shield. And I had to accept that whatever Keratily had done to hide herself and Inopsy had done one hell of a job at it.

“All I need to do is get that damn helmet off of her.” I muttered and backed up a step as my hydra disappeared from my mind. She hadn’t died, per se, just ran out of battery to sustain her. “Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a mind control function. And the only one of us who does is currently as close to being mind controlled as possible. Shouldn’t her damn core have some kind of anti-mind-control built in? Or, like, a counter illusion?”

Wishful thinking would get me about as far as a snail on tar. I quickly did a mental recap of everything I had in my arsenal, but none of it was suited for anything but combat or recovery. Maybe Jun could’ve blasted the crystal clean off with Okeria’s little pistol. Or maybe it would’ve vaporized Annette’s head in the process, so maybe it was a good thing she wasn’t here right now.

Well, there was nothing left to do but win. I steadied myself and gently draped my fingers against my shield, summoned the cruel world’s partition as far away from me as possible, and shifted my weapon into a sword.

It carved a wide arc through the air that I reinforced with petal-scales, then spun the momentum into another two long slashes. They cut away the ribbons of light that had shifted their target the second I dropped my shield, which fluttered in the pink glow for a split second before they burst into motes of light and coated the room in a different kind of glow.

Fuck. Somehow, I’d seen that through my oily visor. If Annette had put illusory intent into those lights, I was fucked. But I still had a few split seconds before the illusion took hold. I sent my slashes at her with a thought and used them as cover, dodging between outlines of her armor that appeared like puffs of smoke in a fog bank. She raised both of her arms to block, ribbons tightly knit around them like an additional layer on her armor.

I dug my heels in and planted my sword in the middle of her chest. She barely grunted as my blade sheared through her metal and light. In fact, she almost seemed… confused about it. Like Keratily’s crystals were showing her something completely different.

“Seb… are we…” She started, then her neck snapped to look at a point behind me. “Is that real? Please tell me that isn’t real.”

I spun around stupidly, but there was nothing there. Nothing my armor’s function could show me, at least. And I had no way of passing that information to Annette thanks to Keratily’s crystal on her face. Maybe… no. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

Another heel turn brought me faceplate to faceplate with Annette once again. I let go of my sword and raised both of my hands, which got absolutely no reaction from her. But she’d always reacted to my attacks. And my not-quite attacks, since the crystal wanted to keep her under its control.

I planted my hands on her face crystal. She flinched and raised a hand to my arm, wrapped a ribbon around it, and froze. The crystal melted ever so slightly where only the edge of the ribbon had touched it. But it wasn’t enough. Whatever she’d done to melt Inopsy’s crystals was a whole lot more than this, and I still had no fucking idea why this little brush of a ribbon had done what a massive flash of light hadn’t.

Plus, there was still the very real possibility I was under an illusion. I was seeing a whole lot more than I was supposed to through all this oil.

Annette slowly reached her hands up and prodded at my arms once again. I let go as smoothly as I could, leaving her to prod at the crystal on her faceplate with a growing mixture of panic and urgency. Her hands became cloaked in ribbons of light not a second later, and wherever her fingers touched, the crystal melted away. Until it just… all glorped off in one goopy mass.

“Holy… that was messed up.” She gasped as her hands shook. “I thought I smacked that thing away before it could latch onto me.”

“Illusions are fucking overpowered.” I replied with a heavy sigh. My interface told me I’d just spent a little more than a third of my battery for that little ordeal. “Is that head-sized crystal the barrier one? Or is there a much bigger one I haven’t seen yet?”

She bent down and grabbed the crystal. Her fingers sunk into it like soft cheese, and it melted away in a few heartbeats. Such an easy end to a real annoying struggle.

“I honestly don’t know. But this one was hanging from crystal tubes that I destroyed already, and it felt like it had a whole lot of life stored in it somehow.” She answered with a shudder, then snapped to a random part of the cave-like room. “No, I can feel it now. There’s still a thick layer of crystal in these walls. Like… a shell protecting the room. I need to destroy all of that to stop the heart crystal from reforming.”

“And you know that… how?”

“My function.” She tapped the side of her head as a sort of glowing moss sprouted from the scratches and gaps in her armor. “Here, it’s a lot easier if I just do it to you too, so you don’t have to worry about all this annoying illusion stuff. If you’ll let me, I mean.”

I tapped my head and leaned forward a little. “Hit me.”

She nodded and snapped her fingers, which produced a little spark of light. A pink haze I hadn’t really registered until that moment settled all around me, and wherever I looked, the walls glittered with little pink crystalline deposits. Except they weren’t just deposits. They were growing at an alarming page, and their roots extended a few feet deep into the walls themselves.

“Oh, shit. Can you even deal with that?”

“I can.” She nodded confidently. “For some reason the crystals are really resilient to big attacks, but if I focus all my light on one specific point, it melts away like butter. And when enough of it’s messed up, that seems to break down the structure completely. As long as that still works here, I’m fine.”

“Alright. I’m trusting you here.” I said reluctantly and summoned a teleportation anchor. “Take this. I’ll activate another one when I’m at the next crystal, and you can travel between them whenever you’re ready. And I’ll keep one on hand just in case you run into more trouble halfway through destroying one of them.”

Annette accepted the anchor with a nod and got to work. Leaving me to do my own part.