Two bodies climbed out behind me. One reminded me of an old iron stove that had been filled with off-white goop instead of flames, and the other looked like one of those ugly gargoyles that were on castles. Except that one had Staura-like eyes and roots instead of horns.

“You!” White-stove screamed as hatefully as I’d ever heard. Their body shuddered and shook with Endra’s parasites. “You’ll pay for crossing Endra!”

The other one vigorously nodded and shook in agreement. There went any hesitation I might’ve had about killing these two. I shifted my weapon into a spear and cut a few petal-scale slashes into the air, then readied myself for whatever the two of them could throw at me.

For all of two seconds. I threw a slash at each of them before they could call their own functions, but they were obviously ready for that. White-stove dove to the side and came up in a blurry white haze. Gargoyle took the slash head-on, chips of stone flying off their armor like gravel caught under a lawnmower. The chips stopped a dozen feet away, then converged back on them and forced the slash out of a dent that hadn’t even met plant-flesh.

“Buy me time.” White-stove ordered and pressed their fingers together right above their stomach. Their white glow began to spiral inwards and converged in that space between their fingers.

How nice of them to warn me which one was more deadly. I spun my spear and sidestepped a heavy punch thrown by gargoyle, pressed my slashes up against their outstretched arm, and forced them as far away as possible. Which ended up being not that far at all, and definitely not far enough to push the follow-up insect-like wing that crashed into my body.

Unlike an insect wing, this thing carried an absurd weight behind it. My armor blared with warnings as I fought to stand my ground, and I flickered on wipe-away once I realized I’d forgotten to do that. Gargoyle staggered for a split second the second time they felt my function. Just enough for me to drop to my knees and bend over backwards so the massive wing could carry itself over and away from me.

“That one’s fightable.” I muttered to myself and repositioned my slashes to try and keep Gargoyle at bay. “All I need to do is… what the fuck?”

My armor shivered and shook as a deluge of notifications played out over my visor. Little ones, informing me that my armor was trying to repair itself but couldn’t for some reason, along with tiny damage numbers that weren’t making much of a dent. I glanced back at Gargoyle and all the stone fragments that had fallen off of them, then down at my body.

Perfect stone diamonds dug into my armor like burrowing worms. They weren’t strong enough to pierce it, but when I tried to move away from Gargoyle, it felt like walking against a tsunami. I grit my teeth and tried to push through it, but the more I tried to move, the more constant the damage notifications became.

And all I managed was three steps.

“Shit.” I hissed through my teeth and tried to spin and walk backwards. A hard stop before I got even a quarter of the way around informed me that I had a shit ton of stone diamonds on the back of my armor too. “When the fuck did that happen?”

Gargoyle extended an arm towards me. Two pairs of insectile wings spread out behind them like flowing flags of stone, not working at all like any wings I’d ever seen, nevermind insect ones. They bent down with their entire body, then pushed off in a blast that scattered the stones at their feet in an aerial mine field of horrific danger.

I still couldn’t fucking move. But I hadn’t been ripped into the air with them on the power of their stones alone, so I had that going for me. I turned my neck as far as I could to get eyes on white-stove, but their aura hadn’t really changed in the fifteen seconds that had passed. The little whirl of white had grown by a few inches, but it wasn’t my primary concern.

That was the asshole who’d just immobilized me and fucked right off. Their blue outline rose and flew a good fifty feet away before it touched down back inside of the city behind white-stove. I struggled for a few seconds against my stony restraints, but I had to admit, that was one good use of whatever gargoyle’s function was.

A flash of light restructured my priorities. White-stove suddenly swallowed up all of their aura and concentrated it in that spiraling sphere. Almost like they’d just been waiting for their buddy to hold me in place. Which was fucking exactly what they’d told me they were going to do.

“Fuck me.” I grunted and shifted my weapon into a shield, then summoned the cruel-world’s partition a foot away from me and covered both of us in a dome of petal-scales. {Okeria, can I get another one of those lightning deluges targeted on white-stove? It’s sort of urgent.}

{Gimme a second.}

Lightning flashed off in the distance, bright enough that it made its way through my barrier of oily petal-scales. {Uh, Okeria? You didn’t just miss horribly, right?}

{No, I did not.} Okeria snipped. {Looks like they were coordinatin’ some stuff after all, and now I’ve gotta provide air support for ya and Thorn’s group at the same time. I swear, if I hear Inopsy’s voice cut through this and ask me for a blast of lightning, I’m gonna tear my fingers off and eat ‘em.}

That seemed like an overreaction, but it also could’ve been a weirdly translated expression. {I kind of really need one concentrated blast of ‘fuck you’ right now, Okeria. If I go down, that means Annette goes down, and they everything’s fucked.}

Okeria hissed in annoyance. {I know, I know! Drown me, I know. Endra’s got a whole bunch of reinforcements showin’ up unannounced, and I’m tryin’ ta find where the drowned teleporter is that’s bringin’ ‘em all here. I need ta save one world-shatterin’ blast for ‘em, so can ya make use of a much smaller shock?}

Something crashed into my petal-scales. They dissolved like sugar in water. {Give me whatever you got!}

My scales dissolved to long, smoke-like tendrils that wrapped around my dome and extended fingers of vapor. They all emerged from white-stove’s ball of a function, and in the split second between all of my scales completely failing and the tendrils closing in on my body, Okeria’s drone flashed with electricity.

A single silver needle thundered forward with the force of a lightning bolt. It crashed into white-stove’s forehead and embedded itself three-quarters of the way in. Their function died out not a second later, but they were already reaching up to grab for the needle. Whoever this was, they were used to ‘dying’ in combat. That was dangerous.

{I sorta needed you to take the one who’s immobilizing me.}

{Workin’ on it.}

Another flash of lightning. Two eruptions of stone from beyond the walls. The stone diamonds fell away from my armor like hail, but froze in the air before they got too far away. I swiveled around in a panic, all the stones still around me like a prison, and realized I needed to do something else.

My blood-oil rushed through my ears in a deluge of strange sounds. Petal-scales dripped from my shield in a few loose strands. I shifted my weapon into a dagger and took a deep breath as the stones closed in. Oil and scales wrapped tightly around my armor as easily as I’d called them to my weapon, and a surge of battery cost along with stat points followed with them. Something clicked in my mind, and I opened my inventory for a split second to check if something was missing.

All of my copperbound armor was gone. And from the way my oilblossom armor commanded my petal-scales with ease, I knew where it had gone. But I hadn’t intended to use it as material for the corruption, so why had it gone against my wishes?

I shook my head and shoved the petal-scales out against the stones. A clash between my will and the gargoyle split my mind in two, but as I pushed, my blood-oil surged and bubbled until it boiled in my veins. My health and battery crashed as oil powered my function. Stones were forced ever so slightly away, just enough that I could get out of the cage and run at white-stove.

“Your thing failed!” They yelled in annoyance at the distant gargoyle. “Get back here and protect me, drowned moron!”

My weapon shifted into a sword mid-swing, and it barely brushed against white-stove’s armor. They took a step back and smacked one hand against their chest, which began to billow out white smoke at the impact. It bit against my scales with the voracity of a starving bear and the destructiveness of hot lava, dissolving them wherever it touched and gulping away my health and battery to replace them.

Their strange stuff brushed against my armor, destroyed it utterly, and then touched on my arm. It felt like a warm mist, and it didn’t even scrape away my hair. I pushed back and let my core replenish what I’d lost. If I wasn’t sure before, I was now–white-stove’s function was either the destruction of non-living things or specifically things that took battery to work. That could be really dangerous, especially since I had literally nothing mundane on me. And no elemental bullshit like Okeria’s lightning to work with.

Scraping stones heralded gargoyle’s imminent return. I had all of fifteen seconds to find some way to deal with white-stove, or else the struggle would turn sour with gargoyle in the mix. Their stone manipulation core was a real pain in the ass, and it had to have some kind of gravity thrown in the mix with how fast they moved and how their stones hung in the air. Plus, there was the whole flying thing.

{Okeria. White-stove’s got a function I’m not sure I’ll be able to bust through.} I said into my helmet and shifted my weapon into a hammer. {if this doesn’t work, I’ll need another blast.}

{On standby. But please don’t need it.} Okeria said tensely. {...Wait. My drone. Smash it into that guy’s chest.}

I glanced over at the drone that whizzed down from the sky. In a split second, it would be between me and white-stove. They’d already noticed it, and were reaching out with tendrils of their function to destroy the annoyance. It wasn’t quick, and it was a lot smokier than the mass of power they’d built up when gargoyle had locked me in place.

In the moment their function touched Okeria’s drone, my hammer slammed into it. Metal and electricity burst like an overfilled pinata, exposing something in the middle that I sort of recognized. A cube of Okeria’s metal that absolutely screamed with electric potential.

My hammer pushed it into their function. Their function broke it down as electricity coursed into the petal-scales that coated my hammer. Metal met metal in a sickening crunch. And the drone’s power supply detonated.

One second white-stove was whole. The drone’s core buzzed with deadly potential. I recalled my weapon. Then they were missing their entire upper half. Armored legs froze up as metal tried to recreate the damaged parts of their armor, but to no avail. A notification confirmed white-stove’s death. Gargoyle appeared with a blood curdling scream of grief and collapsed over what remained of white-stove’s body, worms wriggling out of the visible flesh as they too perished.

“Nonononononono.” They sobbed. “We didn’t even want to come here! Why are we here?! Who are you?! Why can’t I hear anything through the chitter–”

My sword took their head from their shoulders. I stabbed the blade deep into their body and let it bleed out petal-scales, blending their flesh into a mess they wouldn’t have enough battery to recover. Not a single other word escaped their helmet, and another notification informed me that I’d won.

But I didn’t feel like I had.

{Okeria. Endra’s using innocent people.}