Keratily’s family. I should’ve expected that they’d come eventually. At least if what she told us a while ago was true, then the family was pretty divided. Hell, they could’ve been here to take advantage of the situation and destroy Keratily’s crystals on their own.

{Seb? Are you there? They’re getting closer.} Annette reiterated with growing worry. {It doesn’t look like they know what they’re looking for, but if they have one person with a scouting core or function, then I’m going to have to fight my way out. I can’t do that while also destroying her crystal.”

I bit my tongue and glanced behind me. The streets were about as empty as they could be, but I wasn’t at the next crystal yet. Putting Annette out in the open would only expose her to a lot more danger than necessary.

{I’ll be at the next crystal in five minutes.} I said confidently. {Can you finish up before that?}

Annette murmured to herself, then let out a confident grunt. {Yes, I can.}

Good. That was one positive down. I shook out my arms and took a deep breath, prepared myself for what was definitely going to be a shock, and forced some extra potential into my armor. I hadn’t done that in a while, and as the drain on my blood-oil surged to dangerous heights, I was reminded why I didn’t use it more often.

Then I just ran. Ignoring everything in my way, from buildings and changes in the street to the warm bodies that twitched with Endra’s parasites. Everything flew by even though I wasn’t going that much faster than normal, but it wasn’t because my armor was doing anything weird. My vision was just swimming from the fact that I was losing a little too much blood.

Five minutes. That’s all I had to hold out for.

I crashed through some kind of pink-tinted wall and tumbled down into the crevasse that the house I’d broken through had been hiding. Pink instantly overtook my vision, and I summoned petal-scales to cover my visor in the hopes that it would keep Keratily’s control at bay. My shoulder hit the ground first, followed by my hip and then my helmet.

My world spun as a lack of blood and what was probably a concussion joined together to make existing miserable. I coughed up something thick and wet and forced myself into a sitting position before the massive crystal that hung from thin vines like a fruit that had taken everything from the tree that birthed it. The thing just radiated unbalanced power, which was hopefully a sign that our attempts at sabotage were working. And not that it was on the verge of exploding.

Annette’s teleportation anchor fell from my inventory with a thought. I kicked it a little further away as I summoned and downed a bottle of water, which didn’t instantly give me the kick I’d been hoping for. A blurry notification told me that the stuff would have to do its work slowly for some damned reason, and to say I took that badly would be an understatement.

So I activated the Mind-Shear Reprieve and readied myself for a good, hopefully uninterrupted meditation session. The drain on my blood-oil cut off the second I stopped providing potential to my armor, and I didn’t have to check what I had left to know that it had been a monumental waste of resources. I’d have to ask The End if it was possible to recycle that function of my core into something… less resource-demanding.

Two minutes passed. Nothing showed up to kill me, which was a positive. I took a deep breath and struggled against my self-imposed prison to no avail. Annette appeared thirty seconds after that, took one look at me, then hyperfocused on the massive crystal that hung above us like a horrifically inefficient guillotine.

“Holy moly, that’s a big one.” She murmured and wrapped herself in ribbons of light. “I’m starting to run a little low on battery, but you have more of that healing water, right?”

{More than enough.} I replied in the only way I could–with a text-to-speech message. Annette startled and spun around to glare at me. {Yes, this is me. I’m using a function that forces me to be completely still for a little more than ten minutes.}

“Is it helping you recover faster?”

{Oh, yeah.} I tried to get a chuckle through plain text, but it didn’t really work out. {By the way, the recovery consumable starts working worse the more you use it in quick succession. Don’t overexert yourself and expect to be back to perfect health in one sip.}

She put her hands on her hips and refocused on the crystal. “I wasn’t planning on it, but thank you for telling me. How much longer is left on your function?”

{Nine minutes.}

“Okay, then I’ll be really careful for nine minutes. It isn’t really impressive, but you can watch me work. Maybe give me a few pointers on my form.”

{I was never that kind of strong.} I watched while Annette made her way to one of the walls and planted one foot straight into solid stone. Her ribbons clung to the surface like glue, and when her fingers joined as well, the ribbons bled slightly into the stone. {How are you doing that?}

“Sticking to the wall?” She asked as she climbed.

{Yeah.}

She looked over her shoulder, judged the distance, and lashed out with her ribbons. Two of them wrapped around the top of the crystal, digging into the material as if it were soft sand. She pushed off the wall and let her ribbons carry her to the crystal, then climbed up them like a nimble gymnast.

“It’s not really sticking–I’m stuffing my ribbons into whatever little nooks and crannies there are on the wall and hyper amplifying their strength.” She explained as she got to work destroying Keraitly’s crystal. “Since they’re made of light, I can get them into really tiny places that you might not be able to even see. My core makes them as solid as I want them, so they can be as ethereal as a gas or as dense as a hypersolid. Is that a word? Hypersolid?”

{Not one I’ve ever heard before.} I replied as chunks of crystal sloughed off like melting snow. {In my last life, I thought your core was just the hypnosis and light controlling thing. Hell, when we eventually had to kill you, you still didn’t use those ribbon-like things against us. Why?}

Annette didn’t answer for a good long while. She worked in silence, dismantling the crystal with professional precision as my consumable’s timer ticked inevitably down. Her function furled out around her like a sort of celestial mantle–as if a god had given her her powers, not an Embodiment. I never did find out what the ‘buckshot’ part of ‘glow-moss buckshot was.

{If you don’t want to answer that, how about your core’s name? What’s the buckshot part stand for?}

“I don’t really know.” Annette said slowly. “I experimented a lot in my old life, but nothing I did could make anything like bullets. Flashes of light, mostly, and all the mind stuff that came with it. And the ribbons… well… I took inspiration for those.”

Inspir… wait. I knew one other really important being that was clad in ribbons.

{Inspiration from what?}

She leaned back a little on her ribbons and shook her hands. “You’re going to laugh. When I died… I saw something. It was so much more than my Embodiment, and it was so terrifying. But it was also calming. Reassuring. When I woke up again… ribbons just came naturally to me.”

{Why would I laugh at that?}

“Because I got killed, imagined death, and based how I use my core off of it.” Annette said, then silently went back to work.

Her form needed no corrections. Every movement was fluid when it needed to be, stiff when it was called for, and never had a single wasted motion. Light glimmered on her visor like the sheen on top of a wine glass, and a much smaller version of her mossy light spread over it as well. She must’ve been slightly hypnotizing herself into working better.

Still, there was something in the way she moved that concerned me. As if she was trying extra hard to prove herself. To make up for what she’d done to me and my friends in my old life–the one I’d accepted that I had to abandon for the sake of the future. She was still clinging to it for all the wrong reasons.

For guilt and a desire to redeem herself.

My fingers twitched a few minutes later. Motion spread from my extremities to my core, and I was back up to snuff. I groaned and pushed myself to my feet, expecting there to be some residual aches and pains, but there was nothing. Which I probably should’ve gotten used to at this point, but my brain didn’t like healing that fast.

I rolled my wrists and looked up at Annette. “How much longer?”

She startled at the sound of my voice and snapped to me. “You’re up. Has it been ten minutes already?”

“It has.” I confirmed. “This place is a little more out in the open than the others were, so I’m probably going to have to lead whoever’s on their way here away from you. Can you do an illusion thing to help me out?”

“Of course.” She said with a confident nod. “But you won’t have to lead them away–I’m five minutes away from being done, and then I can run with you over to the last crystal. Just defend me until then and we’ll be all good.”

One of Okeria’s drones crackled into visibility above Annette’s shoulder seconds before his voice entered my helmet.

{That might be the best course of action anyway–there’s a good number of Keratilys less than a minute away from ya. They ain’t gonna follow ya if ya try ta run–they’re here ta deal with whoever’s destroyin’ Keratily’s crystals.}

I nodded and gestured for Annette to speed up. She got right back to work, light shining bright as she worked at dissolving what was left of Keratily’s crystal. I summoned a hydra large enough that it would be a threat, but not so huge that it couldn’t fight inside the chasm. She made a strange noise deep in her throat and snapped her heads to stare straight up–both of them hyperfixated on something I hadn’t even noticed until then.

“How the fuck are they falling down on us?”