A few minutes later, I found myself standing at the edge of my safe room with more than a little anxiety pumping through my veins. Keratily and Inopsy fought like animals off in the distance. Pink crystal and molten coal battled for supremacy, and from where I stood, it didn’t look like either one was gaining ground.

Unfortunately, that was good for Keratily. She could use Inopsy’s own battery to keep fighting him, and she’d eventually outlast him. Which meant there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d be able to leave her alone. So I had to do this.

I crossed my arms and bit my lip. I wasn’t doing a great job convincing myself. “Is everything ready, Acasiana?”

{It is.} She confirmed. {The monsters are in place for Inopsy to kill. As long as you can get through to him, things should go smoothly. And if things go horribly wrong before Keratily gets to the mountain, I’ll be able to rewind back to this moment! For all you know, this is the third time I’m telling you this.}

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I muttered and gently pressed my hand to the communicator that had melded with my armor’s arm. “Can I ask you not to tell me how many times I fuck this up before we manage to get her into the mountain?”

{Of course you can. All it would do is demoralize you, anyway.} Acasiana said chipperly. {Get ready. I’m spawning the next set of monsters into that maelstrom in fifteen seconds.}

Okay. fifteen seconds. That was plenty of time, providing Inopsy hadn’t lost Okeria’s communicator. I took a deep breath and forced my blood-oil to activate my armor, pulled enough petal-scales to cover me, and kept my hydra in the back of my mind as a last resort. My weapon was already strapped to my leg, and the second I activated it on Keratily, she’d know I was here. That would be the last bit of motivation to make sure she kept chasing after Inopsy.

“Here goes.” I muttered under my breath. {Inopsy. This is Seb. Monsters are going to spawn near you in a second, and once you kill them, you’re going to get access to a safe room. I need you to break the wall next to a suit of armor in there, then somehow find your way to my signal. Can I trust you to do that?}

Noise filled my ears along with a few unintelligible shrieks that I was pretty sure were Inopsy’s. Impacts shuddered and rang out like shattering gongs, metal shrieked and sheared as blows landed and were ignored, and the calm through-line of a strange resonance that I instantly knew came from Keratily’s crystals cut through all of it in a torturous monotone.

{Arghbyranmarargh! DrownmeandleavemeforthecreaturesofthedeepI’mstrugglingsohardhere!} Inopsy screamed incoherently, then stopped. {Oh, hey, Seb. yeah, I can do that. See you in a minute! OhgodsIcan’tfeelmylegsnowIcanagainbutthefeelingisallpainandIwanttodiebutnotreally!}

{Uh. Okay. Good luck?} I slowly said as Inopsy’s ramblings got even more incoherent, which made the calm response even more weird. “He’s ready, Acasiana. The second I see the room spawn I’ll target Keratily. You’re sure there’s nothing else you can do until they clear it?”

{If there was, I’d do it.} Acasiana said apologetically. {Good luck. We both want the same thing here, and… I guess I have to ask. If everything works out, and the only way we can permanently deal with Keratily is trapping her with the hazard’s rules… do you want me to keep rewinding back to when Keratily clears the hazard? So we can try things again and again?}

Fuck. I’d just come to terms with what I’d have to do, and now there was another option. But that option didn’t necessarily lead to a tangible reality. And maybe we’d end up repeating those few moments thousands and thousands of times before we got something a little better than what we began with.

And it was all up to me. My decision could end up killing all those poor people.

“...No.” I said quietly, yet with certainty. “Making sure Keratily is dealt with is priority one, two, and three. If we win, keep it that way.”

The things died. A void rectangle appeared off in the distance. And the cloud of blackened dust disappeared like it was never there at all. An armored figure that had to be Keratily stood there for a split second as Inopsy darted into the safe room with crystals jutting out of him like porcupine quills. She paused. My stomach dropped.

I activated my wipe-away. She twitched so hard it looked like a convulsion.

All I could do now was hope. I backed into the mountain. The door disappeared behind me, and I readied myself for wherever Inopsy would come from. Acasiana had disappeared as well, but the ball of volatile matter that would become a hydra lay uselessly in the middle of the room to remind me of our plan.

“COMING THROUGH!”

I jumped out of the way as Inopsy quite literally exploded through one of the connecting walls. He skidded to a stop just an inch away from me, snapped from me to the impromptu passageway he’d just made, and then to the mass at his feet. I couldn’t see Keratily just yet, but wipe-away hadn’t deactivated. She was still here.

“What do you need me to do?” Inopsy asked quickly and skittishly. “I’ve died a little too much for one day. Any more and I’ll need a serious therapy session when we’re done. Actually, I need one even if I don’t die again. I still haven’t recovered from that last time I fought that monstrous woman. Speaking of her, what do you need me to do?”

I blinked slowly to understand his words, then steeled myself. No room for errors from now on.

“Shove that into the throne room through that wall.” I gestured at the mass, then at the wall. “Don’t draw any attention to it. We need to kill the thing that spawns from it, and each of us–Keratily included–needs to do at least a little damage to it before it dies.”

Inopsy nodded a little too quickly, then grabbed the mass and hucked it into the opening. He shivered as it left his hands and shook off the stuff that stuck to him, then grabbed my arm and yanked me toward him.

A pink crystal spear whizzed right by where my head had been less than a second ago. I nodded to Inopsy, glanced down the tunnel, and saw Keratily positioned at the end of it. Even though I couldn’t see her through the helmet, I knew there was an expression of utter disdain painted on her face. And if she knew what we’d done up above, that expression would’ve been multiplied a hundred times over.

“Go!” I hissed and broke into a sprint. My blood-oil powered my every step, but Inopsy easily overtook me and fell into the throne room before I’d even cleared half the room.

The sound of footsteps grew closer at a terrifying rate. I coated my helmet in petal-scales and held my breath as wisps of pink knocked against my armor, sending up a symphony of notifications informing me of what Keratily was starting to take from me. Stats. Experience. Battery. Armor integrity. And a few strange things in the Stauran language that didn’t have any real translations in English.

My fastest wasn’t enough. The outlined mass that was Keratily appeared behind me before I could reach the throne room, and the mortal danger I felt was only compounded by her raising crystal spires in the four corners of the room and accelerating the drain. My hands grew weary. My eyelids drooped as my energy levels plummeted.

She was even draining the awakeness from me.

I planted my foot and spun around, shifting my weapon into a shield to put between me and the crystalline spear that Keratily had aimed at my chest. At the very last second I jumped, praying that I’d aligned myself with the opening, and braced for impact.

It stole the breath from my lungs and the light from my eyes. One second I was in the room, staring down Keratily’s hateful attack, and the next I slammed into a wall on the opposite side of the throne room. Mercifully my armor absorbed most of the impact, but it didn’t stop the damage I’d taken from smashing the back of my head into the wall at warp speed.

“Fuuuck.” I hissed as I shook myself from the pebbles and dust that rained down around me. “Of course she hits like a freight train. Why wouldn’t she? She’s been draining Inopsy since they started fighting.”

As if on cue, Inopsy appeared at my side and pulled one of my arms over his shoulder. I shrugged him off, much to his surprise, and summoned the cruel-world’s partition under a pile of rubble.

“Any tips?”

He stared at me for a split second, then laughed. “Try not to die. You can’t come back from it like I can.”

“Oh, wow, such great advice.” I grumbled as Keratily dropped into the throne room. “Next you’re going to tell me I need to point the sharp end of my sword at her.”

Inopsy didn’t get time to respond. Keratily pushed off the floor the moment her feet brushed it, coating herself in a thicker layer of crystal as four pillars erected themselves in the corner of the throne room. Her fist screamed towards me, followed by a half-dozen spears that spun themselves out of crystal in the split second she took to cross the room.

I gestured at Inopsy. He nodded, then appeared in front of me in a cloud of choking smoke shot through with molten embers. Keratily slammed into the cloud like it was a physical thing, and her spears slowed to a crawl as they passed through it to clink uselessly on the ground. For all of one millisecond before they shattered into tiny diamonds that latched onto Inopsy’s legs like piranhas.

“OW! You drowned BITCH!” Inopsy screamed. His cover of smoke grew redder and redder until it looked like a miniature apocalypse was contained within. “JUST DIE ALREADY!”

The smoke condensed into a single point. A bullet-like plug rumbling with so much potential destruction that it hurt to look at. Inopsy spun into a roundhouse kick that slammed the plug into Keratily’s armor, crushing it between his foot and the pink crystals.

I honestly couldn’t tell you what happened next. The world went red, everything hurt a fuckton, and when I could finally see again Inopsy was struggling to keep Keratily from bearing down on me. And he was doing a piss-poor job of it–pink crystals had already glued my hands and feet to the ground and were slowly devouring the petal-scales protecting me to make their way up my body.

“Inothy.” I tried to say, but there was too much liquid in my mouth for anything to come out. And nowhere near enough teeth to make the right sounds. “Mufugga. Wadg ouh fuh cllaeral dmmag, ashol.”

The facility’s healing waters were damn slow. And I couldn’t move a single damned muscle. I glanced over at something that spilled out of what looked like a gauntlet on the ground, and for a split second, I was terrified that it was my hand over there. But no–the fluid was clear. That was Staura blood, and the armor was Inopsy’s. But he had two hands. His armor had regenerated all that even without the base material to work with?

I blinked slowly and tried to focus. Now wasn’t the time to wonder about Inopsy’s functions–but it was hard to tell whatever was left un-pulped of my brain to stop. In a moment of brilliance, I activated endless and consumed the mind-shear reprieve to help me think. And once my thought got clear enough, I realized what a dumb fucking decision that had been.

“God damn it.” I muttered through freshly restored teeth. The Okeria-pill landed hard on my tongue, and I swallowed it down as well as I could through a mostly-paralyzed throat. “I’m counting on you.”