//ENDLESS ACTIVATED.

//CONSUMABLE ‘OVERMAGNETIC LODESTONE’ ADDED.

//ACTIVATING.

Lightning coursed through my veins. It tore paths where none had been, forced itself into my nervous system, and jolted every single atom of my being into horrific alertness. A deluge of light blue electricity ran down my visor as time seemed to slow to a crawl, and my fingers twitched as I thought to curl them. But they didn’t curl right. Instead of my muscles doing what I wanted them to, my brain sent out an electrical impulse that forced them to contract.

Which… I mean, that’s how it worked in general, but this time the electricity was Okeria’s. Every movement went a little too far, pushed a little too hard, and felt unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t do anything unconsciously.

{Go time, Seb?} Okeria’s voice crackled to life next to me, then flittered into my field of view as one of his drones. Except this one was strung together with bolts of electricity to make a more insectile form. {Keratily, Inopsy, and a hydra-thing. What’s the move?}

Right to the point, huh. I appreciated that. When I tried to speak my words came out like a jumbled mess of sounds in all the wrong order, and Okeria waited patiently for me to remember that I could use text-to-speech for this.

{Keratily dies. Or she gets trapped.} I said as succinctly as possible. {Not sure we can kill her, but Moricla might.}

{Mmh. That or she kills the hydra, clears the hazard, and Acasiana forces her ta take her spot. Clever. Makes us lose our only hope for those people, though. Ya prepared ta make that decision and take responsibility for the consequences?}

I nodded to myself. {No other choice. Unless you kept a massive army secret?}

Okeria laughed, but there was such a grim undertone to it that I shuddered. Well, I felt like I should’ve shuddered, but I didn’t actually force my body to.

{Gods, no. I’ve wished I did for the last few weeks, but wishes don’t come true very often. That decision you’ve made? It ain’t yours alone–it’s ours–and I’ll take equal responsibility for it. Ambus probably won’t ever forgive us, but… well… maybe she’ll have better luck on her own.}

{You wouldn’t say that if it was your own kids.}

{Nope. That’s what makes me a hypocrite.} Okeria said seriously. {Do your best ta get the absolute perfect outcome, then go down the line until somethin’ works. At least that way ya can say ya tried everythin’ before comin’ ta the hard decision.}

Another coal-fueled explosion blew Keratily a few feet back. Her armor didn’t so much as crack, which raised my opinion of Annette another few notches, but terrified the hell out of me. That same attack had pulped my body, but Keratily and Inopsy had taken it and kept fighting not a second later. And honestly, it almost looked like they’d forgotten about me.

I could use that. {Inopsy. Don’t signal that you can hear me. Get Keratily’s back to me, and I’ll do as much damage as I can.}

{Not like you’d do much damage.} Okeria chuckled. {Her crystal armor’s near invulnerable when ya attack it from inside her spires. Get outta her range and your attacks might stand a chance.}

Inopsy shifted slightly, positioning himself so that after the next clash he’d shifted slightly to put Keratily between us a little. It wasn’t much, and I could barely keep up with the fight, but it would eventually add up to an opening. One I’d have a single chance to take advantage of.

I shifted slightly and changed the ground under me into petal-scales. As slowly as possible, and without doing anything that would alert Keratily, I made my way towards the opening that led out of the throne room.

If I hadn’t already seen Okeria’s defensive prowess on multiple occasions, I might’ve tried to join the fight myself. But he’d literally gotten killed fighting the signaleech and failed miserably to fight Keratily in the oilsea. His power’s main selling point was its utility, destructive force when given time to prepare, and its range. Fucking hell, he even had a pill that turned the infinite distance between a hazard and the all-world into a bridgeable gap.

But he’d been the one to say it. He was best suited as an overseer. Coordinating, firing off artillery, and giving out gadgets and gear to help the other fighters do their thing. Meaning that was what I had to assume he’d be able to help me with.

{How do you know about Keratily’s weakness, anyway?} I asked as the petal-scale floor moved me ever closer to my goal. And my heart beat ever faster when Keratily shot glances over at me. {Did you suddenly remember a lot of stuff when Annette destroyed the last crystal?}

Explosions and horrifically loud shattering completely overwhelmed whatever response Okeria gave. My ears rang for a good fifteen seconds after whatever the hell had happened, and it took everything I had to keep myself propped up against the wall instead of ducking for cover. Pink crystal shrapnel sheared through my armor like wet clay, but the attack wasn’t immediately followed by Keratily’s armored form breaking through the smokescreen.

She hadn’t noticed I was alive just yet. Or she had, and she’d decided it didn’t matter at all.

{Let me say that again.} Okeria said. {When ya destroyed that last crystal, it wasn’t like I got a deluge of memories. It’s more like… say my memories are a fridge. I open ‘em up, and I can see everythin’, but there were some things I just didn’t see. Now when I open up that fridge I can see and grasp everythin’, but there ain’t a grandiose show of tellin’ me what I forgot. Makes sense?}

{Sort of.} I said slowly as the fighting resumed. Inopsy’s arm flew off as an arc of pink cleaved it from his body, but in the next second a new one appeared in a flash of molten black. {Like you were looking for a book you knew you had on a shelf, but your eyes kept skipping over it every time. And now you can actually see it’s there, but if you don’t go look at the shelf, you won’t find out that it’s there.}

Okeria’s drone vigorously nodded its head. {Yeah, ya got it! Exactly that. Oh, and ain’t ya wonderin’ in the slightest what ya can do with this now? I told ya I would use ya as a conduit for my functions so ain’t ya curious?}

I froze as an explosion blew Keratily just a few feet away from me. She skidded along the ground, her feet kicking up a mass of stone shards and dust as she went. I instantly shifted my petal-scales back into stone, just as I’d seen my hydra do, and held my breath as she muttered something under her breath and summoned a pair of obelisks on either side of her.

Inopsy burst out of the smoke, frantically searching for Keratily, and groaned when he saw her. “Aw, come on! Again! This is such bullshit!”

He tried to charge her, but a crystal erupted from the ground and skewered him through the stomach. It only took him a split second to break his body in a spray of coal to free himself, but that was all Keratily needed.

The obelisks pulsed with pink light. That light drained from the top-down to condense at Keratily’s fingertips until it was five points of pink that were so bright I couldn’t even spare a glance at them. But I had to. My helmet was already facing her.

With a sound like a downed power line smacking onto the grass underneath, Keratily’s obelisks shattered. The light flowed from her fingertips in long strands, shooting through her armor to spin around a very obvious point near where her heart would’ve been. They spun for no longer than a second, leaving lasting trails in their wake, then planted themselves in her core like seeds extending their roots.

Electricity shaped itself around me into a second display. It outlined Keratily in a yellow glow, then spat out a lot of numbers at me that only kept going up.

{She’s regenerating. Shit.} I muttered as Keratily did just that. {Just making sure, all this stuff is invisible to anyone but me, right?}

{Pretty sure you’d be dead if it wasn’t. Now, I’m gonna need ya ta do a few things ta get ready for that long-range attack ya need ta pull off. Is your brain in good enough shape ta hold that much information?}

{It better be. Hit me.}

Okeria’s drone rammed itself into my visor. He snorted out a quick laugh. And I had to remind myself that this was the person I was relying on to save the city–his city–from the absolute monster that resumed her fight with Inopsy with renewed strength and vitality. It was strangely… reassuring.

Somehow. Fuck me if I knew why.

{Okay, enough of the funny. Wipe-away ain’t active right now, and I need ya ta keep it that way. It’ll suck ta lose all those extra goodies if it manages ta kill Keratily, but it’ll also alert her ta your location. And, I mean, let’s face it–we ain’t killin’ Keratily without Acasiana or Moricla’s help.}

I sighed and closed my eyes. {Cool. Of course I won’t get anything out of this bullshit. Weird question for right now, but is Annette teaching Inopsy human swears?}

{Nope.}

{Huh. Weird. He used two while he was fighting, so I–}

{Mortician has been.}

The news surprised me more than almost anything else had in the last few weeks. Then I thought about it for all of five seconds, and it made perfect sense.

{Well, fuck. I thought I was doing alright to keep my conversations clean around them.}

{You’ve cursed a half dozen times since we started talkin’. Stop derailin’ me. I’m gonna send ya some schematics, and I need ya ta get ‘em through your head and transform your weapon into exactly that.}

The electricity shifted, and in it I could see a strange blueprint. It was extremely complicated, looked like nothing I’d ever seen, and assumed that I could turn my weapon into something a lot more complicated than a spear.

I studied it quickly. The thing looked like a throwing spear, but with some kind of inner mechanism that would dislodge the spear at extreme velocities and leave behind the rest of the casing. It was very small spear compared to what I usually used, too–sized more like a footlong piece of rebar than anything actually used for fighting.

Then something else came in. And another. And another after that. I blinked in confusion and scrolled through all of them, each of which was labeled ‘secret’ or ‘work in progress’ in Okeria’s handwriting. They all looked like these sort of double-working weapons with inner mechanisms, but save for the first one I’d already memorized, they didn’t use electricity to power themselves.

They used oil.

{Whoops, sorry, all those ain’t ready ta use yet.} Okeria apologized and hastily removed the plans from my field of view. {Didn’t mean ta get your hopes up. Can ya focus on the scale treadmill and makin’ that plan into a reality at the same time?}

I closed my eyes again and let my function move me. It worked subconsciously, thank god, and I visualized the spear design as they worked. It wasn’t too complicated–a housing that held a mechanism that induced magnetism to create a massive speed boost when I threw the spear. But my weapon hadn’t made anything more impressive than… well… metal.

{I’ll try.}

I eventually cracked my eyes open and glared at the mass of glowing stuff that still had yet to become a hydra. Keratily had to be draining it to keep it from spawning the beast. It had only taken a few seconds the last time I was here, so if I managed to stagger Keratily with this attack, we’d be able to move on to the next step. Or, if we were unbelievably lucky, maybe she’d just die.

It’d be unceremonious, and even a little anticlimactic, but I’d take it in a heartbeat.