I brushed my fingers against the wall and nodded to the others. Uncertainty nipped at the back of my neck, and I shoved it aside with a forceful burst of will. There was no place for hesitation or worry in these next few minutes.

{Acasiana–you distract the strongest ones. Don’t kill them right away even if you think you can, since that’d probably make Scalovera scurry away like a coward.} I said with as much confidence as I could muster. Which was, surprisingly, a whole lot. {Our goal is his head. If we have to struggle with everyone alive to get him to stay with us, then we’re going to have to struggle.}

{Good call. I’ll do everything I can to look like I’m not capable of killing a few weak soldiers.} Acasiana said. {What should I do if they become dangerous enough that they’re threatening everyone else?}

{Kill them, obviously.} I said instantly. {Our lives are more important than letting Scalovera get away, but if it looks like that’s how everything’s going to go, we’ll need to stick him with a tracker he can’t find. That’ll be Viri’s job.}

{Oh, crap.} Viri mumbled.

I held in a laugh and shrugged her off my shoulder. {I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. But your main objective is to shrink his helmet with his head still inside. Hopefully he’ll have some kind of inheritance we can scour for information, but if there isn’t, we’ll have to find someone with a function that can help us.}

She shifted back to full height before she hit the ground, looked between all of us, and reluctantly nodded. {What should I do if he notices me? I don’t want to die either, you know.}

{Don’t let him notice you.} Jun said harshly. {You’re the one who can turn tiny. Use that to your advantage and sneak through the battlefield. And if you happen to shrink a few boots to make our jobs easier, then we’ll make sure you’re paid well when we get back.}

Viri considered that for a little bit, then breathed in as if she was going to say something. I had a feeling there was something she wanted other than money–probably her freedom or safety–but she decided against asking at the last moment.

{...Okay. I’ll do my best.}

Hopefully she’d do more than that, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who worked well under stress. And she was plenty stressed already.

{Jun. Snipe ‘em.}

Jun patted her gun and held up her other hand, which was glimmering with prismatic light from her barrier function. I wasn’t worried about her at all.

{Mortician. You’re with me on the frontlines, and we’re going to try and find out as much about all the people helping Scalovera while we fight them.} I reached up and flicked Okeria’s drone, which blinked into visibility and fluttered shakily. {We need to get a clear-ish picture of everyone’s armor so we can cross-reference it with a database. That’ll give us a good idea about how many cities Endra’s infected, and if there’s any important people we don’t know by sight alone.}

They saluted and eagerly hopped from foot to foot. {Understood! We will do our best to stay by your side!}

…Not exactly what I’d said, but close enough. I waited a moment to see if anyone else had anything to add, but the tense silence told me that we were all ready. I held up five fingers and readied my hydra to charge. One by one I ticked them down, my blood rushing ever louder as they fell, until finally the last one dropped.

My hydra swirled into being, crushing the door under her massive expansion. I raised my weapon and flooded my armor with blood-oil as I followed, scanning the reservoir room for anything Viri had pointed out.

Frightened screams met my ears at the same time as I saw one of the most horrible scenes of my entire life. Thousands of bodies–some armored and some not–all strewn haphazardly about and piled up next to a pool of shimmering water that reeked of death and parasites. Scalovera’s hideout was there on the other side of the room, just like Viri had said, but I just couldn’t get over the sheer absurdity of death that was this place.

Only eight people looked alive. Two of them were the people Viri had pointed out, and before I could even get a command to climb out my throat, Jun and Acasiana were on them. The other six died before they could move.

I swallowed my disgust, waved Okeria’s drone to go and scout the massacre, and bolted towards the two guards who were standing their ground. And… nothing else. They didn’t react at all when Mortician and I got up close to them. The one on the right didn’t react when mortician drove their fist through their stomach, and the one on the left didn’t react when I slashed their legs out from under them at the knees.

A mass of parasites wriggled free from the one on the left’s wounds, and a sack of pulsating white stuff dropped out of the one on the right’s chest cavity. Mortician and I just stood there in shock, the lives of the two supposedly powerful people moments away from being ended by us, and we were just… ignored. Ignored for the peppering of bullets and shrapnel that risked damaging Scalovera’s fucking box.

“This is too much.” I muttered as I seared both of the guards’ armor into my mind, then called Okeria’s drone over to take a more permanent memento. “They’re completely mind-controlled into defending the box, but since we’re only attacking them, they aren’t even defending themselves. What kind of a fucking moron decided that was the best way to defend this place?”

Mortician waited for the drone to flitter away, then crushed their guard’s head in one hand. Blood and plant matter sprayed out in a grisly fountain, but parasites were mixed in to such a heavy degree that they outnumbered the body’s natural matter.

My throat burned with bile. It was such an utter waste of potential, especially if these two were supposed to be on Danday’s level. I turned and gave my guard a swift and brutal end, then forced down the notification that I’d killed a core-bearing entity.

“Get their cores, please.” I quietly told Mortician and gently placed my fingers on the metal. “We’ll identify them that way, and then I’ll try to get… something useful out of their deaths. Not like how Scalovera squandered their lives.”

Mortician nodded, but didn’t make a move. They just silently looked back over the sea of death and injury before letting out a growl deep in their throat that somehow encapsulated everything I felt about Scalovera at that moment.

“We will have to kill everyone here who is still alive.” They said gravely. “We don’t know how we can tell… but there is not a single person here aside from us who has not been infected by Endra. And there are… hundreds of people here. Thousands, even. We… we don’t remember seeing anywhere close to this amount of injured.”

“Scalovera’s definitely using this place as Endra’s sick bay. Or one of them at least. Which means there’s another war going on somewhere else, and all these people are being caught up in it.”

I brushed my hand across the metal, and it blossomed into petal-scales. This wasn’t from the facility itself, so it took absolutely no effort to change it. Pleasantly warm air washed over me, carrying on it the scent of herbs and liquor. The deep hum of some pulsating device in the center of the room threatened to throw off my sense of balance, but a few drops of oil in my ears solved that before it could become a problem.

Out of absolutely everything I’d expected to see, this wasn’t one of them.

A lanky Staura sat behind a desk, casually sipping on a glass of wine as he overlooked a fuzzy image of the fighting in the city. It wasn’t anywhere near as brutal as I’d expected, and from the looks of it, there wasn’t a single Keratily fighting anywhere to be seen. He lazily looked over his shoulder, then froze in absolute terror.

“Y-you!” He screeched and lept out of his chair, armor forming around him as he pointed at me like an idiot. “How’d you get in here?! This metal was supposed to be invulnerable!”

I shrugged, rage and hatred warring for purchase with disappointment and… not quite pity. It was like pity, but where you want to fucking smash the thing instead of protect it.

“Your time’s up, Scalovera.” I said coldly and shifted my weapon into a hammer. It wasn’t a conscious choice–but if I had to give a reason, it’d be because he’d suffer the most from it. “Whatever you did to your guards fucked them up something fierce. We came in here expecting a war, but all I got was you. So now I’ve got all this built-up tension and aggression with only one place for it to go.”

Something skittered by out of the corner of my vision. Viri. I didn’t make a move as Scalovera stammered through an unintelligible series of terrified noises, then bared my teeth in a horrible sneer as she reached his boot. He was as good as dead, and now it was my job to get him to spill everything he knew before we shuffled off his mortal coil.

But before I could even utter a word, he started talking. Well, rambling, more like.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with here!” He cried and jabbed a finger at me. “These things have been in motion for thousands of years, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them! I’ve been Endra’s loyal soldier for centuries–centuries, you hear me! An insignificant speck like you can’t do anything to stop the tide of change that’s about to wash over this world!”

…Centuries. He’d… was that how Nia got infected in the first place? Did she… no. I pulled up my map as I ground my teeth, then overlaid my current location marker with where the veterans’ quarters would’ve been before they were destroyed. I hoped against hope that they wouldn’t perfectly line up. But of course they did.

“Everyone who survived that war is infected. All those hurt, broken, and vulnerable people. They’re all… doomed. And you… you did this with the promise of healing them.”

Scalovera must’ve heard something in my voice, because he sure shut the fuck up quickly. Threads of light started to spin around his fingers, then took on a deep blue hue like the ocean on a calm night. Maybe there was something there I should’ve been worried about. Or maybe I should’ve thought a little harder about interrogating the bastard.

Honestly, though, I just wanted him gone. Something showed through the threads, like a scene being knit onto reality itself, and through it I could see another battlefield. One a thousand times larger than the one district of Rainbow Basin, and with shows of power on Inopsy and Keratily’s level so commonplace that they were drowned out by the bigger fish. And most of all, in the middle of everything, I saw a colossal monster made out of black plates shining with orange light through the seams.

So he did have a teleportation power. And he was trying to call Endra right to us.