Now, I’m not the most cautious person, but blindly following a magical shark-wolf down to who knows where is a little out of my comfort zone. At least without a whole lot more knowledge to go off of. But… something tells me that I can trust her. Probably the fact that the blood surging through my veins is apparently hers–or at least created with her magic.
And that she could’ve killed me at literally any point. Or just… left me dead.
“Thanks, uh… wolfie?” I try as I get to my feet, gently herding Pearl towards her shell with one hand while I push off with the other. “I probably shouldn’t call you that, should I?”
The massive painted dane lets out a low rumble that might be a laugh. “Not if your life has value to you. I am the Prismatic Megalodane. I am also called Illumisia. Call me either, but do not call me… wolfie.”
I swallow hard at the threat in her voice. It’s noted. Very, very noted. “So, Illumisia, why did you save me? Not that I don’t appreciate it–I really like being alive–but… most of the other painted danes…”
“They would not hesitate to end you.” Illumisia growls. “That is what they have fallen to. The system robs them of their minds, gives them powers they can’t handle, and lets them loose. Some of us the system can’t change. Myself and Pearlescence, for instance.”
“I told you to just call me Pearl.” Pearl says.
Illumisia looks back at us for a second, then huffs dramatically. “Someone of your status deserves a bigger name. I will call you what I want until you are once again strong enough to make me do otherwise. Back to the question–I was and am too powerful for the system. It gives other painted danes power. I am power. You brought me a new power and put an end to a great suffering. Along with being allied to my ally, that is why you were brought back.”
I really-and I mean really–want to ask about Pearl having an alliance with this monster. But the horrible memory of what happened at that console terrifies me. And this feels like the same caliber as whatever I saw Pearl do. So I swallow hard and silently try to identify Illumisia, just to have a little control over the situation.
Entity detected: Outside of System bounds.
Any information given will be eyewitness only.
Cost: 12,990,233,081 Worth.
…Hundreds, thousands, millions… billions. My eyes nearly bulge out of their sockets at that obscene number. It’s not even in the same reality as the ones I’ve seen so far. A quick swipe over to my skills shows that I don’t have another use of See All ready just yet, so that’s definitely staying unidentified.
“Did your system tell you anything useful?”
I snap my screen shut and start stammering out an apology, only to look up and see a self-satisfied smug smile stretched across Illumisia’s face. It’s strange how expressive she is for a literal shark-wolf, but that’s definitely not the most out there thing I’ve seen so far.
“Did you know it would do that?” I ask with a flourish of my Class Card. “It told me I needed over ten billion Worth to identify you. I haven’t even had two hundred Worth at one time yet.”
“Of course I knew.” Illumisia chuckles and turns back to the tunnel, then speeds up a little. Just to a light jog, but she’s definitely moving faster. “The system attempts to cage everything it can’t control. Pearlescence is a prime example of that–turned into a quest item when her species could not be altered.”
Static nips at my ears. Illumisia’s getting dangerously close to saying something the system’s going to censor, and apparently she knows it. Because she instantly switches topics to something with barely a connection to what we were previously discussing.
“I took the depthripper corpses as payment and used most of the corpsedragger’s bones to make new ones for you. Everything else you own is safely stored and protected.”
“Including the mechanisms and the power core!” Pearl chimes in happily. “I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to get a completely lossless transfer from the reactor to the shell. Oh, that’s how Illumisia got here, too! The system–”
“Imprisoned me with my own word.” Illumisia cuts in with an intensity that shakes my soul. “As long as the alliance holds, I can do no damage to shellraiser technology. Now that the terms have been rewritten, no such restrictions can hold me.”
A ragged, panting laugh hisses out of Illumisia. It’s filled to the brim with hatred and malice, but somehow, I know none of it is pointed towards me or Pearl. If anything, it’s pointed directly away from us. Towards an enemy they apparently once shared.
“She was stuck in a really strong barrier. You disabled it by removing the core.” Pearl whispers to me, but Illumisia’s ears perk up anyway. “She ran right over to see what happened, and then took you all the way here.”
Here. Right. Somewhere I have absolutely no idea where it is. “Where are we, anyway?” I whisper to Pearl. “It still looks the same as where we were.”
“Deep beneath the ocean. Protected only by glass from the crushing pressures of the depths.” Illumisia answers, and Pearl lets out an ‘eep’ of surprise that she was overheard. “I have not seen any of your specific system-kind, but I know you have arbitrary tasks set for you.”
I frown at the way she almost spits the words ‘arbitrary tasks’. “You mean quests?”
“Yes, those. There is always a very similar first one, and so I am helping you. Were you assigned a location, a time limit, or a Worth threshold?”
“All three.”
She whips around, stares at me intensely for a second, then goes right back to walking like nothing happened. Leaving me with a very high heartbeat and more than a little terrified.
“I see.” She says slowly. “You are one of those. One the system wishes to fail, which is all the more reason for me to give aid. Pearlescence tells me that you have another quest–one to defeat a machine she says is built for teleportation. I will help you, then you will teleport to a specific location I set into the machine.”
Stolen story; please report.
“Whoah, that’s a little fast, don’t you think? I mean, thank you for saving my life, but I don’t exactly want to jump into a teleporter that could be going to nowhere.”
Pearl pats my temple reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it, Shelby. We can trust Illumisia. Plus I can always take a look into the machine before we connect the power core. I’m the one with the clearance to make it go, you know.”
Alright, that is a little reassuring. And if Illumisia actually knows where to find the teleporter, then I guess it’s better than running around in the dark hoping to find it somehow.
“Okay, we’ll go with her until she shows us the teleporter. And if she doesn’t set it to go somewhere in the middle of the ocean, we’ll go from there.”
…I’m… not a person that needs a whole lot of convincing, am I? I furrow my brow and consider being a little more hard headed, but, uh, huge shark-wolf. Now’s not the time to strengthen my spine.
“The ocean is not the easiest way to kill someone of your strength. That is the sandshear desert.” Illumisia replies. “Winds close to four hundred miles per hour carrying metal pounded into razor-sharp flecks that imitate sand. You would survive for seconds at most.”
I shudder and shake my head. “And why the hell would you tell us that?”
“Just to let you know that there are far deadlier things than what you expect. Trust is dangerous if used wrong. That includes trust in me.” She turns around and locks eyes with me. “As well as trust in the system-born.”
Oh. So that was directed at Pearl. I… yeah, that actually makes a lot more sense. I’m the unknown variable here, since the two of them seem to have at least a little history together. They trust each other for real reasons, whereas Pearl trusts me from just a few days of knowing me.
“So you don’t trust me?” I ask.
Illumisia thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. “I trust Pearlescence. By proxy, that means I must trust you. If you hurt her for any reason and the alliance shatters, you will not survive the fallout.”
“Illumisia! Don’t threaten our friend!” Pearl chastises the shark-wolf. “She could’ve done so many bad things to me, but she’s only helped!”
“So far. Trusting a system-born is dangerous. They make great allies, and even greater enemies. If your ‘quest’ ends with the system-born having to kill you, are you confident that she will forsake the temptation of the system?” Illumisia speeds up even more, her clawed feet scraping deep gouges into the glass with every step. She turns away, and her voice grows… cold. Distant. “The system may not give her a choice. Her life against yours. Or her life against both her life and yours. Be aware that she will make a choice eventually. One that the system has pre-approved. If it wants you dead, it will know the exact right way to force the system-born into killing you.”
“Uh… u-um…” Pearl stammers, then goes quiet. She looks up at me, then stares straight ahead. “...If that happens, then it’ll be really far down the line. We’ll find some way to make sure the system can’t do that. It… it might not even be the same system we know from all those years ago. It’s meant to learn and adapt, right?”
Illumisia laughs bitterly. “Your optimism is still intact. I truly hope it continues to remain that way. Now, system-born, you should know that your body is in perfect shape. The testing period is over.”
Testing period? I cock my head to the side, then look down at the ground. It’s flying by way faster than I noticed, but it feels like I’m just running normally. There’s no extra muscle strain, no horrific exertion, and I’m not even breathing harder than usual. Hell, I’m breathing about as hard as I used to when I went up the stairs.
“Did you do something to my muscles?” I ask cleanly and without my breathing cutting in, which is definitely not something I used to be able to do while running. “I should one-hundred percent be breathing really hard by now.”
The skin on Illumisia’s back glimmers like light through a stained glass window. Strands of ruby fur seem to appear out of nowhere, coating her in a beautiful rustic coat that darkens the further down her body it goes. She makes a noise deep in her throat that seems to shoot directly into my brain–planting an image of insane speed that’s even faster than the corpsedragger’s.
I gulp and get ready to sprint. But she doesn’t zip away in a blur of red mist. Her feet all impact the ground at once, crush the glass beneath her, and push her off without any magic to help her. With just her muscles alone she accelerates to a speed that’s absolutely mind boggling, shearing through the air around her as the ruby-red fur pulls in close to be more aerodynamic.
All I can do is speed up as she inevitably gets ahead of me. “How… the… hell… can… she… run… like… that.” I pant as the strain finally kicks in. “It’s… insane.”
“She’s powerful.” Pearl answers unhelpfully. “She once told me her top speed without any magic at all was close to five hundred miles per hour, and that was a pretty long time ago. I bet she’s even faster now.”
“Of course she is.” I mutter in one breath, then gulp down air as I push myself to my limits. My muscles flex and contract in perfect harmony, pushing me with instincts I’m pretty sure I didn’t have before to be the absolute fastest I can be. I can’t tell what it is right now, but from how absurdly light on my feet I feel, it has to be pretty damn fast.
I run at my absolute peak of exertion for a good fifteen minutes before my body tells me I need to take a break. My breaths come deep and quick, drying my mouth with every inhale and exhale, but they don’t hurt. And instead of slowing to a stop, I just jog for about five minutes until my body tells me it’s ready to go again. Much, much faster than I’ve ever recovered before.
With absolutely none of the lasting aches, either. I bear my teeth in a wide smile as adrenaline courses through my body while the wind whips through my hair, arms spread wide to take in every brand new sensation. A giddy laugh slips free when I’m not careful, and Pearl laughs right along with me.
“It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?” She leans down in her shell and presses her hands to her cheeks. “Being completely free, without any weird biology quirks keeping you down. I… um… promise you won’t be mad?”
I turn to her and smile even wider. “Pearl, I’m not sure I have the ability to be mad right now.”
“Okay, but remember that you promised.” She takes a deep breath before continuing. “I had to rewrite a lot of your damaged genetic code.”
I blink blankly, then turn to her with absolute befuddlement. “What?”
“The cold from the power core… it causes severe genetic damage to any flesh it damages. Which is fine for shellraisers, since we don’t really have flesh, but for you… it, um, kind of destroyed a lot of stuff. And I had to rewrite it, but I don’t really know what your species genetics look like, so I just kind of took the best from Illumisia, forced it to work with yours, and stitched it together with… me.”
“So that’s what the you-coloured helixes I imagined were.”
Pearl tilts her head as a frown creeps onto her face. “You remember that? Does that mean you remember us taking all those bones in your ears out and repurposing corpsedragger bones into new ones? Or how we took out your eyes and replaced them with new ones made out of glass and shellraiser goo? Oh, you already know about the teeth, too, so of course you know that.”
I press my fingers just under my eye. It feels a little harder than I remember. “How’d you make glass eyes actually work?”
“I… think my electrical impulses work something like nerves. And those electrical things in your brain. And… well, pretty much any signal your body can produce, shellraiser electrical impulses can do the same.” She explains, but there’s definitely a lack of confidence in the delivery. “I don’t really know the specifics since it wasn’t my area of expertise, but if I did, I would explain everything to you. Sorry.”
Those words from when I was apparently between life and death seem a whole lot more real now. I glance down at the floor, then slowly trail my vision up to the ceiling. Everything’s so much clearer than before. The air is more fragrant–which isn’t necessarily a positive–and every sound is blatantly obvious. I can even make out the difference between each of Illumisia’s claws raking through the glass, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s completely natural.
Combine that with the lack of strain, my obviously increased endurance, and whatever other benefits this transplant must’ve had on me? Plus the fact that I’d be dead without it? Pearl doesn’t have anything at all to apologize for.