The horrible, scraping voice of the elemental pricks at my mind. It sends shivers through my entire body in a mixture of all too familiar pleasant and unpleasant sensations, though it’s infinitely less intense than what I felt from the waterfall. I lick my lips to get the salt from them and narrow my eyes without lowering my weapon or coins. The elemental doesn’t flinch.

“You’re the one from the waterfall.”

It doesn’t move as it speaks. “Yes.”

…It also doesn’t elaborate. Maybe it's not good at speaking? Or… well… it could be a magical creature that doesn’t work on the same pleasantries as we do.

“What the hell are you?”

“I don’t know.”

Okay, still unhelpful. But… it's answering my questions. A twitch wracks through the right side of its body, and two of its arms lance out towards me. The thing’s eyes flash bright and the arms fall away, but the side of its body still looks like its trying to get to me. Still no elaboration, and it looks like whatever’s talking to me is quickly losing out to the elemental that its possessing.

“Is your body fighting against you?”

“It is resisting me.”

Resisting. Not fighting, but resisting. There’s a distinction there I’m not smart enough to make, but it gets the image across well enough. The thing that’s talking to me is the same thing from the waterfall. And it isn’t a… hive-mind with the rest of the elementals. But they’re still connected somehow, I think.

It shudders again. Arms grow back, and when the waterfall-elemental fights back, they only fall away from the ‘elbow’ down. The elemental’s losing ground fast, so I’ve got to make my questions count. First of; those goddamn thorns.

“What did you do to make those thorns fall from the ceiling? And why did they mess with me so much, but not anyone else?”

“You are attuned.” It says without a moment’s hesitation. “The krarig wakes. You could help it not. Why did you run?”

“I could… help it not?” I frown and take a step back as the arms reform again. “Do you mean we could kill it before it woke up? Is that even possible?”

“Yes. Why did you run?”

“I ran because you hurt me.”

The elemental is silent. Its eyes flicker once, and then everything below the neck lunges at me. A shield pops up between me and it, but something else holds it back too–the neck, which strains and cracks as the body inexorably pulls it towards the breaking point.

“I do not know what ‘hurt’ is. When you come back, I will try not to ‘hurt’ you.” The elemental says through the cacophonous cracking. “Without help, I will die. I do not want to die.”

One final crack heralds the elemental breaking free from whatever was underneath the waterfall. Leaving me with those six words that bore into my mind and take hold like a parasitic worm. Pearl stares straight ahead with intense determination, and I know she’s focused on the exact same thing I am; the elemental knows that its alive. It knows that it can die. And, somehow, not going back down will both cause the krarig to wake up and the death of quite possibly the first completely intelligent non-human entity on Earth.

Thorns of salt emerge from where the head slams to the metal roof, lodging it into the building as the molten glimmer of magic slowly bleeds out of its eyes. Before the rest of it can adjust to my shield the speaking elemental is gone. Leaving only the raging husk with a molten heart of salt behind. …And it’s thousands of friends who’re more than desperate to meet Ursula and I to rip us limb from limb.

My frown deepens as I backpedal to the edge of the roof. I send my coins away and draw my gun, aiming it squarely at the gooey center of the twisted elemental through my shield. From how it’s treating the flat pane like a complete wall–complete with scrabbling its arms to either side to try and reach me–there’s not a shred of intelligence there. Not worth wasting my own Worth on.

But… what does that mean? Is that one from the waterfall alone in being aware? Are all the others just manifestation of magic, primal and thoughtless, brought on by the krarig waking up? If so, how the hell did exactly one of them suddenly grow a brain? As if to prove my point, the elemental shoves itself even harder into my shield, cracking it about half as much as the corpsedragger did back on the other world. Not bad for a stationary start, but this thing’s not fast. If it isn’t smart or full of raw power, either, then it isn’t a threat.

I almost lower the gun Ursula gave me. But I’ve still got to deal with this thing before she can put up a barrier–which she definitely should’ve done days ago, now that I think of it. Instead I toss it to my hand with a barrier-making knife stabilizing it, flick off the safety, and take aim.

“Sorry ‘bout this, but we’re kind of in a hurry.”

My finger gently squeezes the trigger. It clicks slightly, but then the resistance comes. Along with a strange sensation like the gun magically probing my brain for… something. Which is really weird since Ursula gave me this specifically because it doesn’t need any magic from me to fire. I tense my forearm and command the shield inside of my knife to spread down and stabilize my arm, watch it ooze out like thick oil, and squeeze as hard as I can when it coats my wrist.

An ear-spitting crack explodes from just down my arm. My shield shatters completely and utterly, falling like twinkling pieces of rainbow-tinged darkness as the bullet screams out of the barrel and slams into my stationary shield. Which it simply passes through in a perfectly clean hole as if it didn’t even exist. My awareness tracks it for a few hundred feet, which takes all of a second to happen, and then it’s gone. Flying somewhere over the waves until gravity eventually takes it.

The elemental doesn’t have a chance to react. One moment its pressing into my shield and the next its crumpling to the ground, molten salt pouring out of a massive hole in its chest cavity where its core used to be. There’s nothing left of it now. The molten salt hardens in heartbeats, gluing the elemental’s corpse to our roof as it erupts in thorns that pierce through the roof. Just like the head.

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I stare in disbelief for a few long seconds. I raise both of my arms and look from the gun to my coins. That was one bullet. Fired by someone who doesn’t have any skills–both system-gained or normal–to make it any more powerful.

“She can just give this to anyone.” I mutter in disbelief as I carefully put the safety back on and slip the gun into its holster. “Thank god she’s a mercenary and not an arms dealer.”

After taking a few more moments to let my ears stop ringing, I tap my earpiece three times. “Sorry for the loud noise, Architect. Didn’t know it’d be that bad.”

“No worries. I turned you way down the second you drew the gun.” March crunches down one something, then swallows directly into the mic. Ick. “Mercenary’s putting up the barrier right now. You should go back down to see the pump room feed I just put up on a monitor. It’s pretty freaking cool.”

“Cool? How’s a dump truck being taken over by the apocalypse ‘cool’?”

“Uh… how isn’t it cool?”

I shake my head and trod over to the edge of the roof. “It becomes a hell of a lot less cool when you have to see it in person. How about the other symbols? Any info on any of them?”

“Yes, but not good info. I can’t find any meaning behind any of them.”

Weird. I bend my knees and drop to the small platform surrounding the building, take down the shield blocking the window, and vault into it. Ursula looks over at me and raises an eyebrow. When I give her a thumbs–up she nods, then goes right back to fiddling with something that looks like a crystal ball smudged with different shades of blue paint. Must be the barrier thing.

I lean against a wall and cross my arms. “If there’s no meaning behind any of them, then are they just markings for us to look for down there? And the shit we find hidden behind them is how we’re supposed to open the vault–hell, how we’re supposed to find it in the first place?”

Ursula looks up once again. I motion at my earpiece, and she mouths an ‘ah’ as she goes right back to work. March crunches and slurps some more at whatever meal or snack she’s consuming in the noisiest humanly possible way, then loudly licks her fingers with a few wet smacks. A new shudder works its way down my spine, but this one’s got no magic in it at all.

“I’ll keep looking just in case, but yeah, it looks like that’s the case.” She confirms when she finally decides to speak. “You should keep an eye out. Oh, and look at the screen.”

I turn my focus to the screen that previously showed the insides of the pipes. Half of it is still the seemingly endless pipe, but the other half now shows the pump room. Complete with a massive dump truck falling to the apocalypse. Still falling to the apocalypse, to be precise–it’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Can’t even make out what kind of animal it’s going to mimic when it’s done. But from its sheer size, and from how many elementals went into it to override the apocalypse… I’d bet something like a whale. Or a mythical creature of some kind.

“Has an industrial dump truck like this been taken before?”

“I’ll check.”

While March eagerly clacks and slurps away, I watch the elementals and the apocalypse struggle for purchase. Not sure why they wouldn’t just wait until the thing got fully taken before they moved in, but maybe it’s easier this way. Hell, maybe this is the only way it’s possible with something this huge.

“Aaand… done!” Ursula exclaims with a slap of her hands on her thighs. “Barrier’s up and running.”

She pushes herself to her feet, revealing that the strange glass thing is connected to what looks like a car battery. A magical car battery that flickers and sparks with deep blue magic like wisps of smoke, sure, but still a car battery. She spares one glance at the monitor with a little nod to herself, then completely ignores it to stare at me.

“Fired the gun for the first time, huh?” She grins and clenches her right hand open and shut a few times. “How’re the old fingers doing? Gotta take a swig of healing potion to make ‘em feel right again?”

“No, in fact, I did not. But only because I had this.” I gesture at the knife strapped to my arm. “The shield absorbed most of the recoil and stopped the gun from kicking out of my hand. Why the hell did you give me a gun this powerful?”

She shrugs. “Figured if you were going to use it instead of your coins, you’d want something efficient. Nothing’s more efficient than putting a massive hole in your problems. Unless your problems can’t be solved by putting holes in them; in that case you’d probably just be making ‘em a lot worse.”

I roll my eyes and pat the holster. “No shit. In other news; the thing under the waterfall can talk. It can also possess other elementals, and it thinks that when the krarig wakes up, it’s going to die. Oh, and it doesn’t want to die.”

“No shit?” Ursula asks, then frowns and crosses her arms when she sees that I’m serious. “Well, that makes things a little more complicated. Yeah, the elemental’s right–if the krarig wakes up, all these elementals go bye-bye in the process. Pretty sure I already told you that, but if I didn’t, just take it as fact that when the apocalypse stops funneling magic in here to birth the krarig there won’t be any left to sustain the elementals.”

“So… what do we do about it, if anything at all?”

Ursula hisses through her teeth, but doesn’t say anything. She furrows her brow in thought as she drums her fingers against her forearm in a beat that almost sounds like a song I’ve definitely heard somewhere before. I’m pretty sure she’s pitting the positives of trusting the thing under the waterfall against the negatives of going back there–even if it is true–since we’ve got basically no leads on the coins. Add in the preservation that’ll be here any time between now and whenever and you’ve got a damn persuasive argument to cut and run.

It’s not what I want to do, but I understand the line of thought.

“I found two cases of dump trucks being taken recently, but they’re both a lot smaller than this one. And… one from fifteen years ago.” March pipes up, giving us something else to focus on. “It’s a… pretty bad story. Lots of people died. And they didn’t even manage to kill it, it just covered itself in dirt and went to sleep. Apparently it’s still buried somewhere out in Russia.”

“Cool. Terrible for the people, but cool.” Ursula clicks her tongue and looks over her shoulder at the screen. “How’s the size compare to the one we’ve got?”

“Let me see… it’s about twenty percent bigger than the one down there. But that one’s still twice the size of the more recent two. Did I say what it turned into?” March pauses. “I don’t remember, so I’ll say it anyway; it’s a triceratops but without the horns. A dumpceratops.”

I snort out a laugh. “We are not calling it that.”

“Too late, it’s funny and I’ve memorized it.” Ursula grins and raps her knuckles against the screen. “We’ll be dealing with a dumpceratops in a few hours from the looks of it, so we’ve gotta get moving quick. Doesn’t matter if we trust the talking elemental or not–we’ve got a job to do.”

That’s… a lot more confident than I was expecting.

“What’s with the sudden burst of confidence?”

“Confidence? Sister, this ain’t confidence. We’re completely done with this place real soon, whether that’s from the preservation or the krarig finally coming alive. If we don’t go back down there right now, we might as well pack up and leave. I’ll leave the choice to you.”

“...I might’ve also left out one thing the elemental said.”

Ursula gestures for me to go on when I don’t elaborate riht away.

“Alright. So… now don’t forget that this is a chunk of salt speaking–” I wince as Pearl’s deep frown lights up the inside of my mind. “What I meant to say was a very magical and very impressive chunk of salt told me this, so take it with a grain of salt.”

“Hee.” March giggles slightly.

I roll my eyes. “Pun not intended.”

“Cut to the chase here, sister. I’m on the edge of my seat.” Ursula says in the most forced, monotone, uninterested voice she can muster.

“Fine. The elemental thinks we can kill the krarig before it wakes up.”

The news hits Ursula like a sack of bricks. She deeply inhales through her nose, then exhales for a long few seconds and stares wistfully at the door filled with patched-up holes.

“That just made the decision for you. We’re going back down.”