I didn’t look back as I threw Okeria over my shoulder. Keratily and Inopsy’s clash was growing in intensity by the second, so much so that neither of them had time to say a single word. Impact after impact, explosion after explosion, and shatter after shatter, they fought. I couldn’t tell who was coming out on top; especially since I knew Inopsy had some kind of supreme regeneration function, so what might look like an utter loss for him could just be a minor setback. And Keratily knew that as well.

Keratily yelled something in our direction as we left the range of her crystal spires. A weight lifted from my existence as her draining function disappeared the moment I wasn’t within the four spires any longer. Mortician actually sighed in relief, sagging down for a quick moment and reminding me that Jun and I were a little more enhanced than they were.

I nodded to Jun, who cocked her head to the side and got close enough that she could hear me. “Yeah? Do you need me to carry Okeria instead?”

“Either you carry Okeria and I carry Mortician, or we switch. They can’t run fast enough.” I explained.

“Ah, gotcha.” Jun replied with a nod. “Okeria knows where to go?”

{Okeria knows where ta go. And we’re going that way right now.} Okeria confirmed.

“Alright, then. I’ll go throw Mortician over my shoulder. Let me lighten your load a little before that, though.” Jun said with a flick of her wrist, summoning the pen she used for her etchings. She quickly scratched one on Okeria’s right shoulder, and he was suddenly drastically lighter. “There. It’s weirdly easier to keep these up now, so I figured I should practice more. Thanks for volunteering, Okeria.”

{No problem. I totally consented ta this.} Okeria chuckled. {Ya know, this is the most casual group I’ve ever been in. We’re one dead broken man away from Keratily disposing of the three of us and taking Juniper ta get her mind wiped. Most people would be shaking in their boots, but I’ve got a strange amount of confidence in us.}

I snorted and shifted Okeria’s lighter weight on my shoulder. A strange confidence was right, and I definitely felt it too. Maybe it was because I’d seen what Endra had done, and when I combined that with all the shit I’d seen in my last life, this wasn’t honestly that horrible. Jun was still alive, we hadn’t lost anyone since Nia, and we’d actually managed to bring Mortician to life.

I patted Okeria’s crystal-encased noggin. “Yeah, a strange confidence. That’s a good way to put it.”

“We can feel it too.” Mortician vigorously agreed from atop Jun’s shoulder. She got a little closer to me so Okeria and Mortician could hold hands if they wanted to, which they apparently didn’t. “Keratily is a threat, but it feels as if Inopsy is counteracting that threat. And… Sebastian… we have the memories of the fourteenth. This ‘Beginning’ is a true monster.”

“Was. It was a true monster.” I muttered. “When we get to the exit, then we’ll get some real answers. It feels like we’re stepping into a centuries-old conflict that’s reigniting, not something brand new.”

Jun hummed low in her throat at that, then shook her head. “I don’t think that’s exactly right. It’s more like… someone’s taken on a mantle that’s been worn before, or that this was always a danger with how the all-world works. I mean, Endra can’t be the first one that’s tried to take over for herself, right? There’s gotta be a reason there’s an endurance Embodiments’ agreement in the first place.”

That was almost what I’d just said, but in a few more words. But if that was true, then there had to be some reason Endra tried this now. She had to have made plans for decades, centuries even, just waiting for another species to come to the all-world to put them in motion. And she couldn’t be the only one. All the other species I hadn’t even heard of yet, all the countless Embodiments who did what Endra did but quieter… there couldn’t be just one Embodiment walking the all-world.

“Well, that’s going to be a problem for literally everyone soon enough. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it, or if we’re even supposed to do anything about it. How strong is a full-powered Embodiment, anyway? As strong as two Keratilys? Three? Half a dozen?” I wondered aloud, and found myself with silence in return.

As much silence as there could be from the two-person apocalypse that was going on around us, that was. I could feel the weight of our actual problems setting on everyone, the cheerful-ish mood from before withering away under the knowledge that the world outside of this hazard would be guaranteed to be worse than we had it now. The second we stepped out of here, Endra became a reality once more. The other Keratilys became a reality. Our little hazard of not-quite-peace was about to be over.

And I didn’t know if Jun and I had grown enough to survive outside.

{Heads up, ya two. Whatever part of the creator Juniper dealt with wasn’t the whole monster, and we’re gonna be in real trouble in a minute. Can ya hurry it up, or are we gonna have ta fight? And by we, I mean the two of ya, while Mortician and I do our best not ta slow ya down.}

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Jun clicked her tongue and opened her interface without missing a stride. She stared at her numbers for a few seconds, muttering to herself as she did, then shook her head and closed it.

“I can afford about nine seconds of time dilation for Seb and I, but then I’ll be completely dry. Come here; I’ll write the symbol on you just in case things to really wrong.” Jun said as she shifted Mortician from one shoulder to the other. They yelped in surprise as Jun ducked down low and rolled them over her shoulders, leaving her left arm free to write on me.

I leaned in close and slowed down as she did, leaving me with a very shaky rendition of her symbol on my forearm. I craned my neck to see it around Okeria’s encased head, chuckling to myself as I compared it to the one on Jun’s neck-warmer-like trinket.

“Yeah, I know, not my best work.” Jun said sarcastically. “Lucky for you, it’s the intent that matters. Well, fifty-percent intent and fifty-percent accuracy. I can’t just scribble two lines and think that it’s one of my symbols; it’s gotta look at least a little like the original for it to work.”

“Good to know for the future.” I said. The pebbles under my feet quivered as a sound like a glass house collapsing erupted from behind us, followed almost immediately by the deep rumble that came with earthquakes. I spared a glance over my shoulder, expecting to see Keratily or Inopsy on our heels, but the sounds of battle just resumed a little further away. “Is Inopsy driving Keratily away?”

Okeria smacked his head-crystal against my chest in… confirmation? {That’s what I asked him ta do, so I’d sure hope that’s what he’s doing. I don’t know near as much about Keratily’s core as I’d like, so I don’t even know how either of ya would fare against her. What I do know is that she can heal, steal stats and integrity, seal away functions and your interface, make crystals that are so drowned hard that I could barely cut through ‘em, move through her crystals at rapid speeds…}

That seemed like a whole lot for one core to do. Okeria kept rattling off things that Keratily could do with her crystals, most of which seemed like extensions of the ‘make and manipulate crystals’ part of her core, but it was the flexibility that intrigued me. She’d had so much time to master her core that she’d obviously pushed it in directions it was never expected to go, which meant that cores could be used in ways not listed on our interfaces.

Unless Keratily’s core was the most overpowered and over-explained thing ever, I had some experiments to run. When we were safe, of course.

Jun hopped over a pile of fallen stones that reached out tendrils of oil to try and grab at her. She brushed them off with an annoyed swipe of her hands that sent chunks of hardened oil flying into the distance.

“How close are we?” She asked, crushing a tendril that had latched onto Mortician’s ankle with a swift heel kick. “The ground’s getting worse and worse, and I can’t change its number. The creator’s gotta be right under our feet, and I don’t have the battery or energy to fight another one of its creations.”

{None of the rest of us are exactly in perfect shape either.} Okeria said with a pinched laugh. {If the creator pops up, all we can do is hope that Mortician can… I don’t know… talk it into submission? Assimilate all of its oil? Murder it with godlike power that they’ve been hiding from us?}

“Unless there is a god of being extremely weak in comparison to your fellows, we do not have godlike power.” Mortician replied.

“Not one that I know of.” Jun laughed. “At least not in our pantheon.”

My mind went back to that poor child, who I didn’t even learn their name, trapped in that locker for… so, so damn long. I wondered what they would’ve been the god of if they hadn’t been trapped underground; if they’d lived with Moricla and the other not-Staura that Mortician seemed to know. Well, if someone knew, it would be the person on top of Jun’s shoulder.

“Mortician, do you remember what the god inside of you was the god of?” I asked. Okeria let out a noise that sounded something like ‘bwuh’ in confusion, and Jun just waited for their answer. Which they didn’t seem comfortable sharing. “Nevermind, that’s a private question. I completely understand that you don’t want to answer it; pretend I never said anything.”

Mortician lifted their chin as high as it would go and sighed. “No, it is not that we don’t wish to answer; we are trying to discern the young god’s memories from all the others we are in possession of. Braving the haze of thoughts and feelings is quite a lot more difficult now that we are not… connected to the network any more. We are the network. All of the memories reside within us until we can give them a proper home within the Ossuary.”

“And them being inside of you makes it harder to get at them? Why?” Jun asked. “Shouldn’t it be easier?”

“...We are not good at similes or metaphors, so we cannot easily relay what we are feeling. It was compartmentalized specifically before, and we knew where to go to find what we needed to find. Now we have access to all of it at one time, but it is no longer compartmentalized.” Mortician explained. “It takes less time to arrive at the memories as a whole, but finding the specific ones we desire is that much more difficult. Unless it is one of the titans’ memories, which we can feel at all times, but are completely inaccessible to us for an unknown reason.”

Probably locked away until they had a higher core mastery. It wouldn’t surprise me if their core was built from all the titans working together to find something that worked perfectly for them, since it took so much oil to make. And speaking of, I really didn’t know how their core worked. Just that it gave me the permanent transformation I’d been told was coming.

The ground swelled before us, turning from flats to a hill to a near mountain within a few heartbeats. I stared up at the bubble of oil and stone like a boil on the surface of the world, too round to climb up and too huge to go around.

“Aw, come on.” Jun groaned, stopping on a dime with Mortician. My own stop wasn’t quite as instant, and Okeria’s head crystal slammed into my stomach with enough force to send him toppling out of my arms. “That’s so much bigger than the one we just fought.”