This time, The End’s reply didn’t come near instantly.

//I… I BELIEVED THAT THE EMBODIMENTS WOULD FOLLOW THE RULES.

//I NOW REALIZE THAT THAT IS IDEALISTIC FOR SOMEONE SUCH AS I, BUT IT IS THE TRUTH.

//ENDRA’S INCURRENCE WAS SOMETHING THAT I DID NOT FACTOR IN WHATSOEVER, EVEN IF I DID NOTICE SOMETHING STIRRING WITHIN PERSEPHONIA’S BOND.

//INITIALLY, I TOOK IT AS A TEMPORARY BOOST FROM ENDRA TO FIGHT OFF ADDIA’S FORCES.

//BUT AS IT GREW… I IGNORED IT.

//AND ENDRA BROKE EVERY RULE AND LAW THAT I SET IN PLACE TO MURDER PERSEPHONIA AND GAIN A FOOTHOLD IN THE ALL-WORLD.

{So why won’t you just kill Endra for breaking the rules? If you want to keep the Embodiments in line, breaking the rules has to come with a punishment. Otherwise, the only people who’ll follow them are the good ones.} I sent, remembering the struggles humanity had had when we tried to build our little towns. The good people didn’t steal even when there wasn’t a rule against it, but the bad needed a fear of punishment to stop them. A rule meant nothing unless there was active enforcement.

//YOU SAY THAT, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW THE BALANCING I MUST DO TO SIMPLY EXIST.

//IF YOU HAD A PERSONIFICATION OF ALL THAT IS WRONG, WOULD YOU NOT SEEK TO END IT?

//I AM THE END.

//I AM THE FINALITY THAT COMES WHEN NOBODY EXISTS TO REMEMBER YOU.

//I AM HATED.

{But you aren’t, right? You’re like the doctor that comes in to tell someone that they will inevitably die, but you’re going to make them as comfortable as possible in the meantime. Or… bring it quicker, if they’re really suffering.}

I shook my head to clear the tears that were forming in the corner of my eyes. I knew what it was like to make the hard choices, to be hated for something that I had absolutely no control over. I remembered divvying up enough food for five people among thirty, making an informed choice based on who had the highest recovery stats, but that meant people would go starving. It meant I would go starving. And everyone looked at me with hatred in their eyes for their friends who went hungry, even though the only reason we were even in that situation was because we’d been raided the night before and we’d lost everything that wasn’t in our inventories.

Then, I tried imagining what it would be like to do that for the entirety of existence. To be technically responsible for every loved one’s death, for the end of everything good that ever started, or to have to kill an entire planet for the simple fact that letting it live would be an indescribable hell for everyone who remained on it. I remembered standing next to Jimmy, musing that the people who’d instantly vanished might have been the lucky ones. But I was one of the very few people who had the experience to say that and actually mean it.

//THANK YOU, SEBASTIAN.

//THE KNOWLEDGE THAT MY CHOSEN UNDERSTANDS IS VERY COMFORTING.

//THOUGH YOU MUST REMEMBER THAT DELIVERING A WILLING END IS VERY DIFFERENT THAN FORCING ONE.

I nodded to myself, watching Jun and her grandma quietly talk with the intention of not letting me hear. I’d seen far too many ends to hold the childish view that they were all equal, and perhaps I’d seen too few to actually understand the horrors that come with an all-out war. That had broken Nia, and had broken so many people back on Earth, some of who never put themselves back together. If Endra wanted to drag humanity into a fresh hell, I’d have to do everything I could to stop her.

If The End was, well, The End, it was just as responsible for preventing unjust ends as it was bringing them. Jun turned away from her grandma and nodded at me, then gestured at the mostly dead slyk between us.

“Apparently whoever carves away the crystals rootia made will get the credit for the kill, so, uh, you should… you know…” Jun trailed off, obviously trying to keep my core as secret as possible. My one true ally in this world was making a hand gesture that only made her hesitance infinitely more suspicious. “You can kill it. Then we’ll see what we can do with the crystallized slyk and the rest of the oil.”

Right, because the oil not being solid was the reason we were hammering away at the slyk’s rocks. Definitely not because we couldn’t get at the entirety of the fucking thing. “Can your grandma destroy all the rock around the mostly-dead-slyk?”

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“I could, but where would the fun be in that?” Jun’s grandma teased. She was already back to acting like an old woman, or she was back to acting like herself again; I wasn’t sure which was real and which was the facade. “I’ll just go ahead and make it a little more brittle for you. Juniper, go sound the alarm and wait for me in the main building. Okeria’s had his fun, but we need to get to work on making it out of here. I’ll make sure he’s out of the trawler before it leaves the port.”

Jun nodded and beelined for the thing Okeria had used to call the trawlers, made it make its horrible noise, and waved to me before she went into the main building. It was a little jarring how she’d gone from absolute dismissal of her grandma to happily going along with her, but then again, they’d completely left me out. It could be something like a temporary truce, or Keratily could’ve revealed something grand to Jun that completely changed her mind. I’d have to ask her about it once this slyk was good and shattered.

Once Keratily and Jun were both gone, I hefted my hammer and brought it down on the slyk’s rock. I’d hoped that it would shatter instantly, but the large chunk that blasted apart in a dusty explosion tinged in pink was a fairly nice surprise. The newly revealed portion of the crystallized slyk was somehow completely unharmed, and after a short rain of blows I’d revealed a fairly large lattice of crystal that had once been alive.

I broke off the slyk as I went, which shattered like sugar glass under my fingers but held strong like diamond against my hammer. It was fairly slow work, and against the grinding of the trawler slowly making its way out of the switchport, I didn’t hear the torrent of oil triple in strength. What I did hear was the explosion that followed, and I wrenched my neck upwards to see the massive slyk from before sailing off into the distance on a spray of oil and molten silver.

Okeria looked down from the new hole he’d blown, rubbing his neck before looking back up at the slyk he’d just sent flying. “I’ll, uh, go get that. Team meeting in the main building in five minutes, human, so finish up with that slyk or leave it for later. Either works, just don’t be late.”

Keratily appeared right as Okeria pushed off, stepping on tiny silver platforms that formed beneath his feet and disappeared as he stepped off of them. She waved down to me before jumping to the highest point of the main building, disappearing from my line of sight as the sound of her clunking around on the roof joined the cacophony of the trawlers all leaving at once.

“Five minutes.” I muttered to myself, looking down at what was left of the slyk with my hammer on my shoulder. There was way too much left for me to finish in five minutes, but I did have a one-node function that I could slot in exchange for a small stat penalty. And what was I really using recovery for at the moment, anyway?

Two quick swipes later I was down some recovery and up one strange, low-leveled function. I pushed some battery into its node and imagined one of Nia’s scales hovering over my palm, but something wasn’t quite right. The battery drain was far too low for any kind of function I’d ever dealt with, and when the scale appeared in my hand, it wasn’t hovering. It sat on its end for a split second before it toppled over, and I had to scramble to catch it before it hit the ground. I glared at the fruit of Nia’s function for a moment, trying to find anything extraordinary about it, but came to a conclusion almost immediately.

These things were completely useless. I double-checked the skill’s description to make sure it hadn’t changed when I slotted it in my core, then had to double-check my reserves when I saw how much battery I’d lost to make the chitin scale.

“One battery. The lowest possible amount of battery a function can use.” I muttered to myself, turning the scale over in my hand with a newfound appreciation for it. It was the length of a dinner plate from tip to tip, the width of my fist, and maybe half an inch thick. It had taken on the blue of my armor, but had a glossy white sheen to it when I shifted it in the dim light of the hazard. “These scales have a static cost to them, so how the hell did I manage this?”

I flipped the scale multiple times in my hand, but couldn’t find anything out of place. I pulled up the skill’s description again, and after a quick look, found something out of place.

//CHITIN SCALES.

//CORE MASTERY REQUIREMENT: 1.

//STATIC FUNCTION: LENGTH 1.

//EXPEND (5) BATTERY TO CREATE A MANIPULATABLE SCALE. SCALES COPY THE USER’S STATS.

The scale in my hands was completely severed from my interface, and from my control. It simply existed now, and would continue to exist until it ran out of battery to sustain itself or if it was destroyed. Had I somehow removed the ‘manipulatable’ part of the function? A quick attempt at controlling the scale showed that yes I had, but that shouldn’t have been possible. Functions as simple as this only worked when their parameters were perfectly met, and Nia only got away with altering her input because of her core.

I let the scale dissolve into nothing and re-triggered the function, but this time I went in with the intent of making a ‘manipulatable’ scale, whatever that entailed. There was a slight pushback when I tried to get my battery into the function this time, like if there was a layer of cling wrap covering it. I raised an eyebrow and pushed harder, feeling the function strain against my insistence, and then it simply disappeared.

I blinked in surprise and opened my interface, where there was one blank node staring me in the face. The chitin scales function was gone. I opened the summary of my core and found that the spine of enmity and all my stat nodes were still there, but now the floodforest’s gift and the chitin scales names were blurred out. The space where they should’ve been shimmered and shook before coming together and forming into a bar of tightly knit flower petal-scales. I prodded at the bar and got a message over it, followed by a number that was frustratingly low for the zero potential I currently had.

//FUNCTIONS ‘CHITIN SCALES’ AND ‘FLOODFOREST’S GIFT’ SIMILARITIES DETECTED: ATTEMPTING CORRUPTION.

//CORRUPTION OF ‘CHITIN SCALES’ AND ‘FLOODFOREST’S GIFT’ STALLED DUE TO A LACK OF POTENTIAL TO FINISH THE PROCESS.

//POTENTIAL REQUIRED FOR COMPLETION: 136.

//CURRENT POTENTIAL: 0.

//NOTE FROM THE END: IF YOU DON’T WANT YOUR FUNCTIONS TO ATTEMPT TO CORRUPT EACH OTHER WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION, REMEMBER TO LOCK THEM ON YOUR CORE SUB-SCREEN.