I launched my slashes forward before Danday got the chance to fully rebuild. They smacked against his partly constructed shield with little effect, but did exactly what I wanted them to; they slowed him down. He raised his bladed gauntlets and batted at my slashes, his wound already starting to close just as mine was.

{If you can make an opening, I’ll kill him.} Jun said coldly. {I would’ve done it when you broke his armor before, but… it surprised me. I’m sorry, Seb.}

I shook my head. {Nothing to be sorry about. We’ll kill him next time.}

Danday jumped back and pushed his shield out further, then twisted his left hand. Bladed protrusions appeared out of nowhere as the shield spun viciously, destroying the few slashes I had left before he pulled it in close again. But when he pulled it close, all the protrusions disappeared.

So he couldn’t pull it close and make it dangerous at the same time. Well, he could, but it took a lot longer for some reason. I couldn’t fathom why that was, but Danday had no reason to withhold anything from us at this point. And if we didn’t take what we saw at face value, I risked getting torn open like a can of expired tomato sauce.

Jun took a breath deep enough that I heard it from where I was standing. I risked turning my head to see her holding her gun pointed at the ground while it shook like it was about to burst apart. She pulled four bullets from ad-infinitum and pressed them against her forehead as she whispered something I couldn’t hear, then cracks of black light shot through them with little bursts of yellow sparks dancing around the tips.

{Four shots.} She warned me. {Once I fire all of these, I won’t have enough battery to back you up anymore. All I’ll have left is Okeria’s little gun, but that thing terrifies me.}

I wasn’t sure we had a choice. Danday grunted as the chittering hit a fever pitch, then pushed off hard enough to send ovals of hard dirt flying into the air.

“Fuck!” I cried as I shifted my weapon into a pair of daggers. Not the best choice in hindsight, but in the moment, I knew I needed to block everything. His blows rained down like mortar shells, each carrying with it a blast of brown light that exploded off his gauntlets and caused radiant damage to my armor.

He wasn’t as fast as he’d been. But neither was I. Mortician’s shield held for all of five seconds under the barrage of shattering barriers. Jun fired off a few shots that definitely didn’t have the power I expected the cracked bullets to have, but it made sense if she was waiting for an opening. An opening Danday seemed hellbent on preventing.

“You’re quick for whatever a human is.” Danday taunted. He slammed both of his gauntlets down on my shoulders, and I barely managed to get my daggers up in time to block. Which left my torso wide open for a heavy kick that sent me staggering back. “But just being quick isn’t enough. No matter how many years you’ve fought, it doesn’t mean anything when you get to the all-world. The things that killed in the blink of an eye now barely do anything. Fighting with swords and tech-magic isn’t just the norm; it’s the best way of doing things.”

He gestured at Jun as another bullet shattered against his shield. “Look at little Juniper over there. Pinpoint damage doesn’t do much of anything against a shield like mine. And even if she shatters it, she’s working with limited resources. Abyss below, I could go clear any hazard and find some function that lets me throw spears of solid daylight. Why would anyone ever bother using a gun anymore?”

I spat into my helmet, which coated my visor in bloody mucus for a second before my armor whisked it away to God knows where. “You know, I pretty much agree with everything you said. But then again, I’m not the one that just shattered your barrier.”

A pair of perfectly equal bullets slammed into the web of cracks Jun had built up. Danday’s shield shattered into a million tiny shards of solid light, fluttering through the sky like the glass of a car window after a horrible accident. Danday stared up at the beautiful display of destruction with what I chose to see as wondrous disbelief.

Three bullets echoed against his side. I ran in and drove my daggers into his chest, then ripped them down as hard as I could. His armor shrieked as it was destroyed under my blade, and a weak jolt of electricity stunted the meager resistance he tried to put up. Jun’s final shot rang out with a horrible shriek, and suddenly, a quarter of Danday was gone.

His left arm and most of the chest cavity immediately next to it vaporized into a clear, chunky spray. And something wriggled out of it. Like parasites attached to the outside of a shark. I grunted in disgust and pushed myself back as… as… as whatever the fuck was happening to Danday continued to happen.

“Drown me, that stings!” He laughed as the chittering grew ever louder. I couldn’t help but stare as he rolled his right arm and kept walking forwards, even as the aura of primordial fear ramped up to terrifying levels. “Close, but not close enough. You’ll have to do better than that.”

The barrier snapped back into place. The parasitic insects in his body squirmed outward to create something like a replacement arm, and with a flick of his not-wrist, Danday summoned more armor that looked exactly like the stuff Jun had just demolished. He tilted his head to the side just a little too far, to the sound of dried twigs snapping underfoot, and gasped.

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A desperate plea escaped his helmet. “I’m losing it, kids! Not gonna be me for much longer, so take me out or take off!”

His barrier flickered ever so slightly as he spoke. When he fought back against Endra’s influence, his powers waned. I shifted my weapon into an axe and forced my body forward, putting all of my weight into a swing with the lone purpose of separating Danday’s upper half from his bottom half. It hit the barrier with a spray of light and serrated shards, the vile song of chittering parasites joining in with his aura to create a sensation akin to a living nightmare.

I grit my teeth and forced myself on. I piled petal-scales onto my axe with what was left of my battery, even as it screamed at me to stop, until it was an oily blue-white stain on the world. Danday screamed, but it was drowned out by my own voice bleeding out through my ragged throat. My mind clawed at every fibre of my being, begging me to back away, but I held strong.

Danday leaned in close as his barrier shattered.“When you see Endra, tell her that I’ll be waiting for her.” He whispered as my axe cleaved through his center in a vicious spray of petal-scales and vital fluids.

Parasites popped out of both wounds before his torso even hit the ground. His legs shuddered and fell to their knees, sprouting little white buds as they cracked and split to reveal that Danday had been more parasite than Staura. The top of his body let out a horrible scream, expelling the last little bits of the Staura that used to inhabit it, and clawed at the dirt to pull itself closer and closer to its legs.

Jun retched and lowered her gun. Then she shifted to Okeria’s tiny last resort, and without hesitation, loaded a cube into it. She looked to me, and even though I couldn’t make out her expression through her helmet, I knew she was equating Danday to Nia. Two people taken by Endra, robbed of any free will they might’ve had, and died for the Embodiment’s sins.

“They aren’t the same.” I said seriously.

She nodded. “I know. But if we don’t kill Endra, there will be more like Nia.”

A sudden intrusion of sound and fury split the world. Jun’s arm snapped back under the absurd force of Okeria’s terrible weapon, and when the light had cleared, I saw a little cube floating in the air. In the exact center of a massive cube of missing space.

Danday’s upper body was gone. His legs only existed from the knees down. A rip in existence appeared where his body had once been, and from it rained a mixture of armor, weapons, trinkets, and rations. I stared down at the display of overwhelming force with mild horror, and a glance at Jun showed that she felt it too. She clenched her hand around the little gun and took a shuddering breath, then stepped towards the remainder of Danday’s corpse.

“That was a little excessive.” She chuckled weakly, then emptied what was left in cacophony into the last vestiges of our enemy. They burst into splatters of flesh, and the parasites died with nothing to feed upon. “But… it had to be done, right? Endra’s parasites were already doing something to him.”

//CREATION ACTIVATED.

//RECIPIENT DESIGNATED AS ‘SELF’.

I held out my hand as a small sphere, no bigger than a marble, appeared in my palm. It gave off an aura of desperation, like a much weaker version of what Danday had used. I sent it to my inventory instead of consuming it, just in case it could give us a hint on how to actually fight Endra, and moved to collect our spoils as Mortician slowly stepped out from behind the safety of the cruel world’s partition.

“Your shield appears to be quite damaged.” They noted as they joined me next to the contents of Danday’s inventory. “Would you have survived Danday’s attack if it did not absorb half of the damage?”

“I don’t want to think about that right now.” I said honestly. “But… no. It would’ve done a lot worse than what it did, and it already did some horrible damage.”

Mortician nodded solemnly. “Then we will have to get stronger to protect you and Juniper.”

“That’ll be helpful, thanks.” Jun said quietly. She bent down and grabbed the perfect twin to the marble my core had created, opened her interface to see what it was, and pushed it away with revulsion. “Eugh. It even feels like Endra.”

“All the more reason to consume it then, yeah?” I chuckled. Jun considered for a moment, then nodded slowly and opened her interface once more. Danday’s core disappeared into the jaws of some illusory predator, and that was the end of that. “So now what? Do we keep going, or do we try and fight our way out?”

“Well, first we should divvy up everything here.” I motioned at all of Danday’s equipment, then gestured at the room which was still open for us. “And after that… well… maybe we have a little more time than we thought. Danday seemed like he came down here to wait us out, right? If that was the plan, then the people waiting for us outside the hazard’s exit are probably hunkered down for a few days.”

“Okay. Then we stay for a few more days.” Jun agreed. “If you think nobody’s going to attack us any more, then maybe we can actually take our time, too. Check around with that treasure-finding technique we learned from Nia to see if we’ve missed anything important.”

“It will also give us some time to come to terms with the new facets of our core function.” Mortician added. “We can create an additional treasure now, and that should translate to an additional function in the book Okeria created for us.”

I leaned back and stared up at the blasted sky. Danday was dead. But Endra knew where we were. There wasn’t any chance that she’d ignore us from now on, so we had to work on bringing the fight to her. It’d probably be a roundabout way of doing it, since it’d need a detour for us to find the human Embodiment of Endurance, but there was no ignoring it any more.

We were as much at war with Endra as Addia was.

And there was no going back.