I reached up to wipe my face. There had to be sweat there–I couldn’t give any other reason why I felt so… wrong. I wasn’t ready for this. Glow-moss was a chosen from the start, and I didn’t know how much power they kept from the trial run. It had taken three of us to track and take them down the last time, and that had been when we were fairly powerful. Now…

{Shit.} I hissed. {If that thing’s here to help Scalovera, the plan’s fucked.}

{Then we just have to kill it first.} Jun said. {Glow-moss was one of the cores you recognized, right? Are they going to be any more powerful than Dylan was?}

The question stopped me from spiraling down a dangerous mental rabbit hole. Jun had a very good point–Dylan didn’t seem like he’d kept a few years worth of power when I killed him. So maybe it was the same for glow-moss. Then why the hell were they here? Did they hold a grudge because I’d killed them in my laast life? Had they been looking for me ever since they got to this world?

Were any of my other friends–who’d helped me kill them–still alive?

Questions and bile bubbled up in my throat. The soft ribbons of glow-moss’ light gently wrapped around a twitching soldier and pulled tight, leaving a geyser of sticky light connected to their visor. The twitching intensified as mist spilled out from every one of the soldier’s joints, pooled around them, and seemed to flow back to the geyser in a feedback loop.

I recognized the function. An illusion so powerful that it trapped you in your own mind, completely unaware that anything was even happening, and siphoning away the battery you used for your functions to power the illusion. Until you were completely dry. You could break it if you knew what was happening, but that was the insidious part–the illusion only continued to show you exactly what was already happening. If you couldn’t catch glow-moss putting you under, you were doomed.

{Don’t get caught by that.}

{Obviously.} Jun said with an audio-only eye-roll. {It’s weird, though. I could’ve sworn I saw something like Inopsy’s functions, but I don’t see him anywhere. …Actually, I don’t even see whoever glow-moss is.}

Ribbons flashed into existence, trapped two more soldiers, then blinked out once again. I tapped on my helmet as if that would let me get a bead on glow-moss, then waited with perfect concentration. I missed the next three intrusions of the ribbons, but on the fourth, my helmet’s function locked onto something. Not exactly glow-moss, but their function.

Dizziness washed over me, but I pushed back and forced my helmet to lock onto the source of the function. A notification blinked at me warning about overdrawing from my blood-oil reserves, and my battery dropped like a stone. It wasn’t enough to force me to let go. I rested my hand on my weapon and twined wipe-away with the lock-on function, riding some sort of invisible ribbon back to wherever glow-moss was hiding.

Jun gasped in disbelief, almost pulling me out of my concentration. {They’re all Scalovera and Endra’s soldiers. How did glow-moss get them all to fight each other so easily? Shouldn’t they be… I don’t know… around our level?}

{Their core was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. That includes all the crazy shit I’ve seen in this life.} I said seriously. {All of their functions can leech away their target’s battery to sustain themselves, they can manipulate light like it’s a solid thing, and as far as I know, their effective range is fucking huge.}

Which was why we needed to kill them before they became a real problem. I had no false hope that they didn’t already know we were here, since we hadn’t exactly made a stealthy entrance, but I had to have some hope. Hope that they’d stretched themselves thin to control this fifty-ish person skirmish. And that I was good enough to not get caught in another one of their illusions.

Bright light was the trigger. That’s all it took. Even a little flash in the corner of your vision, and you could be gone. There had been plenty of those, but if I was already caught, then we were beyond fucked. So I had to go on the assumption that I was still of my own mind, and that my continued scrutiny from this point forward would be enough.

I gestured for Jun to be as aware as possible, then mentally commanded my hydra to barrel through the battlefield in the direction my functions were pointing me. Soldiers fell under its weight, but were harmlessly passed underneath just as the civilians had been. It made absolutely no sense how that worked, and it was a little annoying that I couldn’t count on my hydra to just crush things to death, but I’d get over it.

{So, um, how are we going about this? If one of us gets trapped I mean.} Jun asked.

{Obviously don’t go straight for a kill. Try with the communicator first, and see if they talk all weird. If I start spouting off about stuff that isn’t actually happening, that means one of us is trapped in glow-moss’ illusion.}

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{That’s it? Just… I mean… isn’t there any way we can avoid it?}

{Of course there is. We did end up killing glow-moss, after all.} I swapped my weapon from one hand to the other in a nervous twitch. Wipe-away finally got a lock, but my helmet’s actual lock-on hadn’t. {Glow-moss’ illusions stop working if you go from inside of your armor to outside of it, or vice-versa. But they know that, so it’s beyond dangerous to try and do it in the heat of combat.}

I quietly gestured to a rise in the terrain. {Glow-moss is just over that hill. Expect them to be invisible.}

Jun nodded without a shred of doubt. {Are they alone? And if they’re fighting off Endra’s soldiers, does that make them an ally? Or is that hoping for too much?}

Honestly, I had no idea. Dylan seemed to be the same asshole he’d been in the trial run, and I still had most of my memories, so there was no reason to think that glow-moss would be anything but the monster they’d been at the time of their death. But if their ire was focused on Endra for some reason…

Well, again, I had no idea. Nothing they did made sense in my old life, so there was no reason for anything they did to make sense in my current life.

{Just be careful. I trust you to make your own calls, but please stop them if it looks like they’re going to kill me.} I said playfully.

{If I have to.} Jun sighed theatrically. {I expect you’ll do the same for me, of course.}

She held up her left hand in half of that pose artists did to give themselves a mental snapshot, and a small rectangular barrier flickered to life between her fingers. A few quick movements and she’d stuck the barrel of her gun through the barrier, rested it in the crook between her thumb and forefinger, and trained on exactly where wipe-away assumed glow-moss was.

Before I could reply, my hydra bellowed in anticipation. In that moment I felt my helmet’s function snap onto glow-moss, giving me a perfect outline of their armor through the trees. And then it locked onto a second figure. So glow-moss wasn’t working alone.

We burst through the trees in a crash of shattered wood and a spray of water. My hydra charged at glow-moss, who was clad in ribbons of light that were pulled tight to their indistinct armor. A much different effect than the ghostly version from my previous life, but I wasn’t about to underestimate the person that had killed one of my closest friends.

“WHAT IN THE SACRED FUCK IS THAT?!” Glow-moss screamed as they backpedaled away from my charging monstrosity of scales and oil. Their ribbons began to glow even brighter, and I flooded the inside of my visor with oil to block out their function. “OH GOD WHY ISN’T MY FUNCTION WORKING?!”

“Well, if I had to guess, it’s because his visor’s all gooped up with something that looks like oil. And probably is oil, considering where he was the last time I saw him”

I recognized that voice. The last time I’d heard it was when we were running from Keratily, and he’d cannonballed in to buy us some time. But why the fuck was Inopsy with glow-moss?

“Wait. Inopsy?” Jun asked as I let my visor clean itself. And it revealed that, yes, it was indeed Inopsy. And glow-moss. Together. “We… why… what happened to you? Why is your armor all… weird?”

Inopsy tilted his head to the side, then made an overdramatic show of looking himself over. “What, these pink cracks all over me? You didn’t think I could get away from a monster like Keratily without adhering to her fashion sense just a little, did you?”

He cackled as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world, doubling over and starting to wheeze when he’d spent more breath on the laugh than the explanation. Fingers brushed against his visor as if he were wiping tears away from four eyes, and then he straightened himself like he hadn’t just lost it for a second.

“Seriously, though, this is permanent structural damage. I sort of lost myself after I lost to Keratily, and it seems like a little bit of her function seeped into the broken ends of my armor while I was trapped in crystal.” He explained, then pulled glow-moss to him with one arm around their shoulders. “Then I met this lovely woman, who used her light to free me from the crystals somehow, and we teamed up to find one Sebastian Cormier in Rainbow Basin! You wouldn’t have any idea where to find him, would you?”

“Oh, and hey to you, too, Juniper. Congrats on getting married.” Inopsy said fluidly, as if he hadn’t just segwayed away from something incredibly important. “How’d Keratily take it? Or was her ripping me to pieces and scattering them across a blasted wasteland how she took it?”

“I… think that was how she took it, yeah.” Jun said slowly. Inopsy had taken her off guard, and I wasn’t really any better.

The fact I hadn’t managed to open my mouth yet was a testament to that. I gawked at glow-moss, who was remaining visible and allowing them–no, herself–to be touched without trying to put Inopsy under an illusion. Or anyone else, if you didn’t count the soldiers who still fought on in the background.

I stared at Inopsy for a moment, then at glow-moss, and finally let out a titanic sigh and dispelled both my hydra and my weapon’s slashes. There was only one sure-fire way to know what glow-moss was here for. I walked up to her, Jun nipping right at my heels, and reached up to manually take off my helmet.

{If she goes to decapitate me, shove my head in my helmet.}

{If she goes to decapitate you, I’m killing her.} Jun replied easily. {And if Inopsy doesn’t help me kill her, I’m killing him next. However many times it takes to make it stick.}

I smiled at Jun’s loyalty and pulled my helmet off. The cool misty air nipped against my skin. Glow-moss’ visor was a mirror of my own face. She didn’t react at first, but slowly, she started to get tense. Her hands started to shake, and I heard something like a shuddering breath of worry quietly escape from her helmet.

“Sebastian.” She said in a tone barely above a whisper. “I… I’m so sorry. For everything.”