The signaleech wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Even as electricity arced out from its shattered eye and it leaked a waterfall of oil, it still glared at me with hatred and tried to tower over me on two legs. I’d almost forgotten how massive the thing’s main body was until it reared up and stood on the coiled-up conveyor belts like stilts, letting its tattered thorax hang low and gush out oil as it lumbered towards me.

Was it trying to make itself look more threatening? I’d originally called this thing a spider, but it seemed to have forgotten that it could actually use its oil since the first time it attacked. Now it was just charging mindlessly at me with the hope that the oil that came off its body would spray me. It had to be a side effect of splitting itself and the loss of stats from Wipe-Away.

I wasn’t about to look this gift horse in the mouth. The slyk had lost a whole lot of prowess, but it was still a bundle of strength and oil that would kill me if I took one head-on attack. I resumed my awkward backwards run while the signaleech teetered and shook, making noises that sounded like a combination of grinding of stone to dust and the first revs of an engine that refused to start. It stayed that way for a long while, approaching me with an awkward gait as the noises it was making grew louder and louder until they were joined in by the popping and cracking of overloaded electronics.

“That can’t be anything but bad.” I groaned, upping the speed of my retreat to as fast as my legs would carry me while launching a stone at the middle of the slyk’s dangling oil-sack. It pierced right through without the slyk even acknowledging that it had been injured, oil oozing out of the new entry and exit wounds like thick icing through a ripped pastry bag. In fact, all the previously thick but still runny oil had become thicker than ever and was now barely even moving.

I turned to start sprinting away as the signaleech’s screeching roar turned into something so strange and unearthly that it seared images of my childhood nightmares into my mind. It was somehow at once the roar of a rusty diesel engine, the piercing soft electric hum of lightning cutting through the sky, and tip-taps of a creature with far too many legs skittering across a thin metal roof. And then came the aftershock of thunder, ripping through the trawler’s warehouse like cannon fire as the slyk sprinted into action.

And I do mean sprinted. Its legs bent as if they were human limbs, striding massive lengths in a single bound to catch up to me. Its oily thorax wetly slapped between the two rocky limbs before spinning away behind it to reveal the slyk’s one remaining eye and shredded quarter-head, the shattered socket of its empty eye spitting out globs of oil laced with so much electricity that they sparked and seared the stone as they splattered down below.

“Oh, come the fuck on.” I said with a grimace, spinning up my second-to-last sling bullet with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to outrun this sprinting quarter-spider for any reasonable amount of time. This one didn’t get as much power behind it as the others, since I was just a little preoccupied by the signaleech standing up and running at me, and I had to let it go and dodge away as a leg pierced the rock where I’d just stood moments ago.

A single spark of electricity singed the rock a few feet away, the sparkle of a few tiny shards of glass falling to the ground accompanied by the soft tinkling of glass windchimes. I’d managed to hit the slyk, but I hadn’t done enough damage to incapacitate it. That was more than I’d hoped, to be honest, but I had a bad feeling that I wasn’t going to get another easy shot at its one good eye. And that was with the assumption that destroying its eyes would make it harder for it to find me.

The shelves above me shattered one by one in a cascade that would end with my end if I didn’t move. Stone shards rained down from above and cut through the slyk’s body without any resistance whatsoever, but it took all the wounds in stride and kept pressing downwards. I shot a glance towards the other side of the shelf and pushed off of the ground, scraping my armor along the stone and shifting into a roll that left me on my knees on the ground and away from the shelves.

Stone shattered under the signaleech’s insistence, one leg pressed down from above while the other steadied it like a flamingo in an oil spill. I grit my teeth and turned to run, but came face to face with a pod of pulsing oil on the shelf right in front of me. Shards of rock plinked off of it as if it were completely solid, and the trail of oil that led to and away from it seemed to be overloaded with electricity, sparking and arcing away in a way that it definitely hadn’t been a few moments ago. Okeria had said that the things inside of the pods were the key to killing the signaleech, and I thought that the slyk wouldn’t attack the pods since it was its kin.

But the signaleech was a cannibal. I’d somehow managed to push that one little bit of information out of my mind, but then that meant that the slyk wouldn’t hesitate to destroy a pod. And if it did hesitate, then that meant there was another reason it wouldn’t destroy the pods. I scrambled away from the slyk and put the pod between us; it was simple enough to test this theory out, and if it turned out that the slyk was truly remorseless, nothing much would change.

I took care not to touch any of the oil from the pod while I watched the signaleech stumble over the pile of rocky debris it had just created. It seemed disoriented from the motions, something that it hadn’t shown as of yet, but it shook that off quickly enough and returned to its hunting state. I took one step backwards and pivoted my back foot so I was ready to run the fuck away at the first sign of the signaleech’s lack of hesitance, and watched with bated breath as it zeroed in on my position with another activation of Wipe-Away and charged.

Well, that was why they were called theories, and not facts. I took off the second the signaleech’s eye got close enough to the shelf that electricity peeled off of it and struck the shelf above me in a spray of dust. My feet slammed the rock repeatedly and rhythmically, my own breath the only accompaniment to the sound of blood rushing in my ears as I ran as far and as fast as my armor would carry me. The signaleech’s horrific cry grew softer and softer as I went, but something was wrong.

No crashing and splintering stones followed me. The smell of electricity cutting through stale air had faded away into the background. And the slyk’s cry stopped completely, replaced by the sort of silence that only came along with a complete and utter lack of life. I slowed down and looked over my shoulder, but the signaleech was nowhere to be seen. I’d only gone a few shelves down, and the thing towered over everything on its two spindly conveyor-legs. There was no way I’d lost it in a dozen seconds.

But I briefly considered that I had. Or that I hadn’t lost it, but that it had suddenly decided to be smart about its assault. I shook my head and sighed. “Am I really going to go back and check if it's gone?” I asked myself, glancing down at my sling and one remaining bullet as if they’d have something to chime in with. “Damn it, I need whatever’s in that pod, don’t I?”

//IT WOULD BE A POSITIVE IF YOU COULD.

{Is that you telling me it’s safe?}

//NO.

//JUST THAT THE MORE PIECES YOU GATHER, THE MORE OF THE STORY OF THE STAURA’S PREDECESSORS COULD BE UNCOVERED.

{If I die because of this, you better do something about it.} I sent with resignation and slowly inched my way back to the pod that I’d left behind. I didn’t see much of anything no matter how close I got; just an empty shelf with a single pod on the inside of it, and that made the question of what happened to the slyk that much more terrifying. I inched closer and closer to the pod, my nerves and reflexes on fire from the anticipation, and then I was right next to it.

A massive gouge in the rock where the signaleech had been was the only indication that it had ever existed. I looked around to see if I could see a few more shattered stones where the slyk had slammed its legs down, but it seemed like the signaleech had flat-out disappeared. Electricity sparked through the connecting trails of oil as I reached out to touch the pod, almost in warning, and I summoned my already ruined eel gauntlets to save my arms. The electricity crackled and jolted to an insane level as my fingers pressed against the oil, and I felt something staring back at me through the connection to the trawler.

I yanked my hand back and fell flat on my ass. One eye had stared back at me with a hatred so vivid that it had to be backed by intelligence. The signaleech hadn’t had that level of hatred; it had just been an animal thing, like lashing out at a dog that had just bit it. This was the kind of hatred that came from knowing that the person who killed your family was sitting in a warm home while you froze to death on the streets. A hatred that would never end, even if the slyk killed me.

But… the hatred had passed right through me. It wasn’t for me. I was just there when it happened. {There’s something intelligent in the pods… network… whatever. All I can feel from it is hatred.}

The End’s response was somehow muted, as if carrying a lesson and a warning in one. And it was done without a voice.

//HATRED IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX EMOTIONS, SEBASTIAN.

//ONE HATE CAN BE FOR A HORRIBLE INJUSTICE THAT WAS WITNESSED, ANOTHER FOR THE PAIN THEY ENDURED, AND ANOTHER FOR SIMPLY JEALOUSY.

//BEFORE YOU PROCEED, IDENTIFY WHAT HATRED THIS BEING FEELS.

//THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE YOU HAVE JUST FOUND THE NEXT SOUL WHO WILL CALL THE OSSUARY HOME.

I nodded to myself, and took a deep breath. I needed to be calm and collected if I was going to face that burning hatred again. “Alright. You can do this, Seb.” I assured myself, pressing just my fingertips to the pod. The hating eye appeared immediately, and I felt as if my entire being was immersed in its all consuming maelstrom of one singular emotion.

My next words didn’t come as easy as I would’ve wished them to. But in a way, they flowed smoother than anything else I’d ever said. My eyes mirrored the slyk’s hatred as I stepped closer to it, and it didn’t flinch away. It simply nodded in acknowledgement of my existence, and waited. I intended my words to come out hard and powerful, but all I could manage was an intense whisper.

“What will you do if they’ve changed?”