Annette had a very good point. We were done with this, and now we needed to find out where we were needed. Well where I was needed, and she needed to get back to Inopsy to safely recharge for when she was needed. Because I had no doubts that we’d need her specific set of skills again before this was over.

Inopsy and Keratily were fighting off in a hazard, and everyone else was fighting or evacuating the people of Rainbow Basin. Now that all the crystals were destroyed we had to worry about the Keratilys joining in the fight, but they also didn’t have Keratily prime to give them orders. I doubted they’d eagerly work alongside Endra, and they definitely weren’t going to side with us, so they were just another enemy front we had to deal with.

I needed outside insight. {Okeria, how’s everything going? Any sign of Scalovera?}

{Nothin’ for now, and everyone’s holdin’ out alright. Juniper, Thorn, and Mortician are pretty much a three-person army right now, and our actual small army with ‘em is fightin’ alright.} Okeria paused, and I could hear him tapping his fingers against the map table. {If you’re lookin’ for input, I’d say bring Annette back here for now. She’s runnin’ on fumes, and we’ve got a few healers who can expedite her recovery process.}

I nodded and gestured at Annette. “If we need you to create a huge distraction, how far away from the place do you need to be?”

“How huge is huge?”

“Mmm… about a quarter mile radius.” I settled on after mulling it over for a few seconds. “And we’d need you to only affect our enemies. Can you do that with how strong you are now?”

She blew out a long breath, then shrugged apologetically. “I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know. But if you just want a quarter-mile hypnosis blast, then I’d need some kind of big light that I could force my function through. It’d drain me completely dry, though, and I can’t guarantee that I’d be able to completely prevent our allies from being affected. Unless Okeria can tell them all to black out their visors right before I launch it.”

{That’s doable, but I’ll need a few minutes to get the drones in place beforehand.} Okeria confirmed instantly. {And I’ll get ta work on a big prism for ya right now. Can ya come back and give me a hand with the dimensions and how your function interacts with it?}

Annette nodded, and I had to give Okeria props for getting her to rest without making it look like he was pulling her away from the battlefield. She patted the teleportation anchor on her waist, waved to me, then disappeared in a flash of light.

{Nice one. Anywhere in particular I’m needed?} I asked once the electricity and light had died down.

{Not at the moment. But the Keratilys and Scalovera could show up at any second, so stay on your toes. Or ya can go into the hazard and try ta give Inopsy a hand so Keratily don’t appear and shift the tides of this battle.} Okeria suggested. {Either one works, but one of ‘em involves… hold on a second. I’m gettin’ some real wacky readings here.}

Wacky readings? That couldn’t be anything but a bad sign. {What kind of wacky readings?}

{Power readings. Ya know, people who ain’t scared ta let their cores run wild while they’re runnin’ here.} Okeria said with a mounting frustration in his voice. {Visuals on ‘em are shaky at best, but it don’t take a genius ta recognize more of Endra’s chosen. They ain’t usin’ the teleporter, so they ain’t comin’ from the same place, but we don’t got a lotta time. An hour’s all I can guarantee us.}

{Shit. Then we definitely need more firepower.} I decided and brought up my map. The teleportation anchors were still there, and I locked on to the one closet to the hazard we were pretty sure Inopsy had gone into. {I’m going to get Inopsy. Will the Okeria pill let me summon your power inside of a hazard?}

{That’s what it was intended for.} Okeria said as electricity overtook me. I took off running before he got the chance to say anything else. {Alright, just checked your path, and it looks eerily clear. Kertily might’ve put some guards around it, or the other Keratilys might’ve gone in after her already. Keep your eyes open.}

Rainbow Basin disappeared behind me as I made my way back to the hazard I’d left just a few days ago. I had to hope that Inopsy was still alive, and that Keratily had actually been weakened by what we just did. Because if nothing had changed, I wasn’t strong enough to change things.

“No time to talk, sorry.” I told Archivist as I appeared on the Ossuary. “Things are going down, and I can’t risk the few seconds that would pass while I’m in here.”

They nodded knowingly. “I understand. Good luck.”

“Hope I won’t need it, but I’ll take it anyway. Thanks.”

My feet touched down on blasted dusty ground, and I snapped through all the popups that appeared in my vision with single-minded fervor. For the first three seconds, I wondered if Inopsy and Keratily were actually here. Then something exploded.

Pink crystals and molten coal peppered the air like hail falling horizontally. Four huge pillars of crystal jutted up from the ground a few miles away, and a cloud of flaming black smoke shrouded whatever was going on inside of it. Flashes of pink showed images of two beings fighting at horrific speeds, exchanging blows that created backdrafts of fire and crystal shards to scour the already destroyed ground far into the distance.

{Welcome back, Sebastian.} Acasiana’s voice echoed clearly inside of my helmet. {Your strange immortal friend fighting over there tried to fill me in, but there’s only so much you can do with crystals constantly destroying your body. Do you want to use your checkpoint?}

“Very much so, yes.” I confirmed warily. If Keratily caught wind of me, I had a feeling she’d take a few seconds out of fighting Inopsy to try and murder me. “If I can bait her into the mountain, can you fight her for me?”

{I don’t know. Maybe? She’d have to fulfill the conditions to clear the hazard on her own, and if she’s in that state, I really doubt she’d be down for some puzzles.} Acasiana chuckled, which slowly faded away to a sigh. {So… did you find the facility? Was it all still functional?}

My vision blurred for a half second, and then I was in the stone checkpoint cave. The wall was still open to the rest of the mountain, but there was nothing else of value in there. Even the recovery pool was dry.

“A bit of it was functional.” I said as I walked right through the opening and into the summoning room. “All the water in there turned into a really powerful consumable that absorbed the memories from Rainbow Basin’s people. Oh, and it gave me visions of when you fought Endra.”

{It did? Well, that saves me quite a few explanations.} Acasiana chuckled. {Endra found herself a new host, Rainbow Basin’s in danger, and now you need to kill Keratily so she doesn’t put herself between you and your goals. Is that about right?}

“Spot-on, actually.” I walked past all the devices we’d already solved and dropped down into the throne room. “Do I need to fight the hydra again to talk to you in person?”

“No.” Acasiana grinned at me from the throne. “Not for now, at least. If Endra or Inopsy come into the mountain I’ll be pulled back into the control room, but until then, we’re free to strategize.”

I looked over Acasiana’s shoulder with more than a little worry. “So… is the fake Moricla here? Does she still want to kill me?”

Acasiana stood from the throne and stretched her arms over her head. “Yes she still wants to kill you, and no, she isn’t here. She’s watching Keratily and Inopsy fight from the control room, and she either wants to go hug Keratily or murder her. I’m not really sure which, since I couldn’t get a straight answer on if she actually knows Keratily or not.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I don’t know if Keratily was born before or after this Moricla got put in this hazard. She’s technically from the future, but that future isn’t necessarily congruent with the real past.” Acasiana explained. She snapped her fingers, and suddenly she was completely armored. “I’ve missed a whole lot, but if there’s anything I can do to stop them from destroying the city I built, I’ll do it.”

There wasn’t really much I could imagine Acasiana being able to do. She has some power over the hazard, so she might be able to put some debuffs on Keratily, but those only worked when the fight happened in an arena. If they were strict with the rules, Keratily would have to fight through a few arenas to get to the point where they actually hampered her. And that wasn’t even considering the fact that she could just recall herself out of the hazard whenever she wanted to.

I hummed in thought and turned to look at the fight in the distance. It seemed so far away now, but I could still feel the tendrils of Keratily’s functions trying to nip at my armor. She didn’t seem any weaker now that we’d destroyed her crystals, but then again, this could be her weakened state. I didn’t really get to see how terrifying she was before we took down the crystals.

“I honestly don’t know what we can do.” I reluctantly admitted. “Unless you’re not actually bound by the rules of the hazard?”

“Unfortunately, I am.”

“Then I don’t know.”

Inopsy and Keratily’s fight raged on. Crystal and coal clashed for supremacy, and even though they looked sort of evenly matched, I knew how this fight had turned out before. Even if it had taken weeks to actually finish. Maybe it was wishful thinking to hope that Inopsy could manage to fight her to a standstill again, but maybe it wasn’t.

No. That wasn’t solving our problem–it was just delaying it. Rainbow Basin wouldn’t be safe until Keratily was well and truly gone.

I took a seat on the steps leading up to the throne and rested my chin on my hands. There had to be something we could do, but we’d have to do it so quickly that Keratily wouldn’t have time to speak and leave the hazard. If she was so occupied with Inopsy that she couldn’t focus on anything else, then maybe. But I’d have to be the one to do it, not Acasiana. So there had to be something she could do.

“Is there anything you can do to slow them down?” I asked with a gesture at the far-off brawl. “Anything at all?”

Acasiana shook her head. “I can only follow the rules of the hazard. That’s how we were going to try and cure those people of yours, remember?”

Oh, I remembered all right. But that wouldn’t work for shit if there was an angry Keratily right in the path we needed to take with them. There had to be something. Some kind of loophole or rule-skirting path we could take to get Acasiana actually involved in the fight. One that didn’t involve me taking her place, of course, since fake Moricla would kill me the second I took up that post.

I sat up a little straighter. That was the answer, and it would help solve the problem of all the reinforcements spilling into Rainbow Basin.

Somehow, I needed to get Keratily to clear this hazard.