Oja delivered on their promise.

First with a slap to the back of the head that caused the other crew members to wince and then with shrill insults into Aurelio’s ear.

“You utter buffoon! You impossibly dense moron! You, you-” Oja belted out.

“I get it, I get it!” Aurelio lifted his hands up and reeled in pain at the motion, the skin on his arm raw and bloody, “But we got something good out of it!”

Oja delivered another slap, this time to the face, “You think suffering wounds like this is alright!” She yanked his arm by the wrist, much to his chagrin, “You’re wounded. Your skin is exposed to a swamp biome! We’re not even at our target yet and you’re lesser than the rest of the crew. And for equipment that we can’t even use yet?”

He quickly avoided struggling at the androids steel grip, the sensation feeling like blades digging into the wrist.

“I wasn’t worried because I knew we had you to patch us up, right Doc?” Aurelio answered.

Oja let go of his arm and sighed.

“Right?”

Oja stared him directly in the eye, “Crew members like you learn better with a little bit of pain.” With that, Oja got into her march formation and waited for the rest of the crew to follow up.

“Wait, you’re not going to heal me with your power?” Aurelio asked with a hint of panic.

“I might,” they paused, “When you consider it important enough to avoid getting hurt in the first place. I want to engender good behaviors within the rest of you and the first one is to dispose of all notions that I will just dispense healing at the first sign of a boo-boo.”

Phineas let out a long whistle and got in formation, avoiding looking at Aurelio in the eye for his transgressions.

He turned to Kalani and the commander shrugged.

“I can’t force a crew member to do their job if they don’t want to do it, Lio. You’re just gonna have to dress the wounds and move forward.” Kalani stated bluntly.

He wanted to say it wasn’t fair, but Oja did warn them about their disdain for the Trader.

On the other hand, he was suffering and how dare they leave him all bloody and wounded like this!

They didn’t seem like someone who’d change their mind if he complained of the pain so he bit his lip and got into formation. Each slight swing of his arm or the way the wind brushed across his chest left him aching in pain.

He wasn’t going to adopt the Sawbones role to deal with the pain but every step made him consider it a more viable option.

|?Reveal Your Path?|

Aurelio struggled to focus on his visual display, the event card hovering in his sight waiting for him to interact with it. Disgruntled, he swiped at the card and triggered the sequence to experience the event.

|Chosen has drawn “MEAT HAZE”|

He searched through his memory banks and drew a blank on the listed event.

Was this a new event?

If it was, his eagerness to acquire resources with the Trader might have backfired on him. He wasn’t going to reveal that information to Oja though. They’d be rather smug with that admission and he wasn’t interested in appealing to that sensibility of theirs.

His associations with time distorted as it had with his other event choices. The crew idly talked about their past while Aurelio focused on maintaining consciousness. A quick inspection of his body through his diagnostics sheet confirmed that he lacked all armor for the fight and had suffered lighter injuries on his chest and left arm.

It didn’t feel like a light injury but the heavy injury tab wasn’t blacked in so he was doing fine there.

“Aurelio, heads up.” Kalani pulled him out of his thoughts and into the scene at hand.

The fungal stalks in the vicinity were gnarled and naked, any organic looking component on the mushrooms sucked away to leave a shriveled husk in its wake.

Bright pink strips of flesh clung to sections of their long stems, balls of rancid smelling pink meat littering the floor. The meat bubbled with a thick orange-black ooze. Some would pop and release an acrid orange gas that visibly dissolved what it’d glance over.

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And he had no armor.

|?Let Fate Decide?|

“What’s the plan, Aurelio?” Kalani looked at him for guidance. His attention flicked back to the shortening timer.

“Yes, Aurelio. What exactly is the plan for traversing through this meat maze?” Oja crossed their arms and waited, daring him to come up with a foolhardy plan.

If he was sticking to his variables for this excursion, there was nothing else he could do other than roll dice and hope his numbers were high enough to garner something useful out of the encounter.

He conjured two dice and flung them in the air. They shattered on impact with the ground, thin trails of fire zipping back above the timer to show a glimmering six pips next to a dim, measly, one pip.

Seven in total. Bog standard. Middle of the pack.

|Reap What You Have Sown|

Aurelio hated that statement with a passion.

A shimmering line tugged at his chest and he began to move without warning. It was as if the system had assumed control of his body, removing any inputs on what he could do or interfere with.

“F-follow me!” Aurelio shouted with uncertainty. He was given the ability to speak, at the very least.

The line weaved him through a scenic route of desiccated fungal husks and putrid piles of pink, pus-encrusted meat.

“Is this what the Malignance is made of?” Phineas asked, heaving mid sentence at the whiff of a diluted acrid cloud. The cloud washed over his head and ate away at the helmet, corroding the protective layer and exposing his flesh to the elements.

Fuck.

“You’re correct, Phineas,” Oja carefully walked along Aurelio’s path, “These are bits of the Malignance that it’s left behind like flesh buds.”

“It reproduces by budding?” Kalani asked the experienced Sawbones.

“That's my scientific assumption, anyway. Sections of the Metal Mire are often caked with flesh and it doesn’t make sense for a creature of that size and malleability to leave behind pounds of flesh unless it was budding off pieces of itself to survive and consume in other hunting grounds.” Oja elaborated.

Before Aurelio could add his own assessment of the situation, he felt something wet wash over his back.

“AH!” He cried out in immediate pain, shaking his body to get whatever was on his back to detach. It felt like he’d rubbed his raw, exposed back to a salted geode, digging the crystals deep into the meat to let the inner flesh burn and irritate against the jagged rock.

Oja ran up to him and ripped the assailant in question off of his back. A strip of pink flesh had sloughed off the tip of a fungal cap and onto his body.

The consequences for his middling roll was random damage to two party members.

He squirreled away the knowledge into his memory banks in between the physical spasms of suffering.

“This is gonna hurt a bit before it gets better.” Oja relayed to him.

He felt their cold fingers press against his raw flesh and heard their inner core rev up with energy.

|Sawbones used MENDING (LVL 2) on Chosen|

The other crew members watched as a balm of brown fire washed over Aurelio’s back and cleansed him of the worst of his wounds.

The sensation initially added to the pain, the heat intermingling with the irritated wounds across his back. Later, however, the heat overtook the open irritations in his skin in pain until eventually all he could feel was the unpleasant presence of a warm fire lapping at his skin like hot sandpaper.

The ball of flesh had thrown him into a heavy injury and Oja took the initiative to heal him at the end of things.

“I have one more of those in me before I need to contend with my core’s meltdown.” Oja stated grimly.

The [Faulty Core] was not a core that Scavengers wanted to meltdown into often. They’d have the advantage of starting the fight with their warm-up bonus but they were half as safe as the rest of the crew in using JOLT to avoid charges or DISENGAGE to evade otherwise devastating blows where they’d stand.

He didn’t let the situation sour his mood too much. There were unseen circumstances to their travels that simply didn’t allow for the forward planning that he wanted. He did what he thought was best for the progression of the crew in the moment and used up resources for their encounter as a result.

Aurelio still planned to secure a victory. He had to.

“Guys,” Phineas drew the crews attention to a clearing in the distance, “I think I see our target over there.”

Kalani leaned forward and frowned, “Yes. It looks like our target is in the middle of… subsuming another fungal stalk in the open field.”

They had the element of surprise then.

Aurelio groaned as Oja assisted him in standing back up, “Let’s set up for an assault then. I want to get rid of this monstrosity as quickly as possible.” He hobbled ahead.

The rest of his crew hesitated.

“Can we please get a move on? I’d rather have the benefit of setting up and pounding at this thing with all we’ve got while it's busy chewing on its mushroom toy than have it start the fight munching on one of us.”

Another moment of silence hung over the group before Kalani backed him on his decision and brandished her [Scrap Blaster].

“I’ll take point and assist on positioning. Aurelio, Phineas, your comms are down and we don’t have the luxury of a burly engineer to fabricate you two new ones. I’ll shout on my speakers to relay orders and I expect Oja to repeat my commands for the front line.” Kalani outlined the plan.

The rest of the crew obediently followed. Commander Kalani took charge, analyzing the battlefield ahead of her to take advantage of their positioning and their element of surprise.

Aurelio just hoped that he wasn’t required to move around so much. The ache across his body oscillated between bearable and unbearable depending on the extent of his motions so the stiller he was, the better.