[https://cdn.discordapp.com/ephemeral-attachments/1092492867185950852/1205018609429250098/b_97a827e6a5a6ef075daa085a98d62d1533858667.jpg?ex=65d6d808&is=65c46308&hm=e0ed585b8e28589d35ac6662bf32c16403d42b14258cc6a9f3657963331576ab&]

Rowan woke up in the morning when they landed near Nelsonville, Ohio.

“Sorry, this is as far as the suit can go,” Cora said. For whatever reason, she had a big, stupid grin on her face, and her pupils were wide. When he tried to catch her eyes, she avoided his gaze.

What the heck is with her?

“Stand still, you have something in your eye,” he grabbed her cheeks between his hands, forcing her to look into his eyes. He expected she’d put up some struggle or objection, yet she obeyed, only the tip of her tail wagging around like mad.

Insight check successful

Random words appeared directly in his mind: Exchange of saliva during sleeping cycle achieved… Pascals… in Newtons…. Is it too much to wait? Catnip?… might be possible to achieve dilatation out of season.

Then the connection was lost. “Was nothing, my mistake.” Rowan detached his hands, letting her flushed cheeks go free.

She’s weird, he decided. But maybe he was also weird, for her, and his prejudice could be unwarranted. And she was the only reliable source of information about alien stuff anyway. “What do you make of this?” Rowan produced the item Viscardi had given him from his inventory, offering it to her. The item’s shape was similar to a car sparkplug, carved from a large crystal.

“For a sake’s fuck!” Cora yelled. “It’s a sensor for a military-grade Quantum Scanner. The kind you find only on the most advanced starships.”

“First, we say: for fuck’s sake. Fuck comes first. Is it valuable?”

“Yes, and hard to get. This,” she shook the object, “detects other ships because starships run on Mana Cores as well. Different from Dungeons or City Cores, but still Cores. A Smuggler could use this to avoid patrols, but we could use it to track cores. I guess this is how he found those cores his dungeon consumed. I can study it and make a lesser version for our teams, to widen the search area. It’s generous of Viscardi to give us this…”

“Not really. If someone’s after the Sensor, they’ll come after us, not him.”

“True, but if we’re careful, we can level up the County fast. Let’s put my Interfacer skills to work and see if I can connect it to my tech. You know.”

She tinkered with the Sensor and the Compass, which shifted in shape, allowing the sparkplug to go inside. Rowan had witnessed hair standing on people, or himself, but Cora was in another league. Her head, tail, and ears had doubled in size, bristling with a monstrous fluffiness, at the same time cute and scary, all from the joy of playing with tech.

“OK. Activating… And what do you know? We have an active mini-dungeon about ten miles away. Can’t read the level, though.”

“Let’s give it a check. If it looks dangerous, we retreat. Better idea: writing an SMS to Grace: We found a mini-dungeon, do you have any bad premonition?”

----------------------------------------

An hour later, after buying a second-hand car in town, driving deep inside Wayne National Forest, and hiking for a couple of miles on uncharted terrain, they were near their target. Checking his phone, Rowan found a message: I’m not reading anything, but take care. He replied with a heart and kisses emoji and nodded to Cora.

They took a few steps forward, and then she stopped him, inspecting her compass. “Here's the limit... ”

“Hm… the forcefield is barely visible,” Rowan said, touching the invisible barrier with his hand.

“Yeah, that’s strange. I’ll put my suit on, but my fuel is down to ten percent, so don't count on me to do much combat."

"No problem, I'll do the combat… Just one moment, to find my equipment… err… fuck…"

“Err fuck what?” Cora asked, already dressed in the suit.

“Give me five minutes." Rowan invoked the floating inventory bag in front of him and began extracting bottle after bottle of Bourbon, laying them carefully on the ground, trying to find spots with moss and leaves, to protect them.

“How many bottles of Bourbon do you have in your inventory?” the Nekojin hissed, and she sounded a lot like a cat. Rowan couldn’t see her face but could bet she was creasing her nose and showing her canines.

“… about…. sixty? I drink about a bottle a week and bought a few extra to share with friends, you know.”

“I absolutely don’t. Never mind. Hurry up.”

A hundred and something bottles later, Rowan exclaimed in triumph: "Finally!" and began dressing his armor. Then he fastened a holster at his hip and a spear on his back, and started to put the bottles back.

"Wait!" Cora hissed again. Her face was reddened, either by emotion or because she had face slapped a lot during their wait. "Put the bottles at the bottom, in the slots that aren't shining blue. Those are for armor, weapons, and important items, to make the extraction easier."

"I know, it's just I had to make some fast decisions back in Louisville and moved things around a lot. Why is your inventory way bigger than mine?" Rowan asked, remembering a question that had nagged him for a while.

"Yours is the standard pocket dimension everyone gets with a class, I have an extra bespoke bag, industrial-sized, made on an Engineering planet from shards farmed in special dungeons. Now please, hurry."

When explaining tech stuff, Cora's eyes shone like a cat's in the night, Rowan noticed. "Just a minute. Now they're out, I can order them properly… proof, craft, non-chill filtered…" Cora snorted, turning her back to him, arms crossed and waving her tail in annoyance. Another couple of minutes later, Rowan straightened his back with a most happy expression. "Ready!"

"Finally! Let's go." Cora took the lead and they stepped inside the dungeon, waving her scanner around. "Strange… Two miles and a half in diameter… quite sizeable for a mini… yet no monster shows on the screen."

They roamed around for half an hour and found nothing. It was a forest, with trees, patches of grass, bushes, and the occasional rock formation, and that was all. “I don’t understand,” she shook her head stopping at the edge of a clearing, reading her compass’s screen again. “It’s like this place is abandoned.”

“Let’s search that shack,” Rowan pointed to the shoddy wooden construction, bordering the forest.

“OK. Follow me," she said, briskly stepping forward. "Whaaaa!” Ten feet before reaching the hut, Cora yelped and disappeared into the ground. “Help!” her muted voice called.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Joint Trip activated. 3/10 stacks remaining.

By instinct, Rowan had activated his perk, which had recharged one stack during the flight. In due time. An arrow passed through his now immaterial head and lost itself in the woods behind. Somebody had shot at him, from the hut. He dashed forward, intending to profit the whole duration of the perk. On the way, he saw Cora at the bottom of a ten-foot-deep pit, a trap. He continued on, stepping above her, on the air, as the perk allowed him to move wherever he wanted, disregarding any obstacles.

When he reached the hut, twenty seconds remained from the Joint Trip. An arrow on the string, a woman scanned the clearing, bobbing her head on and off in front of a shooting window. Wiry, wearing a sleeveless shirt and jeans, with dirty and unruly hair, looking around forty years old, he couldn’t tell. The tag about her head showed: Human Mountain Ranger, Level 60.

Human, meaning not a monster? Shit… I mean, fuck… we have to take her alive… This complicates things.

He prepared to return to the normal dimension. The plan was to talk and defuse the situation, and if necessary, to pistol-whip the woman into submission. A bow was a terrible weapon in an enclosed space, plus he had quite a bit of training from Isla.

“Don’t shoot, I’m a fr—”

In a blink, the woman turned, shot the arrow into his right leg, threw the bow in his head, and jumped at Rowan with a knife, trying to stab him in the armpit, through the gap in the armor. He almost shot her by instinct but managed to restrain himself at the last moment, pistol-whipping the Ranger's hand. Both his gun and the woman's knife fell on the floor in the process. Going into a wrestling match was out of the question in that tight space, and with two lethal weapons lying on the floor.

Joint Trip activated. 2/10 stacks remaining.

She's good. The arrow hurt like hell, and he grimaced extracting it. On the other hand, the knife wound was shallow. Running behind the tree line, he prepared a message for Cora and sent it the second the Joint Trip ended.

[Rowan]: There’s a woman in the hut. A normal human. I could use a hand to restrain her. Can you exit the hole on yourself?

[Cora]: You mean you want to take her alive?

[Rowan]: Of course I want to take her alive. Since when do we murder people at first sight? Maybe the dungeon landed next to her home and she thinks we’re trespassing or something. Let’s try to end this peacefully.

[Cora]: I can’t get out, there’s a sort of bear trap down here, I’m stuck. Moment, I have some stun grenades. You're not in the hut now, right?

[Rowan]: I'm behind the tree line.

Arching up from the pit, three grenades went through the hut's window. The explosions were quite strong, making plumes of smoke shoot out and also blowing out the door. The next second, the Ranger erupted out of the hut, an axe in hand, starting to bang it on the Nekojin's helmet.

“Calm down, lady, we’re friendly, we just want to talk!” Cora shouted through her speakers, but maybe because grenades had been just shot at her, the Ranger seemed nonplussed by the offer and continued hitting the helmet.

Fuck… I need to engage before Cora’s armor gets smacked or she shoots that lady dead.

“Hey, leave her alone,” Rowan shouted, leaving the trees’ cover. Still hoping to reach a mildly peaceful conclusion, he grabbed a thick dead branch instead of his spear.

Screaming, the Ranger jumped over the hole and came at him, axe high above her head. Plan B was to parry the axe with the branch while applying a bit of Gravity and Cold, then put the Ranger in a choke. It suffered the same fate as Plan A. The AoEs slowed the woman way less than he hoped, he had restrained himself too much, the branch broke, and the bearded axe bit deeply into his left shoulder, the lower point going into the lung. He could have sworn it had also cut through the heart.

You have received a Critical Hit. Delayed Truth activated. You have 0% HP.

Grabbing the axe’s shaft with his left hand, he pummeled his right fist into the woman's chin with all his strength, the type of hit he often used to knock out cold someone in bar fights. The hit dazed his foe, but it took two more full-force blows to knock the Ranger out. He threw the axe down and chugged a Health potion, adding a spell.

Combat Heal x2 performed. 270 MP remaining. DOT has stopped. You have 56% HP.

You have Leveled x2. 31 APs available for distribution.

He took out his destroyed armor, threw it away, extracted both a rope and handcuffs from his spatial inventory, and tied the woman tight. While at that, he shouted at Cora: "Why didn't you use your Telekinesis to knock her down?"

"It's an Ultimate, dummy! It kills bosses. Why don't you get me a ladder instead of unwarranted criticism, huh? I managed to free myself from the trap,” Cora bellowed.

After carrying the unconscious woman inside the hut and putting her on a makeshift bed, Rowan found a wooden ladder behind the shack and threw it down the hole. Moments later, the ladder broke under the suit’s weight and Cora was forced to consume her precious fuel after all. She flew up and joined Rowan near the prisoner, dismissing her suit.

“She’s waking up,” Cora stated. “You need stronger armor," she pointed at his mangled shoulder. "Stay put, I’m applying Minor Heal.”

“Don’t make me hit you again,” Rowan menaced the wiggling prisoner, waving his fist as a demonstration.

“You’re not monsters?” the Ranger asked, trying to keep her head up.

“We told you so from the beginning.”

“But… the Terminator… shot grenades at me. And you had a gun…”

“I did, but I didn't shoot you, did I? It was just a misunderstanding.”

“She has a concussion. Healing her,” Cora said.

“How come you can Heal?” Rowan asked.

“I’m a max INT built. I have Minor Heal by default.”

“Is that a tail?” the Ranger asked, moving her eyes from Rowan to Cora. “Who are you guys?”

“We’re from Elkin. My name’s Rowan, and she’s Cora, a friendly alien. Her ship crashed not far from the town.”

“Is… N-Nelsonville… safe? Has the world survived?” the Ranger blurted, struggling against her ties.

“The town’s intact, yes. What happened here?”

The woman began to cry. They had to wait for five minutes for her to calm down. Rowan patted Cora's hand and pointed at the wall. Above the makeshift bed were cuts in the wood, a day count—more than sixty.

“You’ve been here since the beginning?” Cora asked.

“Tell us what happened,” Rowan added, but the woman seemed to have other priorities.

“C-can you… g-get me out? I wanna… check… my f-family…”

“We can get you out,” Rowan said.

“Not before we claim the core,” Cora added. “There’s no notification, nothing.”

“We can leave at any moment. I can walk in between dimensions, and carry you two, remember? What happened here, madam?”

The woman shook her head, recollecting herself. “I work seasonal jobs in forestry as a maintenance worker. Was walking around foraging, after finishing my work… then monsters appeared, large bears… I thought the world ended and I was in hell… I hid in the hunting cabin and shot at them.”

“Ah, I get it, this is a hunting cabin,” Rowan nodded, waving his finger around.

“The last one broke in but I killed him with my knife… I got badly wounded and fainted, thought I was going to die… yet I got up in one piece, changed, stronger. Then there were some strange texts.”

“Yes, the notifications. Have you accepted them?”

“No… I thought I was going crazy, and pushed them away. Then I saw nukes in the distance and thought Earth was done for. Monsters kept coming, daily, at the same hour. They spawn a minute apart, in the same spot. It’s eerie, they just sit there, immobile, until all appear, and only then do they attack. I figured it out on the third day and started to kill them before they became active… Then I became so bored I started to fight them again, and build a trap, to manage the numbers… I think I was losing my mind. I’m sorry I attacked you.”

“She didn’t claim the core and the dungeon glitched,” Cora said. “She must’ve killed hundreds of monsters on her own…”

“Food was hard to get by,” the Ranger continued. “The monsters can’t be eaten. I hunted a couple of deer, then foraged mushrooms… I was lucky there was this object that kept me warm at night…”

Pushed by instinct, Rowan stretched his arm and pulled the dirty blanket away. Tucked inside the hey serving as a mattress was the core. Big as a crystal ball, and shining softly. Touching it produced a notification.

The DireBears’ mini-dungeon Core (Lvl. 60) has been Claimed and transformed (per default) into a Town Core.

“I’ll be… What should we do with it?”

“Technically, she cleared the dungeon,” Cora pointed. “She should have a word in it.”

“I don’t care about the dungeon, I want to go back to my family,” the woman pleaded. "You can untie me, I swear I won't attack you again."

“Yeah, she did clear it, but without us, she'd be still stuck in here… you get the picture. Let’s go to Nelsonville and take it from there,” Rowan proposed. “If they want to activate it and join us, we’ll help. If not, we’ll take the core ourselves and reward her with something she'd like.”