The creature crashed to the ground fists first, sending waves of dust through the ground that ripped through its skeletal brethren. I slashed my weapon through the air and ducked behind the slash, letting it flow around me before I rolled over it and lunged forward to skewer one of the creatures that had survived the blow.

It clawed at me helplessly and mindlessly, skeletal hands reaching forth with too-long fingers that fell just short of my knuckles. I frowned and swept my weapon to the side, sending forth a slash to obliterate the creature as I moved on to the next one.

A golden ripple flowed over my visor, alerting me that one of the creatures had attacked the cruel world’s partition. “Mortician! You alright?”

“We’re fine! Just slightly overwhelmed!” Mortician’s response was punctuated with a crack and the soft clattering of bone shards. “We will need new functions or weaponry by the next large combat unless you have another way of absolutely protecting us.”

Dust surrounded me as more creatures fell to my slashes. Their numbers weren’t endless, but there were enough that I could've made that mistake. “Good to know! Keep it up for now!”

“We will!” Mortician replied with another crack of metal on bone. The damage to the cruel world’s partition stopped after that. “Thank you for your concern!”

Jun chuckled and shook her head as she fired off a trio of small bullets. They echoed against the huge creature, leaving webs of cracks with every ringing impact, and Jun followed up with a quick swipe on her gun and one single massive shot.

“I guess this shows how not dangerous this is for us, doesn’t it?” She laughed as the creature screamed, it’s right arms hanging from mostly shattered strings of bone. “I could barely talk while I fought off those slyk with Okeria, and now we’re barely yelling over the noise against a monster like this.”

I had to admit; she had a good point. I could do so much more if I needed to, but I was holding back for all the other combats we’d have to go through. That would’ve been completely impossible while we were fighting the slyk. Even the carvurch put up a better fight than this.

Cleaning everything up took barely a few minutes. I slaughtered the rabble, Jun made swiss cheese out of the biggest one, and Mortician made sure we took absolutely no damage while we did it. We worked like a well-oiled machine, even when Mortician was trying out something for the first time and Jun was working with a weapon she barely knew. In a few months, we’d be something to be scared of.

“As long as we survive that long.” I sighed as the biggest creature crumbled to the ground, bone shattering like brittle glass as it went. The core somehow managed to land perfectly on top of the osseous pile; a strange thing that looked like a ball of roots, except they’d all been turned into bone.

“Survive what that long?” Mortician asked as they stepped up to the core. They leaned down and poked it, as if it were going to come alive, then looked over at Jun and I. “Oh, you meant Endra and Scalovera. We suppose that should have been obvious. Can we have this?”

Jun and I shared a look, then both nodded in unison. “Go ahead. You need the experience and nodes the most.” Jun said as she opened her interface, then sighed. “Still no notification about the prizes. They have to be in the room.”

I nodded and designated myself as the target for the duplicate core, then moved to collect the crystallized experience the creatures had dropped. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it would be enough to push at least one item past a mastery threshold.

“We’ll find out in a minute, I guess.” I opened my inventory and stuffed everything in there for later. Except for the puddles of marrow I scooped into the canisters I had left over. Those I left on the ground, just in case something happened to them when the door opened.

Which was right then. The boundaries disappeared along with the bodies, leaving behind only the big creature’s core and the marrow that I'd put in canisters. “Huh. Looks like stuff we put in things won’t disappear.”

Jun knelt down next to me and pressed her hand to the ground. When she raised it, only dust followed. “All the rest is completely gone. So what happens if we find a monster that’s got parts worth carving off? Will we have to leave one thing alive while we harvest everything else?”

“Good call.” I confirmed, sending two of the four canisters into my inventory. “I bet we’ll have less and less time to recover after every successive fight.”

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“That’ll make things annoying.” Jun grunted as she stood up straight. “So what does everyone want to do? Rest in the room for a few hours, or take a quick look around and keep moving?”

Mortician crushed the core in their hand, then sighed as if dissolved and streamed towards them. “That is a wonderful feeling. We would appreciate having a few minutes to rest, but hours would be too much in our opinion.”

“No point talking about it out here.” I pointed out as I made my way to the doorway. “Might as well see what the room has to offer before we make our choice.”

I stepped through the gleaming white frame, the telltale slight disorientation of teleportation telling me exactly what had just happened. The room was a portal, but it seemed like it was a portal to a space that was overlaid with where we’d just been. I pulled out my map to make sure as Jun and Mortician followed behind me, their own little noises of disorientation telling me they’d just felt the same thing I had.

“Well, this is underwhelming.” Jun huffed as she took a look around the safe room. “It looks like this place was hollowed out of a solid rock. And not skillfully from the look of these walls.”

The room was pretty shabby. All the walls were stone the same colour as the ground outside, save for the fact that they didn’t have a thick coating of dust on them, and there were a few raised platforms built in that I could almost imagine as a bed and some benches. There were a few strange white cubes sitting on the ‘bed’, which I assumed were our rewards from beating five combats, and a pool of water off in one corner that crackled and popped with visible arcs of electricity.

And that was it. No healing items, no integrity repair items, just a pool of battery restoring water and our rewards. I swiped over to double check that the hazard description had said we would have healing and integrity restoring items in here, then frowned when I was proven right. We were missing things.

“Weren’t we supposed to have healing and repairing consumables?” Jun noted before I could say anything. She turned to see me looking at my interface. “Oh, you’re already checking. So?”

I nodded. “We were. And it said consumables, not pools. Maybe this is a different safe room from all the other ones? Or… maybe the consumables won’t spawn unless either us or our armor is damaged?”

I didn’t know why the hazard would bother with that, but it was an option.

“We don’t need them now, so it doesn’t really matter, but it feels like a bad sign.” Jun muttered. She walked over to the pool of electric water and watched it for a second, then shook her head. “Even the pool’s not completely full. There’s about five inches of water missing.”

Okay, that was definitely strange. I joined her and stared down into the pool, watching the electricity lap at the edges of the otherwise still water. “Huh. It’s almost like someone’s been using it. Or it didn’t reset from whoever was here last.”

“Yeah. It’s really strange.” Jun agreed, then turned to the cubes. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything we can do about it now. Should we open the cubes, or do you think they’re a trap…”

She trailed off without finishing, her arms dangling at her side at whatever she saw. “Jun? You see something?” I asked as I followed her gaze, only to see Mortican frozen halfway through ripping apart the largest box. “Mortician?”

“We… we were excited.” They said guiltily, looking from the cube to us and back again. “It doesn’t seem as if they’re trapped. Can we continue?”

I chuckled and shook my head. “You’ve already got it half open, so go ahead. But maybe don’t open anything else without analyzing it first, okay?”

Mortician vigorously nodded, then returned to ripping open the cube like a kid on christmas. Little plates of white material clinked to the stone floor behind them, and once they’d completely destroyed the upper half, they reached in reverently and removed something that looked like an old and badly beaten helmet.

“It’s… a helmet. A broken helmet” Jun crossed her arms after her succinct observation. “Why’d the hazard give us a broken helmet?”

“It must be extremely valuable once repaired.” Mortician said in awe, gingerly shifting the helmet as if it would shatter at any moment. “Though it seems… strangely small, does it not? And disproportionately long for its size.”

Mortician’s observation was definitely right. I gestured for them to hand me the helmet, which they did carefully, and I shifted it around in my hands to get a better feel for it. The thing looked like an old diving helmet from back on earth and a bathtub had been squeezed slightly in a vice, and that somehow combined the two instead of destroying them. Jun leaned over my shoulder for a better look, and after I set my interface to analyze it, I handed it off to her.

//DAMAGED STAURA RELIC: HELMET.

//A heavily damaged Staura relic. It bears a resemblance to something, but you don’t know what.

//Cannot be equipped, traded, or removed from the hazard.

Well, if that wasn’t the missing piece to some puzzle we hadn’t found yet, I didn’t know what was. “It says it looks like something, but I’m not a Staura, so I wouldn’t know what it looks like. Do you recognize it Jun?” I asked, to no answer. “...Jun?”

I looked away from my interface to see Jun staring intently down at the helmet, her body language wound as tight as a spring. She gingerly shifted the helmet in her hands, then carefully reached her fingers into the small neck hole. Moments later, she pulled out a small seed the colour of damp earth with little vibrant green stems germinating out of it.