I slid one blade down my arm, feeling it bite ever so lightly against my armor, reducing my integrity by the smallest sliver I could manage. No notification came up to tell me that my core function had activated, and after a second of utter confusion, I remembered exactly why that was. Everything had been taken from me.

The lichenthrope’s attack was wild and obviously telegraphed, bringing both of its arms together into a massive axe that it tried to bring down on my head. A slight tap from one of my blades sent it off path and directly into the ground next to me, the other one already falling to meet the outstretched neck of the overextended lichenthrope. It bit and got stuck halfway through, so I dropped my severed arm-blade to the ground and gripped the thing’s forehead as if trying to force it to look at me.

I pushed the lichenthrope to the ground, my muscles and armor struggling to overpower its own struggles, but it couldn’t escape me. And the moment my foot pressed down on my sword’s handle, the lichenthrope was as good as dead. I reached down with my other hand and ripped the thing’s head towards me as my foot pressed my sword deeper into its neck, the shriek of metal on metal coming to an abrupt halt as I ripped the thing’s head clean off.

A small notification appeared on my left eye, and I couldn’t help but chuckle as I threw the lichenthrope’s head to the ground. Jun walked over, a little hesitant as she grew closer to me.

“I just unlocked the ability to change my sword into a helmet.” I said with a smile, kicking the lichenthrope’s head towards her. “A little violent for my tastes, but whatever works, I guess.”

Jun bent down over the only lichenthrope that was emitting the luminescent spores, shot a glance at the sample I held between two fingers, and brought out her own. “How did you move like that?” She asked, watching as her own sample was filled with bleary-eyed life. “And before you say it was the system giving it to you, no. It wasn’t. I can’t move anywhere near as good as that.”

“Years of experience.” I said solemnly, remembering all the hazards I’d struggled through with a shake of my head. I wouldn’t call myself a master of all; hell, I wouldn’t even call myself a jack of all trades. But I had tried almost every weapon I got my hands on, even if I’d always fallen back to a sword and shield in the end. “Even if the system doesn’t give me mastery levels to compensate for them.”

“Uh-huh.” Jun said suspiciously and crossed her arms. “The same society that you explained to me earlier breeds people that can move like that. With two different types of weapons. That aren’t commonly used in your society.”

I shook my head and sighed. “Believe me that it’s much easier if you just believe me.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I was looking for the easy route. You don’t have to tell me the truth, but I’d like to know why you’re lying to me.” Jun demanded, stepping closer to me and dismissing her helmet. “There. You know I’m not a human that’s lying to you. Now tell me why you’re lying to me.”

The face that stared back at me was the furthest thing from human that I could imagine, but still identifiable as a person. My first thought was that she looked like she’d been carved from stone, but also that she looked like she was part plant. Four eyes with deep black whites and mottled white-pink pupil-less irises were locked on mine; two exactly where my own were, and two higher up her forehead and slanted at a fourty-five degree angle. The rest of her face was the same pale white-pink as her eyes, reminiscent of the lilies my dad used to buy my mom every year for Mother's Day.

She didn’t have hair as I would call it, but rather a mass of rose-shaped petals that covered the back of her head and cascaded down to her shoulders. A few of the same petals were clustered under her eyes, tightly knit together in a form reminiscent of scales. But the petals didn’t seem to be soft in the slightest, rather looking as if they were additional accents that had been carved from stone.

She was alien in every sense of the word, yet the emotions behind those eyes were distinctively human. It was strange to look at a face that had barely anything in common with mine and see something so familiar, but it was also reassuring. This alien being had a culture that was substantially different from mine, but at the fundamental level, we were still similar.

“What are you?” I wondered, reaching out to touch the scale-petals under Jun’s eye with one hand.

She sighed in annoyance and leaned back. “I’m Juniper Keratily. The exact same person I was ten minutes ago, and the person who wants to know why you’re lying to her about something as trivial as this.”

Trivial? I chuckled and shook my head slowly. “It’s not trivial at all. In fact, it might be something huge and world-changing. But I’d need to find the one other person I know who’s in my same position to ask him if that’s the case.”

“And that position is…?” Jun trailed off, gesturing for me to elaborate.

I sighed and pressed my now live sample back into the hilt of my sword. “You know what, you won’t believe me anyways. Short version; I lived for thirty years after Earth’s razing, got my core taken away from me, and got sent back in time to right before everything happened. I’m still not sure if it was a dream, or a simulation, or if I actually lived through everything, but I’m leaning towards simulation myself. Since I never found anyone that wasn’t human in the whole thirty-ish years.”

“Right.” Jun snorted, a small smile crossing her face as she studied me. Her expression fell when she saw that I was one-hundred percent serious. “Oh, you weren’t kidding. Skies above, that must be torture.”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t really hit me that hard.” I admitted with a shrug. “Some pretty horrible things happened in those thirty years, and having a little bit of optimism and hope injected into me from my old memories and feelings hasn’t been that bad.”

“Horrible things?” Jun muttered, glancing down at her own sword. “Don’t you, I don’t know, miss anyone from that life? Friends you made, people you loved, or even some enemies or rivals you had? Nothing?”

Another shrug was all I could manage. “Of course I miss them. But those were people who had decades to grow and change. I know who they could become, but most of them did not start out as good people.” I tried to make my gaze deadly serious, and Jun flinching away told me I’d succeeded. “Dee was an abusive piece of shit for the first few years. It took him losing his wife and kid to change, and that was after another few years of being a different kind of piece of shit. If I tried to go find him now, he wouldn’t be the same person I knew. And if I tried to change him into the person I did know, he wouldn’t have it.”

I shook my head and sighed. “Some people only change when they’ve got nowhere else to turn. And if everything’s better for everyone this time around, then maybe the Dee I knew would never come to be. Garrett will find that out real quick if he tries to go after Dee first.”

Jun nodded in empathy, but not from experience. It was a hard thing to determine, but true understanding was hard to miss. “Garrett was another one of your friends from back then? Or from… not yet?” She shook her head. “You know what I mean.”

“Hell no.” I laughed coldly, surprising myself at the hatred that laugh contained. “He’s the one that stole my core. Or the one that my core was stolen for, I guess. The Embodiment of Will told him that my life and my allies were actually his, so he’s probably out there trying to find one of my friends now.” I shook my head and let out a grim laugh. “He’ll be in for one hell of a surprise depending on who he picks first.”

I watched closely for Jun’s reaction, expecting to see a whole lot of disbelief and a little confusion. Instead I saw someone deep in thought with a concerned scowl etched onto her face. It was strange how accepting she was of all of this, from the fact that I was an alien race to everything I’d told her about the hazards, and I couldn’t chalk all of it up to being a naturally curious person. There was something else at play here, but I couldn’t find any concrete proof of my suspicions.

“Let’s focus on getting us out of this hazard first, then we can deal with everything else.” I decreed, stepping past Jun to make my way towards the dead tree. “All these monsters had to have gathered here for a reason, and I doubt that little cloud of spores was it.”

The dead tree creaked like actual wood under my fingers, even as it sloughed off sludge that splattered to the dirt. I called my helmet at the first splash of possible contaminants and pulled myself up the tree with a grunt of effort, leaning on my waist over the lip to get a better look inside. Patinated copper tendrils frozen in death were intertwined to make a solid core while the wood rotted away, leaving only the layer I was balanced on.

And in the space between the dead wood and the entwined tendril core I found what I was looking for. Small gems bubbled up in the wood-rot muck, candy-sized and shaped pieces of vibrant green that sent root-like tendrils searching through the sludge. Nine times out of ten the hazards gave out their most valuable non-armor prizes in the form of gems, and as I reached to pluck one from the sludge, I sent a thought to the error messages to analyze them.

//ANALYSIS COMPLETE: CRYSTALLIZED MOSSROT. Closer in form to an amber than a naturally forming gemstone, the CM is a crystallization of the last dregs of a Coppercore Softwood’s life. The true death of a tree is a once in multiple centuries event, and as such, CM is a completely unknown currency.

Uses: Unknown.

Value: Unknown.

Rarity: Depleted.

I grinned and sent the small piece between my fingers into my inventory, then gathered as many as I could see to join their brethren. I hadn’t found a depleted rarity gem until my second decade last time around, and the equipment that had been created from it had stayed in my inventory until the very end.

I felt the tree creak and looked over to see Jun stick her helmeted face next to mine. “Why would an embodiment work with a normal person?” She asked, eyeing the lone gem that I hadn’t scooped up and whispering ‘identify’ as she reached for it. “They don’t need worshippers like gods do, so why bother?”

“Hell if I know.” I grunted, leaning over a little more to fish one hand through the sludge for more gems. “And honestly, I don’t want to find out. It’ll be a good day when I never have to see or talk to Garrett or his Embodiment buddy ever again.”

My hand brushed something inside the muck, but it felt far too large to be another gemstone. I felt around for another few seconds just to be sure, but when my initial feeling was proven right, I leaned back and let myself fall to the ground. Jun’s boots thunked down a second later, and she looked at me as if she was waiting for whatever I was going to say.

I grinned under my helmet and tapped my knuckles against the dead tree. “How does a little desecration with a side of grave robbing sound?”