Almost two weeks dedicated to killing lichenthropes did minimal wonders for my stats, and mild wonders for Jun’s. Adding one when the experience gained from killing a lichenthrope was in the single digits did great things for her growth. But even after everything, I was just barely prepared to venture into the summer floodforest. I shuddered at the thought of what the floodforest would look like in the flood season, but that was a thought for weeks from now.

Along with the stat gains, we’d scoured every inch of the Floodforest until we were fully equipped with cleaned weapons we transformed into armor pieces. I opened my interface to triple-check for the last time before we changed seasons.

//Sebastian Cormier: 21 year old Human Male

//Core: //NULL

//Equipment

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mosshelm

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mossplate

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mossglove x2

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mosspaulder x2

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mosspants

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mossgreave x2

//(Few,Professional) Copperbound Mossblade

//(//CORRUPTED,Rare) //ENDLESS

//Core Stats

//Mastery: 4 //Hazard: 3 //Health: 52

//Armor Stats

//Battery: 12 //Speed: 12 //Power: 12 //Resilience: 12 //Recovery: 12

//Core Functions

//CONSUMPTION

//CREATION

//ENTROPY

//Armor Functions

//ENDLESS

//Inventory

//(Scarce, Unknown)Copper Peony x 15

//(Depleted, Unknown)Crystallized Mossrot x 10

It had taken a lot of searching to find enough fragile weapons to fully clad ourselves in copperbound moss-gear, and even more struggling after that to level my gear enough to get my hazard tolerance up to 3. Jun hadn’t had that problem in the slightest; now sitting at core mastery seven and hazard tolerance 5. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the second we found enough stat nodes to fill her empty core nodes she shot straight up to hazard tolerance six or seven.

She accomplished what had taken me three years in less than a week. Or slightly more than a week, depending on how the long days added up. I hadn’t really been keeping track. I expected it to sting a lot more when I looked at her, but instead I felt an odd sense of pride. As if I was as responsible for her strength as she was, even if I reaped none of the benefits.

I stared at the lichenthrope-esque form that Jun’s armor now took, coils of copper tightly wound to create armor. Her own colours, however, had overtaken the copper and green. Her coils were now midnight black with a dusting of yellow, and her visor was a dull yellow that didn’t glint when it caught the light. I was her twin in blue and white, but our blades still retained the mossy copper colour they’d always held. Weapons tended to do that for some reason.

“It feels like this has been a long time coming.” Jun chuckled, twisting at the waist as she did some stretches to limber herself up. A completely unnecessary gesture, but anything to ease the nervousness I knew she felt was welcome. “You said it would take a week, and now here we are almost two weeks later walking into part two of six. Are we ever getting out of here, Seb?”

That was a question for the watchers. Or the Embodiments, I supposed. Unless they weren’t one and the same. That was both an oddly calming thought and a terrifying one. But I couldn’t give a non-answer to Jun, and most of my experience was telling me that we were going to be stuck here for a very, very long time.

“We will get out of here eventually. But I have no idea how much later ‘eventually’ is going to be.” I admitted. “It could be a month or two, or we could be here for upwards of a year. Compound hazards are insidious like that.”

Jun sighed, then forced out a tight laugh. “At least I’m not stuck here alone any more. These weeks have been infinitely nicer with someone to talk to.”

“I am an immaculate conversationalist.” I said with a grin, gently laying my sword on the statue’s palms and feeling the world shift around me. “Now I’m not one hundred percent sure on this, but we’re probably going to be looking for something permanent to give our skeletal friend here.”

“I know you’re being sarcastic, but it’s actually fun talking with you. Probably because I spent the last two years being talked down to for my own safety, but pretend that didn’t happen.” Jun said with a smirk in her voice. “And look for something to put on the statue. Gotcha.”

The sound of creaking metal, like a rusted scaffolding on the verge of collapsing, blew through the forest like a cursed birdsong. I raised my hand and gestured down the path the skeletal custodian had come from. Jun nodded in silence and summoned her sword, then we started trodding the same path towards the dead tree.

Seeing as we had no leads, it seemed like a good place to start. The water tree would’ve been an even better place, but Jun and I had agreed that if there was anything up there it would be far too strong to deal with. We walked through the unfamiliar familiar landscape, the paths unchanged but the scenery painted in different materials and colours. The tree’s bark was now the brown of burnt caramel, and when I reached out to touch it, it felt equally as sticky. Whenever a tendril emerged from one of the trees, it wasn’t a solid mass of copper anymore.

It was as if countless tiny iron scales had been shaped into a tentacle, shifting and interlocking as they moved. It felt a lot less biological than the strange copper of the lichenthropes, and flaky red rust began falling from above like the embers of a massive fire. That was the first thing to draw my eyes skyward, and I almost wished it hadn’t.

What was once a near perfect cover of leaves now looked like glass sculptures with iron bones, holding up massive reservoirs of red-tinged waters as they pulsed with life. The light that filtered through was ever so slightly red, dyeing everything in a bloody lens that somehow increased the temperature of this place. I was starting to sweat even through my armor’s protection, which was a terrible sign, but we couldn’t turn back just yet. It had been hard enough to convince Jun to grind levels for two weeks, and trying to get her to go back for another few weeks would be like pulling teeth.

At least we hadn’t seen any summer lichenthropes yet.

“You know, I've never been this terrified in broad daylight.” Jun said with a nervous laugh. “But apparently a simple change in scenery is enough to set me on edge.”

I agreed with a silent nod, holding a finger up to my helmet for silence. We’d been attacked along this path in the spring forest, and I was not going to be caught unaware by the first summer lichenthrope we encountered.

Two hours later, I was growing concerned. We hadn’t seen a single sign of life, nevermind a living thing. There hadn’t been a single crashing flood, nor any writhing tendrils from snapped trees. It was as if the changing of seasons had killed everything here.

It wasn’t utter silence, but it was as close as the wilderness got. Unnerving wasn’t anywhere close enough to describe what I felt, and I grew tenser and tenser until my muscles began to ache.

“We’re turning back.” I decreed, grabbing Jun’s shoulder and making her jump. “There’s something extremely wrong here, but I don’t know what it is. So we need to go back to the water-tree.”

Jun didn’t argue, and the way back was just as silent as when we’d ventured out. We returned to the water-tree to find that exactly one thing had changed; the skeletal statue of spring now held a small glowing disk of verdant energy between its hands. I didn’t have to identify this anomaly to know what it was; I’d seen close to a hundred of them in my last life.

“An exit portal?” Jun murmured, confirming what I already knew. “Don’t we have to clear this place first?”

I’d never seen an exit appear for anything less than completion of a hazard, and I opened my interface to double-check that I hadn’t missed any hazard clear notifications. There weren’t any new notifications, but my eyes skimmed over something that made me do a double-take. My map had updated.

//RUSTED FLOODFOREST: SPRING. 26% EXPLORED. MAIN OBJECTIVE CLEARED.

1% Exploration: hazard revealed as 1.

25% Exploration: Season revealed as Spring.

50% Exploration: Treasures revealed as Crystallized Mossrot. Status: found.

100% Exploration: Location of Hazard Treasure's general area has been marked. Status: found.

Hazard Cleared: Exploration level overwritten as exit portal has been created. Compound Hazard initiated thanks to alternate completion methods. For information on RUSTED FLOODFOREST: SUMMER, return in: 739.2 hours.

“It needs time to load?” I muttered, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. What was the alternate completion method? Hell, what was the normal completion method if we’d done the alternate one? And how long had that timer been ticking down? “I guess it’s time to leave.”

Jun’s armor clattered to the ground, and I swiveled with my sword readied for whatever had just attacked her. Instead, I heard her laughing quietly to herself amidst soft sobs. I smiled to myself and placed my sword just above the green portal, feeling the world shift back into spring as the verdant hue spread to the water-tree. It seems as though it would be our ticket out of here.

“I never thought I’d make it out of here.” Jun laughed, lying on the ground with her limbs splayed out and staring up at the cover of leaves. “A long time alone, a few weeks with you, and then a whole other hazard to deal with. It seemed like this was never going to end.”

“Sometimes things end anticlimactically.” I said with a shrug. “Not every hazard ends in a blaze of glory or a fight with a massive monster. Most of them do, but not this one.”

Not yet, at least. I leaned down and offered Jun a hand, which she readily took with another quiet laugh of disbelief. “Well, I guess we’ll see what happened to your people soon enough.” She said happily, stepping in front of me to look at the tree. “I can see one of our settlement’s flags in the distance, so we won’t have to walk for long before we find out if they got grouped together with us.”

Flag? All that I could make out through the tree was a wall of swirling green. Nothing like a portal to be found. That couldn’t be a good sign in the slightest. And if I was about to be separated from Jun, she deserved to know that the possibility was there.

“I don’t see anything through the tree.” I admitted, pressing my hand to the tree and feeling something pressing back. Error messages flooded my interface, and I tried to parse through them while Jun looked at me in confusion.

The standouts spoke of something I hadn’t even considered.

//ERROR: CORE [//NULL] DOES NOT BELONG TO THE RACE [HUMAN].

//ERROR: SEBASTIAN CORMIER BELONGS TO THE RACE [HUMAN].

//ERROR: CORE MISMATCH. TELEPORTATION DISABLED TO [HUMAN] TERRITORY.

“Fuck.” I hissed, pulling my ever-warming hand off the tree and shaking it in the air. “I’m not allowed to leave.”

“What? Why? No, wait, let me try something…” Jun said, then swiped her hands through empty air multiple times and tapped on nothing even more. “The people who came to train us brought us to a secure facility like this, so maybe I can do the same for you. Here... we... go… there!”

//JUNIPER KERATILY HAS ATTEMPTED TO EXTEND AN INVITATION TO YOU.

//NORMALLY IT DOES NOT FUNCTION BETWEEN RACES, BUT I HAVE REMOVED THAT LIMITATION FOR YOU ALONE.

//I RECOMMEND ACCEPTING IT, UNLESS YOU ENJOY BEING A FOREST HERMIT.

I pressed accept on the notification before I read any of it. The errors wanted to survive as much as I did, and speaking from experience, the forest hermit life wasn’t for me.