We walked for a good eight minutes before anything happened, and even then, I barely noticed it. A tiny notification popped up in the corner of my vision, and when I pressed on it, it told me that I couldn’t go any further without completing the combat. I frowned and looked around, then relayed what I’d just read to Mortician and Jun.

Even after that, we looked for a dozen minutes. It didn’t seem like anything had spawned, and there wasn’t exactly a lot of cover for anything to hide behind. I rubbed the side of my helmet and huffed in annoyance, taking one last look around to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.

“Did the system bug out?” I wondered, opening my interface to see if I’d missed any errors. I hadn’t.

Jun shrugged and sighed. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. It says we have to ‘complete the combat’. Maybe that means something other than winning a fight?”

I shook my head. “Combat always means a fight. If it said ‘challenge’ or ‘trial’, then maybe. But we have to be missing something.”

“It could be invisible.” Mortician suggested. “The system said it was a combat, not that the combatants would attack us.”

That was a very good point. Unfortunately, we didn’t have anything that could reveal invisible things. And whatever it was, if it was invisible, it hadn’t left any footprints or made a single sound. It seemed like a little too much for the first combat.

“Isn’t that a little much for the first combat?” Jun pointed out, vocalizing my thoughts before I got the chance to. “Or… maybe it isn’t. This is a level twenty-one hazard. Maybe that’s the point the system thinks we’re strong enough to deal with an invisible enemy.”

Another good point. I tried to think back to the level twenty hazards I’d cleared in my old life, but my memories were a little… hazy. I remembered fights, and I remembered puzzles, but everything sort of blended together into one years-long stain. What I didn’t remember were any of them being so brutal that I couldn’t handle them when I had the right level of hazard tolerance.

“I don’t think the system would do that. Hazards are meant to be cleared, and putting a roadblock that needs someone who can see through invisibility or… track enemies…”

I sighed in frustration as I activated my helmet’s function. An oily sheen appeared around the edges of my vision, along with an oily shadow of something standing off in the distance. I looked all around, then up and down, to make sure there wasn’t anything else we were missing. But the thin was alone.

I pointed directly at it. “It’s there. Shoot it.”

Jun drew and fired her gun in a heartbeat, and the invisible thing staggered backwards in an explosion of dusty fragments. Its invisibility flickered and shimmered and bled away, revealing a creature that looked like a mixture between a skeleton and one of those carnivorous pitcher plants. The skeleton was the wrong shape for a human, though; its spine was long and coiled like a spring, with arms composed of eight individual bones tightly braided together.

“Wait.” I turned to Jun as I finished taking in the thing. “Do Staura have bones?”

Jun tilted her head to the side. “Sort of? They don’t look like that, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“It was.” I confirmed, staring into the four empty eye sockets of the skeletal carnivorous plant thing. It was the colour of sun bleached bone, and dusted with so much ash that I could barely make out the thing’s original colour through the coating. I ordered my interface to analyze it, then gestured for Jun to kill the thing.

It died without fanfare.

{Congratulations, prospective glory-seekers!} A voice echoed through my head, loud and clear and confident like a stadium announcer. {You have cleared the first hurdle, which was randomly selected from a pool of thousands of possible encounters! The safe room is now open to you, but be warned; you have ten hours of banked time that refreshes with every five combats cleared. If you run out, too bad! If you finished five combats with time left, use it all up! Once you start your sixth combat, your time resets.}

I felt my vision drawn to a gleaming white archway that appeared just a few steps beyond where we’d been trapped. The hazard was forcing me to look at the room, which was actually a portal to somewhere else. Maybe inside of the mountain, for all I knew.

{Good luck, glory-seekers, and may you triumph over the longest march!} The voice decreed, then crackled out to let us know it was done talking.

Jun was already in the process of walking towards the door before the voice finished. She put her hand on the thick white column on the left, then frowned at her interface. “The map says the room is right in front of us. It wouldn’t do that if it was a portal, right?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes portals don’t work the way you’d want them to. Hell, this could be some kind of overlaid-space that can be summoned to wherever we finish a combat.”

“Huh.” Jun mused. “That seems needlessly complicated.”

“Most things are.” I chuckled, walking past the room and gesturing for Mortician and Jun to follow. “We’ll check out the room once we finish combat number five.”

Mortician looked from the skeleton to me, then back at the skeleton. “Are you not going to harvest its core?”

“No point. Check the thing’s description in your interface.” I told them, motioning at my own for emphasis. “Its core is transient, which means it only exists for that monster. If you went digging for it, you wouldn’t find anything at all.”

“It is very skeletal…” Mortician said reluctantly, shooting one last glance at the corpse before they nodded and started walking. “Why is that one’s core transient, whereas all of the carvurch from the oilsea had fully consumable cores? We must have slaughtered hundreds of them, and it was a lower-rating hazard.”

“Because they barely gave anything. I only got a few empty nodes from each, and maybe one in ten of them gave me a stat node.” I explained. “Jun could’ve made good use of them, but I bet she’s got more stat nodes than empty nodes now.”

“Almost at two-to-one now.” Jun confirmed. “I’ll get two empty nodes and five stat nodes at minimum from a core. And a lot of those slyk gave me the absolute minimum they could.”

I hoped that more of these nameless creatures actually had cores for us to consume. If they didn’t, we’d only get the experience that was going towards our armor and weapons. It’d still be worth the effort, but it wouldn’t be the boost to strength we needed if we were going to fight Scalovera and his goons head-on.

“Oh, right! Weren’t we supposed to get a small prize for killing that thing?” Jun pointed out. She opened her interface to check for notifications, then shook her head. “I don’t see anything here. How about you two?”

I double-checked my notifications, then my inventory, and found nothing. “Nothing here.”

Mortician shook their head as well. “We do not have anything we did not have before we entered the hazard.”

“Huh. Maybe the prize is in the room.” I offered, but when I looked back, the doorway was already gone. “Well, looks like we can’t check now. Might as well keep moving.”

I crossed my arms, a dagger in each of my hands, and glared down at the pile of eight skeletal bodies we’d gathered. “You’re sure this is all of them?”

Jun nodded. “It feels smaller than it should be, doesn’t it?”

“Much smaller.” I agreed, shooting a glance at the doorway that had appeared a few minutes ago. We’d just finished clearing the fourth combat, which was just more of the invisible enemies that didn’t attack us combined with a handful of venus-flytrap-like skeleton hybrids that actually did attack us. “I know we killed at least a dozen of these things. So where’d the corpses go?”

“We saw one of them burst into shards of bone and blow away on the wind.” Mortician informed me. “If we’d known that was why you had us gather the bodies, we would have told you right away.”

Okay. The skeletons disappeared a while after we killed them. I already knew that, since when I looked back, I didn’t see any corpses. But some of them disappeared much faster, and that disappearance only started with this combat. There could be an important rule of this hazard hidden in that fact, but I wasn’t sure enough to call it. All I could do was be more vigilant in the next few fights to see if there was something that triggered them to disappear.

“Good to know. Keep an eye out to see if there’s anything that causes them to disappear early.” I said with a gesture at Mortician, who saluted back in understanding. “Jun, how’s your gear’s experience coming? Is this worth our time?”

Jun tapped her gun, then opened her interface. “Looks like I’ve gotten two levels so far. Not a lot, especially not for me, and especially not if the early levels are a lot easier than later ones.”

That didn’t bode well. We were killing monsters with higher hazard ratings than the slyk, but they seemed pathetically weak in comparison to the oil and rock creatures. I shifted my daggers to a spear and let it rest over my shoulder, looking on the doorway and to the empty wasteland beyond it. If the fifth combat didn’t significantly change things, this hazard would be a bigger waste of time than I’d initially thought.

“Time to see if this place is worth it.” I said to myself, then started sprinting. Jun and Mortician followed immediately after me, already aware of the plan to clear five combats as quickly as possible. “If the fifth fight isn’t worth it, what do you two want to do? Keep going for a little bit, or just leave?”

“I’d say we should keep going. At least until we know if Scalovera’s going to send people in after us.” Jun said without a hitch in her voice from running at full-tilt.

“We agree.” Mortician huffed. “If our main purpose for coming to this hazard was purely to grow stronger, we might think differently. But our purpose was twofold, and one of those purposes is still very much left unfulfilled.”

I nodded. “Alright. But if we get to combat fifteen and we don’t see any sign of Scalovera’s mercenaries, and the rewards don’t get any better, what should we do then?”

Jun shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out when it comes to that.”

Another minute of running led us directly into the fifth combat. I swiped my spear through the air to summon a slash of petal-scales as the arena cemented itself on reality, but this time there was a sort of ethereal weight that came along with it. Like the pressure of a cheering crowd, and a requirement for victory. Even though the hazard was completely silent.

For a second, at least. {Welcome to the fifth combat of the hazard, glory seekers! For this combat, and for all future combats, you will deal and take 5% less damage. An easy one, since it's your first, but don’t rely on damage calculations you’ve got memorized!}