“So the helmet was key?” Jun wondered as she stepped over the hole. “What does that mean for the symbiotic seed? Was it put in there for no reason?”

I shrugged and leaned over the hole. It looked both deep and shallow at once, almost as if someone had painted a perspective onto it. “I bet we’ll have to get a lot deeper into the hazard before we find out what it’s meant to go with. But I don’t know how we’re supposed to do that.”

Mortician joined us in staring down the hole in the floor with by far the most curiosity out of the three of us. “If we are to hazard a guess, it would be that this hazard is very different from the others. Sebastian, you have said so yourself that hazards are meant to be cleared, correct?”

“Right.” I confirmed with a nod. I wanted to see where they were going with this.

“If that is the case, and this hazard was not rated monstrously high, then perhaps it is… how should we put it… a looping hazard?” They suggested. “Things grow disproportionally difficult after five combats, and if the hazard wishes to be cleared, combats would grow so horribly challenging that they would no longer be doable by even those far stronger than we are. There must be something we are doing wrong, or at least suboptimally, if this hazard truly deserves its own rating.”

A looping hazard. No; that didn’t seem quite right. I stood up straight and paced over to the archway that would lead us out and stared out over the blasted landscape back the way we’d come. This was supposed to be a relatively low-level hazard, yet absolutely nobody had cleared it. That seemed completely impossible. The Staura had been here for centuries–maybe even longer than that–and they hadn’t sent out a group of their absolute best to try and clear it? The strange mountain in the distance promised prizes and progress, yet nobody had ever reached it.

I stared at the wall right next to the entryway. It was solid stone. The map couldn’t give us any new information. There were so few hints, so little information, that it felt like the hazard wasn’t meant to be cleared. That it really was just a training hazard. But why create a training hazard that went on for so long? One that got so difficult that even Nia and Okeria hadn’t reached the end?

Was it made for the gods? For the Embodiments?

That was it. And we had a clue as to what we were dealing with. “Who was talking to us? And where were they talking to us from?”

Jun tilted her head to the side. “It was the system talking to us, right? Like how The End talks to you.”

“That’s what I thought, too.” I said excitedly, stepping up to the stone wall as my weapon shifted into a hammer. “But what if that isn’t the case? What if this hazard is doing exactly what Keratily is doing to Rainbow Basin?”

“Siphoning away some of the experience from everything defeated… within it…” Mortician trailed off until they fell silent. “Oh. The hazard is not looping; it is truly infinite. It grows itself from the deaths of the creatures it produces by skimming some of the experience we would have gained.”

“Exactly.” I confirmed with a nod. “I thought we were getting way too little experience for what we were fighting; especially when Danday died. So why did the hazard count us fighting him as our twenty-fifth fight?”

“Maybe it felt bad for us?” Jun suggested for the sake of adding something to the conversation.

“Hazards don’t feel bad for people. They’re things put in place to be cleared. Not endless things that never have to reset themselves.” I continued. My hands tightened around the shaft of my hammer, and my armor rang out as I brought it down on the stone. A hairpin crack was all I had to show for my efforts, but it was more than enough. “The endless march is just a distraction. Something to throw us off what it’ll actually take to clear the hazard.”

Petal-scales flowed from my armor to my weapon. I accentuated them with a taste of my own blood-oil, with a staticky discomfort that diminished to a slight numbness that I could easily ignore. The next blow created far more than just a single crack.

Debris rained down from the massive impact crater I’d left in the wall. I took a few short, excited breaths and let my armor stop ringing from the impact, then opened my interface to check my map. Something had changed. Where it once showed our space overlaid on top of the map, it now glitched out something fierce. We shifted from one place to another a few times every second, yet when I looked out the door, nothing had changed. Because the door wasn’t actually a door. It was a teleporter with something else that fooled our maps.

I zoomed in. My map marker began shaking when I was only halfway to the maximum. When I went as far as my interface allowed, it was only on the slice I could see about a quarter of the time. It was shifting so heavily and quickly that there was no way I wasn’t on to something. The question was; were we the first ones to discover this? Or had Nia and Okeria already known this hazard’s secrets, and decided to use it as a training ground knowing its quirks?

“Here, let me.” Jun said as she raised Okeria’s little gun. She cocked her head over her shoulder and smiled as her armor appeared over her. “Oh, good, you’re already standing back.”

Mortician and I weren’t just standing back; we were both pressed up against the back wall with our armors rubbing against each other in abject terror. I trusted Jun with my life, but that gun was fucking terrifying.

She pulled the trigger. The wall disappeared. I winced and looked away until the brightness bled away to the normal dim light of the room, and… the buzzing of electricity? The hole through solid rock Jun had just created led to an extremely well-lit room. One with the off-beige colouring of white plastic that had been used for a long, long time.

Well, not the room itself. The room was created from blocks of stone so tightly pressed together that I could barely see the lines between them, and on those walls hung portraits that looked a whole lot like the employee of the month portraits at a tech company that was less than a month from going under. They all showed a picture of the exact same person; a Staura with skin the colour of tree bark and vibrant amber features. But as the pictures went on, the person visibly aged. Their skin grew tighter, then looser, and their jubilant features slowly weathered to the kindly eyes of a grandmother who’d seen far too much for one lifetime. But who still very much loved her grandchildren.

I frowned and tried to wipe my eyes at the memories of my own family, which had come on a little stronger than usual, but my visor was in the way. They were whisked away before they could dry on my cheeks, and without an ounce of hesitation, I continued walking. Past plastic tables and strange devices with clear plastic spheres on thin metal hooks, each of which had a tiny piece of what looked like old bone and some other trinket inside of them.

A desiccated tiny pitcher plant. A small pendant with a butterfly on it. And so much more than I could perfectly correlate to the things we’d fought. Jun walked up next to me and carefully put a hand to the ball, but it was only plastic. Whatever they meant, they weren’t active right now. Just like the thick plastic slates that laid flat on long tables held up by spindly metal legs that looked like they would collapse at any second weren’t. I reached down to grab one, and much to my surprise, it let me lift it up. It looked like a very primitive version of the thing Nia had used so long ago.

And on the very top of it was an indent with exactly enough room for a single seed. And it was filled. I gently reached down and tried to pull out the thing that was a perfect double for the symbiotic seed, but when I pressed on it, the tablet just turned on. I raised an eyebrow and tapped on the slate, which pulsed out a set of three concentric circles like a ripple on a still pond. A sound like a water droplet falling on a hot stove came with the slate beginning to shake ever so slightly in my hand, and once it finished, a picture of a vine drawn in deep green quarter-inch long lines appeared on it.

Nothing else I did made the tablet do anything. Mortician walked up to Jun and I with a tablet in their hands, turned to face away from them with a picture of a pitcher plant drawn on it just like my picture of vines.

“If this is the puzzle, all it will cost us is time.” They said with barely restrained excitement. “Do you think the hazard will force us to fight whichever nameless creature we complete the set of?”

My own excitement dulled by a handful of degrees. Nowhere near enough to be impactful, but just enough to remind me we were still on a time limit. Or… were we? I opened my interface to see if there was any sort of countdown, but when I swiped over to my map screen, I paused. I was still zoomed in so far I couldn’t see much of anything.

“The strange plant is right here.” Jun said to Mortician from over my shoulder. “The base under the ball looks like it has a slot big enough for that slate. Want to see what happens when you put it in?”

“Of course we do!” Mortician gleefully confirmed, then did exactly that. I looked down from studying the lump of nothing my map showed me to see the base of the ball suck in the slate like it was an old VCR and the tablet was a tape. We all waited a few seconds for anything to happen, but all that came out of it was a low scraping sound.

Mortician leaned over and poked the base with two fingers. “Did we do it wrong? Will it give us back the slate if we hit it hard enough?”

“Just because Seb solved one problem by hitting it very hard, doesn’t mean this one can be.” Jun teased as she stepped back to join me in surveying the map.

“Hey, you hit it a lot harder than I did.” I argued.

Jun laughed heartily and leaned into me. “I know. But I’m not going to self-deprecate, now, am I?”

“I do it all the time.” I chuckled as I zoomed out one last time. The blob came into focus, revealing exactly what I’d hoped was going to happen. Because it confirmed nearly all my theories about this place.

Jun leaned forward with a cute little gasp that may or may not have been to tease me. “We’re in the mountain.”