Six days passed by without anything of note happening. Jun led Harvester and Scalovera, which I learned weren’t their first names, on Persephonia’s strict regimen to increase their health. Very small gains showed themselves, with the two lower-level recruits gaining one point each, but not Jun.

And certainly not Persephonia herself, whose message had encompassed most of my waking thoughts. I’d read it over and over again, but the few lines it had were far more cryptic than I’d been ready for.

“There is more to this world and our people than you know. Gods, Embodiments, and chosen are not mutually exclusive. If you can endure as I have, you will endure to see the drastic shifts a new species can bring.” I muttered to myself, then swiped away my interface.

The first line was fairly obvious, and I was pretty sure I already understood what the ‘Gods, Embodiments, and chosen are not mutually exclusive’ sentence meant, since Jun had been aware of the Embodiments when I first met her. I assumed the Matria was telling me that each and every species had their own embodiments, and that someone could be both a godblood and a chosen at the same time. Or a priest and a chosen at the same time. But I could’ve been completely off base, and there was some cultural significance behind that line that I didn’t have the experience to understand.

But it was that last sentence that bothered me for some reason. Had Persephonia already seen a new species come into this world while she was alive? Was it really such a common occurrence? And something bothered me about the fact that she used ‘endure’ instead of any other word. ‘Survive’ fit so much better, so why had she chosen ‘endure’?

I’d tried to ask, but the Matria refused to talk to me since our lengthy-ish discussion earlier that week. She was laser-focused on making sure Rozem–who I knew as Scaolvera–and Bhura–who I knew as Harvester–were as ready as they could be for the hazard the recruits were set to take on in exactly one week. From what little I could glean from the group addresses the Matria gave, this hazard was supposedly one of the more difficult ones the recruits would be regularly visiting over their training years.

Crumbs fell onto my hands, breaking me out of my thoughts. The source of the crumbs was Jun, who devoured a piece of dark brown bread with a thin spread of light blue jam that I knew tasted like carbonated apple cider, muttering to herself through a waterfall of crumbs that splattered onto the glass square she was trying to read. She grunted in annoyance and brushed them off for the fifth time, swallowed the last of her breakfast, then looked up at me from across the table.

“So how’s your training going?” She asked, jabbing directly at the fact that I wasn’t taking part in any of the health training. It wasn’t malicious, but it was curious in a prickly sort of way. “Matria Persephonia keeps telling me that you’re working on your own, but I never see you go anywhere or do anything.”

That was because I wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. I didn’t feel in any sort of rush to push myself through the health percentages, so I’d spent my time fiddling around with my new core and the Floodforest’s Gift instead. Unfortunately I hadn’t found anything worth noting, except for the fact that I didn’t have the battery nor the recovery to sustain the function for more than a minute or two, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

“We don’t have anywhere that’s safe enough, so I’m just focusing on eating better and trying to make some potions that’ll help.” I half-lied; that had been the plan, but I’d only gotten around to the ‘eating better’ part of it. I was very good at doing nothing, a skill I’d lost in my past life. “I should ask Nia if I can use the gym at night.”

“Oh, gods.” Jun laughed and shook her head. “Please tell me that ‘Nia’ isn’t short for Persephonia.”

“...It might be.” I admitted.

“Maybe don’t call her that to her face. Or behind her back. Or… ever, really. It’s not just weird, it spits in the face of the chain of command.” She swiped away something on her glass square that wasn’t a crumb and frowned. “Speaking of the Matria; we’ve got our first real assignment to help Rozem and Bhura.”

She slid the tablet over to me to read as she continued speaking. “Do you have any idea what an ‘artificial hazard’ is? Aside from the obvious, of course.”

“Well, I’d guess it’s a hazard that isn’t natural. But that’s what you meant by the obvious, so no; I don’t know what it is.” I answered as I read the somehow translated words before me. It wasn’t much; a place and time for the two of us to show up at, a warning that we would be extracted from the hazard if it wasn’t cleared in five days, and to pack accordingly. A lengthy scrawl in Jun’s language was underneath the English, which brought up a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.

But I did anyway. “Why is Persephonia giving you so much more info than I’m getting?”

“Because even if she trusts you, she can’t risk too much getting out.” Jun answered a little too comfortably. “If anyone got ahold of this, they’d already be suspicious that there was some of your language on it. Nia can pass it off as trying to run some translations by me, but if there were two exactly equal orders, it’d look way too suspicious.”

I grinned to myself when Jun used ‘Nia’ instead of Matria Persephonia, which elicited a confused look from her that she wiped away with a shake of her head.

“I don’t know why you’re smiling, but you wouldn’t be if you could see what I see. We aren’t allowed to step in for any of the fights, just give little hints and dance around the edges. Unless either of them are going to get seriously hurt, of course.” Jun grumbled. She really seemed to want to stretch her legs again, and her next words more than confirmed that. “When do you think we’ll be able to go back to the floodforest?”

“Fuck if I know.” I answered reflexively. Based on the pace we were taking here, it might not be for another couple of months at least. “That depends on if we can convince Nia to let us clear a few hazards on our own. She has to have a few marked out for the recruits to do as a group, but doing them with just the two of us might serve us pretty well.”

Jun’s bright grin lit up the room. “Something to look forward to, then. Mind training up some of our equipment mastery out there for a few hours? That’s the one thing I’m falling behind on.”

Unfortunately, it was also the one thing I had zero knowledge of. Individual equipment mastery hadn’t been a thing in my previous life, but I assumed it would increase the same way as core mastery did. Using the thing as it was intended, and doing it repeatedly and consistently against stronger and stronger enemies.

What I didn’t know was how it would affect my hazard rating. Would leveling up my equipment completely invalidate the need to find better stuff? Would it become rarer and stronger the higher level it became? Hell, would it lose mastery levels if I enchanted it into something slightly different?

All questions I’d only find the answer to if I went straight at it. “Let’s get to training.”

Jun squealed in excitement and summoned her armor, jumping out of her chair and immediately darting for the darkened glass doors. She paused and looked back to make sure I was armored up, then threw them wide open. And revealed that all the other recruits were in the middle of their own training exercises.

“Keratily? Is something amiss?” Nia asked with mild concern, looking between Jun and me once before ignoring me completely. “You will not benefit from this exercise, as I already told you, so what purpose do you have here?”

“I, uh, completely forgot that this was going on.” Jun sheepishly admitted, backing up into Nia’s room while waving apologetically. “Nevermind us; we’re going to do our own training somewhere else.”

Nia sighed as Jun slammed the doors shut and raced past me to the other exit that didn’t lead directly into the crowd of recruits. “The edge of the forest it is, then.” She exclaimed without a hint of embarrassment, striding through the Matria’s office and throwing open the doors with just as much reckless abandon as before. “Let’s pretend that didn’t happen and I chose perfectly the first time, alright?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” I laughed, joining Jun in the late morning sun as we made our way to the chain fence. “But now that you mention it…”

Jun’s groan only made me smile wider, and she spent the rest of our short walk ensuring that I wasn’t going to make fun of her. I suppose it worked, as I couldn’t get a single word in, positive or not. When we got to the fence, Jun reached forward into the empty air as if plucking fruit from a low-hanging branch and offered me a hexagonal badge that was inscribed with a half-moon and a swirling wave.

“This’ll make the sensors think you’re one of us, instead of showing nothing at all.” She said as I accepted the badge, letting it snap onto the back of my forearm with a magnetic pull. “Matria Persephonia gave it to me to give to you instead of just handing it to you herself for some reason, but I don’t pretend to understand everything that goes on in this place’s politics.”

The badge had so little power to it that it didn’t even qualify as an equippable item in my inventory, just a miscellaneous thing I’d picked up. “Yet you knew why the translated portion of the order was so much smaller?”

“Because Nia told me that that was the reason, obviously.” Jun said with an implied eye-roll, even if I couldn’t see it through her helmet. “I was physically trained and given a standard education, not trained to be some sort of politician or spy. But I do have a really good memory.”

That explained that. I stuck my hand through the ethereal chain link fence and looked around for any sort of alarm that might be going off, but it seemed that Nia’s badge had somehow added me to the whitelist. Jun coughed and nudged me forward the rest of the way through, whispered a warning about looking like I belong, and hurried off towards the semi-distant edge of the coral forest.

“So how should we start?” Jun asked, summoning her sword and letting it lie against her shoulder. “Weapons, armor, or functions?”

“Weapons.” I said without hesitation. My sword appeared in my hands, then shifted into a spear. “Don’t go for any killing blows and we’ll be able to train our armor as well. So no decapitations, no throat slashing, and try not to sever any limbs. It’s a real pain in the ass to put them back.”

Jun nodded excitedly, hopping from one foot to the other in anticipation. “Will do. On ten?”

“On ten.” I agreed with a nod, activating //ENDLESS and sighing in relief as the Scorched Bloodcoral Concoction spread through my bloodstream. A web of pulsing orange veins spread over my health indicator, and a small timer began counting down beside it. I readied myself for the desire of bloodshed, but it never came. Jun stood strong, waiting for me to start counting, and as I looked at her a different sensation came over me.

Where I’d felt nothing but the desire to end the eel, I now felt a deep desire to have the most intense and skillful duel I could with Jun. The Scorched Bloodcoral Concoction didn’t make me violent; it amplified whatever desire I had at that moment to its maximum. With the knowledge that I wasn’t going to have to fight my own brain in addition to Jun, I shifted my stance and pointed my spear directly at her chest.

“One.”

Jun lunged forward without a word, swinging her sword down in a vicious arc that was meant to take my right arm’s use from me.

“Shit!” I cried as I backpedaled, swinging my spear to divert her attack as well as I could. She’d put all of her effort into that one surprise attack, so when I struck the back of an exposed knee with a flowing kick she stumbled and almost went down from one single strike.

But almost wasn’t down, and my follow-up strike that I’d aimed for her weakened thigh was kicked out of the way by a roundhouse that followed through with a blind swipe at my chest. I sucked in air through my teeth and jumped back as the metal just barely scraped my plate, leaving a perfect line through one of the metal vines that showed just how much damage I’d take from a direct hit.

My next few thrusts weren’t meant to hit, but instead tested her reflexes and which way she’d dodge depending on how I moved. She wasn’t an expert fighter, even with the system helping her with her footwork and knowledge, but neither was I. There was very little muscle memory left over from my old life, and I couldn’t make use of most of it anyway. A spear very much wasn’t a sword and shield, and all the fighting I’d done with those was centered on a core I no longer had. We were on a much more even field than I’d have liked to admit.