Unsurprisingly, the item mastery upgrade for my chestpiece just gave me more stats for my oil-based armor pieces. I’d have to corrupt the rest of the set at some point, which would ideally be before we left the hazard, but all that could come crashing down if Scalovera sent some of his mercenaries in after us. It was a part of the plan, yes, but it wasn’t a guarantee. Scalovera was a mystery to me; a violent and horrific mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.

I couldn’t count on anything, but I had to plan for everything. Which included the best outcome; we cleared five more combats, got whatever boon was waiting for us, and fought Scalovera’s mercenaries on full batteries and freshly repaired armor. The worst outcome wasn’t even that terrible; we left the hazard to find that Scalovera set an ambush for us at the exit, we contacted Okeria, and then we fought our way out.

Of course, that counted on Scalovera not knowing how powerful Okeria actually was. Which he probably didn’t, or else he wouldn’t be antagonizing Okeria while flat-out torturing his friends. The fact that we hadn’t found anything to help the brain dead members of Okeria’s entourage was slowly growing in the back of my mind, and any ideas I might’ve had just died out before they went anywhere. We needed some way to access their interfaces.

There was no good way to do that. Hell, I couldn’t come up with any way to do it at all. No feasible way, at least.

So for now, I could only look at the possibilities that were directly in front of me. Mortician’s core upgrade, arming Jun with more powerful gear, and corrupting the hell out of anything that could give us an advantage. Plus leveling up the gear I’d already corrupted.

I swung my legs around and summoned my weapon, tapped it against my thigh, and nodded to Jun. She grabbed Mortician by the wrist and hefted the insensate mass of a person over her shoulders, then followed me out of the safe room. Our time was up, and whatever Mortician was doing, they’d have to keep doing it while we fought on.

Jun stepped close to me and shook her head when I tried to help her carry Mortician. “I can carry them myself. You need to keep that scanning function of yours on so you can see Scalovera’s people try to ambush us.”

“I don’t see how they’d be able to do that, but sure.” I shrugged. My helmet activated with a thought, and a small sip of the slowly dwindling signaleech oil I had on hand. “Unless they can bypass the rules of the hazard, we’d see them fighting their way towards us a long time before they saw us.”

“That’s not a reason not to be careful.” Jun said warily. She shifted to hold Mortician in a more comfortable way, then sped up slightly. “I need to test out my new inscribed bullets on something that we aren’t going to die fighting. There’s going to be a lot of timing, trial and error, and recovering my battery in between. They could catch up to us almost instantly if they’re actually as good at clearing hazards as they claim to be.”

I nodded reluctantly. “Or if they know something about this hazard that we don’t. There could be checkpoints every twenty-five combats. Which would mean they could appear between us and the mountain if they’d already cleared some of this place.”

“Exactly.” Jun hissed. Something had set her on edge, and it had only happened in the past few minutes. And she seemed to be aware of that, too. “Sorry. I’m… something weird’s going on, Seb. It’s almost like I can feel someone–or something–breathing down my neck. And it only started when we stepped out of the room.”

Well, that was terrifying. Even the sound of our own boots scraping against the ground seemed far more sinister than it had moments before, and I could almost feel Jun holding her breath right next to me. But I couldn’t hear anything different. Nothing felt wrong. I wasn’t about to call Jun out on misleading me, especially since her senses were a little stronger than mine were, though I wanted to. We hadn’t been this on edge for a long time, and it seemed like it was for no reason at all.

We walked for minutes in silence. No strange noises disturbed the stillness of the almost dead hazard. When the combat arena popped up around us, it was almost a relief. Jun shrugged off Mortician the moment the notification appeared on our visors, and I repeated the shielding procedure I’d used in the last combat to keep Mortician safe. Tension gathered in my shoulders, wound as tightly as an industrial spring, and the frustration of not knowing where to direct it only served to increase my worry.

Nothing new burst out of the ground. Repetitive monsters charged us, or burst from the ground, or flitted about annoyingly while supporting a big fucker that sent pools of marrow after us. They all died with varying amounts of effort. Jun’s bullets were almost incomparable to the ones she’d been firing in our previous combats, since she could quite literally double every shot while also making them hit even harder. And, from what I could tell, if two bullets shattered the cracks at the exact same time they both got the damage bonus.

I didn’t trigger //intervention once that fight. Nor did I activate wipe-away on any of the monsters, simply letting the experience go to whatever source it was meant to. And about twenty minutes after the fight had begun, it was over. Absolutely and decisively over. Jun didn’t lower her gun as the creatures disappeared into the ground, and for some reason, I didn’t let go of the petal-scales that protected Mortician.

Now I could feel it. Something was here. It was watching us, waiting for a moment of weakness. I nodded gravely to Jun then started scanning the area. She raised her gun and aimed it over my shoulder, waiting for my call to fire. Slowly but surely I did a full turn, and saw absolutely nothing. No cores, no notifications to mark anything, and not a single sound outside of our own armor’s quiet creaks.

“Something’s out there.” I finally broke the silence with a quiet statement so obvious that Jun should’ve laughed.

Instead, she just shivered. “I know.” She whispered, slowly backing away to stand next to Mortician’s protective sphere. “It’s not coming from Mortician, so it can’t be whatever their core’s doing to them. It’s… it feels like it's everywhere. Watching us. Judging us.”

I couldn’t feel it to that level, but I no longer had any reason to doubt Jun. I stuck my hand into the sphere of petal-scales and grabbed onto my shield, pulled it away, and tried to keep the petal-scales in place. It took a lot more concentration and battery than I’d expected to make the sphere without the shield inside of it, and I dispelled them with a thought. In their place, I summoned a flat surface by slamming my shield to the ground and quickly rolled Mortician onto it.

“Do we move?” Jun asked worriedly, snapping her gaze between the door and the expanse of nothing beyond it. “Or do we hide out for a while and hope whatever this is goes away?”

“Hiding won’t do anything. The door doesn’t disappear when we go in.” I said as I broke into a sprint. “Get to the next combat. Start it up, and leave one thing alive so there’s an invisible border keeping everything else out. That’s our best shot.”

Jun caught up to me without even trying. I looked back to make sure Mortician was still completely attached to my floating platform, then sent them ahead of us with a flick of my hand. The creeping sensation of something watching me, growing ever closer with a desire of its own that I couldn’t place grew stronger. Every step forward increased that sensation by the slightest amount, until it felt like there was something in the sky glaring down at me. Staring a hole into my soul. Trying to pick apart what made me tick just from watching me move.

Another invisible border shot up around us. I threw my shield at Mortician as Jun aimed her gun at empty space, called the petal-scales to protect them once more, and settled into what was becoming a familiar strategy.

The intensity never faded.

Something was watching us.

Everything died around us in our manic desire to be safe. All except one pixy that flitted around uselessly among the shattered corpses of the things it was designed to support.

And then we waited. Waited for what felt like years, as rushing blood drowned out my thoughts and tinted my mind with a molten red haze. When I managed to gather myself enough to open my interface, I found that only two hours had passed. Two hours in which neither of us moved a single inch. Whatever was here had us in a stranglehold of our own doing. And it was getting closer.

Like a steadily rising tide threatening to consume an entire island, it encroached. Molten haze infused every single inch of my mind, scraping away at my thoughts until only the basest desire remained. The primal terror of staring a true end in the face, so unable to do anything to stop it, and knowing that it would come for me in time. It’s own time. Whenever it decided it wanted to take me, everything I was, and everything I loved.

I clenched my fists as my voice stuck fast in my throat. Jun hyperventilated off to my side, gun drawn and feet planted while she snapped from random location to random location. As if she could kill whatever was doing this to us. But… this was more than that.

A call to survive. A threat to my continued existence.

Someone that had been terrifyingly absent for as long as we’d been out of the hazard.

Or, as I finally saw something vaguely familiar strut into view, one of her chosen.