Table of contents:

For safety warnings, turn to page three.

For other products in this same line, turn to page eight.

For the questions you will be asking yourself as you summon monstrosities from beyond the veil of worlds, turn to page thirty-one.

For options to repent for the unspeakable acts you will have caused by operating this device, turn to page fifty-eight.

For setup instructions, turn to page ninety-one.

Whatever was after ‘setup instructions’ in the list had been scratched out with something that didn’t destroy the paper underneath. In its place was a hand-written note.

‘If you are reading this as someone who broke into my home, run. Run, little vermin. Your clueless fingers and pointed assumptions will bring ruin to this great, verdant land.’

“Verdant land?” I snorted in disbelief as I read over the hand-scrawled note. “What part of this place is ‘verdant’?”

“Absolutely none of it.” Mortician agreed helpfully. “Unless there is a different definition of ‘verdant’ that has evolved for Staura culture that we are not aware of. Perhaps it is now a synonym for ‘desolate hellscape that has been fucked by whoever controls it’?”

I stared blankly at them as those words came out of their mouth. “Language.” I chided in disbelief as Jun burst into laughter from across the room.

“You’re not helping!” I yelled at her, which only served to deepen her amusement. I sighed and held in a laugh of my own as I flipped over to page ninety-one, which would hopefully tell us everything we needed to know about the sphere-and-VCR machine.

The page was blank.

“Oh, fucking wonderful.”

I knew what Mortician was about to say before they said it. “Language!” They laughed, and once again, Jun descended into giggling madness.

I ignored them both to the best of my abilities. It was more difficult to ignore the one right next to me, since they just leaned in closer and closer to try and get a reaction out of me. I gently pushed my palm against their visor and pushed, but that only seemed to make them push harder.

My other hand flipped through the pages, one by one, to reveal that they too were blank. I grabbed the book and held it up by one end and let the pages fall before my eyes, hoping that my elevated speed would let me catch a glimpse of anything at all. But the book was completely empty, save for those first few pages. I even double-checked all of the mentioned pages in the table of contents. Nothing.

“Well this was worthless.” I sighed and flipped the book over to check the back. A small red and white maple-like leaf was taped to the back of it. “Okay, maybe not completely worthless. Jun, have you seen any empty spheres?”

Jun stopped a sphere she’d set spinning and looked around. She pointed directly at one a few rows away from me. “That one’s missing something. Why?”

I peeled the tape off and gently palmed the leaf. It clinked like porcelain when it hit my armor. “I’ve got something to fill it with. And nothing else. So… maybe we are just supposed to match all of the things in the spheres to their appropriate tablets.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try.” Jun shrugged. She bent down and came up a second later with a massive stack of tablets. “Time to get matching.”

Jun and Mortician huddled around me as I held the last tablet in my hand. It displayed a two-toned leaf with three distinct long spires that each forked into three more; the same one that I held in my other hand. I nodded to Jun, who opened the sphere with a grunt of effort and held it there until I dropped the leaf in. She yelped in surprise when the sphere snapped shut the second it hit the bottom, then muttered something unkind about it as she smacked her palms together.

“Language.” Mortician giggled.

“...I guess it was my turn.” Jun sighed. She crossed her arms and leaned in close to watch whatever happened when I slid the tablet in.

I pressed the inlaid symbiotic seed at the top one more time to make sure it would stay on and held my breath. If this didn’t work, we only had one other easy option; set the balls spinning and see if that changed anything. If it didn’t, well, I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure where to go from there. Maybe matching only the things with leaves, or only ones with flowers?

“Here goes.” I warned as I slid the tablet into the device under the sphere. It greedily slurped up the plastic and began to quietly whir, as if it was working, then fell silent. We all stared at it with unrestrained anticipation.

It beeped.

…Well, at least it had beeped. I sighed and leaned back in disappointment, then cast my gaze around the room. Nothing else seemed like it had changed. That meant it was time for the second half of the easy part. I pressed my hand to the sphere and spun it as hard as I could.

A cacophony of rapid beeps blared from the machine. I stumbled back in surprise as something began to glow from within the sphere, overtaking the materials in the middle with a strange yellow-y off-white that made me feel slightly off when I stared into it. Something about it reminded me of my own core; like something would just… pop out of it at any second.

I took another step back and signaled for Jun and Mortician to do the same. “It feels like something’s coming. Be ready to fight.”

Jun nodded and drew her weapon along with Danday’s knife. It wouldn’t give her any benefits, but it would still stab things in a pinch. Something about her shifted as well, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was as if she was… more of her. It couldn’t be her core, since she’d been constantly using it while we were in the hazard.

And Mortician. They summoned their book and raised one hand, hovering it above the words, and summoned a green glow. Like an algae bloom in stagnant water. Their surprise was palpable, as if they hadn’t expected to summon the ability that they had, but after a moment they shook their head and flipped through their pages. The green shifted to black and then gold, and barriers appeared around all three of us.

“Ready.” They both said in unison as they backed away to a safe distance.

I summoned my weapon as a shield and poured scales into it while my armor drew from my blood-oil. Whatever emerged from that thing wouldn’t get through me. And it wouldn’t survive Jun’s onslaught.

When the constant beeps rose to an almost ear-splitting screech and the light burned as bright as the sun, the sphere cracked like an egg. Inside was a tempestuous vortex of light and sound, crackling and hissing like a horrible fire. I raised my shield and readied myself for the inevitable impact of a function crackling to life.

It came without fanfare. Molten light slammed into my shield and burst into a stream on either side of me. I grit my teeth and summoned more petal-scales to completely cover myself, then summoned the cruel-world’s partition right behind me to absorb some of the damage. It began to glow almost immediately as my scales flaked away, growing at a terrifying pace that perfectly matched the damage my shield was taking.

“Kill it!” I ordered without a hint of curiosity. Mortician’s empowerment shifted to a combination of black and gold not a moment before Jun’s echoing bullets slammed into whatever had emerged from the light, followed by a horrible shattering shriek and a spray of something off-white into the corner of my vision. The beam, or breath, or whatever it was died away almost instantly, and I barely activated wipe-away and an experience boosting consumable before the system counted it as dead.

Only when the notification told me it was one-hundred percent dead did I call back my scales and risk a peek over my shield. A stain of what looked like sapmarrow was spread across the room from right in front of me all the way to the wall, where pieces of something slowly slipped down the wall in a dripping river of off-white. I grimaced at the grisly display and shook my head, then reached forward to grab the strange octohedral core the thing had left behind.

//Summoned Core: Lock-On.

//Trial Mode: Deactivated.

//The summoned creature will expand all given energy in a single attack, aiming to eliminate whatever it sets its sights on. The creature will not shift its focus until its chosen target is eliminated, or incapacitated if ‘trial mode’ is enabled.

I frowned at the thing I held, which gave me a description where none of the other cores in this hazard had. Rather than a core, though, this felt like a single function. One piece of a much larger puzzle. I tapped my knuckles against it before I threw it to Jun.

She caught it easily. And held it for a moment before she raised it higher as if to study it under the non-existent sunlight. “What’s different about this one? Why does it have a description?”

“It has a description?” Mortician asked from the other side of the room. And underneath a table. They popped their head out a moment later and tilted it to the side. “It looks quite similar to the other cores. What is different about it?”

They both looked to me as if I had an answer. “I don’t know.” I said defensively. “Why would you think I know?”

“Because you know strange things.” Mortician said bluntly. “Strange things about strange things. We thought this might be one of those things.”

“Yeah. That.” Jun agreed with a nod. “But if you don’t know, then all we have to go on is what the core tells us. It’s a summoned core. It makes the creature do something. And it has a mode that makes it weaker on purpose. That probably means it was made by something else, and that ‘something else’ can make cores. Is… is that even possible?”

From the fact that she held the core in her hand, it was obviously possible. But that beggared the question; how had something made the core? How did it make all the cores? How did any of the hazards make core-bearing enemies?

All questions I had no idea how to answer. But I highly doubted any hazard would give just anyone access to what amounted to infinite experience. So there had to be a catch. For pretty much every other one I’d cleared in my lifetime, it was because the strong monsters were few and far between. And they didn’t just respawn when a hazard was cleared; some time had to pass in between to recharge. But I’d just created a monster out of nothing. And it had dropped a core.

I grabbed the core my function had created and crushed it in my hand to consume it. It granted me empty nodes and a single filled one, just like a normal core. But… no experience. I frowned and double checked to make sure I hadn’t imagined anything. Nope. No experience. Like eating what looked like a fully loaded sandwich that turned out to only be differently coloured bread.

“Alright, that’s not normal.” I said with a frown. “Either something took all the experience out of it the moment I tried to consume it, or it never had any experience in it to begin with. But… the other cores had experience in them, right? I wasn’t just imagining that? And… wait… where are the experience crystals? Was that thing completely void of experience?”

Mortician opened their interface and nodded. “We gained nothing from the creature’s death.”

“Damn. This is strange.” I muttered as I finally looked around the room. Not a single thing was out of place, save for the table Mortician had turned to use as an impromptu shield. Including the creature’s remains. “What are we missing here?”