Well you do got that assassin shapeshifter after you, my bets, the System's telling us to book it before it shows up. Could be this is the System's way of telling you the assassin's too hard to beat and we should dip out and run ( ?▽?)っ?

  "Should we?"

  no way lol, we have a whammy combo going right now. Dodge rolls aren't ever going to give you this milage again, not without some other way to restore stamina quick. Plus if the System's just constantly plowing us with quests, that's probably the other way to level up. Getting above the mithril sea shouldn't be thaaat hard.

  Wade considered the options. He already had all the coins he needed to lock in the water mastery, and possibly more. He really could just find a way to make a bed, and end the round early. "It would guarantee the Medy and Bael quests to getting them back on earth…"

  Which would be extra coins and also start up his enterprise early with an alchemist and a forgesmith capable of enchanting gear. So long as they were both holding his hand when he use his escape key.

  They really just needed to know what the hell was after them and how hard it would be to fight before they made the decision to cut and run.

  But one thing Wade was almost certain about: He could outrun it.

  He had the extra stamina, and he had the water mastery boots to kick off with. Maybe he wouldn't have the raw damage needed to kite and kill it, but escaping… He looked down at his gear and items.

  The true core of THE GAME was all about figuring out the rules. Information was king.

  Wade held out the key, "Activate."

  Ah ha, testing how it works eh? You sly dog you~

  He wasn't on a bed, nor under shelter, so it shouldn't be consumed. But it would tell him if this was the kind of item that was just a binary yes/no trigger, or if it would tell him what was missing. And if talking out loud would even trigger it at all.

  The System promptly answered him.

  Missing Requirement: Bed.

  Missing Requirement: Safe Location.

  Wade exhaled. This was the best possible option for the key. "All right, here's the plan. We test out what the system defines as a bed and a safe location separately, and then I pack up whatever it calls a bed in my backpack. If we run into real danger, we outrun it, and then pull out the bed and get the hell back home." Just knowing he could tunnel back out to Earth almost anytime would be the main point to this.

  Bael and Medy might not be able to keep up with your running speed.

  "They can." Wade said, certain of it. "The mithril supply crate, a lot of the other goods weren't touched because likely the demon didn't think it was worthwhile taking or didn't want to pay it back when they got out. But there's one thing that was almost all tapped out dry: Mana crystals."

  That meant the single most valuable thing to an escaping demon down here was those crystals. And Wade could take a guess why. "There's no fear of death by mana poisoning down here. If they burn through past the point of no return, that's fine. It's a slow death that takes more than a day. None of them survive longer than that before they have to reset in some way."

  Ah, so you think they can burn hard through the mana crystals we got in order to keep up with whatever speed you're going?

  "If I tell them I'm bringing them back home where they won't have to fear getting pulled back into the mithril sea here, they'll keep up."

  Death by mana poisoning was a slow thing that would take more than a day. Down here where demons often had to reform themselves every few hours since something or another would infect them easily.

  Wade spent the next ten minutes testing his key out, figuring out what the rules were for it.

  Using spare clothing in his backpack, along with some clever use of 'comfortable' modifications to his backpack for a pillow, he had a working 'bed' that he could stuff back into the backpack at any time. Or at least something similar enough to a bed that the System decided to just give throw him a bone.

  A safe location was a bit more difficult to figure out. It turns out it wasn't all about a safe location, but rather about shelter itself. So long as he had a roof above his head and there wasn't anything within the room that was hostile to him, the system considered it a safe location. He just had to make absolutely sure there weren't any black rotten bugs in the room. Since those apparently counted as hostile targets.

  A bit more testing revealed that the room didn't actually need to be a room at all; it just needed some kind of shelter. A small cave did register as a safe location according to the System.

  So now he had a backup plan. In case of emergency, run as fast as possible to the nearest cave, throw his backpack down, extract the bed, and immediately lay on top using the backpack as a pillow, legs curled up to his chest like a shrimp in order to fit on the 'bedroll' of shirts.

  It should work out. Theoretically. He hadn't been able to test this exact setup since doing both things at the same time would actually trigger the key, and he only had one key to work with.

  By the time he was done with all his testing, including a bit more practice with the enchanted armor, Bael was the first to reform.

  The demon reappeared exactly as he had in the prior incarnation. Landing onto the ground with his original form of black fur. And equally changed his appearance back to how Wade remembered him. He gave Wade a look, a grunt of approval, content the human had stuck around instead of running off.

  Between Wade and Medy, he knew the demoness couldn't actually run off, she was under contract to protect him just as much as he was under the same for her. So while the human could break his word without issue, he could depend on Medy to hold to it.

  So not seeing her nearby didn't set him on edge just yet.

  There didn't seem to be much of a change otherwise, the valley was still strangely empty of Blackrotten beasts. A good omen, generally once blackrot was aware there was an untainted meal roaming around the area, they would all be drawn here over time, as if the alarm was sounded off.

  Bael shook his fur clean like a dog would getting the rain off, then cracked his neck. "What did I miss?"

  Eri gave a satisfied jaw click, skull leering as it usually did, leaning on his Nathir sword. Oh nothing much. Just havoc. Chaos. Adventure.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Man, where do I even start?" Wade muttered. "You, uh, missed some tense moments."

  Bael frowned. Then his gaze swept the area, trying to find their third. He'd expected her to go all-out after Wade without him to moderate. "Where's Medy? Still collecting plants, or did something with teeth get to her?"

  "Uh, teeth in this case. She took one for the team."

  Bael grunted. "Assume it was worthwhile if you're still here waiting."

  Eri flexed his skeletal arms, even turning around like a bodybuilder would. Preening.

  Wade shook his head, mildly exasperated. "Oh shut the fuck up, you shot the thing to death with me."

  Eri patted the sword. Yeah, but I was also ready to slice and dice it to death too. Would have wrestled it down even.

  "The thing? What thing." The demon wasn't surprised the master necromancer here had somehow won and survived again. What he wanted to know right now was what he'd won against. The master necromancer once more playing with his puppet wasn't much of a surprise to Bael, he was mostly certain this was how Wade practiced his control over the minion. A rather interesting way to fine-tune movements.

  The skeleton leaned again over the massive sword, then pointed a finger behind Bael.

  The demon slowly turned around to look. And further off behind was the body of a massive beast.

  "That's a Fused Colony."

  And it made no sense. Those things couldn't be killed. The fungus would grow tendrils within the bones, creating so many redundant nervous systems there wasn't a real head to hack off, nor a brain to stab through and squash.

  Was it really a fused colony?

  The giant boar corpse left behind wasn't a pretty sight, given most of the stomach contents were splattered under it, but it was the tentacles that were flat on the ground, like dead weeds, that made Bael realize what this was. Those things sprouted mostly out of its back where the original colony had moved, but further tendrils erupted from all over the body mass, even smaller ones by the head, and every single one of those lay flat and unmoving.

  There wasn't a trace of life in that thing. Which was impossible. It wasn't hacked into pieces, or burned to complete charcoal.

  He could even see blood oozing out of the ruptured stomach, with only minor parts of it singed.

  "How?" Bael simply said. "Those have too much mass to be killed. It takes an entire force to hack it into small enough pieces it cannot regenerate from. How is it even dead at all? The body looks good enough to reconstitute."

  "Grenades. Bullets. Eri helped."

  "Grrrrenaades," Bael repeated flatly, not understanding at all the strange words. Bullets and grenades didn't have any demonic analogue. Not yet.

  "Yeah. It's an Earth thing." Wade shrugged, non-plussed about it. Then he waggled his eyebrows at the demon. "Interested in hearing about it?"

  "Even less." Bael answered, eyes looking around for something. "Where did she die?"

  If there was a fused colony here, and no sign of Medy, Bael already assumed she'd either been killed or willingly reset herself before things got worse.

  Taking one for the team, the human had said.

  "Further behind the signpost, she ran off the other direction to give me time."

  "Uh huh." He snorted, sniffing the air for the hint of infernal essence.

  While he took a few meandering steps around, searching for where she'd return, Wade watched, waiting.

  He wasn't planning on pressing Bael right now.

  Medy would be back pretty soon, and he'd be able to give his speech to both of them at the same time. Like Play had told him a while back, it didn't really matter what he said. All he had to mention was that he could bring them away from Azdrial entirely. That'd be enough to make them take the gamble.

  "Here." Bael pointed a finger at something in the air that faintly fuzzed. Wade would have missed it if he hadn't been looking specifically where the demon pointed. "She's returning soon. A few minutes at most. Fast regeneration this time. She must have been preparing her essence ahead of time for it."

  "You can do that?"

  "At a cost." Bael snorted. "She dissolved her stomach and organs back into raw essence. Faster reformation, but you're running on fumes. Weaker strength, inability to physically eat anymore, and other issues. Primordial essence mimics living essence, and that mimicry is deeper than you might suspect. How long would you stay alive without your stomach?"

  "Good to hear we'll be back to moving soon. We should gear you up then, get that done." Wade handed Bael back his shirt and longsword, then pulled out his next item of consequence: The single mana crystal he'd recovered. "Found this in a mithril supply crate, along with some other goods. Brought those along with me in the backpack. Want any of it?"

  Out came armor, flares, and a few other random bits.

  Bael watched intently. "Supply caches aren't charity. You take from one, you're expected to restock it later. That's how the system works down here."

  A human wouldn't be obligated to follow that, deals were a fundamentally different force to mortals. But Bael knew if he even so much as touched any of this, he'd need to give back eventually, that was the pact. The mana crystal would be greatly useful. The enchanted weapons would be less so, as the human did have weapons that seemed to work better against blackrot than the blade would.

  And the current longsword Bael held was among the finest blade he'd held. Even without enchantment runes layered on the blade, he could channel raw mana and cast a more primitive free magic enchantment to cover. "I'll take armor and the mana crystal, if you have no further use for a crystal."

  Bael was mostly certain the human had a single higher quality crystal already burning in his core. How else would he have a skeleton at his side of this quality and command? And he hadn't offered Bael a crystal otherwise earlier on, which meant only one crystal.

  The mithril collar would have been his choice had he been alone and without any mana crystal. But with a team to watch over each other and equipment that could use mana, there wasn't much use in the collar. Being Blackrotten only conferred strength and constitution at the cost of using mana completely and giving up on powering armor or weapons. He wouldn't have taken the collar himself, there wasn't much longer in the trip remaining. But the human could certainly pilfer these supplies without thought of paying it back.

  And he indeed had stuffed the mithril collar into his backpack without a shred of hesitation.

  "I'll discuss loan repayments with the proper authorities when I get to it." Wade said, confirming Bael's suspicion and then handed him the pilfered mana crystal along with a task: "For now, think you can transfer some of this energy back into my skeleton here? I want to test something."

  This… was the strangest request he'd ever gotten from a necromancer. Perhaps his own mana crystal was growing faint, and he was reserving the mana within for larger fights? Eating two mana crystals was often far above what most mages could manage. Two sources of chaotic fluctuating mana was nearly impossible to tamper and control simultaneously. And for no gains he could think of. A larger crystal would be the same amount of power, with only one thing to focus on.

  He looked over to the skeleton, then back to Wade. He wouldn't expect a demon to harm him under their current contract, but this was still a mortal. He had to be cautious with how casual they were.

  Still. He couldn't see any angle the human might have. He was already powerful enough to somehow kill a fused colony, likely with solar empire relics. What would Bael possibly have to offer?

  Against his inner suspicion, he opened his gullet, and swallowed the mana crystal, then moved to the skeleton.

  Already he felt the mana crystal begin to dissolve in his stomach, mists of mana flowing out of the breaking down crystal walls. He focused his control, keeping the mana in a tight circle around the crystal itself, pressing it back into a solid as quickly as it was dissolved. Keeping the crystal in stasis.

  Not technically required, he could die as many time as needed down here, he was already stuck in hell. Anywhere else he'd be more careful. Still, a good habit to practice anytime, storing mana for later use.

  He reached the skeleton, who was smaller than he was. The skull looked up with a leer. The jawbone clicked once.

  Eerie.

  He could see some of the bones had already been leeched of their infused mana. Burned away to power the artificial being. Wade should have been steadily replenishing his minion's mana again. Although Bael could see why he hadn't:

  The bones here were deeply infused with mana. Layered on, more dense than the general infusions would be. This was an old skeleton, created over time by nature. Wade likely found this body at the bottom of a cave, where mana would eventually sink down into and pool into a more dense cloud.

  But he could restore some of the mana in the outer bones at least, he wasn't out of practice with that. Perhaps Wade was testing his ability as a necromancer, to see if his own dabblings would match. Or perhaps the mortal was showing off again his mastery. 'Come look upon my work in more detail.'

  He'd seen plenty of mortals seeking all kinds of things in life.

  As Bael drew closer to the skeleton and extended a hand, he felt it. Another impossible thing.

  But unlike the blackrotten fused colony where the necromancer's relics and strange abilities might have explained the victory, this one had no possible explanation.

  Because there was emotion in the air around the skeleton. Curiosity.

  And Bael could tell one thing with true clarity: It was coming from the skeleton.

  Eri slowly turned that skull, then clicked his jaw once again. The sound was far more heavy than anytime he'd done so in the past.

  Because Bael saw with undeniable proof - that there really was something behind those eyeless sockets.