Generally, stabbing skeletons was not the greatest of ways to defeat them. Your sword would go between their bones and maybe even get stuck in their ribcage. Luckily, a katana wasn’t designed to stab, but to cut.

And that was exactly what I did.

Before the first one could register what I was doing and put up his shield, I was right next to him, slashing at his upper spine with grace I could only imagine in my original form. His skull went flying and the rest of the skeleton soon crumbled into a pile of bones.

The other two immediately tried advancing on me, but I backed off right away to avoid their swords. Somehow, even with the sharp swords getting this close to me, my mind was calm, my eyes carefully watching all their moves… though, my heart was still racing.

The skeletons took up a defensive position, holding their shields in front of them. But that was the most primitive of responses. They were only trying to protect themselves rather than trying to work as a team. I could use that.

I dashed to the side, circling around them to line them up one in front of the other. Before they could reposition themselves, I jumped forward, and thrusted my katana’s tip into the shield of the front skeleton, causing him to stumble backward and fall onto the other one, making them tangle into each other.

Before the moving pile of bones could recover, I approached it and slashed it into an even finer pile of bones.

With that, I’d defeated three skeletons. With my real self rather than a game avatar.

I felt utterly ecstatic.

Well, sure, my heart was beating out of my chest and I felt like I should be panicking, but none of that could beat the satisfaction of actually beating something stronger than a harmless wood doll.

A whistle from behind me stole my attention. When I turned around, I saw Frank leaning on his axe, his foot propped up by the downed Dreadnought mini-boss.

“You did say you were good with blades, but damn.”

I gave him a little smile. “Yeah, well. As you said. Magic.”

“Agreed.” He nodded sagely. “Anyway, this guy dropped more teleports to this place. Not much else really.” He shrugged. “What did these give you?”

“Hmm? Oh.” I had been so caught up in the moment, that I’d completely forgotten to check the drops. “Let’s see.”

I went back to the pile and looked it over… but saw nothing of interest.

“Uh, nothing?”

“What?” Frank frowned as he looked at the pile as well. “Weird… they usually drop coins at least…”

We glanced at each other for a second.

“Right, got it! The devs artificially added drops for players to make the world more game-like! But you don’t count as a player!”

Yet another little hint to this world’s true nature. But actually…

“That could mean either one of the theories. They just didn’t program drops for anyone other than players for their game.”

“Oh yeah, you’re right… Hmm…”

A moment of silence as we both pondered over this anomaly.

“Welp, either way, you’re not getting any drops.” Frank shrugged. “Let’s keep going?”

“Yeah, let’s.” I nodded.

We went on, leaving the defeated piles of bones behind. They would later disintegrate into dust at some point and then respawn elsewhere in the area. I briefly wondered what the lore was regarding respawning and dropping loot.

That aside, it took a good while for my heartbeat to calm down again. It was a wonder that the incompetent, easily scared me was able to stand up to these things, much less handily defeat them. What other secrets was this fox form of mine hiding?

Would my true true form be even more amazing? Or would it be worse?

“Oh, more of them,” Frank said, knocking me out of my thoughts.

Five more of the weaker skeletons emerged from behind one of the buildings.

“Look at that! Perfectly lined up! It’s like that karate thing where you split five logs with one hand chop!” my companion yelled out before charging at them, swinging his axe sideways, and cleaving through bone and shield alike.

Just like that, all of them were down.

Yeah, even though this form of mine was stronger than expected, it still couldn’t stand up to high-level player avatars. If it could, that would be quite ludicrous.

“Cool! They dropped things! Money… another teleport… bones. Wow, so much loot.”

I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to tease my inability to get drops or making fun of the bad loot.

After Frank stuffed the loot into his inventory, we kept going. We encountered two more groups of skeletons on our way, one of them even had the archer type. But since none of them included any more mini-bosses, we swiftly made it to the edge of the ruins.

The entire ruins were surrounded by half-broken walls just tall enough to discourage trying to get past them with four gateways in each direction. In front of us stood the eastern gateway if I recalled correctly.

“Here it is. This used to be closed before the update, right?”

“Yeah… I wonder what the explanation for this is. Who opened it? Why was the door totally impenetrable before?”

Frank shrugged. “Well, video game logic. Either that or our evil dev nemeses weren’t done taking over that part of the world.”

“Right…”

Once again, I tried focusing on the portals, and as expected, still found a portal right in the direction of the new area.

“The portal’s definitely in there. Or somewhere past it, I guess. It’s hard to tell the distance.”

“Cool, let’s go then!”

We passed the gate and into the withered forest that surrounded the city. A few minutes later and we walked out of the forest and on top of a large cliff overseeing… the bubble.

Frank whistled as he eyed it.

“Well, I get why they call it the bubble now. But dammit, isn’t it way too big? It’s like… bigger than that ruined city back there!” He pointed his thumb back into the forest.

“Yeah, it’s… something.”

Simply said, it was a gigantic bubble engulfing what seemed like yet another ruined city. The entire thing was squished down, possibly due to gravity.

According to the wiki, and what people had said on the forums, the bubble periodically switched between being filled with air and water, somehow. You either went there only during the air-filled periods or you had to deal with the change in buoyancy and obstructed movement on top of having some sort of way to breathe underwater.

“Well? What does your scouter say about the portal’s location?”

I raised my eyebrow at the forced reference but tapped into my portal sense nonetheless.

“Still in that direction.” I nodded. “Let’s walk around.”

“Aye aye, captain!”