Hazel accepted the [Chainmail of the Emberheart], the chainmail vest hanging in the second row of loot. All three choices disappeared, her selection made, and the orange-hued metal link vest appeared in front of her, which she grabbed before it fell to the ground.

“Of course, the effects won’t be useful on you,” Mia said. “But the passive defense bonuses are what you care about, which all armor comes with. Even unpractical-seeming armor can protect you.”

“Like yours?” Hazel asked. Obviously, her skimpy succubus outfit didn’t provide much real protection, going by the normal laws of—well, how the world worked. She had assumed that the effects that came with the armor outweighed the protection deficiencies, but maybe armor simply worked differently, here. She wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.

“It’s cloth armor, so not fantastic,” Mia said, “but yes, it affords me protection against most forms of attack to some degree or another. Even the places it doesn’t cover.”

“Interesting,” Hazel said. “But how do you tell how good each piece is if it doesn’t come with a defense rating or something like that?”

“It can be inferred. Chainmail is medium armor. This one is a level five common. So we have a rough approximation of how strong it is.”

“But only rough?”

“How else?”

Hazel shrugged. “A grade? Like our stats.”

“I suppose,” Mia said. “But no. There’s no such thing, though armorers have systems to rate a piece of armor’s effectiveness against different categories of damage. Appraisals like that are expensive, though, and, if you’re stress testing it, risk breaking the equipment. This is all besides the point. Go ahead and try it on.”

Hazel did so. She slid into the chainmail and accepted the equip prompt. The moment she did, something strange happened. The metal links dissolved into green slime and joined her body. Baffled, Hazel stared down at herself, where no trace of the armor remained. It had simply been absorbed into her.

“Looks like slimes don’t wear armor,” Mia said. She stepped up to Hazel and placed a hand on her shoulder, which prompted another confused look from Hazel, not knowing why she’d done so. Mia rolled her eyes. “I’m checking for the warming aura. And yes, it’s there. So you still get the effect. Not that a cold environment would have been a problem for you either way.”

“So I’m wearing it?”

“Yes. There’s just no physical piece of armor. But I bet your body is more durable now, and you get all the effects of the armor.” She shrugged. “Slimes will stay how slimes naturally are, I suppose, and can’t really wear armor—aesthetically speaking.” Mia stepped away, withdrawing her hand. “Consider yourself fortunate. Having physical gear would make shapeshifting tricky. Though I suppose the armor could simply have morphed with your body.” She shrugged again. Then, her face turned sour. “And at least you don’t have something as absurd as this.” She tugged at her skirt, then frowned down at her cleavage.

Hazel politely didn’t comment. She was more distracted by how the armor had literally melted into her body. It was pretty weird to think about. “How do I get it out? Do I just—? Oh, yeah. That works.” Thinking about removing the armor resulted in an unequip item prompt. “Weird.”

With her scythe and primary armor piece equipped, Hazel’s attention turned to the last of the three rows of loot. The bottom row, Mia had said, comprised the ‘mundane’ loot of the chest, the items that could all be taken, rather than being a choice. Hazel scanned them. There was a collection of what she would expect: first, bronze essence coins and even a single silver, which apparently made Rift delving far more lucrative than the regular dungeon, then secondly, along with the coins, there were three potions: two health and one stamina.

Mana potions existed, Mia had mentioned, but they were expensive and reserved for emergencies. They also had much longer cooldowns than health and stamina potions, which themselves couldn’t be spammed.

Naturally, Mia gathered the loot and put it into her inventory. She paused before depositing the health potion, then looked at Hazel with a frown. “Here,” she said. “Take this. In case you get hurt.” She tossed the vial filled with red liquid, and Hazel caught it.

“Thanks.”

“They can also be used as salves and general medicines,” Mia said. “Drinking it provides the fastest, most comprehensive results, but if you want to ration the liquid, then applying it to a bandage make them go much further. That’s how commoners use them.”

“Good to know. They’re expensive?”

Mia scrunched her nose. “Less so than much adventuring gear. But yes, adventuring in general is expensive.”

“But also lucrative in return,” Hazel commented, glancing at the loot chest.

“Because it’s frequently deadly. But yes. It pays well.” The loot chest emptied, Mia nodded to herself. “Let’s carry on.”

They did so.

Over the following hour, Hazel discovered that there was an upside to being too weak to participate in Mia’s fights. Having received a scythe, a weapon she had no experience with, Hazel had training to undergo. A lot. A scythe wasn’t a weapon that could simply be wielded, as perhaps a club could, or to a lesser extent, a sword, axe, or mace.

So while Mia worked her way through the Rift with her charmed snake companion acting as the frontline, Hazel hung back and oriented herself with her weapon. There was a possibility their adventure would yield another selection of weapons, but loot chests were rare, and weapons uncommon inside them. They had gotten equally lucky by the early drop as they’d been unlucky in receiving an unconventional, difficult to use one.

The good news was that her empowered strength and dexterity made handling the weapon easier than it should have been. The long shaft with a curved blade at the end was nearly weightless in her hands despite the size. Adventurers with ‘F-‘ grade strength were already stronger than the typical adult human, from what Hazel could surmise, and she’d progressed from F- to F through her [Attribute Siphon] ability. More importantly her boosts to dexterity—which had unfortunately stayed in F- thus far—boosted her natural ability to control her body.

Her limbs obeyed her in a way they never would have on Earth, and she intuited natural ways to swing the scythe. She was no dancing acrobat of steel, but even with the brief practice, she learned how to hold and swing the weapon in a way that could at least deal damage—and from a good distance away, rather than up close and personal as with her rock.

In short, after some time familiarizing herself with the weapon, Hazel could say that she was much too unskilled to bring a scythe’s full ability to bear, but more than capable of using it in simple combat. In the end, the goal was simply to cut open the enemy, and her supernatural dexterity provided barebones competence in that.

Eventually, she felt comfortable in joining in on Mia’s fights in small ways. Namely in rooms that had many weaker enemies, where Mia and her snake would handle the majority, and Hazel would sneak in and try her hand at a single or at most duo of the tiny swarming-type monsters. The larger ones she needed to excuse herself from; she’d be a liability.

She discovered something fortunate in these encounters. Her [Attribute Siphon] ability worked using her scythe as a conduit. The weapon counted as ‘making contact’. That indicated that she might want to continue using long-range weapons like the scythe, or perhaps a spear, polearm, or something similar.

In less than an hour, her dexterity stat progressed to F, as did her constitution. Intelligence and wisdom stayed at F-. Those would better be siphoned from magic type monsters, which were rare compared to physical-type ones.

The labyrinth of courtyards seemed to be endless, but Mia quickly mapped the landscape out—the manual way, with her brain rather than being aided by the system, lacking a map module. Rifts opened up into the proper dungeon in many places, according to Mia, and they weren’t here in the Courtyards to gain experience, loot, or to find a boss; they simply wanted to escape, and Mia figured the section of the Gray Stone Hollows that they had been in prior was secluded from the rest. She assumed that by exiting in a different location of the Courtyards, it would be easier to find their way to the surface.

With that in mind, they explored every nook and cranny of the complex. Underground wine cellars were common, as well as other sorts of storage rooms and basements. Those would be where an exit was, Mia said. Loot chests showed up in them sometimes, though with more lackluster items than ones found in the courtyard proper, which were guarded by monsters and so provided better rewards. They collected various knickknacks, and Hazel acquired two accessories and a piece of minor equipment. Nothing particularly that fit her class, but just starting out, any sort of bonus was better than nothing.

About two and a half hours into their Rift adventure, trouble found them.

Descending into an innocuous seeming cellar—or as innocuous as the rest—the moment Hazel’s goo-like foot touched the cold stone floor, the trap door above them snapped closed with a loud clang that threw up dust in every direction. Both of them spun to stare at it.

Mia’s posture stiffened, and her eyes went from the trapdoor to Hazel, then back.

“Oh,” she said. “That isn’t good.”

“What? What happened?” Hazel’s eyes widened as she saw something over Mia’s shoulder. “And what is that?”

At the far end of the room, which was much larger than most of the wine cellars previous, and emptier as well, was a large cauldron filled with some kind of black liquid—tar that boiled and popped, droplets flinging and splattering across wine racks and the stone floor.

“I believe,” Mia said, “that we just wandered into an unavoidable miniboss fight. They’re not common. Usually you can just leave. You should’ve been staying behind and letting me clear these rooms myself.” She eyed the trapdoor again, which had slammed shut on them. She didn’t move to try to open it, and Hazel intuited that was because Mia knew it wouldn’t budge. “Yes, this really isn’t good.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Well, you can handle it, can’t you?”

“I’m not worried about myself,” Mia hissed. “I can handle a level five miniboss, yes. Alone, it would be unpleasant, but certainly doable, else I wouldn’t have come to this Rift at all. But keeping you alive? Or rather, both of us? Our odds are much worse.”

Ahead of them, black liquid poured from the cauldron, quickly taking shape. Tar coagulated and joined, piling upward, and a torso emerged, then two arms, a head.

“Oh,” Hazel said.

The severity of the situation sank into her. She’d had a kind of laid back attitude toward her transmigration through worlds, for some reason, even despite the violence she’d seen and partaken in. She guessed the whole thing had felt surreal enough she’d detached herself from it all. But in face of this development, some of her rationality returned. She stared at the boiling pot of black liquid, the monster emerging from it, with apprehension that was quickly turning to fear.

It wasn’t even the danger she was in that finally snapped her out of it—or at least that wasn’t the biggest factor. It was that Mia herself was at risk, especially combined with the innate, unquestioning assumption Mia had made—that she would try to protect Hazel, regardless of the risk that doing so put her in. Hazel didn’t even think Mia realized there was a choice to be made. That she could ignore Hazel and worry about herself, and if Hazel died, then that was her fault. But Mia didn’t even seem to have considered the possibility.

“Just—just stay behind me,” Mia said. “I’ll do my best.” Her tone implied she wasn’t at all confident about things would turn out.

Hazel gripped her scythe and, doing as she’d been told, braced herself for a fight.