Chapter 81 - Rampant Growth

  The doors swung inward, revealing a huge open space inside the structure. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this! I’d figured there might be monsters inside. Maybe some new challenge to face? But there was no sign of life within, just a huge, vaulted hall that stretched back the full length of the building.

  At the back, though, there was something. I couldn’t make it out, at first, because my NightVision was having trouble differentiating between the brightness of day outside and the total darkness within. But as the doors finished opened, I realized that the back of the building sloped down. It looked like there might be a ramp to a lower level back there.

  “What do you see?” Alex called out.

  “Not much,” I shouted. I walked up to the foot of the stairs set against the front of the building. Those led up to the doorway. If I wanted a really good look at whatever was in the back there, I’d need to climb the steps. “Might be a tunnel or something in the back. I’m taking a closer look.”

  I climbed the stairs with caution, watching for any movement within, signs of traps underfoot, or other dangers. I could have just flown up the stairs instead, but then we’d have no idea if walking across them triggered any reaction from the place, and of all of us I was the best prepared to deal with anything I triggered.

  Nothing happened. There was no reaction whatsoever from the building. I walked all the way to the top of the steps and peered inside the place.

  The interior walls looked the same as the exterior. They were made of the same flat, dark grey stone slabs. The construction looked seamless to me. I couldn’t spot any places where different pieces of rock met one another, except for maybe the corners. It looked like each wall was roughly carved from a single massive block.

  In the far back was the sloping passage I’d spotted from a distance. It did indeed lead downward, sloping away at about a thirty degree angle, veering down sharply. There was a faint green glow emanating from the lower level, but I couldn’t see anything else.

  I left the steps and walked right up to the threshold, but still nothing popped out to attack me. Maybe there just was no threat here, but I still didn’t trust the place. I stepped forward, crossing the line where the doors stood when they were closed.

  That got the activity I’d been looking for.

  As soon as I crossed the invisible line where the doors had stood, something made a tremendous booming sound from somewhere below. That was followed by more booming, like something massive was stomping its way toward me.

  “Got something,” I called back over my shoulder. “I think we’re about to have company!”

  I heard Alex barking orders outside. When I glanced back, he and a dozen of his people were already racing forward to back me up, which I appreciated. Sure, I could hopefully take whatever it was that was down there, but a little help never hurt anyone.

  The booming steps continued, and I whipped my attention back to the ramp as soon as I saw a hint of movement there. Something was coming up to greet us.

  Something big.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It stood a good twenty feet tall and had a wide top, something like a tree. With each footstep, more of the creature came into view, until the shape finally made sense.

  It was a mushroom. A massive, twenty-foot-tall mushroom with legs and arms. It had eyes and a mouth directly under the mushroom cap that made up most of its head. Each arm ended in something like a seed pod. The legs were a pair of titanic stalks.

  “Whoa. Wasn’t expecting that,” Alex said as he came up alongside me.

  “Me, either,” I replied.

  “It’s tier eight. That makes it one of the toughest monsters we’ve seen so far. You think we can take it?” Alex asked.

  “I’m tier nine,” I replied.

  “Not what I asked.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see as we have much choice. If we don’t defeat it, it’ll be free to wander loose and terrorize people, right? If the thing shows up to your front door, what’s the plan?”

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  “Sauté it?” Ruiz asked, chuckling.

  I grinned at the idea. “I don’t know. I always heard that eating random mushrooms was bad for your health.”

  “Good point,” Ruiz replied. He drew a sword from a scabbard at his belt. “Ready to fight on your orders, sir.”

  “Hold back,” Alex replied. “Let’s see how much damage we can do at range, first. Cameron, you’ve got Lightning Bolt too, right?”

  “Sure do,” I said.

  “Let’s hit it.”

  We both raised our hands and did our best force-lightning impressions. Blasts of electricity flew from our outstretched palms, arcing through the air toward the monster. It kept coming at us right up until the bolts hit, then froze in place as the lightning wreathed its giant form, coruscating over its body.

  Parts of the mushroom cap glowed red as the blasts poured enough energy into its form to burn it. The fungus creature staggered, barely keeping its feet. Then our spells ended, the Lightning cut off, and the monster shook itself briefly before starting toward us again.

  “I think we hurt it?” I said.

  “Some, but not enough. Spears forward,” Alex said. “See if we can lock it down.”

  Four men rushed in, each carrying a long spear with a cross bar. Those were new. So was the sword Ruiz held. Alex’s crafters must have been hard at work, making tons of new weapons for his people.

  The spearmen formed a loose half circle around the fungus creature, then jabbed it in the chest with their weapons. The spear heads sank into it all the way up to their cross bars, but still the monster made no sound. Maybe it was voiceless? I kept expecting it to scream, yell, cry out in pain…something! But there wasn’t any reaction to the attack except for it to try to take another step forward, and fail.

  The spears were holding it back. Mostly, anyway. All four men had lost a few inches when the creature tried to continue its forward march. They’d been forced back a bit, their boots slipping across the stone floor. But they’d managed to slow it substantially, anyway.

  It looked down at the men holding it back for the first time and cocked its head to the side, almost like it was seeing the people in front of it for the first time. It tried to take another step, and again the spearmen held it back. Stymied, the creature brought its pod-like hands forward.

  For a moment I thought it was trying to reach for them, which wasn’t a threat, because the arms were too short. Those spears were all long enough that the men were well out of harm’s way. So long as all four of them kept the pressure on, the creature just couldn’t reach them.

  But it wasn’t trying to. Instead, it held the arms directly in front of it, stretching them as close as they could get to its attackers.

  “Alex, pull your men back…” I started to say.

  He’d already realized something was up and was calling out similar orders. “Pull back! All of you, back away from the thing!”

  His men were veterans of the Karabos war. They knew about magic, knew how to fight, and had been through enough battles against magical beings to know when they needed to react quickly. All of them tried to back away, darting back and yanking their spears free from the monster.

  The man on the far left of their arc found his spear stuck fast, though. Part of the cross bar had embedded itself in the monster’s body, and the man strained to pull it free.

  “Leave it!” I shouted to him.

  Too late.

  Both pods opened up, splitting into four segments like a flower blossom opening, but it wasn’t petals set inside them. They were packed full of fungal spores, which shot toward us as soon as the pods opened up.

  The man with the stuck spear saw the danger, now. He dropped his weapon and backpedaled away from the creature as fast as he could, but it was too little, too late. The spores settled around him, drifting down. He began coughing immediately.

  The other three spearmen were about to rush forward to grab their fellow, but Alex halted them with a word. “Stop! Everyone, back up down the steps. No one go near Roberts. He’s contaminated with whatever that stuff is. Keep clear!”

  Roberts kept moving, stumbling and coughing as he backed away from the monster, which continued its steady march forward again, now that it was freed from the spears. He turned away from the creature, giving me my first look at the man’s face since he was sprayed with the spores.

  It wasn’t pretty. A patch of green mold was spreading across the right side of Roberts’ face, and a few small mushrooms had taken root in his skin, growing at an incredible rate. They were already an inch tall and expanding quickly.

  “Help me! Please” Roberts called out, staggering down the steps toward us.

  He stumbled and fell to his knees, then screamed and started scratching at his face with both hands. He clawed some of the fungi away from himself, but more grew to replace the ones that he tore out.

  “There has to be something we can do!” I said to Alex.

  Alex shook his head, grimacing. “We have one person with healing crystals, Cameron. She’s back at City Hall. Even if you fly to get her, you’re not going to get back in time.”

  “Damn it, we can’t just stand here!”

  “I’m open to ideas,” Alex replied.

  I didn’t have any, either.

  The fungus monster loomed over its hapless victim now. It reached down with one arm, almost like a caress, and touched the top of Roberts’ head, spraying another dose of spores all over him.

  That was too much. Roberts coughed several more times, each hacking sound followed by a wheezing gasp as he tried to suck in air. All around him, glittering spores sparkled. Every breath the man took was just drawing more of them into his lungs, and God only knew what they were doing in there. My guess was, nothing good.

  Roberts fell forward, face-first against the steps. I was pretty sure he’d stopped breathing.

  “Shit. Keep backing up, everyone!” Alex called out. “Stay far enough back that you don’t get any of that crap on you.”

  His people listened, staying close to the two of us as we gave the monster more room. We’d already lost one man. We didn’t want to lose more.

  But I had zero idea how we were going to stop this thing.