Not one of the Myconid Travelers so much as looked backward as they wove through the massive maze of fungus. Tori stared at them, spells at the ready, but they seemed focused and intent on moving through the dungeon as efficiently as possible. After a few minutes, she looked over her shoulder. “There’s another group about three hundred feet back,” she whispered.

  I checked. Sure enough, another pack of ten or so Travelers was lumbering along, the spore-filled air turning them into vaguely humanoid blurs. “Let’s pick up our pace a little. They’re not going to look backward.”

  “How do you know?” Tori asked.

  I shrugged. “This all feels like an assembly line. I don’t know if the Travelers are even sentient. They barely reacted to us killing the previous wave earlier.”

  She hesitated. Then she nodded. “Alright.”

  We closed the gap until the group of a dozen in front of us was only fifteen or twenty feet ahead. Sure enough, none of them reacted. They ducked into an opening below one of the intersections of the massive rings—we seemed to be following the ripple-like structure—and cupped something in their hands. It dripped from the ceiling above the intersection.

  I waited until all twelve were done, then ducked forward. “Let’s check it out.”

  When I got there, to my surprise, I felt something familiar. The ringing in my ears. The feeling I’d felt all throughout the last phase.

  The substance was resonant. That meant…”I think it’s Charge,” I said.

  “That makes sense. If dungeons run on it, and you were feeling it in the Stronghold and the other dungeons, it has to be here, right? But what do you think they’re doing with it?” Tori asked.

  “I have no idea.” I stepped past the dripping, bright orange liquid and hurried to catch up to the group of Travelers. The further we walked, the more convinced I got that they weren’t sentient. There was no intelligence here; they were nothing but walking mushrooms. Not that they weren’t dangerous, but they weren’t aware in the same way a lot of dungeon monsters had been.

  That tracked with what I’d seen from the Fungal Surge, too. It hadn’t fought intelligently. Instead, it had reacted when Tori had provoked it—then hadn’t even followed up.

  After almost two minutes of walking, the Myconid Travelers turned, heading straight for the center of the ripples. We kept following them as they formed a long, single line and filed up a rough, soft ramp made from thick green fungus. Then, one at a time, they lowered their cupped hands and dumped the liquid into a basin. The basin wasn’t full, though. In fact, it looked almost completely drained. As I looked up, I realized why.

  Node Two: Level Eighty-Eight Dungeon Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Extreme

  The Nodes are the life-givers for the entire Mycopolis. They stabilize the fungal ‘city,’ regulate it, and provide it with everything it needs. In return, the city will defend them to the death.

  That was it. No rules. No affixes. Nothing but a short description and a massive, yellow thing suspended in the air by gigantic pillars of fungal matter that looked like elephant’s legs. Tendrils hung down into the basin below, forming a half-shroud as they drained what was left of the orange liquid and sucked it up into the Node.

  I blinked at the massive thing. Then I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Tori. Looks like it’s a tear-down job. Ever done demolition?”

  “There was an old vintage space game about it,” she said. “You played as a freedom fighter on one of Jupiter’s moons or something.”

  “Okay. Cool. That’ll have to do.”

  The mech appeared, its three-toed feet sinking into the fungal mat below it before rebounding slightly. I climbed in. “Let’s get started. I’ll go left, you go right. When the next wave gets here, we kill them and keep going. Easy.”

  It wasn’t that easy.

  The moment my first grenade went off against Node Two’s massive support pillars, spores rained down from above. So did something heavier. They hit the ground in a rain of wet-sounding thuds, and the mech-mounted Bio-Electric Scanner went crazy as it lit up with eight new lights.

  Mycopopop: Level Eighty Monster (Rank One)

  Each of the new dungeon monsters looked like a small, short mushroom with black, scaly flesh on its head and a tofu-looking white body everywhere else. They rolled to their feet, spores coating the fungal mat behind them, and started waddling toward me. I leveled the grenade launcher and fired again.

  Whump!

  Fungus sprayed across the walkway surrounding the empty basin. A Mycocopop exploded into dozens of pieces. Goop splattered against the mech’s armor. But even as the monster died, a smaller one pulled itself from its corpse.

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  Mycropop: Level Seventy-Eight Monster (Rank One)

  This one was green—an almost black shade of green, in contrast to the rest of the Mycopolis. Its flesh was more wrinkled and almost wooden, and it moved much faster than the Mycopopop had. I put two rail gun rounds into it, and it stopped moving. But that left seven more of the original fungi—and worse, the Myconid Travelers in the next wave were closing in.

  “Tori, plan change! I’ll do monster control. You tear down the Node!”

  “You say so,” Tori said doubtfully. I understood why; it was the opposite of how we usually worked. But in this case, her spells were doing meaningful damage to the fungal supports. The wound my grenade had ripped into the first pillar had already mostly healed, and while Tori hadn’t taken hers down yet, all her scaling gear was paying off. Every Push and Pull tore more and more fungus away than the last blow.

  I backed up, following Tori down the right path and stepping over the corpse of the Mycropop. The mech’s feet crushed it as I pushed toward her, then stepped in behind her. More of the black-rimmed fungi rained down, and I loaded up another grenade and fired.

  It hit a cluster of three—two of the older ones, and one new one. This time, though, I didn’t get just one Mycropop per kill. I got five total. Another grenade slotted into the launcher, and a little more Charge went into cycling as it launched, detonated, and took out the wrinkled, wood-like fungi.

  “Tori, hurry it up!”

  “I’m working on it!” Tori snapped back. She cast Crush, and the first pillar buckled and parted. Spores and Mycopopops rained down—some of the fungi hit the basin below, melting on contact with the liquid that could only be Charge inside of it.

  “Work faster!”

  Grenades fired as fast as the mech’s systems could load them and I could refill the ammo bays from my inventory. My rail gun was in danger of overheating. And the Voltsmith’s Grasp and mech’s charge levels were both starting to drop. Tori sprinted to the next pillar and started casting as the first Mycropop reached the mech’s leg. It detonated like a land mine, and an alarm sprang to life as flashing lights went off in the cockpit. I’d taken damage. Significant damage. It’d be reparable—probably—but it’d take work.

  Then Tori pumped a fist. “Yes!” she shouted.

  “Tell me some good news,” I said.

  “It’s one entity!”

  “And?”

  “All my gear cares about is that I’m attacking the same entity!” She cast Crush again, and the second pillar broke. Then the third.

  More and more damage warnings went off as Mycopopops exploded around me, spewing smaller monsters onto the walkway. A shadow moved overhead, and I spun the mech around. The leg that’d taken damage buckled, but didn’t break. “Get down!” I yelled.

  “Huh?” Tori asked.

  Then I hit her with all two tons of mech, knocking her to the ground and bracing the machine’s arms and legs as best I could. A second later, the Second Node fell onto my back, driving us both down into the fungal mat. It broke apart, rolling off the platform onto the path the Travelers were taking and into the basin.

  Boss Defeated: Node Two

  Level Up! X to X

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  “You okay?” I asked as I maneuvered the mech off of Tori.

  She glared up at me. “That cost me a Body point. But yeah, I’m fine. Totally fine. Thanks for the assist, I guess. What’d we get?”

  I glanced over at the broken, fading remnants of Node Two. Then I did a double-take. “What do you think orange means?”

  She pushed herself off the ground, face shifting from annoyed to confused and then to thrilled in the space of a second. “Legendary loot!”

  Elixir of Lifegiving (Legendary)

  This Elixir can repair any damage to any living thing. However, it spoils forty-eight hours after being removed from its host dungeon.

  Tome of Mycropop Summoning (Epic)

  User learns the spell Mycropop Summoning, which creates one fungal Mycropop for every three seconds spent channeling the spell. If the spell is channeled for more than fifteen seconds, eight Mycropops will be created instead. Each summon has a base level of ten below the caster.

  Mycopolis’s Pillar (Legendary, Charge 30)

  +16 Mana, +10 Body

  This hammer’s wielder may create and destroy barriers of fungus up to three times per day. These barriers appear as vertical fungal mat, and span either thirty feet by thirty feet or the distance between two solid surfaces. The fungal barriers solidify into something approaching stone over three minutes.

  “That Elixir…” Tori stared at it. I could practically see the saliva building up—and I couldn’t blame her. It was incredible. Easily the most powerful item we’d ever gotten. Any living thing was an incredibly broad category. I didn’t know what she wanted it for, but I did know two things.

  First, that it could fix the arm I’d lost fighting Taven Liu.

  And second, that it could almost certainly do more than that.

  I flexed the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s fingers as Tori watched me. My metal fingers weren’t as good as my real ones. They didn’t have the same level of dexterity, and I doubted they ever would. And Jessica had been very clear that she couldn’t fix my missing arm. Neither could Body points. This was what my body was now. And that elixir promised to fix that.

  “Hal, take it,” Tori said.

  “You’re sure?” I asked. She nodded, and I reached out, grabbed the bottle, and pulled it into my inventory. “Okay, I’ll take it, but I’m not using it yet. It’s too valuable to spend until we have to. We’ll have two days after we leave here to figure out what to do with it.”

  “Understood. I guess you’re taking the Pillar, too, huh?” Tori grinned. It seemed forced; she cared a lot about loot, and she wasn’t getting anything that fit her build from this. “No problem. I’ll get something for myself soon.”

  I nodded and picked up the Pillar. It slotted into my gear nicely, and gave me something to do if the mech wasn’t out that wasn’t ‘try to shred things with the Voltsmith’s Grasp.’ It also had some fascinating utility. Sure, it was a mix of hot pink and safety vest green that made me sick to my stomach, but some sacrifices had to be made.

  The mech’s leg needed a few minutes of work to get it back to full functionality—damage to the joint was a problem. While I worked, Tori kept herself busy by summoning Mycropops to fight the sporadic tides of Travelers arriving at the wreckage of the Node.

  We’d won a solid victory, but I was still disappointed. As I finished up with the mech and pulled it back into my inventory, I looked around for any sign of Charge resonance. There was plenty—but none of it was coming from the destroyed basin. The aftermath of the fight had removed an opportunity to learn more about Charge, and I couldn’t let that happen again.