The mushrooms all looked pretty typical. Wide caps, stumpy arms, stumpy legs, no visible eyes. They had sensed the presence of humans, somehow, and were even now waddling vaguely in their direction. Josh used Identify on one almost as an afterthought.

Fungi Grappler Level 31 Monster Look, I don't know what to tell you. It's a mushroom that tries to wrestle with you. No, it doesn't have any special poison or explosive powers. It just grabs you and tries to beat you to death. It's super boring. Oh, I guess it has one special ability you should know about: It's all but immune to blunt force trauma. Wow, it's a good thing three quarters of your party aren't specialized in blunt weapons like hammers and fists. Fun fact! If you make a single “fun guy” joke, I'm turning off your System access for a week.

Josh paused. Turn off System access... Now wasn't that a horrifying thought. But was it even possible? If it was, and the System could do it for bad puns, word would have spread by now.

There were many theories on what, precisely, the System was. It was connected to the Tower, that much was obvious. It had been proven that the Jungle granted power independent of the System, so the most common theory was that the Tower was an artificial addition and limitation to make the power of the Jungle easier for intelligent beings to use.

The problem was, that didn't really explain whether the System itself was intelligent. Sure, it made references to human culture and sometimes spoke in the first person, but that could easily be explained away as random fluff generated by an unintelligent program. Before the Tower, human technology could fake a computer with a personality without too much trouble.

As far as Josh knew, the System had never gone so far as to threaten someone. Or worse, actually carry out a threat. Maybe it was just more fluff, randomly generated when a possibility of a pun came up. There was really no way to know for sure, and Josh wasn't going to test it.

He looked at the ceiling of the cave. “You're not really going to turn off my access, right?”

Of course, there was no answer. There never was. If people could get a response just by yelling at the System, the world would be a very different place. Even a basic tutorial would be wonderful.

He shook his head to clear it. What was he doing? The monsters were closing in, and he was off in the clouds, contemplating nature and existence and all that muck.

Ruth held up a grenade in one hand. After they had suffered in the bug dungeon due to a lack of supplies, the two of them had made a lot of grenades. They all had four of them hanging from their belts, and they had spares. These were still the steam and shrapnel grenades, not true magic grenades, but they were effective.

Before Ruth could throw the grenade, Darius stopped her with a raised hand. “Why don't we hold off on that for a moment? They are still a limited resource.” He nodded at Josh. “I think you should start us off.”

Josh raised an eyebrow, but he didn't exactly disagree. He just thought the clump of mushroom men was a perfect target. He shrugged, took out his ax, very specifically did not wince at the feel of his missing fingers on the haft, and readied his combat art again.

He had earned the [Empty Chop] art by combining his [Chop Tree] technique with his [Hands-Free Crafting] spell, essentially letting him chop with an ax even though he hadn't had an ax at the time. Not only was it an art, a combination of a physical technique and a magical spell that received all the benefits of both, but it was a combat art. Any combat abilities were extremely difficult to earn for a [Utility] class. He suspected that the only way to do so was through strange loopholes like what he had used. He wasn't sure if he would ever get another.

The point being that the art was very strange for a [Crafter]. Using it on its own, without a weapon, sent out a short invisible chop of energy. Exactly as if he produced all the force of an ax, without the ax. Using it with a weapon sent out a wide wave of energy, barely visible to the naked eye. Well, visible to his naked eye. With his ridiculous Perception and Sensitivity, he could see a lot of things that shouldn't be possible.

Regardless, this wave of energy crashed into the crowd of mushroom men, chopping through half a dozen of them as easily as if they were mundane mushrooms on a cutting board. Unfortunately, this didn't slow down the rest of them at all, and they charged over the corpses of their fellows even as red light leaked out of the bodies. It turned white and streamed around them without care, until it found Josh and he breathed it in.

He glanced at his experience notifications, but it was nothing impressive. Fighting monsters of a lower level than yourself barely got you any experience. This entire crowd might give him a reasonable bump all together.

He jogged back over to his team, easily outpacing the mushrooms. The range on the [Empty Chop] wasn't great, but it was enough to keep him out of reach of the mushrooms. Between that and their short little legs, he had absolutely no fear of them catching him while he was awake.

Ruth gripped her hammer, looking nervously between Josh, the mushroom men, and Darius. “So... what, is he just going to whittle them down a handful at a time?” Josh had killed half a dozen, but there were easily twenty or thirty left. He'd empty his laughable stamina and mana pools trying to handle them all himself.

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Darius raised a questioning eyebrow at Josh, who raised a hand in surrender. “Hey, I'm all for nabbing what experience I can, but I don't think we have the time to burn on this. Best finish it up and keep looking, yeah?”

Once Darius nodded at that, Ruth pulled out her grenade again, threw it into the crowd of mushroom men, and detonated it remotely. The blast echoed impressively in the cavern, and dust rained down from the ceiling. Josh rubbed his ears and winced.

There were only two survivors, and Darius and Beor handled them even with their handicaps. They both fought with their fists, which weren't all that effective here—though at least Beor had actual offensive techniques. Still, resistant to blunt damage or not, they were still just mushrooms. Both men dispatched their targets in under a minute.

They started sorting through the pile of human corpses, looking for anything valuable or at least a means of identifying them. They were too rotted to ID them based on their faces, so Josh pointed out that the families might appreciate having something of their children. Dog tags, favored rings, anything that they could use to remember them.

They didn't find much, but they put what they could into Josh's storage ring. A couple families who were missing their delvers might appreciate having the question answered. Even if in the worst way.

They also all agreed to incinerate the bodies on their way out. They couldn't do it right now, because creating so much smoke in enclosed tunnels was a bad idea, but they could do it when they were leaving. Ruth just needed to carve a Pyro rune in the middle of the pile and overcharge it from a distance.

Once they had everything they needed, Josh crushed one of his runestones to boost up his Capacity by an extra point. That gave him enough mana to use his Stonesense aura, which he immediately turned on.

Once he acclimated to the sensory overload, he was able to determine the direction they should move in. If they kept moving west, they'd find more caverns and pockets in the stone. Unfortunately, he also noticed some places where the stone was shifting even as he observed it.

“What does that mean?” Ruth asked, gripping her hammer tighter.

“It means there are more monsters,” he said grimly. “Ones that can move a lot of stone, very fast.”

“I would assume earthworms, based on the shapes of these tunnels,” Darius said. Then he sighed. “I want to complain that earthworms should absolutely not be able to tunnel through stone, but I suppose it's far from the strangest thing we've ever seen.” He cocked his head to the said. “Then again, it's likely the only reason the magic has reached down this far at all. I wonder if that is a normal bit of the Jungle's ecosystem, monsters expanding it in every direction...”

“It is,” Josh said, distracted. He hadn't thought about it before, but it was true. “In the early days, Jungle-touched birds and rodents spread seeds around the lands, and Jungle-touched fish and other swimming things got the waters.” It was why quarantine procedures had proven so hilariously ineffective. As Josh understood it, the country had been halfway to constructing a wall around the entire state when they realized the Jungle had already reached the other side of the planet.

Ruth looked down at her hammer. “Worms get splattered by hammers, right?”

“Better than mushrooms, at least,” Josh agreed. “Come on. It's this way.”

It only took a few more twisting tunnels to find the monsters he had sensed making their way through the stone. There were three of them, and they all poked their heads up out of the tunnel floors, sensing their approach. They were not, however, earthworms.

Talpidae Stoneswimmer Level 26 Monster An underground monster adapted almost entirely towards moving through stone at maximum speed, with a few other related abilities to shore up its tunnels so others can pass. Fun fact: A System standard week is eight days. Not sure if you knew that.

Josh paused. That had to be an intentional answer to his earlier question. Unfortunately, there was still no way to prove it, so he just took a deep breath and focused.

The monsters weren't worms, they were moles. Highly corrupt moles that looked more plant than animal at this point. Their fur was dark bark, broken into crags like stone. Their claws looked like pale wood, but were probably stronger than steel even when they weren't using any abilities to enhance them further. Their beady little eyes were like tiny red torches.

Despite all appearances, Jungle-touched animals weren't plants. His sister had dragged him to a few lectures in his day. Dissections and vivisections had proven that the visual similarities were just cosmetic. Monster meat did not burn like wood, nothing in a monster produced seeds, and they gave birth to young or eggs or whatever was normal for their species.

Josh considered all that, as Ruth brought down her hammer and splattered one of the moles into a spray of sap and splinters. She hopped back before the others got in range, green pulp dripping off the head of her massive hammer.

The beast even smelled like sap and splinters, an almost pleasant scent. It was certainly an improvement over the normal smells of dead animals. He shook that thought out again—why was he getting so distracted today?—and attacked the other mole with an [Empty Chop]. He trusted Beor to handle the last one.

Unfortunately, Josh's target dived into the stone, dodging the strike. He had just a brief sight of the monster spreading its claws in front of it exactly like a swimmer parting the water in front of it before it was gone. There was a ripple in the stone, and he thought it looked a little different, but he didn't have time to examine it more closely. Ruth's runelight wasn't the steadiest in the world while she was fighting.

“Lost one,” Josh called, even as Beor crushed the skull of the last mole. “Don't know if it will come back with friends.” It would come back, of course. All monsters went after humans to gain power and grow. The question was whether it would come back alone, attack from surprise, or bring half a dozen more monsters with it.

Darius made an annoyed scoff. “You should have kept your Stonesense aura active.”

Josh rolled his shoulders. “Don't be daft. Can't fight with it on, can I? Even if I was willing to try fighting with weights on, it's blinding to use.” Using his aura reserved so much of his mana that he was left with only a single point. If he had some combat techniques, which used stamina instead, that might be something he could try. But he needed mana for his art, so he couldn't really do that.

Before Darius could respond with a no-doubt cutting remark, the mole returned. It burst through the ceiling of the tunnel, landing right on top of Darius. Darius got his shroud up in time, so Josh didn't even have to feel bad for laughing at him. Ruth and Beor took care of the monster.