The teenager could barely talk through all the coughing. “It’s ask… asking me if I—I want to level up?”
Behind her, the girl’s parents’ coughing took on a rasping, rattling quality.
“Something’s wrong,” said the businesswoman before she collapsed to the ground and leaned towards the dirt as if she were trying to pry something out of her lungs through sheer force. Her spouse followed, his face washed of all color as he gasped like a fish, green drool trailing down his chin.
The woman in the sundress lurched, her crowbar dropping to the ground with a limp hand, all her concentration on staying upright as she gasped for breaths through her coughs.
Oh shit. “Accept the level increase and throw all five points into constitution!” said Logan.
The teenager gave Logan a helpless look, her face flushed and her lips blue. “I can’t—can’t breathe. Mom…” Then with one last rasping breath, she collapsed and her eyes fluttered shut.
Jack darted forward and gathered her in his arms, shaking her gently. “Kid! Kid! You need to level!”
But no matter what Jack said or how hard he shook her, the teenager didn’t wake up. Jack rested a finger against her throat for what had to be only a minute but felt like an hour. With a drooping head, he let this hand drop and finally glanced up at Logan with a raw look. “She’s dead.”
“Fuck,” said Logan as he looked at the bodies of her parents. They’d collapsed to the ground face first while Jack had been trying to revive the kid.
The woman in the sundress had managed to lurch to the edge of the clearing. “I’m not—”—cough—“dying today, motherfuckers!” She made it about sixty feet before she dropped to her knees, clawing at her neck before collapsing.
Numb, Logan just stared. In the back of his mind, that slight feeling of swollen gums and a sore throat made sense. The defence mechanism wasn’t just the ejection of spores upon an attack, it was a built-up of the spores in the atmosphere. The fog around them wasn’t fog, it was biological. And Logan had unknowingly asked defenceless people to linger in a clearing saturated in slow-acting death.
Jack got to his feet and turned away, his back facing Logan. He cleared his throat and then whirled around. “Fuck you for making me care, Logan!” His eyes were moist, and his face was haunted.
Logan took a step back in shock.
And then he understood. Jack did care. That unfeelingness he’d been so concerned about had all been a front, a protective instinct to wall off the threat of more pain. After all, if Jack didn’t care, he couldn’t be hurt. Logan had broken that barrier, stumbling into something that he didn’t understand and causing his friend more grief. “You need to get out of here,” Logan ground out, the injustice of the situation hitting him like a sledgehammer. “Your constitution is lower than mine.”
“So you’re just going to ignore all the dead people around us? You were the one who told them to stay here!”
That hit too close to home. “What do you want me to do? I can’t stop people from dying, Jack! All I seem to do lately is get people killed.” He swallowed. “I thought I was doing something good here, trying to make a difference in this fucked up world.”
The mist continued to cling to the clearing as if taunting him and one of the remaining mushrooms on the edge of the clearing swayed drunkenly in the breeze. “If you want to be upset at someone, it’s the asshole that started this in the first place.” It was the System who put the mushrooms here, tempting them with an easy level. The System had killed Eleanor; it had been the System who blew up the cars and planes and stranded everyone.
It was the System who had him arguing with Jack. “Jack,” he said, resting his hand on his arm. “Think, man. Who are you really mad at right now?”
Jack darted his gaze at the body of the teenager and grimaced. “So I can’t go off the handle at you without you calling me out?” he said in a quiet voice. “Since when did you get so wise?”
Logan gave him a soft smile. “You should have a look at my wisdom attribute,” he joked.
Logan glanced at the bodies around them. “I’m not going to lie; this is seriously fucked up. Just when I thought I had a handle on what was going on, we have to deal with biological warfare on top of everything else.”
Jack let out a deep cough and Logan’s anger turned to worry. “You need to get out of here. We don’t know how high your constitution needs to be to avoid getting hurt.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m staying until I kill these things so they don’t lure anyone else. It’s a walking death trap for unleveled people.”
Jack didn’t argue and he seemed relieved to leave the body of the teenager behind. “The mist isn’t too bad at the edge of the clearing,” he said, wheeling the shopping cart over grass and boulders before coming to a stop. “Where’s the woman?”
Logan gave Jack a sharp glance and followed him to the edge of the clearing. Here, the mist was grey rather than violet and thin enough for the sun to break through, illuminating the trees around them. He could have sworn the woman in the sundress had collapsed on this spot.
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Logan crouched, looking at the dirt. He had no idea how to track and would just as likely mistake a dog’s print for a bear paw, but even he could tell that something had happened here. Scores ran through the dirt and mycelium, as if someone had clawed it with their fingernails.
A trickling of hope helped to lessen the guilt that threatened to overwhelm him. If the woman had managed to level up, she might have been able to raise her constitution high enough to survive. “She must have gotten out.”
Jack sighed. “Thank God. And my throat doesn’t hurt anymore. This must be the edge of spores’ toxicity. I’m giving you five minutes to kill those things and then we’re out of here, you hear? Just because you have a higher constitution doesn’t mean you can’t be hurt too. I saw the way you were swallowing.”
Logan gave him a sheepish grin before returning to the clearing. If there was one positive out of this whole shitty situation, at least he felt better about Jack. He wasn’t an unfeeling psychopath, just a man grieving for his family.
All told, they’d already killed three mushrooms and that only left two. However, they’d doubled in size and when Logan used [Idiot’s Inspect], he could see why:
[Noxious Mushroom: Level 5]
[Noxious Mushroom: Level 6]
They must have fed on the deaths of the people in the clearing and leveled up. A mushroom twice the size of the others could generate a heck of a lot of spores, but they were still fungi with the same soft skin. Logan didn’t hesitate. He needed to pulverize the hell out of these things… and if it was a therapeutic way to express his anger, all the better.
Logan ran at the lurching mushroom while swinging his bat, hitting the sides of the mushroom cap to mitigate the risk of the nails sticking into the fungus. After the first swing, he took a chunk out of the top and rushed past, but he soon realized that although he hadn’t been in the direct path of the spores, the thing ejected a plume as big as a fishing net that only added to the toxicity around him. Immediately, he felt his eyes burning and his throat grew tight.
And unlike the other mushroom, it didn’t stop releasing spores just because he wasn’t hitting it. It continued ejecting violet, minuscule spores like an air diffusor. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t in the direct path. And it wasn’t just his eyes and throat burning.
What the hell was going on with his skin? Alarmed, Logan examined his hands. Blisters were forming as if he’d gotten the mother of all sunburns.
He didn’t have time to wait. Either he killed this thing, or he’d turn into an oozing fungus cesspool.
Logan rushed at it, but the mycelium veins had spread underneath his feet, and it was like running over ground that had a thousand uneven rocks that squished at the same time. The mycelium was interconnected tissue, and he couldn’t watch his feet while keeping track of the spores. There was only one way this would go—down.
Logan tripped and fell face first right underneath the gills of the mushroom.
Oh fuck.
Looking up at the underside of the mushroom cap, he realized where the shrieking was coming from, shrieking so loud it blasted his ears. The dark gills weren’t gills—they were mouths, each one shrieking and spewing spores. And because he’d fallen right underneath it, it was ejecting spores right onto his face.
He felt his eyebrows go first, the hair burning to the skin, then the stubble on his face went as if he’d had a close shave. After that, the spores ate into his skin.
Squeezing his eyes shut and praying he wouldn’t lose his vision, he crawled, ducking his head low to the ground, his hand wrapped around the handle of his baseball bat. If he couldn’t see, if he couldn’t breathe, he wouldn’t attack from the top. Logan dug into the dirt, using his baseball bat like a shovel, tearing into the roots and fleshy veins. Every mushroom had a stem, and when his burning hands reached the base, he jabbed the nails of his baseball bat into the flesh. The back of Logan’s head now faced the direct stream of spewing spores, and he felt patches of hair burning away. His throat burned, his esophagus on fire.
[Idiot’s Paradox is Level 4!]
Logan ignored the notification. He only wanted one message. Tearing his fingernails open as he dug into the dirt with one hand and tore the mushroom’s stem apart with his bat, Logan screamed.
Then, with a last slash, something gave way.
Ding!
[You have defeated a Level Five Noxious Mushroom! Extra experience granted for defeating an enemy above your level.]
[You have leveled up!]
Logan didn’t hesitate, relishing in the rush of euphoria and slamming all five points into his constitution attribute. The difference was immediate. Logan gasped, able to breathe fresh air for the first time since this started, but the reality was that nothing had lessened the toxicity around him. It was only his body’s ability to process the spores, filtering them out.
Opening his eyes cautiously, his face streaming tears, he blinked, his vision coming into focus. Logan could see. That was one worry gone. The capped head of the mushroom was on its side, stem shredded to bits. He hacked and spit and cleared his throat as the concentrated mist gradually dissipated. Feeling the back of his head, Logan winced. He still had his hair, but now there were bare patches on his scalp as if someone had dabbed him with hair removal cream.
Holy shit, that was what a level five mushroom could do? He still had the level six one to contend with, but he couldn’t leave it. It would just grow stronger. More people would travel through this path looking for Martin’s Convenience, more people would gather in this clearing. If Logan didn’t act, he’d have more deaths on his hands.
Logan reviewed his XP status: 11,300/16,000.
He was on the cusp of another level, and if the level six mushroom ended up being too much, he could do the same thing again—throw another five points into his constitution attribute to mitigate the damage. Despite the System’s label, he wasn’t an idiot. He’d just avoid showing Jack the back of his head until his hair grew back. Logan grinned, feeling like a madman, but it was undeniable that the thrill of being good at killing the hell out of shit was giving him a boost.
But just because he was feeling the thrill of the hunt, didn’t mean he couldn’t be smarter. It was the ingenuity of humans that made them strong and brute force wasn’t always the answer. There had to be something he could do to make this easier.
Killing the mushroom wasn’t the problem, it was mitigating its defensive capabilities. Spores. Spores in the atmosphere. Logan ran through the problem while studying his hands. His skin was bright red as if he had a massive sunburn, but underneath the sleeves of his dress shirt, he was fine. That meant he could use clothing as a shield.
The direction of the spores was another consideration. Attacking underneath made its offensive capabilities worse since the gill mouths ejected the spores downward. Although his instincts were telling him not to be higher up due to the ominous look of the fog, by the time the spores rose in the air, they had to be diluted.
What if he attacked from above?