“Someone’s here with us,” Eik said.

“But… how the hell did Menka Tokanami’s people come after us that quickly? Wasn’t Atla supposed to stop them from following us through the fracture,” Heath exclaimed.

Sonja shrugged. “Anything could have happened after we left. If Atla and Mikla were forced to leave the fracture unguarded it probably wouldn’t have been that difficult to get through.”

Eik massaged the bridge of his nose with a sigh of frustration. “From what I can tell, it’s been at least ten minutes since this tall guy was killed but they could still be around here. If they’re looking for us, they aren’t necessarily just wandering around like we are.”

“It’s difficult to tell with all the moss, but I think they went this way,” Sonja said as she examined a series of indentations that resembled foot prints. The direction indicated was not the direction Eik’s team had been moving nor particularly close to the one from which they’d come so they decided to simply continue going as they had been.

“All we really know is that there’s at least one person and that that person uses fire to attack.”

“I think we’re going to have to trust that Atla fixes this whole thing and try to solve this practical as quickly as possible,” Heath said. “preferably before we run into whoever is chasing us.”

"That's a good plan if we're willing to trust that she doesn't actually want us to fight these guys? For the 'experience' and all that," Eik muttered.

The others didn't answer but their faces said they were thinking the same thing.

Going from slow trudge to light jog, they made good time along the stream, eyes on stalks looking for the tall, well camouflaged striders.

Three more of them succumbed to Michael’s tripping tactic before they encountered a new type of monster. At first they mistook it for another strider corpse, but upon closer inspection it was moving and very much not the same beast.

With the appearance of a ghastly cross between an overgrown tadpole and a salamander, the monster dragged its body languidly through a shallow stream on thick, short arm. Hind legs were nowhere to be seen and its movements lacked anything that could be described as grace and fluidity.

Along its back grew several bulbous membranes filled up with some kind of fluid like a balloon. They wiggled from side to side rhythmically as it waddled awkwardly.

Michael pulled the most advanced expression of disgust Eik had seen from him yet. He stuck his tongue out, warped his facial features, and uttered a guttural groan.

“Why does everything here have to be so freakin’ disgusting?” he whined, trying to look away but not quite able to tear his eyes away from the strange life-form.

“Even the trees are like this, for god’s sake!” He flicked a finger against the soft ‘bark’ of one of the enormous mushrooms, the dull rap one might expect from an Earth tree replaced by a meaty thump that would make more sense coming from a raw steak.

“Should we just kill it then?” Heath asked, kicking some water on the thing that barely seemed capable of keeping its own brain from flowing out of its ears.

“I mean, it’s not even reacting, but unlike the creepy strider I’m pretty sure this guy is just too stupid to notice us in the first place,” Eik said.

“Could you shoot it, Sonja?”

They stepped back a few paces just to be on the safe side and then she let an arrow fly. It struck the thing in the side, eliciting a vocal moan like that of a tired old man.

For a moment it stopped and they thought it might be winding up for an attack, but then it simply continued along its wobbly path.

Sonja sent another arrow, the shaft penetrating deeply into the slick body of the large tadpole. Moaning airily again, it shuddered and slumped to the ground, unmoving.

“Uuh, is that it then?” Heath wondered. “Did it die, or...?”

“Don’t know,” Eik said, craning his neck for a better look. “Mike, can you cast a Single Protection on me? Then I’ll go over and check it out.”

Although her face said she hated the idea, he managed to talk Sonja into lending him her bow so he could poke the thing at a bit of a distance. It didn’t respond at all to the provocation.

“It’s definitely not alive anymore.”

“Maybe we can drink the stuff inside those things,” Michael said and gestured to the fluid-filled membranes on the monster’s back. He didn’t look over excited about the idea himself either.

“I’m not drinking that!” Sonja spat. “That’s disgusting!”

“What about in three days?” Heath asked testily. “What about four days? Five? I’ll drink that stuff if we don’t find something else in two days.”

“No, you won’t, jerk,” she answered. “You always try to sound tough but you always back out of all of it, you big braggart.”

“Some of it I don’t back out of!” he protested indignantly.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“Oh yeah, sorry! You didn’t back out of eating a gallon of ice cream in twenty minutes, or getting on that roller coaster again and again until you threw up churros and grilled cheese sandwich,” she countered, rolling her eyes.

“See? Exactly! That’s what I’m saying! Some of it I do do!”

“Hey, kids, how about we find a place to rest for a bit?” Eik suggested. “I could use some more sleep after getting pulled out of bed in the middle of the night like we did.”

In the end, Eik cut off five of the fluid-filled sacks and put two of them in his own rucksack, forcing his three friends to take one each as well. Better safe than sorry, although there was no way he was going to test that damn liquid before it was necessary.

They left the bubbling stream and went further in among the now densely packed mushroom woods to look for a place with enough cover to keep them out of sight of both monsters and Menka Tokanami’s henchmen.

Their bedrolls were thin and flimsy but the mossy ground offered a soft foundation. They took turns at watch and talked about this and that for a couple of hours.

The past week had been stressful for all of them and they all just needed a reminder that not everything was doom, death, war, political intrigue, and multiversal cannibal cults. Even if current events tended to skew more in those directions.

As gloom began to settle over the strange planet the transformation of the landscape was subtle and barely noticeable, but once darkness made its entrance in full a whole different side of the place became very clear.

The moss all around them took on a pleasantly green, bio luminescent glow that cast the world in a markedly different hue than the daylight had. It was like a fairy tale. The undersides of the giant fungi too began to light up, almost as if on cue.

Gentle, humming nuances of purple, orange, and blue from above clashed with the bright, light green from below to create what Eik imagined eight acid trips combined into one must feel like.

Shuddering and stretching as if waking up from an afternoon nap, the broad hats shed layers of glowing specks that rained down like so many snowflakes, covering the ground and their bodies like sprinkles on the cake at a five-year-old’s birthday party. Even slight breezes seemed to carry the little things far.

“It’s beautiful,” Michael said as he looked up into the night sky, his head resting on his backpack.

"I hope it's not toxic," Eik remarked to which he got horrified expressions from his friends.

“Get some sleep,” Sonja said. “I’ll take next watch and then we can continue looking for an end to this thing in the morning.”

As Eik closed his eyes to sleep, the whirr of alien insects lulled him into a restless sleep.

***

“—k! Eik! Wake up quickly! Come on, wake up!” It was Michael and he sounded panicked.

“Wha…?” Eik mumbled, the confusion of sleep slurring his words. “Mike? What’s going on?”

“I’m hearing voices!” the healer said.

Eik raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s new.”

“Not those kinds of voices, you numb-skull!” the young man hissed with uncharacteristic vigor. “Like, actual voices from people nearby! They’re searching for us!”

At this Eik jerked into a sitting position. “Seriously? How did they find us?” he whispered as Michael shook Heath awake. Sonja was already up and alert, peeking around the fat trunk of the large mushroom they had chosen as the site for their overnight camp.

Luckily a lack of firewood had meant a lack of fire so smoke and light wouldn’t be what gave away their position to their pursuers at the very least.

“How did they find us?” Eik repeated as he joined Sonja by the trunk. The look in her eyes was one of absolute focus and he guessed that she was listening with her Bat’s Ears ability.

“I don’t think they’ve found us yet, actually,” she said without looking away. About a hundred meters ahead a group of five people stood in conversation.

Only the bioluminescence from the moss and fungi made it possible to see them at such a distance despite the darkened sky, but even then the would-be assassins were nothing more than faintly flickering silhouettes. Eik could see nothing of their weapons and equipment, or even whether they were humanoid or not.

“What do you mean they haven’t found us? They’re right there!” he said as Heath and Michael came to look as well.

“Yes, but they don’t seem to know that we’re right here,” she said. “I think they’ve been following the corpses of the monsters we’ve killed. When no more corpses appeared after the corpse of the tadpole thing they must have backtracked and expanded their search from there. If they had a proper tracker I think they’d have found us by now.”

“Shit!” Eik hissed. “They’re assuming that we’re still somewhere around here.”

“And they’re right,” Michael added.

They observed the group of a assassins for a while. They seemed to be deep in discussion.

No, that actually didn’t describe very well what seemed to be happening. It was an argument. And one marked by raised voices and irate gesturing.

“What are they doing?”

“I think they’re… fighting?” Michael said.

“But why?”

“Disagreement, maybe?”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Do you think they’re going to come this way?”

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Heath said. “They’re so pissed at each other that I doubt any of them will notice us.”

After another ten tense minutes Heath’s presumption turned out to be true when two of the strangers appeared to get close to throwing fists. A third simply walked away and a few seconds later the others followed.

“Did they leave?” Michael asked.

“I think so.”

For another half hour they kept careful eyes on their surroundings but the pursuers truly seemed to have left.

“I think it’s safe to get some more sleep,” Eik said and, leading by example, snuck back to his bedroll. Sonja took watch.

They set out as the suns dawned the next morning, the glow of the mushrooms and moss giving way to the warming rays. Today they proceeded even more cautiously.

The pursuit team would have to have slept somewhere as well, and Eik and the others couldn’t know how close.

When they made it back to the same stream they had been following yesterday the corpse of the tadpole monster was gone. Dark blue blood had seeped into the earth, but otherwise scattered chunks of meat and fragments of bone were all that remained of the ugly thing.

“Did the other guys eat it?” Michael wondered out loud.

“No way, right?” Eik said.

“I mean, they’re from a different world,” Michael pointed out. “They could be a bunch of weirdos. That, or there are predators here that we haven’t seen yet…”

“Must you absolutely jinx us like that? Now we’re definitely going to run into predators.” Eik moaned.

“Could just have been a strider,” Heath said.

“Yeah, maybe…”

Another two striders fell to Michael’s flawless Bind plus mace to the face tactic and they decided to start hauling the corpses out of the stream and further in to obfuscate their movements. Luckily the striders that resembled spider crabs in form were light enough to be carried away without making obvious grooves through the moss.

As they continued, the junctions of waterways grew more frequent, the streams having gathered enough force to be difficult to wade through. It had to be leading somewhere.

A handful of striders and about three more hours of steady walking later they found out what.

“That… That can’t be real,” Heath breathed, mouth agape.

“I’m not even surprised anymore,” Eik groaned.

Towering high above the mushroom forest like a creepy observatory, at five or six times the height of the already tall ‘trees’, stood what must have been the emperor of mushrooms, cap blacking out the sky.