“Are you guys seeing three of them as well?” Eik asked.

“Yes…” Michael nodded, swallowing hard.

“What do we do?” Heath asked as he raised his shield protectively. “I don’t think I can keep the attention of all three of them or even survive it if I could.”

The three newly arrived guardians stood shoulder by shoulder and briefly eyed the lifeless heap that had been their kin before regarding the Earthlings with cold, yellow eyes. They were completely identical to the first one they killed, with the exception of their eyes.

The one on the right had a single, glowing yellow eye in the middle of its head. The middle one had two eyes with a third in the center of its forehead, while the third on the left had four eyes in total.

“How many of these damn things are going to show up before we can go home? Is this really E-rank difficulty?” Michael asked.

“Well, in an ideal situation we would have had more time to prepare and we would have been able to focus more on the actual practical test rather than getting harassed and wounded by Menka Tokanami’s stupid underlings,” Sonja pointed out.

“Is your Boosted Arrow ready to go yet, Sonja?” Eik asked as he back up and behind Heath’s great shield. “If we could get to one of their cores and destroy it from the get-go then we might just be able to handle the last two.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s still going to be a good while before I can do that again. Not in time to make a difference in this fight anyway.”

The three golems charged and Heath stepped forward resolutely as he repeatedly slammed the wide cheek of his short sword into the front of his shield, the metallic clanging drawing the three guardians to him. Whether they were just dumb or the Sitting Duck trait was doing what it said on the label was a little difficult to tell with any type of certainty, but it gave Eik and Sonja the freedom to scatter to try to get at the bosses from different angles.

Heath took two simultaneous blows at full power, his shield flung violently up over his head, the straps forcing his arm back with the shield. The third guardian rushed in from behind the two others and struck him in the chest as he stood defenseless.

A Single Protection that Michael cast when the three monsters had first arrived shielded Heath from a lot of the direct damage, but he was still thrown off his feet and onto his ass. He rolled backward awkwardly and got to his feet with his shield raised to meet the enemy. Only one of them had changed target.

“Sonja!” Heath screamed as the guardian with only one eye went for her, the many vines making up its body shooting out like snakes to catch her. Her brother dashed for her, avoiding the lunge of the first golem coming at him and bashing away the hands of the next with his shield.

Leading with his sword, he slashed an Unerring Strike across the one-eyed boss’ back, almost severing one of the vines. It ignored his attack and picked Sonja up as he was forced to turn to receive the three-eyed and four-eyed golems.

“Shit!” Eik hissed and leapt onto the back of the one attacking Sonja to pour Profound Toxin onto the cut left by Heath as well as open a few of his own. Almost immediately it tried to wrap vines around him as well even as he threw Sonja to the ground, knocking all air out of her lungs.

Eik jumped back, only barely managing to trigger Accelerant on the toxin stuck to the one-eyed golem while avoiding its attack.

“This isn’t working!” Eik shouted, activating Movement Boost to get to Sonja and pull her out of harm’s way. He got her far enough away from the golem for it to change its mind and go back after Heath who was already struggling with just two. “We need to figure out another way! It’s too dangerous to get close enough to them to damage them.”

“Are there more coming?” Sonja asked breathlessly, supporting herself momentarily on Eik’s shoulder.

Michael scrambled up the slope, clawing through the moss with his fingers to find purchase. He gazed out over the crater for a few seconds before his hand flew up in frantic surprise. He wiggled his index finger agitatedly in the air as if the rest of them were next to him to see what he was pointing at.

“Th— There’s another one coming! It’s coming this way!” he yelled as he slid back down the side of the ridge. “We’re going to die! Aah, crap! We’re definitely going to die this time! Crap, crap, crap! What if they never stop coming?”

“Stay calm, Mikey!” Sonja said, her voice an impressive example of self-control. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it, this part is a simulation. It’s a test. It’s not a real situation with dangers so great that we don’t stand a chance. There must be a way to beat it, and if these things keep spawning indefinitely, then the true solution is likely something else. These horrid golems are probably nothing more than a distraction from the real goal, whatever it may be.”

“So how do we find out what the real solution is?” Heath shouted as he stumbled backwards, his back against one of the large mushroom trunks. A golem’s powerful fist shattered the fleshy fungus stem with a juicy splat, Heath only barely managing to jump out of the way of the strike. “I can’t keep this up! Especially not if there’s another one on the way, and it might not even be the last of them! Sitting Duck’s making them come after me, but if I stop and defend I’ll be killed in seconds!”

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“One of us has to go to the fungus king! They’re obviously protecting it so the answer must be there!” Eik said.

“Eik, you go,” Sonja told him firmly.

“But… what about—”

“Eik, we’re about equal in speed and mobility—”

“Speed maybe, but the way you moved through the speed test back then was absolutely unreal. It was insane, Sonja,” he interrupted.

For the briefest second, a faint smile flashed across her face even during all the chaos. “Thank you for that, but more importantly than that, if you manage to get your toxic little grabbers on something, it tends to perish, painfully and gruesomely. I think you’re the best candidate to go.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll go,” he said and hurried up to look for the best place to descend into the belly of the crater. He found a place where he could clamber down and called to the others. “I’m going, guys! Be careful and stay away from them! Don’t attack, just avoid them as much as possible!”

Nobody answered as they tried to keep the bosses from doing damage to the best of their abilities, Heath eating any attack that couldn’t be avoided while Sonja tried to take some of the heat off her brother by deploying harassment tactics and kiting the golems away from him with her mobility maneuvers.

Meanwhile, Michael threw up another Single Protection on Heath, followed by a surge of Heal to treat the first of the tank’s injuries and refresh the effect of Galvanic Fortification. He used Bind on cooldown at whichever golem seemed closest to hurting one of his teammates. He stayed on the outer perimeter of the fight which seemed to be enough to keep the guardians off him.

Eik slid down the slope, trying to keep his balance as the unstable soil crumbled under his feet. As he got down to the bottom, now eye level with all the striders standing between him and the fungus king towering above everything like a world tree, the distance to the base of the giant suddenly looked significantly more daunting than it had from above.

“How the hell am I going to get through that swarm of creepy crawlies?” he wondered out loud, suddenly feeling a urge to hear a voice, even if it was his own. Being separated from his team here in a foreign and strange world was an unsettling thought to say the least.

As he took the first few steps toward the feeding striders, a movement caught his eye in the periphery of his vision. Something slid down the side of the inner wall of the crater to his right. It was far away still but the shape of the fifth golem was not easily mistaken. At the bottom it stopped and regarded him for a moment like all the previous ones had done. It was almost as if it was… communicating with someone or something.

“You have got to be kidding me right now!” Eik hissed.

Before it could come for him, Eik broke into a sprint heading directly for the countless striders. The moment he made it into the range of the outermost strider’s extensive feelers the first leg came crashing down like a falling battering ram. Unfortunately for the tall strider, Eik was no longer in the location it had aimed for.

He didn’t stop to fight back or assess the situation. He simply continued through toward the next strider without slowing down at all.

A glance to the side told him that the fifth golem was coming at him diagonally from the back. The vines and roots of its body, which had already taken visible damage, were shaved off even further by the spined legs as it moved back in among the hostile striders.

Eik yelped as a gash was opened in his buttock and down the side of his calf. “My freakin’ butt!”

He padded the injury with a hand and it came away bloody. Trying to get his hand into his belt pouch while keeping up the speed proved a challenge, but in the end he managed to swallow another of the poisonous, purple flowers followed by one of his own chunks of medicine.

The golem was now directly behind him but didn’t appear to be gaining any distance on him, which meant that, rather than running into the feelers of feeding striders, it was passing through an area where they were already all agitated and looking for the next victim to impale.

Eik took another close call to the shoulder, but he was beginning to see the end of the killing fields up ahead. Although the striders seemed to be spread out across most of the crater, they weren’t getting too close to the trunk of the fungus king. Almost like there was an invisible wall keeping them away.

Several times he had to traverse the seemingly bottomless pools of water by running across the massive roots weaving in and out of the ground like sea serpents. Falling in and losing him momentum would probably be his death so he tried hard to balance speed with caution.

“Crap, crap, craaap!” he shouted. If he could pass the territories of just four or five more striders without being killed by their leggy harpoons on the way he would be home safe. Or rather, safe from the striders. Whether he was safe in general or in even greater danger this close to the fungus king only time would tell.

He surprised himself by dodging a spiked stomp before activating Movement Boost and jumping forward in a tiger leap, diving for the safe area. He heard the thunks of several legs digging deep into the ground behind him but he made it through. Rolling in a break fall, he got back to his feet and ran for the fungus king.

Right in front of him was a gaunt, frail-looking mushroom with a shriveled cap, barely reaching the top of Eik’s head. That cap was a deep yellow.

To the left and right were two more mushrooms in similar states, looking ready to break and fall over. Their caps were bright green and red respectively.

Judging them suspicious enough to give it a try, he slashed at the yellow mushroom with Viper Fang, the venom drawing a tail in the knife’s path. Before he could make contact, a slim but lighting quick root shot out of the ground to block his attack.

“Shit!” he cursed and fled further toward the main trunk of the fungus king. The golem was coming and, despite the now severe damage to its body, it was too dangerous to confront it alone when it was so strong against his skill set.

He half expected the same roots that had protected the haggard mushroom from coming up to block his path, but he leapt onto and climbed the few first paces up the fungus king without any difficulty. The flesh of the trunk was soft enough that he could dig his fingers and feet in to find purchase.

Trying to get away for long enough to think of a way to solve this predicament he kept climbing, but suddenly froze as something struck him.

It was a feeling that had become familiar.

It was the feeling of the Profound Toxin reaching out to him.

The feeling of Profound Toxin being present in a victim’s system. He dragged a finger across the white surface of the fungus king.

Profound Toxin flowed through the gigantic thing like blood through a circulatory system.