For several moments Eik was lost in the feeling of the Profound Toxin surging through the kilometer long underground mycelium network.
His consciousness was pulled in and through the tunnel-like structures. It was as if he had become a part of the Profound Toxin itself. Even in the darkness inside of the extensive body of the fungus king, Eik felt the eagerness of the toxin as his own, and the desire to fulfill its purpose as his own desire.
Being connected to something that was kilometers away was more than a little surreal. His body existed there on the trunk of the king but at the same time he was present far away.
He forced himself out of it and back into his body proper, afraid of what might happen to his self if he didn’t cut it off quickly.
The experience had allowed him to understand the whole area a little better. It was not simply a great mushroom forest with a king reigning silently from its throne in the center. It was one titanic fungus with hundreds of thousands of appendages growing throughout the region. The fungus king did not reign over a forest. The fungus king was the forest.
“This is…” Eik whispered.
“Eik!” a distant voice shouted. “Eik, can you hear me?”
He was careful not to lose his grip on the trunk as he turned to call back. “Heath! I can hear you! What is it? I’m kind of in the middle of something!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.
“Did you do something?” the tank bellowed back. “They just lost interest in us completely! They’re coming for you! We’re on the way as well!
“Nuts!” Eik cursed and looked down.
The guardian had begun to climb up after him and this one had five eyes. Four aligned in a square with the final one in the center of that arrangement, all focused unwaveringly on him.
The golem’s climb was slow and careful. Judging only by the body language of the thing, it was extremely worried about doing any degree of damage to the fungus king. Eik guessed that the need to neutralize him as a potential threat to its fungal liege weighed heavier on its mind than its fear of scratching or cutting the trunk, or it would never have started climbing in the first place.
“Guys!” he howled, the sense of urgency putting a crack in his otherwise immensely manly voice. “I’m going to try something! And I don’t know how it’s going to go! Don’t enter the territory of the striders yet!”
Heath’s voice answered a second later. “Got it! Be careful! And don’t do anything that Mikey wouldn’t do!”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Eik found himself snickering. He appreciated Heath’s ability to alleviate worry with a light-hearted remark. It was a good skill to have when your job involved fighting against monstrous horrors in a chaos of constant death and magical destruction, not to mention delving through dimensional portals to explore alien worlds and trying to avoid getting squished under the cosmic boot of a multiversal super power. It was considerably more stressful than working in an apothecary. A good bit more blood too.
It had to be now, so Eik felt for the Profound Toxin coursing through the king once more, careful as he could to not let himself get sucked into the sensory takeover again. As always, it responded with enthusiasm, almost like a dog trying to convince its owner to come along for an extended walk across the fields and through the forests.
Except, instead of a dog, it was a pseudo-sentient ocean of toxic blue murder liquid, and the walk across fields and through forests was actually a senseless massacre across countless corpses and through the rib cages and entrails of titans.
It was frightening and daunting, but also exciting and empowering. He had what appeared to be endless power at the tips of his fingers, if only he could learn to harness it and strengthen it. It was still relatively weak and certainly awkward to use to its fullest, but hopefully that would change as he discovered more of the secrets of the mysterious ability and climbed through the ranks of power.
With a thought, he willed Accelerant to trigger throughout the system of the fungus king. Instantly he was pulled back in and rocketed through the never-ending paths. Eik couldn’t tell exactly what had allowed his toxin to travel so far within the king.
He didn’t know how an alien fungus worked so maybe there wasn’t anything strange about it at all, and he had been releasing Profound Toxin into the water that went under its main body for a good three hours. If nothing else, he now knew where all that water went after flowing into the crater. It served at least partially as a water source for the giant.
Eik was the pulse that blasted out to almost all of the mushroom trees in the forest and up through the trunk of the fungus king and into his capped crown.
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With each of the tree-sized trunks his consciousness passed through, a luminous wave of pure blue rushed out, leaving behind a scorched mass. He moved outward at blinding speed. Much faster than his mind could possibly process.
Suddenly he was at the end of the reach of his toxin, the last vestiges of it so minuscule that it could only react harmlessly once the order to Accelerate reached it. As the final speck disappeared and he lost connection, he zoomed back toward the center of the region where the fungus king stood tall as if pulled back by a vast, fully taut elastic band.
In seconds he was back in his body. Actually, more like minutes. No… seconds, or maybe even quicker than that. And then, as soon as he was in his own head, like a basketball rebounding off the backboard, he shot from his body up through the massive trunk of the king.
Profound Toxin was everywhere inside, inflicting the water that was supposed to nourish the mushroom with its deadly influence. As his consciousness approached the king’s crown, an overpowering pulse of blue roiled up, up and away.
The largest shock wave he had seen yet surged out of the cap like a volcanic eruption, shaking it violently in its entirety.
In an instant, Eik was once more back in his own head, a sense of vertigo threatening to unstick him from the white trunk. The fact that the whole thing was rocking like a ship in a torrential storm didn’t make it any easier to hang on.
Having his mind thrown around like a rag doll between different perspectives of existence didn’t do him any favors either. In fact, he was feeling a non-trivial urge to hurl up the compact food bars they had swiped from the assassins’ camps the day before. Maybe the shitty golem guy below him would like a serving of vomit to decorate his head.
Speaking of, a high-pitched screech jolted him enough to almost make him loosen his tight grip on the mushroom’s soft flesh. Note to self: don’t go climbing anymore. Especially not on mushrooms. Or any type of fungus, really.
He looked down and saw the guardian writhing in apparent pain, arching back as a sound like the tips of a fork scraping across a plate escaped from its entire body at once. It seemed to be losing control of its body as the vines of what had been its hands, feet, chest, and face dug into the trunk of the fungus king, the caution it had shown before thrown aside in favor of deranged fury.
As Eik watched, the thing came apart, its humanoid shape fading and unraveling until it was nothing more than a twisting mass of dangerous tendrils powerful enough to squeeze the life out of him. Being so close to this one it was difficult to say with any kind of certainty, but he thought he could hear the three other golems screaming somewhere in the crater.
Further down the thin, pathetic mushrooms with the colored caps still stood, although they somehow looked even more ragged than they had. They must have been affected by his Accelerant as well, but clearly, with the total size of the fungus king, it hadn’t been enough to completely kill them.
Those four just had to be the key to getting out of here. They could get out now, right? Surely Atla had solved the… issue with Menka Tokanami by now, right? She must have, right?
He started moving sideways and then diagonally down toward the ground, hoping to avoid getting caught up in the pit of death that raged further down the trunk. Even when he passed by with only a few paces between himself and the maximum range of the whipping vines, it didn’t move closer to him. Perhaps it had lost any sense of awareness that would otherwise have driven it to pursue him.
What had happened at the headquarters of the Nidafjeld Alliance. Menka Tokanami coming for them — possibly to take their lives in an erroneous push for some kind of warped vengeance for her son who was murdered and consumed by the cultists during the rescue mission — was frankly outrageous. The more he thought about it, the crazier the thought of it became.
They had been promised that the issue would be taken care of. He couldn’t tell what exactly this situation demonstrated. Incompetence in the leadership and enforcement of the law within the alliance? A disconnect between the different parts of the alliance? An organization so vast in scope and scale that proper enforcement of consequences is practically impossible? All three? Something entirely different? How the hell was little Earthling Eik supposed to know? He was already in over his head in a bigger way than any person from Earth had ever been in the history of civilization.
He dropped the last few meters to the ground and ran for the closest of the tired mushrooms — the yellow one. Brandishing Viper Fang, he sliced through the fragile stem in a single movement, severing it with surprising ease.
Just as he made contact, roots slithered up, lethargic and imprecise, nowhere near quickly enough to actually stop him from carrying out his attack. Without looking any closer at the result, he broke into a sprint and headed for the next.
A glance over his shoulder told him that heath and Sonja were about to make it through the territory of the striders, Michael doing his best to stick to their heels with his F-rank speed. He had used Bind to fell strider and create a path through which they could pass unharmed.
“Eik! What happened?”
Instead of explaining, he pointed to the fragile mushroom on the opposite side. “That mushroom there, with the red cap! Kill it! Destroy it! The four of them have to be the keys to this crap! Nothing else makes sense!”
Without asking for further clarification Sonja nocked an arrow, barely slowing down. She took aim and came to a sliding stop the moment they made it past the striders. Eik slashed through the stalks of another defenseless mushroom as she released the arrow.
The cap was ripped clean off as the projectile impacted it violently, Eik continuing to the final fungus elder with the speed of Movement Boost. He feared that the fungus king would be able to mount some kind of last stand retaliation, but in the end the withered thing died all the same.
For a long time it was silent. The striders wandered about aimlessly, probably sensing that something was not right. It felt like the region itself had fallen into stillness.
Then the fungus king seemed to sigh enormously, deflating slightly like an old balloon.
“Did it work?” Heath asked. “Did we do it?”
“I don’t… I don’t know,” Eik said and looked around the area.
Something clinked lightly in the moss a few paces away. Eik picked up a small octagonal badge that seemed to have fallen from… somewhere. It was the size of a fist.
On the surface was written a few alien words, legible only thanks to the translation ability still active on them.
“Break to go home”