“The clicking, so much clicking! Do these damn things have to make so much noise!?” Michal, or Mikey as his friends call him, curses as he swings his club down to smash another zombie into rotting paste on the ground, the thing exploding into a shower of colorful spores as the mushrooms covering its body all explode.

“Come on Mikey, it could be worse. Imaging if we had to smell these things? That would be shit.” Carther jokes back as he blocks several Gremlins and Goblins with his shield, their puss leaking bodies smashing against the steel surface with a wet squelch of fluids, leaving it covered in gore.

“Uh! Please don’t mention that. I’m already trying to keep myself from throwing up in my suit, Uhh! Damn things, fuck off!”

Splattering another little zombie against the wall, he curses as more of the mushrooms explode into spores and blocks up his suit’s visor. Dragging a hand over the glass, he tries to wipe the stuff off, leaving streaks of browns and yellows behind to obstruct his already narrowed vision.

When he is finally able to see again, he is startled at the sight of a Goblin hurtling through the air at him, having just leaped out of a hole in the wall.

Clicking as it flies mouth first at him, Mikey quickly swings and bludgeons the things out of the air, its little body folding in half as its spine snaps at a disgusting angel, getting sent flying down the hall to tumble into several others and take out their legs. It doesn’t die however, even with its broken ribs poking out of its chest and its spine cracking as it tries to move, the thing is still writhing on the floor and trying to pull and twist itself into a position where it can get a grip. With the sickening sounds of snapping bones and wet meat, the Goblin zombie forces itself onto three limbs and awkwardly crawls/drags its way back towards the slowly advancing adventurers.

It is finally put down as a war hammer smashes down on it and destroys its upper half, finally destroying whatever it is that keeps these things animated.

“If you two would stop bullshitting so much, we would have already made it to the third floor by now. Cut the chitchat and focus.” Their clan’s Lieutenant reprimands with a snap in his voice.

Mikey wants to snap back at the guy, feeling rightfully agitated after slogging through this mushroom infested hellhole for nearly six hours now, but he bites his tongue and just gives a quick, “Yes sir.” Mikey knows better than to talk back to Dale when he is in work mode. Bullshitting at the bar? Sure. But during a mission, Mikey will be lucky if he still has teeth in his mouth after he leaves this place.

As the Lieutenant and Enforcer of the Golden Mare Adventurers Clan, it’s his job to make sure that everyone keeps on top of their shit and comes back alive. A job that he takes quite seriously, even if it does leave most people thinking of Dale as a stuck-up asshole.

Taking an opening in the fighting to try and wipe off his visor a little more, Mikey looks back at the way they came, finding the rest of their group slowly navigating through a cut out trail in the mushrooms infested hallway, everyone dressed from head to toe in protective yellow-green hazmat suits.

The heavy and unwieldy suits are incredibly uncomfortable to wear. Being designed to allow the wearer to wade into some of the most toxic environments known to man, the suits are made from the skins of Boildart Frogs, a rare species of highly poisonous frog that only shows up in a few swamps every few years for their mating season. Until then, they live their entire lives under the muck and mud of the swamp, eating mosquito larvae and other little bugs.

They get their name because you extract the toxins from their skins by boiling the frogs alive. The process removes the toxic fluids from the skins and leaves you with three very valuable commodities. First is the meat. The little suckers are delicious, and Nobles love to eat them. After you boil them, just peel the skin off and cook them however you want. Sauteed with vegies, fry them in oil, cook them over a fire, it doesn’t matter. The little frogs taste amazing. The only problem is that they only grow to be about as large as your palm, so you need quite a few to get enough meat for a good meal, and just one frog is already quite expensive as is.

The second is the poison. Originally, it was used for the obvious purpose of, well, killing people. The stuff is quite potent and contains a bit of mana in it, which just serves to further raise the potency of its lethality. The poison is well known as Heart-Pop, a horrible substance that makes the target’s heart beat so fast in their chest that it literally pops as it tears itself apart. The victim’s last moments are a living hell as their body is flooded with adrenaline and time seems to come to a grinding halt, being forced to experience the pain of having their own heart explode in their chest until their mind finally gives out and dies. This information was obtained by experimenting on death row inmates and has since caused the use of this poison on others to be labeled as a war crime by most nations, it’s use in assassinations being deemed as overly cruel and unreasonable.

This almost led to most nations outright banning the harvesting of these little frogs, but, an entrepreneurial alchemist decided to try and see if the stuff had any medicinal purposes, as many poisons tend to do. And surprises of all surprises, it did. That guy discovered that small doses, when mixed with some other ingredients in a recipe that is greedily protected, can be used to make an incredibly potent aphrodisiac that can turn even the most impotent or sexually frigid of a person into a raging sex starved beast. He is a very rich man now…

So naturally, every last drop of these frogs’ poison is bought up after every harvest and is worth a very pretty coin.

Besides the meat and poison, is the third commodity which is actually pertinent to this current mission. The frog skins.

Rubbery, highly resistant to acids and tearing, these skins, after being processed are almost impervious to all outside elements. Where regular leather would stain and lets hazards seep through, these skins, once turned into leather, let nothing though, not even air. After they are processed, chainmail is sewn into the leather and the stitches are sealed with a generous layering of SlimeCoat, another product whose recipe is practically a state secret, through everyone knows that the main ingredient is Slimes, the humble Jelly’s bigger and much deadlier cousin.

The process and cost of making even just one of these suits is already an expense than most Clans can’t afford, and even the Golden Mare would have bankrupted itself trying to get their hands on twenty of them, but the Guild came through for them and provided them for the mission.

The only problem though is that these suits, despite how protective they are, are incredibly unwieldy and uncomfortable. Wearing them is like suddenly putting on an extra layer of fat and skin all over your body. The gloves are thick and make delicate tasks difficult, the suits are only made in three sizes, so if yours doesn’t fit right, you just have to deal with it, and to make matters worse, the things eat mana shards.

In order to keep the wearer from cooking themselves to death inside, the suits have to be enchanted with cooling spells that are woven into the suit itself, with a little box on the chest for feeding in fresh mana shards to keep everything running. All your breathing has to be done through a specially made gas mask that is built into the suite, the filters needing to be regularly checked and replaced as needed, with the wearer only being able to speak and hear those around them because of more enchantments built into the helmet that allows for it, otherwise, everything the wearer says would be horribly muffled and barely understandable. And besides those is the rather embarrassing enchantments that are designed to remove filth from the inside of the suits. Sweat, vomit, urine, and shit… The suits are designed to be used for extended periods of time in environments where you can’t take the thing off without dying. And obviously, people still have to be able to do their business...

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The result? Besides a further increase in the price of the suit and the drain on mana reserves, is that if you are planning on wearing the thing long enough to actually need to use the self-cleaning feature, then you can’t wear anything under the suit. Clothes get in the way and can cause the enchantments to misfire, because they are still a work in progress apparently. The fact alone that the people who made these thing were able to design a spell for cleaning up filth is already amazing, but they just haven’t quite figured out how to get it to clean shit stains out of your pants without also destroying your pants in the process…

Regardless, and long spiel aside, these suits are horribly expensive and horribly uncomfortable to wear for longer than a couple of hours. Fighting in them is hard, just using your hands is hard, you have to eat and drink everything though a straw and breathe through a filter that has to be replaced every so often, you’re basically naked under them and frog leather feels weird on your skin, and worse of all, Mikey now knows what it feels like to have hot shit running down his legs and also how it feels to have magic clean said shit off his legs. It isn’t pleasant and it feels like being licked by an ice cold tongue…

The things I do for money… Still, one platinum is one platinum. When I get out of here, I’m going to rent out an entire brothel just for myself and get stinking drunk. Hell, I’ll buy the brothel! And I’ll have the girls serve me in the nude and hand feed me as I use softest one as a pillow. And there won’t be a single mushroom in my food!

Trying to think happy thoughts about the future, Mikey gets back to work and uses his machete to hack though tall mushroom stalks like he is trying to clear the way through a jungle’s foliage.

The things are growing from almost every surface and even hang from the ceiling, with some being as tall as a full-grown man. The adventurers can hardly even see past the thick foliage of fungi that blocks up so many of the Dungeon’s labyrinthine tunnels. If it weren’t for the blockage, a party of this size and power would have already reached the fourth floor by now, but instead they are having to cut and trudge their way through thousands of mushrooms and zombies.

Hacking though another thick stalk, Mikey reels back and curses as a hand tries to reach out and grab him, the black a withed thing stopping just short of scratching his visor.

“Shit, fucking things!”

With a hack of his machete, the arm drops off the ground, the hand still grasping and clawing for a few moments before finally going still. Clearing away more of the tall fungi, he finds the zombie stuck to the wall of the hallway, its body being half rotted away and partially fused to the stone by the mushrooms growing off its body.

“Ah, shit… Hey, found a human!”

Dale looks over at the moaning and clicking corpse and nods. “Right, find the tag so we can take it back with the others.”

“Uhh, I hate this part…”

Using his club, Mikey smashes the zombie over the head, finishing the poor bastard off. From the look of it, they probably used to be a freshy. Hardly any armor on the corpse, weapons look like shit, and he can safely guess that their clothes were already ratty looking before dying and getting turned into a corpse glued to the wall. Probably just recently joined the Guild and trying to make a living like so many other desperate people, just to end up like this…

Once the body stops squirming and Mikey is sure that it is actually dead for real now, he stows his weapons and gets to work on searching though the zombies clothes. With how rotted and infested with mushrooms it is, he can’t even accurately tell if it used to be a boy or a girl, but he is certain that they were young.

Pushing his fingered into a filth soaked shirt, the old fabric sticking to dead flesh like glue, he eventually manages to snag a little metal token in the chest pocket. Behind him, the others are walking past, someone else already taking his place to chop through the thick vegetation.

“Let’s see here, who were you?” He says as he finally pulls the tag out and tries to wipe some of the filth off.

“Oh, a girl. That sucks, she might have been cute once. Better ways of earning money than throwing your life away in here sweety, you could have just spread your legs… Anyone know a Cathy, from Hemitt Village? She on the list?”

“Hand it here.”

A hand reaches out for it, a list already held in the other. Mikey can’t tell who is in the suit, not without sharing names, but Vin and Falcon were the ones put in charge of keeping any collected tags, so it’s one of them.

They take the tag and then go down the list, nodding before adding it to the bag with the others.

“Found her. Cathy from Hemitt, seventeen years old, next of kin is her brother. Says here that she went searching for him when he and his two friends never made it back from the Dungeon…”

“Oof… No next of kin then, I guess.”

“Yeah, that sucks. Alright, that makes fourteen in mine now. Keep an eye out for more, the Clan gets a bonus for everyone we bring back.”

“Yup.”

Up ahead, the guy who replaced Mikey calls out, “Looks like it is clearing out up ahead, can see-”

“Mh?”

Mikey and the tag collector turn and look towards the guy, curious about why he suddenly stopped talking. They find him there, his machete clattering to the floor from his limp hand as his body slumps forward, the long rusted blade of a sword jutting out from the back of his skull as he chokes on his last words.

Dale curses, “Shit! They killed Kenny!”

The zombie wielding the sword pulls it out of Kenny’s skull and slashes through the mushrooms, moving forward at frightening speeds to attack Dale, who blocks with the shaft of his hammer, their weapons clashing with the sound of colliding metal that fills the hall with a loud clang.

Carther charges forward with his shield and short sword, swiping at the zombie and forcing it to surprising back off. “You bastard!”

The Undead aren’t known for dodging attacks, not typically being smart enough to avoid taking damage. But there are special cases where in some will retain past experience from their life, making them into much deadlier things.

“Special infested!” Dale calls out as he and Carther move to press the retreating zombie.

The things armor is only just loosely hanging around its body now from how far it has decomposed, but even with its withered frame, the thing move deceptively quick, darting in for attacks that Carther has to block with his shield while grunting, while Dale tries to take any openings to swing his massive hammer at the rotted corpse.

Sidestepping a downward swing from Dale, the zombie swordman grinds his sword against Carther’s shield as he pushes against it, transitioning into an upward swing at Dale’s chest as he goes back on the attack. He blocks, using the head of his hammer to catch the blade and push it back.

As the three fight, noise comes from down the hall and back the way they came, more of the Undead clearly being drawn in by the noise of metal clashing against metal.

“We’ve got incoming! Somebody kill that fucking thing already!” Somebody shouts from the back, the mushroom filled hall being too narrow for too many people to move to the front at once.

Those at the back of the group turn to intercept the Goblin and Gremlin zombies that are sprinting down the path they had been clearing, smashing the little Undead as they reach them, with some holding back the horde with shields.

Up at the front, Mikey catches sight of someone moving to the front of the group, recognizing Sussan by the weird, curved longsword that hangs from her hip. Supposedly, she had gotten it from some kingdom far to the south-east in the deserts.

Walking right into the battle between the special infected and the others, the thing tries to take a swipe at her after its blow gets parried by Dale. She simply shifts her body to the side, the rusty longsword missing her body by a hair before she draws her own blade and cuts the zombie in half from hip to shoulder, her second strike removing its head before its upper half even has the chance to fall to the ground.

“Tighten up formation! We need to keep moving! Fight off the hordes and switch with those behind you when you get tired! And somebody make sure that Kenny stays dead…”

Kenny’s corpse gets dragged back into the center of the formation, his pierced head leaking brain juices along the floor as he is dragged by the yellow-green legs of his suit.

“Shit… Sorry, Kenny… We’ll make sure your ma gets your tag to burry.”

His tag is pulled off from where it hangs around his neck and his pack of extra mana shards and filters is removed. Then a battleaxe is brought down on his corpse three times. Once to remove what is left of his head, and then twice more to destroy the torso because the Undead don’t actually need their heads to come back. Once they are sure that he won’t be coming back, his destroyed body is set aside as respectfully as possible, left to be eaten by the Dungeon. A final resting place that many an adventurer share.

The adventurers of the Golden Mare don’t get a chance to properly morn his death, forced to move forward as they continue to fight their way through the hordes of little Undead, Mikey making sure to collect the tag of the swordsman zombie along the way.

Joel, huh? Rest in peace guy, but personally, fuck you for killing Kenny, you bastard.

He hands the tag over to the collector and another name gets marked off the list, the adventurers of the Golden Mare stepping over his corpse as they fight their way deeper into the Dungeon.