The shadow of the colossal human-like moth was impossible to ignore. It fluttered far overhead, above the canopy of giant mushroom caps, and Dahlia’s antennae trembled as she saw the moth’s glowing amber eyes cruise by.
Its killing pressure was immense.
Immediately, Emilia whistled a sharp tune, and both Dahlia and Muyang were yanked back with an invisible force—dragged behind the base of a giant mushroom, out of the colossal moth’s sight.
Whoa.
Is this Emilia’s Swarmblood Art?
As she blinked in Emilia’s direction, the shorter girl and the older man peered nervously around the mushroom, scowling straight up at the colossal moth. Fortunately for them, the moth didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular. At thirty metres in length and nearly twice that for wingspan, it probably had trouble just seeing the ground through the occasional gaps in the mushroom canopy, let alone actually spotting someone running around underneath. They held their breaths and stayed in its shadow for only a moment longer; soon, it passed by and flew to another part of the fungi forest, leaving them completely alone.
It wasn’t until Muyang finished counting down from ten that the two of them turned back towards Dahlia, sighing simultaneous breaths of relief.
“... I can’t believe the additional obstacle is a sun moth,” Emilia said, putting her hands on her hips as she chuckled anxiously, still looking back and up and left and right. “Well, this is a messed-up exam. The Sun’s gonna kill so many of us, introducing that moth alongside the two Mutant-Classes we already have to hunt.”
Muyang agreed with a terse nod, leaning against his giant beetle head and crossing his arms. “Sun moths are very common in my homeland. They are known to be able to shoot fire from their eyes and raze entire swathes of land from the sky, and they are such a pest that there are entire families in the north dedicated to hunting them to extinction. I, too, cannot believe Miss Jiayin, the Sun of the Arcana Hasharana, captured one and decided to release it here.”
Emilia frowned, looking at him suspiciously. “You’ve fought one before?”
“A few C-Rank Giant-Classes, yes,” he replied, frowning nervously back, “but the one above our heads has to be at least a D-Rank or C-Rank Mutant-Class. Furthermore, its flight altitude is much higher than any sun moth I have seen before. I do not believe any participant has the ranged capabilities to bring it down.”
“It’s supposed to be an additional obstacle, after all,” Emilia muttered. “Something to keep us busy. Something to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Sun probably doesn’t expect any of us to actually kill it, so how about we ignore it and only focus on the two Mutants we are expected to kill?”
“I can agree with that, Miss Emilia.”
The two became fast allies, Emilia’s four hands shaking Muyang’s two, and then they rounded on Dahlia with such speed that she couldn’t help but take a step back out of fright.
“So?” Emilia said, sounding slightly annoyed as she pouted. “You don’t wanna be a hero either, right? Agree to ignore the sun moth and run whenever we see it?”
“Ah. Um. Sure,” Dahlia mumbled, sticking two of her hands out slowly. Her teammates grabbed them and shook vigorously, which came as a surprise. Muyang seemed the polite and formal type, but she hadn’t expected Emilia to look so happy shaking her hand. “So… to go over the rules of the first stage again, we have to hunt and kill at least one Mutant within the month. Simple. That’s… basically it, right?”
With the colossal moth nowhere to be seen, Emilia trudged out from behind the giant mushroom and into the sunlight, holding her hands over her face. “Seems like it. And I’m assuming the Mutants won’t just show themselves. There’s a reason why the exam duration is an entire month, after all?”
Dahlia chewed her lips as she studied the fungi forest around her, hugging herself. “We’ll… have to actually hunt the Mutants down, huh?”
“In an extermination mission, a Hasharana spends most of their time looking for the bug, anyways.” Emilia shrugged nonchalantly, raising a hand and swerving her index finger around in circles. Dahlia and Muyang watched intently as she hummed to herself, her whole body swaying to a musical beat, and then she stopped—she jabbed at their left, head snapping over. “There. Let’s go that way.”
“You’ve located a Mutant already?” Dahlia asked, eyes wide.
“As expected of Miss Emilia,” Muyang said, a sly grin curling his lips. “I am truly blessed with brilliant teammates–”
“Huh? No. I dunno where the Mutants are,” Emilia muttered, kicking dirt back at them as she started walking left. “Let’s just look for a shelter first. We probably won’t find the Mutants within the week, so we can’t be caught with our pants down when night falls. If the Sun’s daring enough to release a sun moth into the forest, then she’s definitely not lying when she said she also released three thousand Giant-class bugs alongside it. You guys wanna sleep outside at night?”
The chestnut-haired girl didn’t wait for them. She strolled deeper and deeper into the fungi forest, and Dahlia shared a look with Muyang before racing after her. The worst thing they could do now was split up.
… Kari.
You there?
She waited one second, two seconds, but there was still no response. She’d no reason to believe there was any reason other than the fact that all Archives were automatically jammed or disrupted within the arena—and though she couldn’t even fathom how that could be done, she also couldn’t fathom she’d been sitting in a dimly-lit room in the middle of the City of Feasts just mere minutes ago.
Now, she was in an entirely different world.
Her steps were quieted by the yielding, sponge-like earth. Around her, the towering mushrooms stretched towards the sky, held up by thick and striped and spotted stems. Their colours were so vivid they almost hurt to look at—amber bleeding into crimson, violets tipped with electric blue—but the dense green foliage crowding the ground wasn’t much better, either. Vines wrapped around mushroom stems, twisting tightly and stretching up into the caps above. Between the mushroom trunks, bushes with dark leaves and small, waxy berries grew in tangled clumps. Roots from the mushrooms crisscrossed the forest floor as well, forming twisted patterns that tripped her up more than a few times.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
But the air smelled of damp earth and something faintly sweet, like overripe fruit left out too long, and she found herself more absorbed in admiring the scenery than actually looking out for any bugs.
“How did we even get here?” she whispered, mumbling to herself under her breath. “We were under the temple just moments ago, but now we’re… here. Confusion. Where are we, anyways? This isn’t–”
“The Worm God’s Swarmblood Art. He can make ‘wormholes’ to connect two places together,” Emilia said, pinching her ear and stopping her from walking headfirst into a wall of thorny vines. “As for where we are, I caught a glimpse of the fungi forest from the outside when I first arrived in the City of Feasts. We’re just a day’s walk from the city. Most likely, the Worm God called upon the Empress—another Arcana Hasharana—to grow this forest from the ground-up.”
So many new names. “So the Hasharana just made an entire forest for the sake of the exam? That doesn’t… that’s–”
“The Empress, fourth-ranked of the Arcana Hasharana, is also the Empress of the Attini Empire,” Muyang clarified, the horns of his giant beetle head dragging and cleaving through the ground behind him. “I am not surprised that the esteemed Empress is capable of cultivating a forest like this within two month’s time. Unfortunately, because it was cultivated so quickly, it would also rot and decay just as quickly. In a month, the fungi will drain the underground desert canals of all their water and perish. That is likely the reason for the exam’s one-month duration.”
Dahlia looked around, still, completely stunned. “And just how big is this entire forest? I can’t even see the end of it.”
“Large enough that we haven’t even run into a single bug or another team yet,” Emilia grumbled, folding her arms behind her head as she sighed. “I can’t hear a single thing with my cicada ears. No action. No nothing. Are either of you catching anything?”
Dahlia consulted her antennae, pulling them down before her face. “No. I don’t… feel anything.”
“I sense no evil eyes on our backs, either,” Muyang muttered. As they all let out another collective sigh, though, Emilia’s little cicada antennae tingled—it wasn’t the blood-freezing type that meant danger, and Dahlia could tell as much as the girl whipped her head over to the right.
She was staring straight at a particularly small but thick mushroom, the spotted red cap only three or so metres off the ground.
There was a hole at the bottom of the stalk as well.
“I don’t assume the Hasharana went as far as building reinforced cabins for us to fight over and take shelter in, but… maybe?” Emilia said sardonically, glancing back to grin at the two of them. “Say, do you two have any problems with living in mushrooms?”
Dahlia was about to ask what Emilia was talking about when her own antennae tingled this time, and they all snapped their heads to look far behind them, squinting at the distant giant silhouettes tearing through the forest.
The giant bugs didn’t seem to be heading for them specifically, but inevitably, they’d clash if the giant bugs continued charging forward.
“... Wanna check the mushroom to see how hollow it really is, Dahlia?” Emilia asked, shooting her a toothy grin and waving her off. “You go inside, peek to see if anything’s already living there, and tell us if the smell is any bearable. We’ll deal with the bugs out here.”
If Muyang wasn’t as tough-looking, Dahlia would’ve swallowed a huge gulp at the thought of letting only the two of them face down that horde of bugs in the distance, but instead, she jogged over to the low mushroom without any weight on her shoulders.
They’ll be fine… I think.
Right?
She resisted the urge to turn around and look as the sounds of slaughter began. Biting her tongue, she circled around the thick mushroom stalk until she found herself standing squarely before the small opening. Immediately, a warm, earthly smell greeted her nose—a mix of damp soil, old wood, and something faintly herbal. But not pungent. Definitely no dead bugs inside, either.
Really struggling to not look behind her, now, she crawled through the tight opening and put her feet down on the soft, fibrous, almost bouncy ground. Standing upright was absolutely possible with more headroom to spare. The interior of the hollow mushroom stalk was spacious, and the circular walls glowed faintly with patches of bioluminescent moss clinging to the walls, casting a soft, greenish-pinkish light over everything. She could easily close her eyes and imagine: three beds in one corner of the room, a few shelves for them to store their equipment, and maybe they could even put some decorative furniture around to spruce the place up. The mushroom was already cosy enough as it was. Dahlia could single-handedly make this room comfortable if she had the time to spare.
… No. She shook her head, clapped her cheeks, and forced herself to refocus. I definitely won’t have time to pretty this place up. The two of them definitely won’t care about how comfortable this place is.
As long as it keeps us safe at night and we have a temporary base to call ‘home’, that’s good enough–
“Sweet place,” Emilia mumbled, squeezing through the opening behind her and then falling flat on her face. Muyang strode in half a second later, his giant body tearing a new opening as he just walked right through the wall; none of them would have to crawl in and out anymore. “It really is quite cosy, huh? Let’s make it pretty! We’ll be staying here for an entire month, after all!”
“I concur with Miss Emilia,” Muyang murmured, stroking his chin as he gazed longingly at the bioluminescent moss. “In a healthy body resides a healthy spirit, and the rejuvenation flow in this mushroom is as clear as the northern sky. Good rest is imperative if we want to hunt down a Mutant-Class—I will gather the raw supplies to craft the wooden spirit. The two of you can focus on carving the bones of this house.”
Dahlia and Emilia frowned, but the shorter girl was doing so for an entirely different reason. “Just say you’re gonna get wood. What was that whole spiel for? Also, I’m the leader of the group, so I will dole out the orders. You go get wood, and Dahlia can carve the uneven chunks of mushroom off the ground. Your claws look pretty sharp, anyways.”
“In my opinion, Miss Dahlia should be the leader of Team Dahlia,” Muyang said as he turned around to wade right out of the mushroom, pausing only to glance back at Emilia. “It is only fitting. Fortune has already smiled upon us that our team shares the same name as one of our members. If we want to hold onto that fortune for just a little longer, we should do our best to please it.”
“What? No. I’m the leader.”
“I disagree.”
“You wanna fight?”
“I do not want to kill you.”
“I said fight, you oaf. You, me, out the back in five minutes–”
“Um…” Dahlia trailed off, standing between the two of them with her hands spread out, her eyes flittering towards the opening behind Muyang. “What… happened to the giant bugs outside? Weren’t they coming really fast towards us?”
“The bugs?” both of them said at the same time, furrowing their brows at each other. “They were exterminated,” Muyang said plainly. “We’ve secured breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next few days,” Emilia said, grinning and raising a thumbs-up at her.
...
Dahlia’s face tightened as she was finally able to peer past Muyang’s giant body, noticing the two small mountains of giant bug carcasses sitting right outside the mushroom.
The mountain on the left consisted of broken bug carcasses, strewn limps, and smushed-up heads, but Dahlia could imagine what happened to them judging by the giant beetle head sitting at the very top of the bloody pile.
It was the exact same mountain on the right without a giant beetle head that she couldn’t imagine being made—much less by the girl kicking the back of her knees and telling her to get going with the carving.
“We’ve gotta have a comfortable homebase!” Emilia chirped, letting out a loud, relaxing sigh as she lay down flat on the ground, throwing out her arms and legs. “We’ll get a nice house made, rest for a few days, and then we probably won’t have to go looking for the Mutant! It’ll come looking for us!”