It took Tori and me a minute to disengage from the Second Node—and from the press of Myconid Travelers that were still dumping orange fluid into the basin even though the Node wasn’t sucking it up anymore. We followed the half-shattered walkway around the basin, then down a ramp on the other side. There, a different kind of fluid dripped from another section of fungus. It was black and reeked of methane. “What is that?” Tori asked.

  “Asphalt. The stuff they put on roads. Not sure how it’s making it, though.” I stomped the mech off the ramp, then tucked into a ‘street’ between two massive fungal growths. Tori followed me, and we butchered a few more Travelers as the black tar dripped onto the path.

  Then the first Traveler passed by, and the goop dripped down onto its head. It matched the black color I’d thought was just how the mushroom was designed perfectly. The Travelers’ spacing was almost perfect; they caught all but one or two drips, then started walking through the streets of Mycopolis.

  “Follow them?” Tori asked.

  “Yes.” I slid out of the mech’s cockpit and pulled it back into my inventory, put the Mycopolis’s Pillar hammer over my shoulder, and started walking.

  Just like before, we followed the Travelers through the Mycopolis, onto the circular ‘ripple’ rings, and then to a ‘through street’ that dove toward the next Node. But this time, as we drew closer, the stench of asphalt overpowered everything else. It had been noticeable by the Second Node. This was much, much more oppressive—it punched clean through the purifying Charge layer in our masks.

  The fungal ‘city’ had started to wilt, like a flower without water. I’d seen it before—some years, Cozad had big water restrictions, and all the farmers competed to use as much of their shares as they could. The most junior fields got next to nothing, and entire fields of beans and corn would shrivel up and die.

  The Second Node had been critical to the fungal city’s survival. We’d cut off its energy, and now, it was starting to fall apart.

  Still, we needed to kill the next Node, and the Travelers were our best guides to finding it.

  Node Three: Level Eighty-Eight Dungeon Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Challenging

  The Nodes are the life-givers for the entire Mycopolis. They stabilize the fungal ‘city,’ regulate it, and provide it with everything it needs. In return, the city will defend them to the death.

  We got the notification before we saw the thing. “Get ready,” I said, pulling the mech back out and climbing in.

  Then we stomped around the corner, and there it was.

  It hung mid-air, suspended from the edges of a stone-and-earth pit by far too many tendrils to cut. A hulking mass of asphalt and fungus, all of it black. There were no clear weaknesses. There were no obvious places to attack. The only parts of it that didn’t look like a mass of amorphous mushroom parts were a single connection to the ground far, far below us, and a dozen growths that hung over the fungal mat road we’d been walking on.

  Each of those growths was currently connected to a Myconid Traveler. I watched from the mech’s viewport as the fungal growths slowly removed every bit of tar from the Travelers’ bodies, leaving them stained but without any of the black goop. Then I shut my eyes. “Dammit.”

  “What?”

  “Look at it and tell me what you think’s going on.”

  Tori stared. Then her eyes went wide. “The Second Node was eating and growing, and it was pushing energy out to the city, right? But that creates waste. This thing is…”

  “Getting rid of that waste. If we fight it, we’ll make the situation here even worse, so we’d better be ready to rush the last Node fast—or get out of here. Either way, Mycopolis is going to fall apart. It’s just a question of—“

  “The full clear?” Tori asked.

  I sighed. “Exactly.”

  Then, without waiting for a response, I stomped the mech out to do battle with the third Node. And a swarm of fungus monsters swarmed out of the pit to do battle with me.

  Mycoprole: Level Seventy-Nine Monster (Rank One)

  Fungal Blossom: Level Eighty-Two Monster (Rank One)

  Living Mat: Level Eighty Monster (Rank One)

  The Mycoproles were the most common. There weren’t more than seven or eight at first; they were small, green fungi that left behind smears of sludge wherever they traveled. Tori Pushed a group into the pit, and they didn’t come back out. And they were also the least dangerous and aggressive. They moved randomly, spreading their sludge.

  That left me to deal with the Fungal Blossoms—and those were much more focused on killing us. They lurked in the back of the waves of enemies, vomiting spores into the air. Most of the time, the spores did nothing. If they landed on fungus, the mech, or even Tori’s skin, they were a little like standing in a snowstorm.

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  But the ones that hit the Mycoproles’ sludge reacted much, much differently. Instead of resting there like a layer of fine, powdery snow, they grew. Fast. I put a trio of rail gun rounds into one of the Fungal Blossoms, then walked the mech forward as the reloading bot put three new rounds into the gun’s barrel and repeated the action. The first Fungal Blossom died—but its body didn’t vanish.

  I kept pushing, throwing rail gun shots into the flower-like fungi and trying to kill them as fast as I could—and hoping I wasn’t already too late.

  And that left the Living Mats free rein.

  I didn’t notice them until they’d already gotten established. They looked almost exactly like the ground around the gigantic pit—but their growth was just a little bit different, and I was busy fighting. My mech stepped onto one, and only Tori’s quick thinking saved me.

  “Hal, brace!” she yelled as she ran toward me. The first Push hit the mech like a peal of thunder, and the second shook me against the cramped cockpit’s frame. I flew into the pit. So did the Living Mat wrapped around my mech’s feet and growing upward toward the cockpit—and toward me.

  “What the hell?” I asked. The pit was shaped like a funnel, with the massive fungal structure at its center and bottom, and even as I hit the side wall, along with the Mat and a handful of Mycoproles, I started sliding down. I punched a steel fist into the fungus and hung on.

  But that wasn’t enough.

  The Living Mat was still growing, and Tori yelled something from above that I couldn’t make out.

  So, one problem at a time. I solved problems, and this one had to be solvable. Three things. First, the Living Mat on my mech. Then, getting out of the hole. And finally, dealing with whatever the Blossoms and Mycoproles were doing.

  The first problem, at least, was easy to solve. I pushed Charge into the mech’s system as the mat grew over its hip joints. A loader bot shoved a grenade into the launcher. Then I fired it. Point blank. At my feet.

  It detonated instantly. The battery bomb was a special brew I’d been working on for a while; its core was battery acid, but the real kick was that, when it fired, it triggered a spark for a split second. That was all I’d been able to get out of tool batteries, car batteries, or any pre-Integration ones at all—but it was enough.

  The rest of the grenade around it was siphoned off gasoline in a hard, brittle case.

  It didn’t detonate so much as it burst into flames mid-air, showering napalm onto the mat’s body—and onto the mech’s. But I wasn’t as worried about my machine as I was about freeing it from the carpet of fungus slowly suffocating it. The Living Mat made a horrific sound as it went up in flames, and the same fire slowly caught along the pit’s edge.

  First problem solved. I rerouted as much power as I could to the mech’s arms as chunks of dying Living Mat sloughed off its legs and started punching the machine’s fists into the side of the hole. And, bit by bit, I dragged myself up as Mycoproles rained down on my viewport. There were dozens of them—so many that they were filling up the pit below me.

  My triangular feet touched down on solid fungal mat, and I looked around. Second problem solved. Third problem time.

  And it was a problem.

  Tori was yelling at me from across the battlefield, but I could hardly hear her over the masses of Mycoproles walking around randomly—and even more were growing as spores and sludge met.

  “What?” I shouted across the gap.

  “Kill them!” Tori yelled back.

  “Oh. Yeah, I can do that.” I leveled the grenade launcher. The loader bot loaded the last-fired grenade, and I pulled the trigger. A napalm bomb ruptured across the mass of sludge the Mycoproles were leaving behind.

  I hadn’t known anything about the Mycoproles, or about their sludge. If I had, the fight might’ve ended faster, and I might not have ended up in the pit. Looking back on it, though, it made sense.

  The Third Node, suspended in the pit, ‘fed’ off of the asphalt the Second Node created. That slimy, sticky substance went through the node and into the hole. And asphalt, at its core, was petroleum.

  The sludge the Mycoproles were spreading was made out of the same stuff, and when the flame bomb hit it, it all went up in seconds.

  I backed the mech up as fast as it could go, then turned around and sprinted it away from the sudden inferno of spores and sludge that had burst into flame all around the Third Node. Hopefully, Tori was running the other way; we’d regroup later. The fire rose by the second, sending flame-lengths a hundred feet into the air and blistering my face through the mech’s viewport.

  Boss Defeated: Node Two

  Level Up! Eighty-Four to Eighty-Five

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  I couldn’t collect the loot, though. All I could do was wait for it to be over, and that took almost fifteen minutes before I could—carefully and slowly, because the very fungal mat we’d been walking on was gone—into the boss arena.

  Tori’s voice came from the far side. “Hal, you okay? Hal!”

  I picked up the three glowing pieces of loot, then stomped across the ashen wasteland where the Third Node had been. The pit spat flame and smoke as the hole at its center continued to burn; it was full of asphalt, and it’d probably go for a long, long time. “Yeah, I’m good, Tori.”

  “Don’t do that again,” she said. “That was too much ‘kill them.’”

  I laughed, then walked the mech away from the burning mushrooms and fungi. Then I slid out of the cockpit and presented three pieces of loot to Tori. “Any of these work for you?”

  Elixir of The End (Legendary)

  This Elixir can end the existence of any living thing. However, it spoils forty-eight hours after being removed from its host dungeon.

  Gloves of the Fungal Mat (Legendary, Charge 27)

  +22 Mana, +6 Awareness

  These gloves allow the wielder to delay up to three spell-casts, holding them in ‘reserve’ until they’re needed. These spells count as cast, and other spells may be cast before casting them.

  Asphalt Treads (Epic, Charge 30)

  +8 Body, +10 Awareness

  These boots leave a flammable sludge in the wearer’s footsteps. On contact with fungal spores, this sludge instead grows a lower-leveled version of the fungus that created the spores. This sludge lasts for five minutes, and burns in fifteen seconds if lit on fire.

  Tori grinned ferally and reached for both the boots and gloves. I held up a hand, but she shook her head. “They’re both mine. Trust me. You can have the elixir, though.”

  I shook my head. “Greedy.”

  “I am not! I just like loot, and I know what my build wants.”

  My head kept shaking as I picked up the elixir and put it into my inventory next to the Elixir of Lifegiving. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I’d made the right choice in not using the first one—and no doubt that I’d be getting a third soon.

  ?▼?