Chapter 368

The air in the depression was nauseating, heavy with mold and darker things. Spores floated in the mist like dust motes, clogging the throat with each breath and threatening to settle in the lungs of anyone foolish enough to inhale too deeply.Nick didn't give them a chance, circulating wind mana around each of them and creating a pressurized air filter that kept the corruption at bay, all while keeping his eyes locked on the chaotic melee below.

“We need to go in!" Raphael roared, his voice rising above the buzzing drone of the insects. "Malik, Yvonne, form a wedge formation! Split them down the middle! Monte, Terence, watch the flanks!"

The melee fighters took just a few moments to rally before charging forward.

Malik was the first to charge into the front lines of the white mantises, swinging his recently repaired shield like a battering ram and putting his great strength behind it. The impact sounded like a thunderclap, instantly shattering the chitinous exoskeletons of two insects.

Beside him, Yvonne kept anything from taking advantage of his blind spots, carving a bloody path with her greatsword, severing any limb that dared come too close.

Considering they had been trying to kill each other less than two days earlier, their teamwork was quite remarkable to see.

“Open a path!" Raphael shouted, thrusting a hand forward.

The air in front of him shimmered, with light refracting strangely as space itself bent, and a dozen mantises leaping toward the backline suddenly found the distance to their prey greatly increased, their momentum fading in a warped pocket of space, before Raphael clenched his fist.

Space snapped back into place, and the insects were crushed into a paste of white ichor and broken shell, falling to the spongy ground in a heap.

Nick watched from the rear, waiting for his moment to act.

painted the battlefield with strokes of spectral light, allowing him to see the nervousness of the trapped adventurers as jagged yellow smog, while the aggression of his teammates appeared as fierce orange.

They exhibited no individual rage or fear. Their souls were pale, stretched-out things, as thin as spiderwebs, reaching from their bodies to connect with a vast, pulsating network beneath the mycelium floor.

, Nick realized, his eyes narrowing.

"Behind you!" Tessa screamed, loosing an arrow that pinned a leaping mantis to a mushroom stalk.

Ord stepped in to bash another aside, but the swarm was relentless. For every one they killed, two more spilled from the fungal treeline, showing no hesitation to take over where their kin had fallen.

And then, the dead began to twitch.

A mantis that Yvonne had bisected only moments ago shuddered. Purple, bulbous growths along its severed spine pulsed with a wet, sickly light. Fibrous tendrils erupted from the wound, lashing the two halves of the corpse back together. The creature jerked upright, its movements no longer fluid but marionette-like, driven by the fungus expanding rapidly inside its cavity.

"They're getting back up!" Terence yelled in horror, backing away as the thing he’d just stabbed pulled a knife out of its own chest.

"Physical damage is irrelevant," Nick murmured as the pieces clicked into place.

For the first time in a long while, he ignored the discomfort it caused and examined the dungeon's spiritual structure more closely. He had thought the "Feral" nature of this place was just about wild aggression, but he’d been overlooking the subtleties of the pattern. The wolves hunted in packs. The grumblers and goblins had their tribal hierarchy. The beetles and other insect-like monsters had their hives. And now, the mantises with their fungal unity.

And within the esoteric framework of the Sephirot, the step he was currently facing, ,symbolized Victory, as well as Eternity, Endurance, and the persistence of both nature and desire.

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This fungus was a perversion of that principle. It was a twisted Eternity, a life that refused to end, simply recycling the meat to keep the colony going. It was a stagnant loop.

Nick realized, feeling the sapling rustle in his soul,

"Change targets!" Nick’s voice boomed across the battlefield, amplified by his wind mana. "They are just puppets! Aim for the purple bulbs and cut the connection!"

“Destroy the bulbs!” Raphael acknowledged without hesitation, shifting his stance. He gestured with both hands, and a rift opened above a cluster of reviving mantises. "!"

The rift collapsed, slicing the bulbs cleanly from the insect bodies, and the mantises nearest to it dropped instantly, inert.

But there were too many, and more kept growing in response to the attack. The dungeon's ambient mana was fueling the bulbs’ growth faster than they could remove them.

"I need a clear shot!" Nick shouted. "Pull back! Group up on the adventurers!"

The team sealed the perimeter, forming a tight ring around the five beleaguered strangers. The mantises surged forward in a wave of clicking mandibles and decaying chitin, forcing their way through without any intention of letting them establish a foothold.

Nick closed his eyes briefly, ignoring the screaming instinct that told him to run. He reached out with his mind, grabbing the fear, rage, and desperation flooding the ether, and shoved them into the Shard.

Nick thought, focusing his will on the underground web connecting the monsters.

Unleashing the accumulated psychic weight in a pulse, he hammered the connection between the bodies and poured the screaming terror of dying prey directly into the hive mind, overloading the fungal network with sensation it had not evolved to process.

SCREEEEE—

The sound that tore through the depression wasn't human. It came from everywhere at once: the insects, the ground, and even the towering mushrooms.

Every bulb within a fifty-meter radius exploded at once, and purple sludge poured down like hail. The mantises fell mid-stride, transforming from terrifying undead warriors back into heaps of rotting compost.

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Nick exhaled slowly, grounding the residual mana before it could backfire into his nervous system. When he opened his eyes, the battlefield was silent, except for the wet plop of falling slime.

“That should be all of them," he muttered, his voice raspy.

Raphael glanced at the chaos with caution but finally nodded, “Yeah, seems like it,” he said, though he looked a bit pale.

He was made of tougher stuff than the other apprentices, but it was obvious he was a little rattled by the sudden explosion of violence.

Nick stepped over a mantis' leg and approached the group they had rescued.

There were five of them. A warrior in dented armor, a mage in red robes, a priest holding a symbol he vaguely remembered seeing in Ulter’s temple, and two rogues who looked like they had rolled through a sewer. They were battered, bloody, and gazing at Nick’s team with a mix of relief and caution.

"That was close," the warrior, a woman with short-cropped blonde hair and a scar running through her left eyebrow, panted. She sheathed her sword, wiping slime from her pauldron. "We thought we were mulch for sure. I'm Kael."

"Raphael," their leader replied. "This is my team. You’re a bit deep in the inner area for a quick hunt, aren't you?"

"Got turned around," Kael said quickly. Too quickly. “The mist separated us from the main trail, and next thing we knew, the bugs were on us."

Nick stayed back, leaning on his staff, letting wash over them.

he thought instantly.

And it wasn't just the lie that made him suspicious; her gear was all wrong too.

The warrior’s plate armor was scratched and covered in dirt, but beneath the grime, the mana signature of the metal remained pure. It was an alloy Nick recognized from his crafting studies as Sunsteel, a costly material often used by the kingdom’s knight corps.

And the rogues? Their daggers weren't the mismatched steel of frontier adventurers; they were identical, standardized, enchanted blades.

, Nick concluded. .

"You're lucky we heard the noise," he said, stepping forward. He kept his tone mild, but he noticed Kael’s eyes tighten as she assessed him, clearly knowing he was the reason for the battle’s sudden end. "This area is dangerous. The curse magic is powerful here."

"Curse magic?" Kael asked, her gaze flicking briefly past Nick.

She wasn't looking at him; she was staring at the Obelisk half-buried in the fungal mat behind him. Her signature told him she knew full well it wasn’t just curse magic behind the fungal hive mind.

"Yeah," Nick said, moving slightly to block her line of sight. "Nasty stuff. We're here to clean it up."

Kael’s smile didn't reach her eyes. "Maybe we can help out? We owe you one, after all."

"We couldn't ask that of you," Monte said smoothly, stepping up beside Nick. The noble had clearly picked up on the vibe, as his hand rested casually on the pommel of his rapier. "You're injured. You should head back to the entrance while we handle this dangerous business.”

"We're fine," the mage in Kael's party snapped. He was gripping a wand with a large ruby set into its back, another sign of external support. "We can handle ourselves."

The tension in the air intensified, but before it could escalate into violence, a low hum resonated around them.

Nick turned around, sensing a renewed presence in the ether through the dungeon's cloaking power. It throbbed like a second heart, pumping wet, visceral mana into the earth.

"I insist," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "You should leave. Now."

Kael opened her mouth to argue, but she didn’t get the chance to refuse him before the presence revealed itself.

The earth jolted violently, knocking the priest off balance, while the spongy mycelium floor rippled like water disturbed by a stone.

“More mantises?" Tessa yelped, grabbing Ord for support.

"No," Nick said grimly, backing away from the obelisk. “It’s the Guardian."

The fungus forest groaned as the giant, house-sized mushrooms around the depression stirred, their roots ripping from the soil with a tearing sound.

In the middle of the depression, beneath the obelisk, the ground bulged upward.

Mud and slime cascaded off a towering form. It was enormous, easily thirty feet high. Initially, it looked like a pile of trash and plants, but then it stretched out. Thick, ropy limbs made of woven mycelium slammed into the ground, and a head, without eyes but split by a vertical maw lined with jagged stones, rose into the mist.

"Move!" Raphael shouted. "Spread out!"

The Guardian warbled a sound that was a mix between a grinding stone and a wet suction. It swung a massive arm and crashed into the ridge where Nick’s team had been standing seconds earlier. The impact sent a shockwave through the mud that knocked the wind out of everyone.

"The Anchor!" Kael shouted, abandoning all pretense of being a lost adventurer. "Get the Anchor!"

Nick watched as the "adventurers" started running toward the Guardian, sealing their fate in his mind.