Chapter 134: The Pandemonium of the Mushroom Forest
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 134: The Pandemonium of the Mushroom Forest
Hallucinogenic spores scattered like cherry blossoms.
Inhaling them would randomly inflict one of four status effects: ‘Sleep,’ ‘Confusion,’ ‘Laughter,’ or ‘Despair.’
“Everyone, get close to me!”
Fortunately, the large-scale barrier bracelet could block those spores. That was why barrier magic was so useful from the 4th to the 6th floors, and it was the very reason I’d gotten this from Professor Isilof.
“Nobody move for now.”
We were in the worst possible situation, but panicking wouldn’t help.
I had to calm down, whatever it took. First, I needed to check if everyone was okay.
Yernil.
“I’m fine!”
Unlike me, she had landed gracefully after hitting the mushroom, like a cat. She wasn’t hurt at all.
Back Attack.
“I’m okay too, boss.”
He had also managed to keep his balance.
Aimus.
“Ugh.”
He was clutching his lower back, struck by the kind of back pain you’d expect from a middle-aged office worker.
“Are you all right?”
“Just pulled it a little.”
“Is Caleb okay?” Yernil asked.
To be honest, my ankle was throbbing, but not so much that I couldn’t walk.
“What do we do now?”
Even a tough guy like Back Attack sounded tense. Yernil looked terrified.
Truthfully, I wasn't much different.
No, I was probably even more scared, because I knew full well that this place was far beyond our current combat capabilities.
I should use the capsule.
I’d summon the Spider Doctor and ask for help.
I wasn’t sure if that monster would be kind enough to escort us safely to the 5th floor, but it was still a better option than trying to navigate the 6th floor on our own…
“What the?”
The moment I took the capsule out of my pocket, my body froze.
“What is it?”
Yernil peeked over.
“Ah, it’s nothing.”
The capsule was shattered!
It must have broken in my pocket when I fell through the sand hell and crashed onto the 6th floor.
But why hadn’t the Spider Doctor appeared? Why didn’t a gate open?
Was this not a summoning capsule?
“Caleb.”
Amidst the confusion, Aimus spoke up.
“Do you happen to know anything about the 6th floor? All I’ve heard are ghost stories and tall tales…”
Right.
If the capsule was useless, I had to forget about it. Wasting time was not an option.
Our team, which had only reached the 4th floor on our last Labyrinth trip, would know nothing about the 6th floor. I had to brief them quickly.
“I’ll give you a quick rundown of the important points, so listen carefully.”
First, the ambient magic.
Just like the freezing cold on the 3rd floor, the volcanic ash on the 4th, and the sunburn on the 5th, the 6th floor had its own ambient magic.
The mushroom spores currently drifting above our heads.
The barrier bracelets could block them, but if anyone stepped outside the bracelet’s range and got afflicted with a status effect, there was no easy way to cure it. The only option was to drag them back inside the barrier and pray they recovered naturally.
“And the monsters here are mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“Yes.”
Adventurers who have fought their way down past the golems of the 4th floor and the sand sharks and giant scorpions of the 5th often scoff when they first encounter the sluggish-looking mushrooms. Most of them die right there.
The mushrooms here are highly mobile.
They have no leg-like organs, but they move like starfish by extending their mycelia in all directions.
Their speed is anything but slow, and when they spot prey, they fire their sporocarps like poison darts. If you get hit, it’s over.
“A mushroom will sprout from the point of impact. Your movements will be severely restricted, and as time passes, more mushrooms will grow, sucking all the nutrients from your body. You’ll end up like a rotting log while still alive.”
To put it in game terms, your maximum Action Points would decrease by one each turn from the moment you were hit, and you’d become incapacitated on the fourth turn.
After that, you’d take vitality damage that ignores defense every turn until you died.
“Then we’ll have to pull the mushrooms out, even if it means getting injured,” Back Attack said with a grim expression.
He was right. Just like cutting off a bitten limb in a zombie movie, immediately carving out the flesh where the spores have taken root could prevent further contamination. But…
“It’s hard to do it on your own.”
The sporocarps fired by the mushrooms are similar to the ambient spores floating around.
The moment one attaches to your body, you’re afflicted with one of four status effects: sleep, confusion, laughter, or despair.
“In that state, it would be nearly impossible to perform a task like cutting out the wound yourself. A party member has to help.”
All three of them turned pale.
And I still hadn’t gotten to the worst part.
“After death, the corpse becomes a mushroom host and starts moving.”
The fallen adventurer becomes a monster.
That was why, even in the game, I’d had to kill my carefully raised party members here a few times.
The 6th floor was hell.
The Labyrinth generally gets progressively harder with each descending floor, but the difficulty spike on the 6th floor is massive compared to the first five.
“There’s a reason Ingelam stopped at the 5th floor to just farm resources…”
And there was a reason brilliant wizards like Clorence spent so much time on the 5th floor.
Talented prodigies who had been charging through the Labyrinth with unstoppable momentum were almost always broken before the 6th floor.
This place was born when the Labyrinth swallowed a piece of the natural environment from the Age of Myths.
An entire floor contaminated with all sorts of malevolent mushrooms and fungi.
A hell of madness where party members, disabled by curses and status effects, turned into monsters one by one, while the survivors suffered from confusion, saw hallucinations, and burst into fits of laughter.
It was known as…
‘The Pandemonium of the Mushroom Forest.’
That was the 6th floor.
“Let’s… let’s find the stairs and go up…” Yernil stammered, on the verge of tears.
“That’s our best bet.”
But there was no guarantee we could find them. Even if we had a stair scroll, it would take us to the ‘Stairs to the 7th Floor,’ so we couldn’t return to the 5th.
I felt just like I did when I was first thrown into the Labyrinth as a slave of the magic university.
Escape itself is the challenge.
“...!”
Suddenly, Yernil flinched and nocked an arrow to her bowstring.
“What is it?!”
“I heard something over there…”
Shit.
Are they here already?
Scrape, scrape!
It slid toward us, tens of thousands of tentacles—no, mycelia—spreading wildly across the ground.
Their texture was less like a mushroom and more like steel, with a metallic sheen glinting off their surface. Its size was overwhelmingly massive. It stood about three meters tall and nearly a meter wide, its enormous cap covered in reddish warts.
“Aimus!”
The vanguard monk instinctively opened his steel parasol.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
A dozen sporocarps slammed into the parasol.
“Hailstorm.”
From behind the parasol, I aimed my wand and chanted the incantation.
Then, I flipped the Hourglass.
[Your turn. Time remaining: 60 seconds]
[Action Points: ■■■■■■]
It was just a field mob, but we couldn’t afford to be stingy with the Hourglass right now.
*
The mushrooms of the 6th floor were completely immune to plague-type magic, but they were vulnerable to fire and ice.
Ice-based magic, in particular, would freeze their mycelia upon impact, immobilizing them and preventing them from firing sporocarps.
However, due to the level difference, a spell like Frost Ray would likely be resisted.
What about Hailstorm, a Tier 3 binding spell?
It had a chance, but a single cast wouldn’t have a high success rate.
So, I would rapid-cast Hailstorm and pour it all on at once.
The AP cost for Hailstorm is 2.
Since I had cast one spell before flipping the Hourglass, I could summon up to four Hailstorm clouds in an instant.
“Hailstorm.”
I summoned the second cloud. 44 seconds left on the Hourglass.
As I waited for the cooldown, I thought.
How many ways did we have to overcome the challenges of the 6th floor?
First, the items we had.
1. A bundle of scrolls I brought for Yernil to use with her magic arrowheads.
Some of these, like the Ignition scroll or the Stun scroll, would be useful on the 6th floor.
2. The wand-mounted focusing lens.
I originally intended to use it to gather the sunlight on the 5th floor to prevent burns and simultaneously increase my wand’s power. But there was no light source here comparable to the 5th floor.
3. The Ring of Mass Hydration.
It prevents moisture from evaporating from the skin and keeps our food supplies from drying out. But it was pretty much useless on the 6th floor.
4. The Hood of Flanking Necrosis on Back Attack’s head. Hmm… Necrosis magic was poison to the monsters on the 5th floor, but it probably wouldn’t work well against mushrooms.
Somehow, I had to find a way to utilize these seemingly useless magic items.
“Hailstorm.”
[Your turn. Time remaining: 21 seconds]
[Action Points: ■■□□□□]
Finding the stairs back to the 5th floor wouldn’t be easy.
That was because there was usually a significant distance between the stairs leading to the previous floor and the stairs leading to the next.
We fell into a trap as soon as we passed through the gate from the 4th to the 5th floor.
That meant the stairs from the 5th to the 6th floor must be very far from where the trap was.
Breaking through to that point with our current strength was impossible.
We’d only have a chance if we could bolster our party’s overall power along the way.
There were three options worth trying.
First, a Treasure Room.
Second, a Fountain of Blessing.
Third, find a special area on the 6th floor and eat an ‘Aether Mushroom.’
The third option was extremely difficult, and the first two depended on luck.
“Hailstorm.”
And I was not a lucky person.
*
The clouds billowed above the monster’s head, forming an enormous cap that seemed to compete with the giant mushrooms of the forest.
From it, a tremendous amount of hail poured down.
CRASH! BOOM!
A deafening roar echoed through the cavern. The magical chunks of ice froze whatever they hit, and a sheet of ice formed on the mossy ground.
Crack.
The mushroom was frozen, but not completely subdued. Its round, umbrella-like cap was completely encased in ice, but it had blocked a good portion of the hail, leaving the stem intact. However, the ice spreading from the ground had frozen its volva and mycelia solid.
Screeech!
The upper part of the mushroom’s stem had a ring. In the biology of a real mushroom, this organ is merely a remnant of the membrane that ruptured as the cap grew, but…
“The ring is opening!”
For a 6th-floor mushroom monster, it was a different story.
“Be careful!”
It was an organ that allowed the monster to escape when it was in danger, like a reptile shedding its skin.
Riiip!
Something like a round egg shot out from the opened ring. It was an ‘ascus,’ a sac containing a large number of spores.
The ascus flew like a cannonball and…
CRASH!
It tore through Aimus’s parasol and flew over his head.
“We have to get it now!”
If a new stem grew from the ascus, we’d be in trouble again.
“Dust Explosion!”
Our party was truly a group of 6th-floor first-timers. They didn’t know what to do, so their reactions were slow.
But…
Magic arrowheads!
At least they reacted instantly when I gave an order.
An arrow tipped with an Ignition scroll flew and embedded itself in the ascus.
Next to it, a dagger was already sticking out. Back Attack had thrown it.
Flames blossomed from where the blade and arrow were lodged.
And…
BOOM!
Smashing Gaia.
The iron staff swung in a heavy arc, shattering the ascus with immense physical force.
“Hah… hah…”
All three of them had sweat beading on their foreheads.
We had finally killed a single field mob.
“Yernil, do you hear any other sounds nearby? Like more monsters approaching?”
“N-no. I don’t hear any monsters.”
That was a relief.
“What about the sound of a fountain?”
I asked just in case, though I wasn’t expecting anything.
“I hear it. The sound of a Fountain of Blessing.”
Huh?
“And Caleb, I think a Treasure Room is close, too. Your compass is beeping.”
Huh?
“Really?”
I quickly took out my compass.
Pressing my ear against it, I thought I could hear a faint beeping sound too.
Me? A guy with such shitty luck gets a Treasure Room and a Fountain of Blessing this close by?
“Where is it?”
Now I was getting anxious when things went well, but I had no choice but to check it out.
“Let’s go to whichever is closer, the fountain or the Treasure Room.”
“The Treasure Room is closer.”
“Let’s go.”
Upon reaching level 20, a new slot had opened up in my Memory Book.
But I hadn’t been able to learn a new spell because the spellbook for the build I wanted wasn’t in the university bookstore.
But a Treasure Room would have one.