Chương 515: 245.Spore Infestation 1

Akari's Perspective The moment Akari stepped out of the drop pod, she forgot to breathe. Not because the air outside was worth savoring. Quite the opposite. Her body simply locked in place, half a second ahead of her brain, pinned by what stood in front of her. The whole world looked like a dream that had broken, and grown back somehow more complete than before.

Towering pipe-shaped fungi thrust straight up into the sky, one after another, thick as towers, their skins mottled with patches of bioluminescence in deep violet and indigo blue. They looked like trees. They were nothing like trees. No branches, no leaves — and yet they held up the entire dim canopy overhead. The light filtering down through heavy fungal caps and pink-purple haze had been stripped of everything useful by the time it reached the ground, leaving only a soft, sickly brightness.

The ground was cracked, but not with the dryness of rock or soil. The surface carried a fleshy, dark-pink texture. Red-tinged mud oozed between the fissures. Boiling Acidic Mudpools pocked the landscape like overheated wounds, bubbling steadily, sending up steam that carried a faint, wrong sweetness laced with metal. Around the pools, deep blue crystals jutted from the ground with no apparent logic — cold, sharp, like teeth the planet bared without bothering to hide how dangerous it was.

Beautiful enough to look fake. Dangerous with total honesty. Akari made no sound. She simply drew a very shallow breath. She knew this was Orpheia. She also knew a place didn't get any friendlier just because it looked like something out of a mythological picture book. Those bubbling pools scattered across the terrain were almost certainly the Boiling Acidic Mudpools from the file.

They were everywhere — large, small, shallow, deep — as if someone had turned an entire forest floor into a field of traps built to scald you or simply swallow you whole. Forest. Akari stared at the endless ranks of impossibly tall pipe-fungi ahead, and for the first time, genuinely wondered whether forest was even the right word. But she had no better one. Composed of mega-fungal pillars hundreds of meters tall. Sky-blocking canopy. Surface held permanently in weak bioluminescent glow.

Mud, spores, crystals, acid haze, and organic fungal mats, all coexisting. Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars. She remembered the name from Shinomiya Hyouka's file, and had exactly one plain thought about it. She'd probably dropped into the single worst place on this entire planet to warm up as a rookie. The ASURA's HUD glowed steady inside her helmet. Akari tightened her grip on the heavy-caliber sniper rifle, pulled her eyes off the landscape, and began checking the navigation and sensor interface.

Unsurprisingly, the moment she opened the main map, the positioning line staggered like it was drunk. Waypoints jumped. Heading calibration shuddered back and forth. Even the most basic route guidance looked locked in mutual sabotage with the Spore Haze in the air. Wonderful. The worst-case scenario Shimo and the others had war-gamed aboard the ship had come true inside the first minute on the ground. Akari didn't swear. She was economical with that particular emotion.

Rather than complain, she was in the habit of working the procedure first. She dropped into a half-crouch, braced the rifle against her side, and pulled up the ASURA's sensor management page. Following the sequence she'd already memorized, she brought the haze-correction module and terrain-filter compensation online. Several sub-windows flickered open and shut along the right edge of her vision. The navigation marker blacked out once, then reloaded. Three seconds later, the jitter eased.

Five seconds later, the terrain outline held. Seven seconds later, a workable guide-line finally drew itself ahead. North. Good. Since she knew the way, she needed to move. Akari didn't linger. She dropped her center of gravity and pushed forward along the nav line. The ASURA performed better than she'd estimated. Which patches of fungal mat were hollow underneath. Which mud surfaces looked crusted but would give way without warning. Which spore-fog banks ran too dense to push through.

Which fallen fungal pillars might be hiding a living heat source behind them — the system tagged all of it ahead of time on the HUD, in clean, unloved little warnings. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. It felt a bit like having a deeply unromantic but highly practical adjutant walking beside her. It offered no comfort. It simply told her, before she stepped into it: that spot ahead will kill you. Go around. Akari liked that style.

At least it was more reliable than the kind that only spoke up at the last second. She pushed deeper in. There was almost no real wind inside the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars. Just heat, haze, and slow-drifting luminous specks — spores, or dust, hard to say — floating without direction through the dim glow. The terrain itself seemed built to strip away any sense of orientation. Every giant fungal pillar looked the same as the last. Clusters of blue crystal kept appearing.

The mudpools kept bubbling in the same low register. After walking a long while, Akari half-believed she hadn't moved at all — as if this forest had no interest in human measures of distance, and would show the same face whether she'd covered a hundred meters or a hundred kilometers. She couldn't say how much time had actually passed. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe longer. By feel, it was closer to a century. The scenery stayed stubbornly the same. Absurdly tall pipe-fungi.

Ground littered with crystal that looked like it should be worth money and would almost certainly kill her first. The same sickly glow off fungal patches and mud. She was skirting around a lower cluster of growth when her vision went black. Smack. Something dropped straight onto her visor from above. Cold. Heavy. Slick. Carrying a faint, deeply wrong sweetness of decay. The mass spread the instant it hit, smearing a curtain of half-set viscera across her sight.

Akari's muscles locked on pure instinct — rifle up, finger nearly closing on the trigger. She caught herself at the very last second. Not from calm. Because someone spoke first.

"Don't shoot." The voice came from her right rear — not close, not far, unmistakably human. Akari didn't lower the rifle right away. She shifted her stance instead, opening the angle, and scraped the mess off her visor with the back of her gauntlet. It peeled away trailing bright, glowing strings — like saliva, like digestive fluid, like some bodily substance this planet had no business letting a normal person understand. She tilted her head up and finally found the culprit.

High in the fungal canopy, thick strands of hyphae hung down in ropes, like inverted purple-brown pythons. Every strand ended in a teardrop-shaped, translucent sac. Amber shell, a glowing green core inside, the sac's surface coated in thick, gelatinous fluid that dripped slowly downward in shining, disgusting threads. They looked pretty enough to pass for living lanterns. They were, in practice, predatory organs built to smother anything unlucky enough to wander underneath.

"Those are Lantern Pods." The speaker had drifted closer — also in an AS, face and origin both hidden. Judging purely from that unnervingly composed, unnervingly leisurely tone, this person was either fearless or not entirely right in the head.

"See those vine-like strands hanging down from the caps?" they went on, with the misplaced patience of a tour guide.

"The luminous sac at the end secretes a thick digestive fluid, mainly for catching small airborne organisms. Some sources classify it as a semi-botanical predator. Others consider it closer to—" Akari had already stopped listening. She trusted the disgusting thing that had just dropped on her face more than she trusted a stranger offering a nature lecture on Orpheia's surface.

The other pilot seemed completely oblivious to how wary she was — even took a step forward, hand rising, as if a friendly greeting was both welcome and overdue. Unfortunately, Orpheia had no interest in supporting that kind of social ritual. Before they even reached her, the body jerked. The next instant, a sound too short to finish becoming a scream tore through the open comms. Something surged up from the ground behind and to the side of them, coiled hard, and yanked.

Armor scraped across fungal pillar and crystal with an ear-splitting shriek, and then they vanished — dragged behind a bank of pink fungal mat and rising steam. The whole thing took about as long as a bad film cut. Akari didn't move. She dropped low on instinct, retreating into the shadow of the nearest thick pillar, sealing her breath entirely, muzzle low, eyes locked on the spot where they'd disappeared. What. What was that. Why hadn't the sensors reacted at all.

The HUD stayed perfectly calm — environmental warnings and terrain lines cycling normally. No large heat source. No hostile marker. Almost no suspicious movement at all. That calm was worse than an alarm would have been. It only meant one of two things: either the thing ran cold, or its camouflage was good enough to nearly fool the ASURA. Akari narrowed her eyes and forced her focus off the bare fact that someone had just been dragged under, hunting instead for detail. Then she saw it.

About a hundred meters out, a patch of pink fungal mat that had looked like nothing but a rise in the terrain contracted, very slightly, at the edge. Not a big movement — just the faint pulse of something breathing. But once she'd noticed the wrongness, there was no unseeing it. That wasn't ground. It was an animal. Four-legged.

Low, bloated, its whole body covered in pink, fleshy fuzz nearly identical to the surrounding terrain, dried hyphae and debris clinging to its back like it had simply grown up out of the surface. No eyes — none Akari could find, anyway. The front of its head was a single massive circular sucker-mouth, rings of flesh folding deep inward, the rim trembling in a slow, patient rhythm — like a meat grinder breathing. Crouched between the mud and the steam, it barely registered as an animal.

It looked more like a predatory organ Orpheia had secreted for itself. The name surfaced in Akari's mind without effort. Mycelium Stalker. It was in House Shinomiya's file. Omnivorous, leaning carnivorous. Heat-sensing predator. Exceptional mimicry. Highly responsive to moving targets and local vibration. Not recommended for close encounter. Wonderful. She hadn't been on the ground long, and she'd already run into something the file had explicitly flagged with that warning.

The unlucky tour guide from a minute ago was probably already an appetizer. Judging by the slow, regular pull of that sucker-mouth, the thing was eating — and fully absorbed in it. Akari thought about it for exactly two seconds. She could shoot. She was confident she could put a round through the front of that mouth from a hundred meters out. The problem was, there was no need. First: she was first leg, not Orpheia's pest control.

Second: she had zero interest in finding out what a gunshot might call in on a planet like this. Third, and most important: she was on the clock. So she picked the correct answer, which also happened to be the least heroic one. Leave. Akari dropped even lower and slipped sideways, using the shadows of the giant pillars and crystal clusters as cover. Every step was stingy — avoiding the rim of the mudpools, avoiding soft mat, avoiding anything likely to carry a clear vibration.

She didn't speed up until she'd confirmed the Mycelium Stalker hadn't broken from its feeding and hadn't turned toward her — only then did she snap back onto the nav line and push the ASURA's output hard. Black armor swept through the dim violet haze almost like a shadow. No sound of pursuit behind her. Not yet, at least. But Akari understood perfectly well that meant nothing about safety. It only meant Orpheia hadn't yet decided how it wanted to bite her next.

And ahead of her, waiting, the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars stretched on without end.