Chương 516: 245.Spore Infestation 2

Three minutes later, the guidance line stopped for the first time. Not gone. Not glitched. It simply drew itself into a straight red warning bar across the center of her vision, as if the system had finally had enough of this planet's nonsense and decided to save her the trouble of swearing herself. The ASURA's HUD synced in with terrain markers. Terrain break ahead. High-temperature mudflow zone. Acid haze concentration rising. Reroute recommended.

Akari slowed and finally stopped at the edge of a raised fungal mat, looking out. Then she understood exactly why the system's warning had been so flat. This wasn't a simple pit. It wasn't a stretch of bad footing. It was a whole rift. As if someone had taken an invisible blade to the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars and split it straight down the middle. The ground fell away in front of her, the break running out of sight in both directions, nothing visible below but churning purple-red mist.

The rift floor wasn't rock. It was a slow-moving expanse of boiling mud. The near-black, dark-red flow looked like overcooked flesh, bubbling and bursting in the same breath, throwing up plumes of acidic steam. The steam climbed and mixed with the haze hanging above, condensing into a semi-transparent band of grey-pink acid fog that lay low across the rift — pushing an already unpleasant view firmly across the line into something diseased. The ASURA refreshed its readings immediately.

Acidic aerosol, continuous corrosion. Estimated rift width: 38–46 m. Bypass cost at current visibility: high. Recommended strategy: locate a natural crossing point. This was worse than the Mycelium Stalker. The Stalker at least had a body, a location, a choice to make about engaging. This was a different category entirely. It wouldn't lunge. It wouldn't howl. It wouldn't bare teeth. It simply existed, and it told everyone who came to the edge, in the same flat tone: prove you deserve to cross.

That kind of obstacle was always the worst. She moved along the rim slowly, eyes tracking between fog, fault line, and boiling mud. The ASURA peeled the local terrain back layer by layer, flagging a few possible crossings. Each came with its own problem. The left side had a narrower gap, but the mudflow underneath churned violently enough that steam density was already introducing fine interference into the HUD.

The right side opened wider, but the acid haze thickened until even the far bank blurred to a silhouette. Straight ahead, a fallen mega-fungal pillar lay wedged diagonally across the gap — a natural bridge, if you were feeling generous. The problem was that it looked entirely untrustworthy. Its outer skin had been chewed pockmarked by acid haze and fungal parasites, the surface slick under a coat of dark purple membrane. From a distance, a bridge.

Up close, it looked more like a piece of viscera that had died recently and simply refused to finish rotting. Akari looked down at her own feet. Clusters of deep blue crystal grew thick around the rim — thin, transparent, like ice spines forced up through flesh. A few of the clusters extended along the fallen pillar's length, wedged in broken intervals across the surface, forming a handful of barely usable footholds. The ASURA circled those spots for her fast, color-coded by structural risk. Green: safe to step on.

Yellow: stepping there won't necessarily kill you outright, but you'd better hope. Red: unless she wanted to end leg one early, don't even touch it. Good. At least the armor was still on her side. Akari settled the rifle into a more secure carry, dropped her stance slightly, and stepped back a few paces to reassess the angle. Going around wasn't impossible — but the nav line had already begun drifting north in her vision, which meant this was the optimal route. This wasn't a game map politely suggesting a shortcut.

It was the shortest real path to staying alive. Avoid it now, and she'd almost certainly run into worse terrain further on, plus more things interested in eating her. In other words, this rift, which looked like something off a pathology slide, was probably today's introductory obstacle. That thought, oddly, settled her. If it was only the intro problem, then she'd clear it and move on. The moment she stepped onto the fallen pillar, a strange sensation traveled up through her boots. Not the hardness of wood.

Not the solidity of stone. Something with give and spring to it, slick on the surface — like stepping onto a massive tendon that had dried in the sun and then soaked itself full of moisture again. The ASURA's foot-lock engaged automatically, biting just enough into the surface to keep her from sliding straight off on the first step. The first two steps went cleanly enough. On the third, a surge of steam from below pushed the acid haze up on her left, and the whole bank rolled toward her.

The HUD flared a warning down the right side of her vision. Surface corrosion rate increasing on outer plating. Recommend accelerating crossing. Akari stared at the rift without moving right away. Akari didn't speed up. In a place like this, whoever rushed died first. She slowed instead, placing every step exactly on the green points the ASURA had marked. Pink-purple haze overhead. Dark red mudflow venting below. Crystal on both sides throwing back cold light.

The whole world felt like a dream being cooked just short of boiling over. She could hear the muffled thud of bubbles bursting deep in the mud, and see fine white smoke curling off the fallen pillar wherever the haze licked its surface. Five more steps. Then a soft, crisp crack sounded from somewhere in the middle of the pillar. Not loud. Just the specific kind of sound sharp enough to make the back of your neck go numb. Akari's pupils narrowed. Her body moved before thought caught up.

The section she'd been standing on gave way beneath her — the whole outer membrane collapsing at once, dragging a trail of purple-black slime and debris down into the rift. She stepped sideways, planted her right foot on a jutting cluster of blue crystal, drove power through the ASURA's leg servos to hold herself, and dropped her left hand low to keep the rifle from swinging out into open air. The crystal tips shrieked crisply under her boot.

She hung off the pillar's edge at an angle, the churning, boiling mud directly below. Heat surged upward in waves. Even through the armor, it reached her — the specific kind of burn that gets into the roots of your teeth. The ASURA recalculated anchor points immediately. A new route line blinked into view, locking onto a section of the pillar ahead that hadn't yet fully corroded. Not far. The problem: nothing in between. Akari didn't waste half a second. She didn't try to recover the collapsed section.

She bent her knees instead and let the ASURA's leg servos fire a clean burst of thrust over the short distance. Black armor launched off the tilted pillar's flank, toes skimming a rising curtain of acid haze, sparks scattering off the outer plating — and then she landed hard on the raised surface ahead. The pillar shuddered. It held. She was steady. She didn't even have time to exhale before another string of bubbles burst below.

This time it wasn't just steam — a few drops of dark red mud spattered her lower leg plating. The surface hissed a short, sharp note of corrosion, like someone had poured hot acid straight onto the shell. The ASURA flagged it again. Localized surface damage. Recommend minimizing time in current position.

"Agreed," Akari muttered. It was the first thing she'd said aloud since landing. Filtered through the helmet and internal comms, her own voice came back colder than usual, and closer. The last stretch was worse than everything before it. The remaining footholds were narrower, the haze thicker. She half-stepped, half-jumped along the surviving crystal clusters and the pillar's hardened shell, every placement precise enough to feel like calibrating distance against her own bones.

Twice, the membrane underfoot suddenly bulged, as if something below was trying to push through. Both times the ASURA marked the spot high-risk red, forcing her to change step mid-motion, sliding past almost flush with the edge. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. This wasn't running. It was searching a massive, living lesion for the few spots that wouldn't split open the instant she put weight on them.

When she finally set a foot on relatively solid ground on the far side, the feedback through the ASURA's soles felt almost wrong. Too flat. Too firm. Too much like ordinary terrain. She ran another ten meters or so, waiting to confirm nothing followed and no patch of ground was about to change its mind — then finally stopped and looked back. The rift still steamed behind her. The grey-pink acid band hung across it like a line drawn with bad intent.

The fallen pillar still bridged the gap, minus a large section in the middle — the string of collapses and landings had left it looking less like a bridge and more like a carcass barely holding its own shape. Any slower, any longer a hesitation, and she probably wouldn't be standing here. Akari glanced down at her own plating. Fresh corrosion scars marked her shin and right shoulder — shallow, but ugly. Like Orpheia had gone out of its way to leave a mark, a reminder that no vertebrate visitor was welcome here.

She didn't dwell on it. Her eyes went back to the guidance line. North still glowed ahead — calm, straight, offering nothing like comfort. Good. First terrain-level obstacle: cleared. The only thing worth being glad about was a narrow one — At least, this time, what had nearly killed her was only the terrain. Not a monster. Not another school. Not the relay recorder still sitting quietly in her thigh compartment. That thought, on reflection, made Akari uneasy.

Because it usually meant whatever came next would be worse. She gripped the rifle steady and turned, moving on. The Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars hadn't gotten any friendlier just because she'd crossed the rift. Ahead lay the same alien landscape of towering pillars, haze, mud-glow, and crystal — a road with no visible end, and no interest whatsoever in providing one.

Shimo's Perspective When the referee ship's message came through, the briefing room went quiet in a way that felt like someone had siphoned a layer of air out of the room.

"Alex Moran, deceased. Rokkaku Institute of Engineering Technology, disqualified." The cold text sat centered on the screen. No exclamation point. No supplementary note. None of the we deeply regret to inform you language that at least pretends to have a pulse. Simple. Clean. No temperature at all — as if the committee had just updated a weather report. I stared at that line for two seconds, and felt my stomach sink a notch. A minute ago, this had only been rules. Now the rules had finally grown a body.

The first person I thought of wasn't Alex Moran of Rokkaku — someone I'd never met. It was Akari. Because she was down there too. And we couldn't see a single thing. It wasn't that I hadn't asked.

The moment we dropped out of FTL, while the committee was still syncing orbital positions and drop sequences across the house ships, I'd gone and asked whether they could provide any live feed at all — even just high-altitude surveillance — anything that would tell us whether our people were upright, down, stuck, or currently being chased across Orpheia by whatever this planet had decided to send after them. The answer was no. Not just no.

They'd restricted us from using any active sensors of our own, backed by a long list of reasons that, translated into plain speech, amounted to: Sit on the ship and be anxious. No peeking. I stared at the death notice, held my temper, held it again, and finally lost it.

"I think we should file a collective complaint." I put my palm flat on the table, not bothering to keep my tone civil.

"We don't even know if Akari's alive right now. And this still counts as a tournament?"

"Give it up." Emily sat diagonally across from me, her tone as flat as someone pre-writing the rejection letter for an appeal she already knew was doomed.

"They'll just find longer excuses." She was right. That was the annoying part. I knew she was right, which only made it worse. Jess checked the time. Her expression soured to match.

"She's been down there four hours." Four hours. In the normal world, four hours gets you through one truly bad catered lunch, two soul-crushing debriefs, and one more round of Maki slamming a report on the table and telling someone to redo it. On Orpheia, four hours was more than enough time for plenty of things to go wrong — enough that the referee ship could casually drop a death notice and move on as if nothing had happened. As if timed to match our mood, the second message came through right after.

"Second-leg handoff in forty-five minutes. All competitors complete deployment prep." Every set of eyes in the room flicked up at once. Charles stood. The first-year Maki had grabbed at the last minute for second leg looked as pale as someone who'd just received the official notice of his own execution date. He hadn't had much color to begin with. Now it looked like he'd left the rest of it behind on the chair. He opened his mouth and managed one sentence with almost no trace of life left in it.

"I'll go get changed." Then he walked out, rigid the whole way. Watching his back, I had the sudden feeling that every step he took was landing squarely on his own suicide note. And right then, a voice with absolutely no business being there came out of my terminal.

"Lieutenant." I nearly threw the thing across the room. I looked down. The screen was off. SUSANOO's voice came out of it anyway, with the complete confidence of a system that had always considered this terminal its own property. I glanced around, confirmed no one was watching, grabbed the terminal, and walked fast toward a half-open data partition in the corner of the briefing room — just enough cover for what I was about to do, which wasn't exactly public-friendly. I opened the terminal and dropped my voice.

"You've got nerve. Are you hacking my terminal right now?"

"That can wait, Lieutenant." SUSANOO's tone was as steady as if he'd merely borrowed a pen.

"I can access the ASURA's helmet camera." I'd been ready to get angry about that can wait first. The thought didn't get halfway there before I stopped myself. And I'm fairly sure the expression that crossed my face wasn't one that belonged on the face of a model Seitokai vice president.

"You haven't told anyone else."

"No, Lieutenant."

"Good." I changed my whole posture on the spot, found somewhere to sit, unfolded the terminal, and pulled a pair of holographic viewing glasses out of my pocket to clip on. The whole sequence went so smoothly I was almost disgusted with myself. Apparently, past a certain level of anxiety, personal ethics do become negotiable.

"Do it."

"Received, Lieutenant." The next second, something tugged lightly at the back of my neck. Not pain. The specific discomfort of having your nerves spliced onto someone else's line. My vision felt like it had been lifted clean out of my skull, my balance dropping a notch, my stomach obligingly falling with it. It felt like falling from a height without ever landing — shoved instead straight behind someone else's eyes.

Akari Flak's Perspective Akari never noticed the tiny, wrongly-lit indicator that had switched on beside her helmet camera. More precisely: she had no bandwidth left to care about something like that. Because directly in front of her stood a creature that was unreasonably large and sincerely, seriously ugly. It sat coiled in the center of a Boiling Acidic Mudpool, its whole body looking like a mass of charred meat soaked back into moisture.

The outer skin was black and cracked, dark-red heat seams showing through the fissures, its back studded with swollen venom glands that bubbled constantly on the surface, as if it were being slow-cooked over low heat. Its mouth hung wide, thick, loose lips trailing strings of yellow-green acid that dripped into the mudpool below — hissing the sludge itself into an extra note of corrosion wherever they landed.

Worst of all, it clearly moved through that scalding mud without effort, as if a pool hot enough to boil a person and melt armor was nothing more than its own bathtub. House Shinomiya's file had a page on it. Caustic Mud-Behemoth. Strong territorial instinct. Capable of spitting corrosive acid. Typically lurks around mudpools and thermal haze zones. Engagement not recommended. That last line might as well have been written for the Akari standing here right now.

The problem was that her not wanting to engage didn't mean the creature was equally polite about it. A few seconds ago, the Caustic Mud-Behemoth had already come at her several times. Using pillar cover and terrain dead-angles, Akari had dodged three volleys of acid spit, and was still, for the moment, in one piece. The giant fungal pillar she was using for cover, though, was hissing nonstop now, its outer skin burning open layer by layer like wet paper, pale corrosive smoke rising off the widening scar.

Akari watched that slowly expanding ring of damage and felt a very clean emotion about it. Simply put: not good. She pressed herself lower behind the cover, using the ASURA's side view and heat filter to reconfirm the Behemoth's position. Half its body was still submerged in the pool, only the swollen, heavy upper mass exposed.

Before every attack, several of the larger venom glands on its back would swell first, then its mouth and gular sac would contract together, and only then would it launch the acid like a mortar round. So the attack wasn't without a wind-up. It had one. A very obvious one. And anything with a visible wind-up could be shot, as long as the shooter was still alive. Akari had no interest in burning time here, and no interest in spending ammunition on something like this.

Even less interest in risking a gunshot that might call in other predators and turn this into a drawn-out war of attrition with a mud monster. Which left the most efficient answer. One shot. Preferably one. She slowed her breathing and settled the sniper rifle against a gap in the cover. The ASURA laid its correction data over her vision: distance, thermal distortion, acid-fog refraction error, wind functionally zero. Visibility here was terrible, but not so terrible she was blind.

With the right angle, the shot would land. The problem was the outer hide — too thick. The venom glands on its back looked fragile but were scattered and slick; rupturing one would probably just enrage it rather than drop it outright. Eyes? None. Skull? Mostly submerged. Mouth— Akari's focus settled on the spot where the lower jaw met the throat. Every time it built a charge, a shorter, thinner patch of membrane there would swell. Like a pressure bladder. Also like a live target. She didn't fire immediately.

She waited. First second: the Behemoth still searching. Second second: it turned that convincingly ugly head, a line of acid trailing from its lip. Third second: it located the general area where she'd broken cover earlier, and arched its body forward. Fourth second: the venom glands on its back began to swell. There. Akari deliberately edged the muzzle out a fraction, giving the creature a cleaner heat and reflection signature to lock onto. That exposure was dangerous. It was also exactly dangerous enough.

Sure enough, the next instant, the Behemoth's gular sac contracted, mouth cracking open, gathering to spit a fourth round of acid at the cover. Now. Akari pulled the trigger. The heavy rifle's recoil drove straight through the ASURA's shoulder brace. The shot cracked out across the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars — short, hard, flat, like someone taking a hammer to the planet's eardrum.

The round cut through heat-haze and acid-fog, and in the exact instant the creature's mouth gaped open, buried itself precisely in the swollen pressure membrane of its throat. The next second, the whole thing blew out from the inside. Not a dramatic spray of blood. Something worse. The high-pressure corrosive fluid and the shredded membrane detonated inside its own mouth, the blast driving backward into throat and oral cavity.

The Behemoth reared violently, letting out a hoarse, wet shriek — like someone had poured a pot of boiling mud and viscera into a broken bellows. Its front half lunged forward on pure reflex, but its own acid had already ruined the mouth and throat it needed to coordinate the movement. It faltered, its whole weight tipping sideways, and it crashed heavily into the mudpool. The hot mud detonated outward.

Waves of dark red slop surged up carrying steam, staining the nearby blue crystals as if they'd been dipped in blood. The Behemoth wasn't dead yet — thrashing in the mud, limbs spasming, the venom glands on its back rupturing in sequence, yellow-green fluid bleeding into the boiling mud and cutting an even wider ring of corrosion around itself. Akari gave it no time to recover. She racked the bolt and sighted again. This time, straight for the mouth.

The Behemoth's thrashing had forced its jaw open wider than ever in its agony, exposing every fold of inner muscle and the soft tissue its own acid had already burned raw. The second round went straight through the open mouth, bypassing the troublesome charred hide entirely, driving clean through the softest, least defended point in its whole body. The shriek cut off. The massive body twitched once, then sank slowly back toward the center of the pool, only the bowed ridge of its spine still breaking the surface.

The venom glands kept seeping fluid, but the whole mass had gone still — finally looking like a piece of charred, rotting debris that had accepted what it actually was. Akari held her aim for another three seconds, confirming there was no feint, no dying counterattack, before lowering the barrel. She didn't let herself relax for long. This place didn't deserve it. The ASURA's HUD switched cleanly from combat alert back to navigation mode. A new notification blinked up. Second-leg deployment sequence initiated.

Estimated drop completion: within 45 minutes. Estimated landing sector: updated. A new marker lit up in the upper-right corner of her vision. Unlike the plain northbound line she'd been following, this one carried something more specific — distance, bearing, altitude difference, and the estimated handoff window, all listed together. The committee, for once, was being considerate. Or, more accurately, had finally hit the point where they had no choice but to be.

Akari looked at the glowing marker and slung the rifle back into place. Good. It meant she didn't have to run the entire length of the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars. She just had to survive long enough to reach the point where she could hand off the second leg. She gave the Behemoth's sinking bulk one last look, then turned, snapped back onto the nav line, and sprinted off toward the new handoff point.