Chapter 491: In mushroom girl’s swamp
“Yes, I’m sure he’s still coming.”
Demi Adair munched and slurped her broccoli and seaweed soup. The jerk of a talking mushroom she bonded stared with its judgy, dramatic little face in silence. She rolled her eyes.
“You know everything I know. He said he’d come find me. I have no reason not to believe him.”
She stretched and cracked her shoulders, reaching high enough to touch the top of her lean-to furs. She’d made her shelter out of small ‘cave’, that was really just a big jutting rock. She’d got what she needed from some nearby trees and vegetation. A few animals. She’d skinned and dried the hides much as her ancestors would have. It was sturdy enough, and between the big leaves and furs it mostly kept her dry during the rains. Mostly.
But tonight was a bad one. Her little ‘swamp’ splashed with enough drops it sounded like applause, the canopy above and muddy ground around her all soaking up the moisture.
She tried not to imagine the muscle-bound patron of Nassau beside her—half naked in her furs. His glowing green eyes watching her like she belonged to him. The rest of the world shut out while they passed the night exploring each other in silence, listening to the rain…
“Well what do you want me to think about?” Demi glared at her mushroom familiar and spooned in another mouthful of soup. The thing didn’t ‘talk’ exactly, but she knew how it felt about…well, everything. Absolutely everything. Which was usually ‘unhappy’.
If her time in the apocalypse had taught her anything, it was that fungi weren’t ‘fun guys’ at all. They were whiny little bitches, as a general rule. And predatory assholes as the exception. ‘Dick Head’, aka Dick, aka Dicky (the name she’d given her mushroom) was a classic example: he was wary of everything, even when he was growing in it.
But he did bring some much needed perspective. On rare occasion. Like the possibility that a horny young man and powerful player may not have been telling her the absolute truth. But she’d seen him react to her Floating Spore. And there was no way he could have faked it. Probably.
She’d at least thought she’d seen the genuine emotion and honest nature of an authentic man.
“My magic doesn’t lie,” she said, as much to herself as Dicky. “I just need to wait here, keep myself safe and fed, and Mason’s going to…”
She almost said ‘save me’, which brought a twin flush of heat to different parts of her body for very different reasons. The idea of some white knight-white man being her savior pretty much flew in the face of her entire upbringing.
But she knew the old world was gone. It was ancient history now, and the feelings it produced really didn’t matter in a world filled with man-eating beasts. It just pissed her off more, to be honest. Like she’d had some kind of righteous anger stolen away.
“I really wish he’d hurry,” she half whispered and half cursed, putting down her empty bowl and staring out the flap of her shelter.
The heavy rain kept on falling, and Demi sighed at the pure quagmire she’d be dealing with tomorrow. By the time she checked all her traps she expected to be exhausted and covered in mud, unless she wasted some mana to float a bit. But regenerating mana took energy, and therefore food, so it was always hard to tell if it was smarter to use it or not.
“Maybe I’ll eat you next,” she said, rubbing an affectionate thumb over her familiar. The sentient mushroom hummed with pleasure. Touching him gave her increased ability to detect the growing life all around her, especially in the ground. It was a bit like another ‘sense’.
She had a pretty successful garden going now, and she smiled as she felt the hungry seeds and plants soaking up the rain. She’d bought several things (and accepted a few gifts from Mason’s assistant Haley), during the ‘tournament’, especially glad for the potatoes that were growing well. She could boost this with mana, too, but it was the same energy-efficiency problem as always.
Pre or post apocalypse, the damn problems were always the same. How to get enough food without getting killed, or exhausting yourself in the process. The never-ending drudgery of being alive.
Demi chastised herself because it wasn’t that bad. She was alive, after all, when a lot of others weren’t. But someone to talk to definitely would have helped. Or, you know, a big, strong, mostly naked man wrapped around her at night, with his soft lips against her and his…
Demi blinked as Dicky practically screamed a warning.
She pounced to the edge of her shelter, staring out into the dark night and the mist, seeing nothing with her actual eyes. But with her ‘extra sense’ she could feel the change.
There was something…wrong with the earth around her. Something was out there—something unnatural, something foreign to the primal plane.
Her heart pounded as she tried to decide. Whatever it was maybe couldn’t see well, either. If she just stayed where she was it was possible she’d be safe. Unpleasant things had wandered through her territory before. She’d chosen a swamp because it was undesirable. Hard to cross.
Dicky earth-sense pinged and pinged again with increasing warning. It wasn’t just one creature, it was several. Demi’s mouth went dry, and she felt light-headed. She’d wait a few more seconds. Whatever the creatures were could still move on, could still pass her by…
She heard a groan in the dark. A muffled growl. The chittering shriek of something terrible and unnatural. Her terror told her to wait, to hide and see and trust that everything would be fine.
But she grit her teeth and fought for control. Then she activated her primary defensive power, Barkskin, and rushed out of the tent.
**
Demi didn’t really live in a secluded swamp—she lived in a minefield. Over the past month (whenever mana and food reserves allowed), she had prepared the plant life for possible attack. Nothing was grown by accident. They were placed strategically—fungus especially, kept in uniform patches across the muddy ground.
She could cover any living thing with ‘Blight’, infusing it with a kind of fungal life. After that she had options. But her most offensive option was a fungal bloom that swelled itself with infectious spores, and flesh-eating bacteria, plus enough gas to explode like a landmine.
She still couldn’t see anything in the foggy dark. But she could hear the creatures moving, and she could sense them stepping through her defences. She stopped and activated Floating Spores, watching her magic fly out with her emotions, triggering the plant life with her need and purpose, just as it had gone to Mason.
The night erupted with the airy hiss of fungal explosion.
Spores filled the air, mushroom patches setting off with flashes of magic in a dozen spasms of light in the gloom. She activated Primal Growth, bending the spores, enhancing their effect just as she grew the food in her garden.
Now was no time to be efficient or reserved. She was at her strongest here, and these creatures were in her kill zone.
Swelling so many blooms was mana intensive, but perfect for a strange enemy she didn’t understand. Her spores had a way of…adapting to their enemy once triggered with Primal Growth. Life always found a way, she supposed. She just had to give it a little encouragement.
The spores did their work. Demi heard the pain and suffering of the creatures without seeing them. She heard their struggle through the mud, heard them growling and maybe communicating in strange voices as they came towards her.
Why would anything being eaten alive by magic fungus keep going? What the hell were these creatures?
She stood there fighting her fear, ready to escape, wanting to at least see her attackers first. Her imagination went wild, but even so, she wasn’t prepared for what came out of the mist.
A horned demon straight from some biblical movie emerged covered in purple spores. He swat at the magic as if at flies, his face half covered in the terrible rot, flesh bubbling as his dark fur sloughed off. He looked up at Demi with one remaining crazed eye and roared like a lion.
She ran towards her secondary patches, letting her spores spread her deadly intent to every living thing in range. Her mana drained, but there was no helping that now. The natural world seethed and strained beneath her magic, lives given gladly to the power of decay and regrowth.
Trees dried up as she passed, their seeds falling as desiccated husks. The moisture of the rain pooled and mixed with the dying plant life, a thousand bomb makers readying to sabotage their invader.
The demons chased, and the demons died. Demi’s home ripped itself apart, plant-life extinguishing everywhere she went, giving themselves with the same terror and fury growing in her chest.
“Why?” she screamed into the dark. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
It was the same everywhere she went. Everywhere her ancestors and people had ever been. Was there no place in the old world or the new for her to be safe and alone? A place to call hers long enough to build a life?
She sensed more and more of the creatures entering her swamp, no matter how many died. She was forced to run further and further, her mana drained now to half and dropping quickly.
As the chase went on, the rain and mist reduced enough for Demi to see a swirling circle of magic in the distance. It was red and leaking with foul magic, and she saw shadows forming beneath it in the shape of horned demons.
She choked back a sob when she saw another form not far in the distance. The creatures were still coming, and they weren’t going to stop. She couldn’t kill them all. Not by herself.
She could feel the sense of fulfilled disappointment oozing from Dicky, like that always depressed robot from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like she really needed to hear that now.
She pulled back her senses, cutting off her actively floating spores, conserving mana now for what might lie ahead. With a final glance back at her home, at the shelter she built and the gardens she’d had such hope for, she scrolled through her powers.
With a final thought to Mason and how he would maybe never find her now, she activated Bloom Cloud, shivering before her body dispersed into a thousand motes of natural mana, and blew away on the wind.