Sporemageddon

what?"

"Ginger, are you okay?" Phillipe asked.

I half-turned to see that Phillipe and Tyro were standing next to the exit, almost as if they'd pushed themselves as far back and away from the core... or from me, as they could.

Smiling, I tried to put them at ease. "Yeah, sorry. I'm fine. I think I'm done here."

He frowned. "And what did you do?" he asked.

That was going to be a tricky one to answer, wasn't it? The easy thing to do, of course, was just to kill him and Tyro. I was pretty sure I could find my way back up on my own now. Especially if I took his map.

That had been my plan from the start, really. Leaving any sort of witness was stupid.

But...

Phillipe was a good father.

"I..." I looked to the floor, then back up. "My God asked me to come here. So I did. I can't say any more than that." "Yeah, but what did you do?" Tyro asked. "Because that felt weirder than anything--" He stopped and looked to his father, who had touched his chest with the back of his arm.

"It's fine," Phillipe said. He was watching me warily now. "It's none of our business. We don't question a client's motive."

"But--" Tyro began.

"No," Phillipe said. "We don't press. Not when gods or politics are involved. That isn't the kind of thing that a common man wants to meddle with. Not for the sake of their own safety and sanity."

I brushed my overalls clean. I was thankful, genuinely, for his respect. I didn't want to have to kill him or Tyro. They'd been good companions so far and I was willing to take a bit of a risk with them if they were willing to do the same with me.

Time would tell if that had been a mistake or not, of course.

In any case, I'd left other witnesses behind that I couldn't do anything about now, so maybe this would work out for the best.

"Shall we go?" I asked.

I didn't know what the ritual did, exactly, but I had the feeling it would be better to be out of the dungeon sooner rather than later.

"Let's head back," Phillipe agreed. "We're going to want to make it to the fifth floor, at least, before camping for the night. It's likely that the rooms on the fifth floor will have reset, so we'll have to fight our way back from there on."

"Okay," I said. That made sense. Once we reached the fourth floor and up there was a good chance that we wouldn't have to fight anything though, so that was a bonus to look forward to. Climbing all those stairs though... that was going to be a lot less fun.

Tyro looked around the room one last time, and I noticed him shivering even if it wasn't cold at all. I wonder what they felt at Feronie's presence? There wasn't really a polite way to ask, not without poking away at the fiction that Phillipe had brought up.

As we trekked through the tunnel again, feet splashing on the wet ground, I brought up my subskills.

[Apocalypse Walker]

You are immune to all offensive and harmful uses of Apocalypse and Forbidden magics

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I blinked. That was it? At the same time... holy crap. Immunity to two entire kinds of magic. Not just magic I'd cast myself, either, just, blanket immunity. They were, I imagined, super uncommon kinds of magic, but still. How would that even express itself for me?

I needed to find out what counted as Forbidden magic. And for that matter, Apocalypse magic too.

Maybe I could ask around at the Union? Or maybe there was a public library somewhere in the nicer parts of the city? I'd been considering visiting one, but that would require that I buy slightly nicer clothes and get a wash up, which would make me stick out a lot in the slums and that wasn't great. The nail that stood out got mugged.

"Spiders," Phillipe said simply. "We'll press through, then walk back across the tunnel. It'll be slow again."

A number of spiders were waiting for us ahead, some of them so well hidden that it was basically impossible to notice them without the fading glow they gave off. So, my life-vision mushrooms were weakening. How long had it been since we'd eaten them?

Call it four hours of useful, active time. Of course, I could just look at Phillipe or Tyro to see the glow they had, but it was somewhat harder to judge since they were right there. A strange quirk. The glow didn't stand out against something that was already lit up.

I had to wonder if it was just a synesthetic thing and if others might sense life with another sense. But no, the mushrooms specified vision.

I remained a little distracted as we pushed through the spider room and directly into the tunnel. I'd noticed that my mana was back to full, likely because of what had happened in the core room, so I wasted some of the excess [Blight]-ing the spiders that I could.

With [Ritual of Sporemageddon] up to level twenty, I wasn't far from having five-hundred total levels. That meant that I wasn't far from a second class either.

I didn't know what kind of option I'd be able to pick, or how they would help, but I was quite certain that I wouldn't refuse any improvements I could get my hands on.

I was actually a little giddy at the idea that I'd be able to advance in something. Levelling up skills certainly had a bit of an addicting property to it. I could well imagine people levelling things up just for the high of seeing their numbers improve.

The trip through the trap tunnel wasn't as long as the first time, but it still took a couple of hours to cross what I could have walked in ten minutes.

Then it was the stairs.

I knew I would regret it, and I wasn't wrong. I was sweaty and my legs burned before I was even a third of the way up, and the stairs just seemed to stretch on forever ahead of me. At some point Tyro glanced back, saw me struggling, and he waited for me to catch up. Then he wordlessly grabbed my backpack and I let him with a smile.

Chalk up another tally on the 'killing them is a bad idea' side.

Not having to lug around a heap of weight on my back helped, but only so much. I even set down Sir Nibbles to make it easier to walk up the steps.

By the time we arrived back at the sixth floor, I was in desperate need of a break. And we were only on the sixth floor. Five more staircases to go.

"We'll take a little break here," Phillipe said. "We haven't cleared this next room, so we don't want to linger."

I gave him a wordless thumbs up because that took less effort than any other reply.

The break came and went too quickly. My stomach gurgled for food and my legs were aching, but I'd felt worse before and decided that I didn't need to complain since it wouldn't gain me anything.

We pushed on through the sixth floor, moving far faster than we had on the way down. Most traps had been disarmed already, and each room I slipped through gave me a strange sense of deja-vu. I'd seen them before, of course, but there had been so many that they were something of a blur now.

That was alright. I imagined that soon enough I'd be out of this place, and then I could work to forget all about it.

The important things in my life weren't down here, after all.

***

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