Chapter 179: Mushroom Mystic
An ethereal battle axe slashed through the dank cave air as Coop wielded his newest weapon against the horde of mushroom monsters. Swirling trails of turbulence twisted in the soup of dust, mist, and darkness, chasing the double-sided two-hander as another Elite Sporeguard was cleaved in half by the gleaming edge. As the monster’s life escaped from the severed stem, its torso collapsed with a wheeze, still grasping with pointed claws as it fell. Coop allowed the momentum from his backswing to draw his body away from the explosion of spores that burst from the monster’s interior. The wind that chased his broad swing pushed the cloud of spores deeper into the crowd of enemies as they surged and he engaged another.
Strangely, despite the increased density of spores in the air, the voices in his head had gradually diminished as the fight developed. Coop believed that the tiny motes had been carrying the whispers, infecting any intruders to the cave system with the mushroom’s madness. It was similar to the disorientation effect of Fog of War. Where his domain was within the mists, the fungal caves were a domain of spores.
The voices had been trying to discourage and confuse him throughout his journey from cave to cave, but it seemed like the reverse had become reality once the battle had consumed Coop’s spirit. He imagined the forms that carried the voices sulking as Coop fought and thrashed in their trap. They still left him with the occasional cryptic threat, but for the most part, they were silent, as if they were the ones that ended up discouraged in the face of Coop’s insistent progress.
Rather than continued mental manipulation, the primary enemy appeared to alter its focus to concentrate on deceiving Coop’s senses in the moment. The cloud of moths kept him encircled, swooping into his flanks or scattering above his head, obscuring his sight and drawing his attention away from other threats. There were constant feints combined with real attacks being launched from behind the moths.
The mushroom boss was manipulating its roots to assault him from different angles whenever he seemed distracted by the rest of its minions. The roots would stab at him like lances from the darkness beyond the swirling white swarm, forcing him to either abandon his position with an emergency dodge or stand his ground and block with the head of his battle axe. The ethereal weapon was up for the task, catching the oversized mycelial threads with clangs that caused a muffled echo throughout the cavern. Coop was also fast enough to step aside, letting the spikes miss his limbs by inches thanks to the combination of his excessive Agility and Presence of Mind empowering his battle sense.
The problem was that the root spikes weren’t always real. The hallucinations drained Coop’s focus, bombarding him with threats that required just as much of a response as the real assaults since he didn’t have an effective way to determine if they were fake before countering. In the split second the quick attacks required him to react, he couldn’t decipher between what was real and what wasn’t. Even with Presence of Mind empowered by his Fog of War, he was never confident as to whether or not he was hallucinating the specific characteristics of the mushroom spears that he detected.
It didn’t matter. Coop simply gritted his teeth and engaged with everything, real or fake. When he chopped through the real thing it was all the more satisfying. Blasting through a hallucination was practice, giving his Haunted title a chance to perfect his two-handed axe technique with every strike.
Ultimately, an extended and chaotic skirmish was playing to his strengths. Over the course of the fight, he was getting stronger, rather than being worn down. Coop shook his head as he swung his axe like he was creating a cyclone, claiming the lives of even more Elite Sporeguards with every shift in direction. It must have been frustrating to fight a Revenant. The carefully laid traps ended up being chewed up by his steady advance.
When the ground rumbled, he ignored it, maintaining his balance with his strong core while eviscerating the mushrooms. He wouldn’t be fooled into abandoning his position by the same trick twice. In fact, he took the shaking room as a sign that he was right where he should be, in a spot that the mushroom didn’t want him to occupy.
Coop’s phantasmal barbarians were only able to defeat two or three of the surrounding creatures before succumbing to the afflictions they accumulated, but the same wasn’t true for Coop himself. Even though he had resisted thousands of the fungal infections, he still collected hundreds of afflictions, yet none of them slowed him down to any recognizable degree. He kicked part of a mushroom corpse away before shifting his attention to the next target. The cloud of moths followed.
Contrary to the typical characteristics of monsters as expressed by the Primal Constructs, the Sporeguards didn’t disintegrate into mists upon their defeat. They also didn’t behave in the same manner as human remains when killed. Instead, when the fungal creatures were overcome by Coop or his phantasms, they collapsed into a heap of what Coop was affectionately calling mushroom meat. Their interiors were filled with the same gray spores that lit up the dark caves and coated every surface until being disturbed by the flapping wings of the small white moths that called the caves home. The motes were expelled from space between interior hyphae while the rest of the Sporeguard deteriorated until a pile of inert gray dust was all that remained.
The battle raged on long enough for Coop to find himself dashing through a layer of dust with muted footsteps, leaving a trail where he had been, and kicking up poofs as he planted his feet to strike at his foes. Coop was one of those people who had never seen snow, but he imagined the Sporeguards had given the cavern a light dusting of gray that was visually similar to the real thing. If it wasn’t for the violence, the dim gray illumination of floating specks falling into the powdery gray blanket with fluttering moths dancing through the limited light might have been beautiful. The presence of the mutated mushroom minions destroyed the image of dark serenity.