“No, no, no…” Ren jumped up when the metallic hiss echoed closer.
The mushrooms in his hair now pulsed with a strange yellowish glow, but he barely had time to wonder why.
The tunnel stretched before him like a black throat. No side exits, no places to hide.
Just smooth, ancient stone, and those mysterious symbols that seemed to glow faintly under his mushrooms’ yellow light.
“Come on, come on,” Ren urged himself.
The metallic hiss drew closer. He could hear the scythes scraping against the tunnel walls, the sickly tinkling of broken plates.
Another hiss, closer.
The Mantis moved faster now, the Excavator’s flesh providing it with new energy. The jingling of its damaged exoskeleton was like a death bell approaching in the darkness.
Ren ran.
His feet struck the ancient floor as he plunged deeper into the tunnel. The air grew colder, denser. His breathing echoed in his ears, mixing with the ever-closer sound of scythes against stone.
Scriiitch. Scriiitch. Scriiitch.
The Mantis didn’t even need to run. Its steady, relentless pace was enough. Sooner or later, the tunnel would end. Sooner or later, he’d run out of places to flee.
A flash of its scythes illuminated the tunnel behind him.
The beast was close enough now that the mushrooms’ light revealed the sickly gleam of its eye facets, the irregular pattern of its broken plates.
It didn’t matter that it was injured.
It didn’t matter that it had been expelled from its territory. It was still a Bronze-rank creature, and he… he was just a child with the world’s weakest beast.
The tunnel began to narrow. Or maybe his eyes were playing tricks in the darkness. The yellow light from the mushrooms cast strange shadows on the walls, making the ancient symbols seem to dance.
Scriiitch. Scriiitch. SCRIIITCH.
Closer. Ever closer.
Ren stumbled, his knee striking stone. Pain exploded in his leg, but terror kept him moving. He rose and kept running, limping, crawling forward.
The Mantis hissed, the sound now so close he could feel the vibration in his bones. Its broken plates created a nightmare spectacle on the tunnel walls, reflecting the mushrooms’ yellow light in fractal, demented patterns.
And then, the tunnel ended.
A smooth, solid wall rose before him, covered in ancient symbols that seemed to mock his fate.
No way out.
The metallic hiss stopped.
In the silence that followed, Ren could hear the scythes scraping against stone as the Mantis approached slowly, savoring the moment.
It no longer needed to run. No longer needed to hurry.
Its prey was cornered, it only had to…
The mushrooms’ yellow light intensified, as if responding to Ren’s terror. The symbols on the wall began to glow with the same sickly hue, peeling off the walls in small clouds, creating patterns that reminded him of…
Spores?
The Mirror Mantis stopped.
Its eye facets reflected the yellow light, creating a kaleidoscope of death on the tunnel walls. It raised its scythes, preparing for the final blow.
But something was wrong. The beast tilted its triangular head, confused. Its broken plates tinkled with a new rhythm, more erratic, more… frightened?
The air grew dense, heavy with a smell Ren had never experienced before.
It was like damp earth and rusted metal, like rotting leaves and something older, deeper.
The symbols on the wall, which he’d thought were marks of the ancients, began to move.
No, not move.
They were detaching.
“They’re not symbols,” whispered Ren, the horror of realization hitting him like an icy fist. “They’re spores. Dormant spores.”
The Mantis took a step back, its metallic hiss transforming into something close to panic.
Its plates now reflected thousands of points of yellow light detaching from the walls, ceiling, floor, spores that had been waiting for centuries, awakening to the resonance of the mushrooms in Ren’s hair.
The entire tunnel was alive.
And it was hungry.
The ancient spores swirled in the air like a golden storm, enveloping the Mantis first. The beast shrieked, a sound Ren never imagined such a fearsome creature could make.
Its broken plates, reflecting light imperfectly, created a horror show as the spores found every crack, every fissure in its exoskeleton.
Ren pressed himself against the back inclined wall, his heart beating so hard he thought it would burst.
The Mantis writhed, its scythes cutting the air uselessly while the golden cloud consumed it. Its metallic shriek faded, transforming into a wet, terrible sound.
And then, silence.
Where the powerful Bronze beast had stood, now lay only a mound of broken plates covered in yellowish mold that pulsed with ancient life.
The spores turned toward Ren.
The golden cloud swirled like a wave of ancient hunger.
The mushrooms in his hair pulsed frantically, but this time there was no confusion, there was no salvation.
The ancestral spores weren’t normal predators, they were vestiges of a forgotten age, and everything living was their prey.
The first contact was like frozen fire on his skin.
Yellowish fungi sprouted from his arms, legs, neck, each pulsing with a sickly rhythm that drained his energy. The pain was indescribable, as if every pore in his body was being devoured from within.
“No… please…” he gasped, falling to his knees.
But then he saw it, where the spores had detached from the ceiling, a ray of light filtered through like a promise of salvation.
An exit, barely large enough for a child to pass through.
Ren stood up, his legs trembling with effort. The invasive fungi kept spreading across his body, but something was different.
Where the Mantis had succumbed in seconds, he remained conscious. His own spore, the “world’s weakest beast,” pulsed with its light, as if it were… fighting.
Every effort was agony.
He pushed himself upward, his fingers finding the hole’s edge just as his knees threatened to give way. The light blinded him momentarily as he crawled out of the tunnel.
It wasn’t the outside.