Chapter 123 – The Sporehost

Chapter 123 – The Sporehost

With an effective way to turn enemies into living bombs (although the timing was a bit iffy sometimes) John was able to conserve his mana and have a blast testing his newfound physical capabilities. When he had gone for mindless jogs before (which still hadn’t paid off) he had only thought about the end result. Actually using his Strength was satisfying. If Frank ever bothered him again, John could punish Dickinson for being a dick. A grimly satisfying thought and a short-lived one. He had greater things to worry about than his bully in a school he no longer cared about.

Aclysia culled the last Treant, just as John, with half his mana regenerated, felt confident enough to use a Mana Ray to bring a similarly quick end to the last Sporeling. He breathed in once, rolled his neck to relax a bit and waited for the familiar message.



And there it was. Now, the next question was how the entrance sequence of the day would look like. The answer came in the form of the little shrooms, previously deemed harmless, suddenly jumping from the ground and running towards the trees. It seemed whimsical, like a scene from a fairy tale, until the thin heads split open.

Four mandibles, resembling the jaws of a maggot, latched onto the white mushrooms that had infested the trees. A putrid stench filled the air, as fungal matter liquefied. Mushrooms cascaded down like wax, sloughing off the trees. Everything looked like he was in the middle of a massive heap of fly larva. John had to suppress the urge to throw up. Even after everything he had seen and felt, this particular combination of stench, wiggling bodies, and wet squelching sounds was disgusting. It was like the entire world around him was rotting away.

The small mushrooms moved within the semi-translucent mess of liquefied fungal matter. A carpet of crawling matter, it all concentrated in a single spot. The blessing of this entire situation was that the ocean of sickly white was flowing around the hill. At the foot of the elevated position, the boss monster manifested.

Ten metres long and two metres tall, a maggot-like thing with centipede-like legs on its squishy, white, segmented body. John could see the mushrooms inside twist and turn, grow into some kind of nervous system, and once that was done, grey chitin horns twisted out of the thing’s back in another wave of that putrid stench that pestered his nose. The eyeless creature opened its mouth, which made up the majority of its front end. A toothless maw, nothing more but a gap in the white body, John looked inside involuntarily, unwilling to leave the boss out of his sight, and saw nothing but an ocean of squirming, toothed mushrooms.



“This dungeon SUCKS!” John decided. Why the hell would a boss only have one piece of loot? Quadruple Experience better be worth it. The Sporehost took a massive breath and, after closing its maw, blew spores of pestilent green out of its chitin horns. Its bloated body shrunk, as the air pushed outwards and the new spores mixed with the already present yellow mist all around. Whatever that was, John had no interest in getting in contact with it. “Salamander, check if you can ignite that stuff, Sylph keep the air around us clean,” John ordered and watched the disgusting creature. For the moment, it seemed content just exuding more spores.

“Got it!” Salamander enthusiastically agreed and, once again the streak of fire, rushed through the air.

“Okay, can do, I just hope I don’t get any more of them in my mouth, I did earlier. Accidentally. Of course. Wow, isn’t the sky yellow today...OKAY I CONFESS I WAS CURIOUS AND ATE ONE. They taste like gummy bears in case you are wondering. At least I think so, I never ate gummy bears myself. Are they bitter? They look bitter. I mean who...” Sylph's words became faster and faster as she kept flying around the rest of the team to create a whirlwind with a safe space for John to stand on in the centre until they were nothing but a high-pitched whisper in the wind.

The Sporehost opened its mouth again and with a deep, slimy burp spit out three goo-covered Sporelings. Compared to their brethren John had just fought, these were tiny and they also lacked the four arms. In return, they were quicker on their feet.

Luckily, John still stood near the top of the hill he had Gnome create. That meant that the Sporelings had not only to climb the hill but also get through the storm shield that Sylph was still busy keeping up. “Gnome, take out the left one.” John gave her a bit of mana for that endeavour, “Aclysia, you take the right, I will take care of the last one.”

Gnome grabbed the Sporeling. ‘Run John!’ she pleaded as she deeply embraced the explosive lifeform, covering it with her tiny body. He had no other choice but to oblige. Through his Bee eyes, always above, he saw what happened behind him. He felt the shockwave of the explosion and saw the small pebbles of Gnome's body fly through the air. He got no notification that Gnome was ‘dead’, which made John breathe in relief. His Possession entered the cloud to find her. What he saw was a halfway shattered little girl. Her left half had been entirely ripped apart by the explosion, leaving the dirt and pebbles, filled with vein like mana lines that made up the inside of her body, exposed. She looked at his second pair of eyes with only the left one still intact. A tormented little smile appeared on her face.

To leave her in that state would have been torture, so he made her shift back to her incorporeal state. The time her sacrifice had bought had to be enough.

The Sporehost had moved on to fighting Aclysia with its tongue. There was some sort of cooldown to the Sporelings, it appeared.

John checked on his mana. He was back up to 40, but what could he do with that? He needed to assess the situation. He took a deep breath and looked at the enemy. Salamander still tried to find some kind of weak spot on the enemy. ‘Any success?’ John pried.

‘No, I would wager its insides are vulnerable though, but I can’t get there as long as these mushrooms are around,’ Salamander’s answer burned with anger for the creature that dared to strike down Gnome. Sylph was preoccupied with keeping the air clean, Undine was of no use against this enemy and Aclysia, while managing to outmanoeuvre the rather slow creature repeatedly, could get no hit in that was decisive. The cuts she made on its body were quickly healed and not deep enough to penetrate to the Sporehost’s hollow core.

The tongue stretched after Aclysia as she stormed around the creature’s body. That tongue, where did it come from? It was clearly made from the mushrooms from the inside wall and the number of heads indicated that most of those were involved. John had not seen any base for that tongue when he had gazed down into the creature’s maw, so each individual mushroom must have been growing outwards to form the tongue concluding that it was hollow.

“It is hollow!” John shouted out his realization as it became his path to victory. The information quickly went through his network.

Aclysia sent calm approval, having no time for words outside of ‘Possible’ while Salamander was excited as all hell ‘Let’s roast that maggot!’

Step one: They would stall the enemy until John’s mana reached 100. This would take another twenty seconds or so. This was rather easy. Aclysia dodged around the repeated attacks of the tongue. In return for its area attacks and immense defenses, its attacks were slow. Aclysia had an Agility of over 50. The only thing they had to look out for was another Sporeling. Whether it didn’t have the ability to create another one or wasn’t able to spit it out due to its tongue being constantly occupied, the Sporehost did not use that ability.

John kept a close eye on his mana before announcing, ‘Now!’ causing Aclysia to change to the Rock and Wind, the dagger she had gotten from Radio Head. She rammed the grey stone blade into the extended tongue from above. Running forwards, she sliced the blade by dragging it through the mushrooms. Following the cut was a light-green blade of air: the dagger’s enchantment ‘Wind-Strike’. It deepened the cut and made the regeneration just the slightest bit slower. It was all the time Aclysia needed to fulfil step two. After dismissing the dagger, she gripped the edges of the wound and pulled it open wide with all her strength. The toothed mushrooms hissed. The tongue wound around the now immobilized Artificial Guardian and started strangling her.

Step three was rather uncreative. Salamander flew through the gap Aclysia’s hands kept open. As theorized, the tongue was empty and only a few of the mushrooms had remained inside the main body, not enough to be a challenge for the small fire spirit to dodge. “You hurt my older sister, prepare to die,” Salamander exclaimed as John’s mana filled her being with power, bursting out in a wave of flame.

John saw the fire spread through the semi-translucent body, burning its way to and then out of the horns at the Sporehost’s back. Its hollow tongue swelled and turned into a smoking mess. The stench of burned mushrooms spread through the forest, a less disgusting but still unpleasant smell compared to what came before. 100 mana was not enough to kill the creature outright but it was clearly damaged. The mushrooms that made up the tongue attempted to turn inwards again. Aclysia wouldn’t let them, equipping the Cleaver of Streets, she brought down the heavy blade, cutting the half-cooked tongue off right at the base.

The Sporehost was panicked now, thrashing in fruitless motions, spreading red spores like crazy. A perfectly good defensive mechanism against John, but against Aclysia and Salamander it was useless and so all they needed to do was wait for John to regenerate mana. A second outburst of power from Salamander rocked the Sporehost’s body, scorching it from the inside. Then a third. The fourth made it collapse to the ground, the centipede legs twitching, slime oozing from the cut off tongue. A fifth, a sixth, a seventh. Then the eighth finally killed the monstrosity.