As quickly as he moved, however, the boar moved faster. It closed the distance in a matter of seconds.
Logan was well on the way toward the ceiling, but one of his legs was still dangling a little too close to the ground, a fact he realized too late. The boar reared up and clamped down around his foot with incredible crushing pressure. He felt a flash of pain lance up his limb and had a momentary flashback to his time in Iraq. God, but he hoped he wasn’t about to lose a leg straight out of the gate; there would be no small amount of irony in that. But instead of panicking, he felt something build inside of him. It was almost like a reflex, a knee twitch.
He thought of his rudimentary spore attack: pollen.
No sooner had he conjured the image in his mind than a cloud of yellow spores poured from his gills under his toadstool cap. The motes of dust danced in the air, getting into the creature’s eyes and snout, filling its mouth with a chalky yellow residue. The boar recoiled at once, promptly letting out a honking sneeze that shook the room and ejected Logan’s foot.
The pollen attack didn’t seem to hurt the boar in the least, but it had distracted it just enough for Logan to climb the rest of the way to the top of the rope, well out of reach of the ravenous boar.
Logan let out trembling laugh. This was fine. He was safe. He had a second to breathe.
From up high, he could easily see both the golden door and the blue door. Both were too far away. With only one rope, there was no way to get to the other stalactites, and the thought of somehow leaping along the upward-jutting stalagmites was laughable. He’d bought himself a little time, sure, but he’d really only prolonged the inevitable. If he wanted out of this chamber, it would be over that boar’s dead body, literally. And speaking of, the hairy beast was circling below, snorting and pawing at the ground as it watched Logan’s hanging form with hate-filled eyes—which were inflamed thanks to his awesome fungaloid powers.
“Too bad you don’t have your inhaler, Piggy,” Logan crowed.
The boar sneezed and snotted, but that wasn’t much of a consolation, as it soon cleared its sinuses. Maybe the monster had secret Benadryl powers.
Logan knew he wasn’t going to allergy the thing to death, and he doubted the rusted dagger would even pierce its tough hide.
As a former ground pounder, his natural instinct was just to brawl, but he wasn’t a grunt anymore, he reminded himself—he was a mushroom. Choosing fungaloid had gotten him here, and being a fungaloid was going to get him out, dammit. But he needed to know what tools he had at his disposal. Dangling like a Christmas ornament, he tried to pull up his character sheet again. This time he pressed his eyes shut and visualized what he wanted to happen, envisioning the floating screen in his mind’s eye. He felt a trickle of energy in his belly—his core activating just as it had when he released the spore cloud.
When he opened his eyes again, the screen was floating before him.
<<< ※ >>>
Logan Murray
Guardian Core Matrix
Base Race: Fungaloid
Current Evolution: Toadstool
Cultivator Class: Deep Root Cultivators; E-Class, Rank 9
Primary Elemental Affinities: Morta/Toxicus
Racial Abilities:
- Digestion
Racial Skill:
Domestic Fungi
- Cultivated Fungi: Outstanding Allotment!
Fungal Form (Active):
- Harden
Fungal Form (Passive):
- Fungal Vision
Spore Halo:
- Pollen
- Symbiosis
<<< ※ >>>
Logan felt an ember of hope stir in his chest and a surge of wild adrenaline race through his limbs. He had options here—way more than Shadowcroft had let on about. He was sorely regretting the fact that he hadn’t gotten even a basic rundown on how all of this worked, but he was no stranger to chaos, pain, or hardship. Logan would improvise, adapt, and overcome, just like he always had. He needed to act quickly, though, since his arms were starting to get tired and he couldn’t just hang there all day. He needed out of this dungeon, and the quicker the better. His eyes skipped past the first few options, dismissing them since he’d seen them before.
He started on Digestion and worked his way down the list, looking for anything that might help.
<<<>>>
Digestion: Consume immobile and dead creatures to absorb more of their core-essence, and instantly convert it to usable Apothos. Fungi are nothing if not efficient, and that efficiency is on full display in the digestion ability! Would you like to learn more about the digestive abilities of the fungaloid? Yes/No?
<<<>>>
Hmm, that sounded like it might have some interesting uses down the road, but since the boar below was neither dead nor immobile it didn’t seem particularly useful at the moment. He moved on to the Racial Skill, Domestic Fungi:
<<<>>>
Domestic Fungi: There are thousands of types of mundane and magical mushrooms that grow throughout the realms connected to Ashvattha. But the fungaloid can spawn many of the rarest, deadliest, and most valuable mushrooms around. These fungi can be quite useful to dungeoneers and attract those looking for rare alchemic ingredients. More advanced types of fungi can have additional abilities or even be mobile and aggressive. Proto-Spore Cultures live inside of the host fungaloid and can be spawned even if mature specimens are lost, destroyed, or harvested. Mature mushrooms can take days or even weeks to grow, though it is possible to drastically increase maturity with the Rapid Growth Spore Ability.
As an E-Class, Rank-9 cultivator, you can select two Level-One Proto-Spore Cultures and one Level-Two Proto-Spore Culture. Would you like to view a list of available Proto-Spore Cultures? Yes/No?
<<<>>>
Logan wanted to get a gander at the different mushrooms he could domesticate and grow, but his fleshy arms were burning and none of those would help with his current circumstances. The skill box said they could take hours or even days to grow, and he needed something that would help right now. So, he dismissed the info and moved on to the next item on the list, Fungal Form Active.
<<<>>>
Fungal Form 1: Harden. Trigger Harden to temporarily calcify your exterior by 25%, reducing damage, though at a 20% reduction to speed. Harden is a stackable ability and can stack up to four times. At higher levels, this turns into Chitin Armor, creating hardened plates of chitin similar to an insect’s exoskeleton. Light but resilient, the chitin reinforces the body without being cumbersome.
Available at: E-Class, Rank 10+
<<<>>>
On the surface this one seemed absolutely worthless—seriously, what good would it be to turn yourself into an immovable brick of petrified wood? He was on the verge of moving on when inspiration struck. Under normal circumstances this skill would be basically useless, but these weren’t normal circumstances. He was dangling thirty feet above a rampaging murder-boar, his arms only a matter of minutes from giving out. True, Harden was obviously meant to be a defensive ability, but in this situation he could use it offensively.
He probably only weighed seventy pounds or so, but seventy pounds of calcified rock, dropped from thirty feet, had to do something. Right?
He wasn’t exactly spoiled for choices, so he made a snap decision. That was something else the military had pounded into his head. Initiative and decision-making—because no decision was often worse than making a bad decision.