Chadrigoth kept his distance when necessary, and always kept an eye out for spore clouds. Often, he would hide behind an invisible wall while he let his hellion imps do his dirty work for him. The little fiends would come leaping out of the Abyss Lord’s flames, reeking of sulfur and gnashing their obsidian-black teeth. As a high-ranked B-Class dungeon core, Chadrigoth could fill the field with his minions. A small army willing to do his bidding at a thought or flick of the wrist.
Logan never stood a chance. And yet, since evolving into a Shroomian Acolyte, Logan had picked up some nasty new spore colonies to add to his ever-expanding list of abilities.
After consulting with Inga, he’d chosen a level-one Blister Wart Proto-Spore Culture and a level-two mushroom set called Gem-Studded Puffballs, which had real promise. Roughly the size of a human skull, the puffballs were a beautiful amethyst color and studded with brilliant multicolored spikes that looked like gemstones. Beautiful, except that they exploded like claymore mines at the slightest provocation, blasting out fragments of crystalline glass. He also unlocked his first level-three Proto-Spore slot, which he’d filled with his first minions! Spore Wargs. Those vicious little critters were as mean as half-starved junkyard Dobermans.
Even with the Spore Wargs, though, Logan couldn’t hold a flame against Chadrigoth. Besides, his Warg minions were an ace in the hole. No one had seen them, save Inga, and Logan intended to keep it that way. Never knew when having a trick up the sleeve might come in handy.
Of course, Chadrigoth pounded him into the ground. Still, Logan wasn’t too concerned, because in half of a year, he had progressed to an Iron Trunk dungeon core. If he kept up this pace, he might reach Heartwood by the time he graduated.
The next few weeks passed in a blur of work and training.
Six days a week, the Terrible Twelfth was up early, out to the Akros Coliseum in the bitter cold, cultivating. Six days a week, they closed down the Codex Athenaeum, studying. Every Monday, Logan and Inga spent the night in the Tartarucha Cells, murdering Sir Rosencrantz Brandybutter in new and interesting ways. They refined their dungeon, worked and reworked the layout, honed the traps, and drilled down on their fighting style. That last was the most important part. Inga could handle herself in a brawl, but even as a Shroomian Acolyte Logan was pretty squishy in the battle department. Harden had evolved into Exoskeleton, which was nice, but he was still too slow and clunky to do any real damage.
Thanks to his level-two Braincap mushrooms, however, Logan could attach spores to Inga’s minions and take them over. Learning to do battle as a centipede with a hundred legs was an entirely odd experience.
During school hours, they sat through Shadowcroft’s ponderous, rambling discussions on ethics and duty, and did their best not to doze off during Professor Nekhbet’s bone-dry history lectures. Well, everyone except Inga; if anything, she was even more smitten with him than she’d been at the beginning of the school year. Professor Crucible’s classes were challenging but also interesting, and Treacle was leaps and bounds ahead of the other students in the class. Professor Crucible had even begrudgingly said, “Nice work, son,” once. Only once, but that was practically an award from him. Rockheart’s course continued to be lessons in suffering—lessons that Logan endured with as much good cheer as he could manage.
Professor Arketa took them on field trips to most of the dungeons on Arborea. The Blasted Barrows was one crypt-like dungeon in the low hills to the west of Vralkag. The Bone Vaults were the other. While they were drier than the forest dungeons, there was still enough moisture for Logan to grow his fungi. There were a couple of dungeons, though, which would be brutal for him to tackle. One was the Bloodrock, in the Heckish Hills, while the real challenge would be the SandScream—one of two desert dungeons. While a handful of fungi could adapt to desert conditions, most couldn’t. The SandScream was all about the sand and the rock, and the deeper you went, the hotter it got, unlike most caverns, which were a constant temperature.
The dungeon was aptly named—you either got sand in your eye or you felt like screaming because of the heat. There was an Anakin Skywalker joke in there somewhere, but the place was almost too awful for humor.
Even the Chaos Oasis, another dungeon nestled deep in the World Forge Wastes, would be easier for a fungaloid. That place had water and some plant life, though not much. Logan didn’t know if his spores would even take to palm trees.
Visiting the Arborean dungeons was fun—especially for Marko, who soaked up the lessons like a sponge—but Logan and the Terrible Twelfth were far more interested in their first off-world field trip.
They’d be going with a big group, led by Rockheart and Professor Arketa, which meant they’d be there with Chadrigoth as well as Ed the Rot Troll. Those two couldn’t be more different. Unless you were talking about Inga and Marko. The more the astral moth studied, the more the satyr slacked off, until even Treacle was worried. Then again, Treacle was basically the living embodiment of existential dread.
Whatever Marko’s history, it was clear that he wasn’t going to stress about anything. Worse, the Gelatinous Knight was proving to be a terrible influence on the satyr. GK had a work ethic similar to Marko’s, but GK was also a highly ranked B-Class cultivator who would almost certainly pass the Winnowing with flying colors.
Logan suspected Marko’s issues were somehow tied into the past he was so insistent on avoiding, but Marko wasn’t talking, and Logan didn’t want to push too hard.
It was mid-February when the four cohorts going on the field trip met at the BYE Portal across the lake. They appeared on a weed-filled patch of gray stones that surrounded a silver-colored tree as thick as a redwood. Only it wasn’t a tree. On closer inspection, the bark, branches, and leaves were the very tip of a limb that dropped down through a hole in the world.
To the west, across the waters of Loch Endless, stood Castle Shadowcroft. The sun was shining on the soaring ramparts as well as the library windows set in the cliffsides below the main keep.
Loch Endless looked especially cold, with little whitecaps traveling across its surface. All the dungeon cores had come wearing their warmest clan robes. The wind was bitter. The dry red and gold leaves of the giant limb clattered, and Logan kept expecting them to drop. They never did, though. According to Nekhbet, the dead leaves stayed connected year-round, but they leaked Morta Apothos during the fall and winter months.
Logan was spellbound.
He wandered around the ancient tree’s limb, brushing it with his thick, three-fingered hands. He could feel the Apothos coming off it in waves—ebbs and flows of both Vita and Morta—and so much of it. He drifted over to the edge of a low wall and saw the rest of the limb descending into the swirling mists of wherever they were.
As impossible as it seemed, the realm of Arborea was flat. Which was terrible in its own way because it meant there was a dimension in existence where the Flat-Earthers were at least partially correct.
A bunch of students, including the other members of the Terrible Twelfth, were clustered by the water gushing from the lake. It cascaded over the edge of the world and into the endless abyss beyond. It was momentous waterfall, so beautiful and so strange. Why didn’t the lake drain out completely? And where did the water go? Did it simply fall forever?
Logan couldn’t even hazard a guess.
Across the channel was the Bogbottom Swamp, though most students at the school—and even most of the professors—referred to it as the Boogerbottom Swamp. Logan and Marko called it the Boogerbottom to annoy Inga. Worked every time.