They pushed deeper.

  The second floor unfolded in ways the first never had - less ruin, more raw earth. The crumbling pnters and rotted support beams gave way to natural cave formations, the tunnels widening and narrowing without pattern or logic. One passage forced them to duck single-file through a squeeze so tight that Marsh's shoulders scraped both walls, leaving pale scratches in the mineral-veined stone. The next opened into a gallery with a ceiling so high their ntern light couldn't find it, only the faint violet pulse of fungi clinging to unseen stactites above.

  A pair of Stonecap Beetles met them in a corridor barely wide enough for Marsh to swing. Tight quarters, no room for Sera to fnk. Leo solved it by putting a bolt into the lead beetle's mandible joint while Marsh pinned it against the wall. The second beetle tried to flee and caught Sera's spear through the gap in its back ptes. Two carapaces added to the growing weight on Marsh's pack.

  They rested in a dry alcove where the fungal glow was dim enough to feel like dusk. Marsh stretched his bruised arm, working the joint in slow circles. Sera retied the carapace bundle's straps where they'd started to slip. Leo sat with his back against the stone and drank from his waterskin, letting the cool water wash the mineral taste from his throat.

  The air coming from deeper in the tunnel had changed. The metallic tang was still there, but underneath it was something sweet and thick, like overripe grain left in a warm, sealed room.

  "You smell that?" Sera said.

  "Yeah," Leo lowered the waterskin. "Let's find out what it is."

  They found out.

  The sweetness thickened into something cloying as they entered a chamber where fungi had conquered every surface. Floor, walls, ceiling - all buried under yers of growth in colors that ranged from bone-white to deep, bruised purple. Shelf-fungi jutted from the walls in overpping tiers. Thick ropes of mycelium crisscrossed the floor like pale veins.

  The air was hazy, visible spore clouds drifting through the ntern beams in slow, zy currents, catching the light like dust motes in a sunlit attic.

  Leo tried to breathe through his mouth. It didn't help much.

  Then a section of the fungal carpet on the far side moved.

  A column of yered shelf-fungus and dense, pale mycelium peeling away from the surface like a scab lifting from a wound. The motion was slow, accompanied by a wet tearing sound as the creature's back pulled free from the growth it had been embedded in.

  It stood.

  Roughly the height and width of a man, but wrong in every proportion. The body was a trunk of packed mycelium - white and faintly translucent where the ntern light hit it. Ptes of shelf-fungus yered over the core like crude armor, their edges curled and dry, ranging in color from gray to mottled brown. No arms in any recognizable sense. The limbs were thick, clublike masses of hardened fungal wood that hung from what passed for shoulders. No face. No eyes. The head was a broad, ft wedge with a single vertical slit running from top to bottom.

  The slit opened.

  A thick cloud of yellowish spores exhaled from it with a sound like air escaping a bellows - hhhhhhhhhh - and drifted toward them in a slow, spreading plume.

  "Back! Spore Shambler!" Sera barked. "Don't breathe it!"

  They scrambled. The chamber was wrong for this fight - too enclosed and saturated with spores already. Leo felt the first tickle in his throat, a faint itching behind his eyes.

  "Get it out of the chamber!" He shouted, backpedaling into the corridor they'd entered from. The air was cleaner here. "I'll draw it!"

  He raised the crossbow and put a bolt into the Shambler's trunk.

  Thwck.

  The bolt sank into the mycelium up to the fletching. The creature didn't flinch. It paused, turning its eyeless head toward the source of the impact and began walking. Each step was heavy, printing a circle of pale mycelium on the stone that began spreading the moment the foot lifted.

  "It's coming," Leo called, nocking another bolt. "Give me room."

  He fired again. The bolt hit center mass, buried itself deep. The Shambler stumbled for a second, then kept walking. The thing was a colony, not a creature. No vital organ to target. No central nervous system to disrupt.

  It cleared the chamber threshold and entered the corridor. Marsh had already tied a rag across his nose and mouth, the cloth pulled tight, his eyes hard above it. He held the axe in both hands.

  "Legs," Sera said, circling to the right with her spear. Her own rag was hastily knotted behind her head, loose strands of hair caught in the tie. "Take the legs. It can't chase us if it can't walk."

  Marsh charged.

  The axe hit the Shambler's left leg with a heavy crunch - like chopping into wet, rotten wood. Chunks of mycelium and fungal pte sprayed outward. The leg buckled, but didn't sever. The density of the growth was deceptive. What looked soft was packed tight, yer upon yer of fibrous material that absorbed the axe bde and gripped it.

  Marsh wrenched the axe free with a grunt and chopped again, and again. Each blow sent tremors through the Shambler's body, its torso swaying with each impact. The creature swung one of its club-limbs at him - not fast, but with the weight of a falling tree. Marsh threw himself sideways. The club hit the tunnel wall and left a crater in the stone, fragments of rock and fungus raining down.

  "Keep hitting!" Sera drove her spear into the joint between the Shambler's leg and its trunk. The iron tip sank deep into the fibrous mass. She twisted, levered, tore a chunk free. Pale ichor - more sap than blood - oozed from the wound.

  Leo put bolt after bolt into its center mass, not to kill it but to stagger it. Each impact rocked the creature backward a half-step, buying Marsh and Sera time to work. He was burning bolts faster than he liked, but the alternative was letting the thing have a chance to puff out more spore. He wasn’t sure if the cloth on Marsh and Sera’s face could stop all of it.

  The left leg came off on Marsh's sixth chop. It hit the floor with a heavy, wet sp and immediately began to spread — pale mycelium reaching outward from the severed stump like searching fingers.

  "Don't step on that!" Sera shouted.

  The Shambler tilted, off-bance, but didn't fall. It pnted its remaining club-limb against the wall and pivoted, swinging the stump of its leg at Marsh in a clumsy sweep. He ducked under it. Sera took the opening and drove her spear into the right leg's joint, leaning her full weight into the thrust.

  It took another three minutes. Three minutes of chopping, stabbing, and Leo's crossbow thwacking bolts into a body that refused to acknowledge damage. The Shambler didn't scream. It just diminished, piece by piece, until the trunk finally lost structural integrity and colpsed into a mound of fibrous, spore-dusted rubble that twitched once and went still.

  A final burst of yellowish spores erupted from the remains. They retreated down the corridor and waited, breathing hard, until the cloud thinned and settled.

  "Gods," Marsh coughed, pulling the rag from his face. His beard was dusted with pale spores. "That was like fighting an angry, toxic tree stump."

  "I heard some other mercenaries mention them," Sera leaned against the wall, chest heaving. A fine coating of spore dust clung to her hair and the shoulders of her leather armor. "I thought they were exaggerating."

  "Were they?"

  "They undersold it."

  Leo's throat itched. His eyes were watering, the faint toxic residue of the spore exposure making the edges of his vision swim for a moment before clearing. He blinked hard, took a long drink of water, and checked his energy.

  The Shambler had given him fifty energy. Not as much as Leo’d hoped from such a tough opponent. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that despite being hard to kill, the Spore Shambler wasn’t very strong offensively.

  Something to think about ter.

  They harvested what they could. Sera stripped the rger shelf-fungus ptes from the remains and packed them carefully. Dried Shambler ptes had medicinal value, she expined, her knife working with steady movements despite the lingering tremor in her hands.

  The ptes were bulky and light, adding volume to Marsh's pack without much weight. He grumbled anyway, adjusting the straps.

  They shared water and washed their faces, while sitting in the cleaner air of the corridor for a few minutes and let their heartbeats slow.

  Then they moved on.

  The tunnel beyond the Shambler's chamber narrowed, bent, and opened into a long, low ceiling gallery that stretched ahead farther than their ntern light could reach. The fungal carpet thinned here. The air cleared, and the spore haze dropped to almost nothing.

  Leo took his first full, clean breath in what felt like an hour.

  A shallow stream cut across the gallery floor, no wider than a man's forearm, trickling along a natural groove in the stone. The water was clear and surprisingly cold. Leo tested it with his fingertips and felt the chill bite through immediately. Seepage from somewhere above, filtered through stone.

  They followed the stream. The gallery's walls were striated with mineral veins - the same dark, branching lines Leo had noticed earlier, but denser here. Some of the veins glittered faintly where the ntern light caught exposed crystal faces.

  It was Marsh who stopped.

  He didn't say anything at first. Just pnted one boot and went still, his head turning slowly toward the base of a rounded boulder where the stream bent around it. The movement was unusual enough - Marsh was not a man built for stillness - that both Leo and Sera noticed immediately.

  "What?" Leo's crossbow came up.

  "Not a monster," Marsh held up a hand, his eyes fixed on something near the ground. He crouched, setting the axe down with uncharacteristic care, and reached toward a cluster of small, wrinkled shapes growing in the damp shadow where the boulder met the stone floor.

  Mushrooms. Unremarkable pale brown caps, no rger than the pad of Leo's thumb, wrinkled and slightly irregur, growing in a tight rosette of six or seven. Their stems were stubby and almost white, barely visible against the pale stone. Without the ntern's direct light, they'd have been invisible. Even with it, they looked like nothing.

  "What are you looking at?" Sera peered over Marsh's shoulder. Her spear was still up. She didn't fully trust his assessment that it wasn't a threat.

  Marsh picked one, pinching the stem between his thick finger and thumb with a gentleness that looked strange on hands that had just spent ten minutes demolishing a Shambler. He held it close to the ntern, turning it. The cap's surface was dry, finely textured, with shallow ridges running from edge to center like the folds of a brain.

  "Stonemorels," he said.

  Silence.

  "Stone…" Leo lowered his crossbow. "Are you sure?"

  "Trust your brother when it comes to food," Marsh looked up at them, a huge grin on his face. "I saw these in Rockhaven. Twice. Once at a spice merchant's stall during the autumn fair. He had a pouch of dried ones, maybe the size of my fist, id out on bck cloth like they were jewelry. Four silver."

  "Four silvers…" Sera repeated. The way she looked at the mushroom completely changed. Leo could see her eyes sparkle as she started counting the money inside her head.

  "You're sure? These exact ones?" He crouched down beside Marsh.

  "Same shape. Same wrinkles. Same way they grow near water. Though I heard that they should be deeper..." Marsh sniffed the cap, and his expression shifted. "Maybe we’re just lucky, like the moonpetals."

  Leo took the mushroom and brought it to his nose.

  The scent cut through the mineral baseline of the dungeon. Warm, savory, faintly nutty, with an undertone of something almost buttery that had no business existing in a cave.

  "That's..." Leo blinked.

  "Yeah," Marsh said.

  "Let me see," Sera took it from Leo's hand. She examined the cap with the same critical eye she used on the Moonpetals, checking the gills, testing the texture between her fingers. She brought it to her nose, and Leo watched the skepticism in her expression flicker.

  "It smells... good," she conceded.

  "Four silver a pouch," Marsh repeated, as if the number deserved a second hearing.

  Leo looked along the stream's edge. Dozens of clusters, growing in the damp shadows of every rock and depression where the water touched stone.

  "We should harvest all of them," Sera said, already shifting into the practical mode that Leo recognized as her default when money was involved. Her knife was in her hand. "If we dry them properly at home, we could get…"

  She paused, doing the math, her lips moving silently. Whatever number she arrived at made her hand tighten around the knife.

  "We harvest everything. Every st one."

  "Agreed," Leo nodded. Then a grin spread across his face. "But can we try one first?"

  "No," Sera said immediately.

  "Just one…"

  "Every cap we eat is money we're throwing away."

  "One cap isn't going to…"

  "Do you know how many turnips one cap is worth?"

  He set down his crossbow, crossed to where Sera was kneeling by the nearest cluster, and crouched beside her. His hand found hers, and his fingers ced between hers. He leaned in, close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek.

  "Sera."

  Her head turned sharply. Their faces were inches apart. In the ntern light, the flush that crept up her neck was unmistakable.

  "We just killed a walking mushroom the size of a man," he said, his voice low. "We've been down here for hours. We're bruised and tired and we smell like beetle guts. Can we just... have this? Just a small taste?"

  Her eyes searched his face. He squeezed her hand.

  "...A small taste," she said, finally. "Tiny. And the rest goes in the pack."

  Behind them, Marsh made a sound that was equal parts relief and exasperation.

  "Just don't start kissing," he muttered, turning away with an eyeroll. "We're in a dungeon, not a meadow."

  Leo grinned and released Sera's hand. Her blush deepened, but she didn't pull away immediately. Her fingers lingered against his for a half-second longer than necessary before she busied herself with the knife.

  Marsh plucked one cap from the nearest cluster, bit off a sliver no rger than his thumbnail, and chewed slowly. His eyes closed.

  "Oh, that's good."

  "How good?" Leo took a cap of his own, broke off a small piece, and pced it on his tongue.

  The taste hit him in yers. Earthy first, then savory and rich, spreading across his pate with a complexity that didn't belong to something so small and ugly. It wasn't like any mushroom he'd ever eaten on Earth. It was denser in fvor, more concentrated, as if the dungeon's strange ecosystem had compressed an entire forest's worth of umami into a single wrinkled cap.

  "It's better roasted," Marsh said, opening his eyes. "Or at least, that's what the ste board said. Roasted in butter, or in a stew with root vegetables. Brings out the fvor."

  "You said you'd never tasted them before," Leo said.

  "I haven't. But I read the board. I can dream, can't I?" Marsh looked at the sliver in his fingers, then at the clusters lining the stream. "We should try them properly at home. Cook them right. Don't waste the whole experience chewing them raw in a cave."

  Sera took her piece. Smaller than either of theirs. She pced it in her mouth and chewed with the careful precision of someone tasting medicine.

  The evaluation sted about two seconds before something in her expression softened. Her chewing slowed. Her eyes went distant, as if the fvor had briefly transported her somewhere warmer and brighter than the inside of a dungeon.

  She swallowed. Looked at the remaining cap in her palm, then at the clusters along the stream.

  "We're cooking these tonight," she said. “Dar might appreciate it too.”

  I thought we were selling all of them, Leo almost said. He caught himself. Some victories were better left unannounced.

  "Let's harvest," he said instead.

  They worked quickly. Sera cut, Leo cupped the loose caps in his palms and transferred them to cloth wraps. Marsh pyed lookout, ntern held high, axe ready, though his gaze kept drifting back to the stream's edge with the expression of a man counting his future meals.

  The clusters yielded more than they'd expected. When they were done, four cloth bundles sat in Sera's satchel - dense little packages that weighed almost nothing.

  Not a bad haul for something that looks like a diseased thumb, Leo thought, shouldering his crossbow, ready to move on.