With the Fungal Surge dead, the technicolor tunnel beyond was open, and after a few minutes to clean out the mech’s cockpit—and to wait for Tori to stop laughing—we pushed on down it. It curved to the left and dove deeper below the Rat’s Nest, or more accurately, into the space dungeons occupied.

  After a minute without any enemies, the tunnel widened into an enormous cavern filled with glowing multicolored light. We stood on a high ledge overlooking what, from above, almost looked like a caricature of Las Vegas’s strip. I’d never been there, but Dad had a weakness for noirs, detective stories, and heists, so I knew more or less what it looked like.

  This was more violently colorful.

  Clouds of spores glowed in the cavern’s air currents, and massive fungal spires rose from the ground and hung from the ceiling like gigantic, living stalagmites and stalactites. None of the semi-dark, uniform light I was familiar with seeing in dungeons. No, not here. The entire cavern looked like a city at night in pastels and neons.

  “Wow,” Tori said quietly.

  “Yep,” I replied.

  She hesitated. Then she cleared her throat. “Last summer, I went to Tammy’s place. We got drunk, and there might’ve been some other stuff involved. This feels like something way stronger than that.”

  I didn’t say anything. As I stared at the mess in front of me, a pattern started to emerge—or more accurately, three separate patterns. The fungal growths that looked like city streets actually emanated from three points, crossing in concentric circles that almost looked like ripples. “We’re looking for the Nodes, right, Tori?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “I think I found all three of them. Look at that.” I pointed with the mech’s arm, and she climbed onto its side to get a better view. At the center of each of the ripple rings was a pulsing, almost violently yellow blob. They were the only things that color, and strands ran off from all three of them, linking them into one unified whole.

  “Okay, so, let’s kill them?” Tori asked as she dropped back onto the squishy ground below me.

  “We could,” I said. “In fact, we should kill two of them. But not the third.”

  “What? What about the full clear? The boss loot? What are we doing here if we’re not clearing this portal?” Tori asked.

  “Our goal isn’t to clear and gain levels. It’s to find a solution to the Rat’s Nest problem, explore, and learn.”

  “That’s your goal. I still want the full clears.”

  I sighed. “Look, this phase is a weird one. The whole thing is a shift away from advancement and toward uplifting. It’s almost like it’s punishing safe zones that were too aggressive in the past—or not aggressive enough. We’re not actually going to beat it with our strength—at least not as individuals. The Rat’s Nest needs our help, and that’s what neighbors do. I didn’t say we wouldn’t clear this dungeon, just that we’re not in it to clear right now.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Is this about your—“

  “No. It has nothing to do with Integration as a whole. It’s just the neighborly thing to do. Give them a chance to solve their problem, or at least let them look at this place and say it’s not going to help them.” I sighed. “Let’s keep moving.”

  As we descended into the Mycopolis, I revised my thoughts about it.

  It didn’t look like a city. It was one.

  We walked through layer after layer of spore clouds, our masks working overtime as the thick, humid air pushed through the layer of filters and Charge. It smelled hot and ozone-like, but it was better than what was on the other side of the mask. And, as the view got clearer and clearer, what had looked like colored lines leading from each of the three Nodes resolved themselves into roadways—roadways with hundreds of things moving along them.

  And they were things. They weren’t monsters. I wasn’t even sure if the gigantic, house-sized blobs of fungus moving down the glowing green roads were technically alive. Tori and I watched from the edge of the Mycopolis as one of them split in half, disgorging a disturbing amount of spores into the air. As the spores settled, a dozen or so shapes solidified.

  Myconid Traveler: Level Seventy-Five Monster (Rank One)

  They were smaller than the Fungal Surge—almost like a bunch of the store-bought mushrooms, but blown up to be the size of a person. Brown-ish heads, white bodies, maybe five feet tall or a bit more. None of them carried weapons. None of them carried tools. But, unlike the…bus?…they’d gotten out of, these weren’t things. They were monsters.

  “Can we fight them? Please?” Tori asked.

  I waited as the wave of Myconid Travelers disappeared into…something. One second, they were there. The next, they were gone. Then I waited a few more minutes until another of the transport things arrived. The next group of monsters was about the same size—maybe ten instead of twelve. I cleared my throat. “Okay. Let’s take them out and see what happens.”

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  “Got it.”

  Tori slid down the little hill leading to the…bus stop?…and started casting. The grenade launcher on my shoulder clunked as a shrapnel grenade slotted into the barrel. The Myconid Travelers didn’t notice either of us, since I hadn’t so much as moved.

  Then Tori’s pair of Gravity Wells dragged the monsters into a clump. That they noticed. And, as they reacted and tried to break free, the shrapnel-filled battery bomb landed in the middle of the Gravity Well.

  Boom.

  The air filled with even more spores, and with smoke, and with all sorts of debris from Cindy’s Garage. A few of the lower-leveled mushroom men lost limbs, and chunks of their round, hat-like heads tore away as the shop shrapnel tore into them. But even as a handful died, the rest broke free from the Gravity Wells. They rushed Tori, and she Pushed them away, then Levitated herself off the ground.

  I stomped forward. My rail gun fired three times. The shots tore the air, then ripped into three of the Myconids. They fell backward almost comically—like villains being shot in a Western. But the three that survived kept closing the gap, heading for me now.

  At least, they did until the first Crush hit them.

  It had been an almost textbook ambush, and now we controlled the place where the transport things dropped the Travelers. “We could farm for a while,” Tori said doubtfully.

  “Nah. Check our percent completion,” I said.

  She did. “What the hell?”

  I nodded. “These don’t count. It’s a gauntlet. The whole dungeon—or at least most of it—doesn’t count toward completion.”

  “So why’d we attack, then?” Tori asked. “We’re just wasting our time.”

  “Two reasons. First, you wanted to fight something. A bored Tori is a dangerous one.

  “Har har,” Tori said.

  “And second, we need to figure out where the Myconid Travelers are going, and we can’t do that from out there. I’m imagining this whole thing as three circulatory systems, and if I’m right, the Travelers have to go back to wherever they came.” I opened the cockpit, then yanked the mech into my inventory. The Voltsmith’s Grasp felt a little stiff, and so did my legs. I stretched out quickly, then nodded at a nearby mass of fungus. “Let’s get behind there and see what we can see.”

  We hid. At first, the orange glow of the Voltsmith’s Grasp seemed bright in the relative darkness behind the blob of flesh-colored mushrooms, but after a moment, I dismissed that. It wouldn’t be a problem here, of all places; everything was already glowing. Then we waited.

  It only took a few minutes before the next fungal transport pod arrived, and a dozen more Travelers got off. They milled around for a moment, taking in the gooey, gross-looking chunks of their peers, then slowly filed off, following the first group. “Let’s go,” Tori hissed.

  I nodded, and we fell in fifty feet or so behind them, disappearing into the building-sized chunks of fungus that were Mycopolis.

  Voril tried not to draw any attention to the dungeon she’d placed under the Rat’s Nest. She didn’t watch as Hal Riley and Tori Vanderbilt entered the Tier Five dungeon. She didn’t monitor their progress through it—even though she could have. She didn’t send out any alerts that the Tier Fives had opened.

  It’d be a bad idea to focus too much on Hal Riley. He was a watched man. The Consortium had been keeping an eye on him ever since her meeting with the Orderman had turned into a fiasco. They needed this Integration to wrap up correctly; there was too much at stake in terms of harvestable Charge for them to be willing to let the Voltsmith get too many ideas. And then there was the Universal Order as a whole. They had mixed stakes. It’d be good for them politically if the Consortium failed, but…

  No. Voril pushed the thoughts about politics out of her head. She was also being watched, and that was much more pressing to her. It was mostly her superiors doing the watching in this case, and that meant one of two things. Either Voril, the Seventh-Rank Worldshaper, was under some sort of administrative review, or they were planning on blue-beaming her project. Either way would be a disaster for her. She needed to play the game as carefully as she could if she wanted to be around when her plans came to fruition, and ironically, that meant moving as slowly on them as possible.

  Just giving Hal Riley access to the Tier Five dungeon wasn’t against the rules. It’d be a challenge for him, especially when he realized the hidden mechanics of the singular, Labyrinthine dungeon. But it wasn’t against any of the Consortium’s rules. Doing much more than that was, though, and while calling attention to what she was doing didn’t break them, it wouldn’t help her, either.

  Instead, she used most of her screens to focus on Museumtown, the West Siders, and the Rat’s Nest itself. All three were struggling in different ways.

  The messy, disorganized West Siders had no real chance of putting together a chunk of viable territory. They didn’t have any plan. Instead, individual groups had staked claims across the border of western Chicago and the farmlands further south and west. None of them could be considered ‘viable.’ In fact, they wouldn’t even meet that requirement if combined into a single continuous space.

  Then there was the Rat’s Nest safe zone. It had strong leadership, but they’d been too isolationist in the last phase, and the System was punishing them for that and forcing them to leave their stronghold. If they didn’t do it soon, they wouldn’t have the strength to carve out territory. In fact, their isolation in the previous phase had already weakened them.

  But Museumtown was the most concerning.

  Museumtown should have been the conqueror. It should have already taken over the West Siders and be occupying the Rat’s Nest as a northern fortress against the folks up the lake’s shore. They, of all the groups in her jurisdiction, were the most suited to form a viable territory, even if theirs would need to be massive. But they weren’t.

  It almost felt like Hal Riley, Calvin Rollins, and Jessica Silvers weren’t playing the game.

  That lined up with what Voril knew about Hal. But she couldn’t dig any further until a few eyes weren’t on her—and him—anymore. The Orderman and the Consortium in general were both paying too much attention to Chicago; she could barely even run her own Integration sector without tripping over a prying eye.

  Phinran—the integration manager whose zone had collapsed at the end of Phase One and doomed Milwaukee—had left her messages hidden in that city, but she couldn’t check on those right now, either. All she could do was manipulate Hal Riley with the few levers she could get away with pulling and hope those would be enough. Whatever Hal was up to, she was starting to hope he’d get away with it.