Under (I)

Alice was woken up by an unpleasant almost-drowning sensation, a warm and sticky fluid coating the back of her throat and slowly running down the esophagus, impeded by her supine position on some kind of soft, spongy, and waterlogged surface.

She managed to get the strength to roll around, coughing out a small puddle of partially congealed blood and saliva on the ground but filling her lungs with life-bringing oxygen in the meanwhile.

As soon as her body had solved its air requirements, however, it had also decided to restart the deluge of unpleasant sensations directed to her mind.

As the flood of newly oxygenated blood cells flowed in her dazed brain, Alice started really experiencing the sharp headache that was coming from the frontal left side of her cranium and slowly spreading its throbbing tendrils of pain to the entirety of her head, jumbling up her already-confused thought processes.

Trying to get a sense of her situation, the stunned girl forced herself to open her eyes, wincing whenever a twinge of pain traveled through the swollen flesh beneath her eye sockets.

A blurry, dark blanket of fungal growths suddenly appeared in front of her face and just a few centimeters away from her nose, covering the ground she was lying upon in a fuzzy and soft layer of vegetation.

Despite their vicinity to her eyes, the countless mycelia appeared like a confused afterimage covered in bright spots and double lines that jumped around her unfocused vision, her dizziness turning into a wave of nausea the moment she got up on her knees and, blinking, shook her head in an attempt to regain her normal vision.

Moments later, a series of painful, retching convulsions was shaking her body, causing the esophageal sphincter of her stomach to open up.

A surge of stinging bile quickly climbed up to her throat and then out of her mouth, splattering onto the ground along with the half-digested remains of her last meal and a large amount of pinkish blood and glowing green particles that sent yet another spike of pain through her eyes as her migraine revolted against the sudden light signals traveling through her optic nerve.

“Ow,” she uttered with her eyes closed, remaining on her knees but tentatively bringing her left hand up to her forehead and gingerly touching the skin with her fingertips, wincing one more time when she found the jagged cut on the left side of her skull, already closed by a thick layer of encrusted blood and detritus.

She gently moved her fingers away from the wound, feeling at the swollen flesh around it and flinching back when she finally reached the deep cut on the bridge of her nose, coupled with the particularly swollen parts of skin beneath her eyes; the left one, once again, was particularly painful.

“Whad de heck habbeged,” she murmured while finally sitting down on the ground, carefully leaning her back against the trunk of some kind of tree as she forced herself to ignore the feeling of nausea that resurfaced every time she tried moving her head around.

Startled by the jumbled way her words had come out of her mouth, Alice attempted to breathe from her nose, immediately finding not only painful but outright impossible, her nostrils completely filled with congealed blood.

It didn’t take her long to realize that the organ was not only clogged but also most likely broken, a particularly unpleasant thought to her given the fact that she had always liked its button shape, so similar to that of her mother.

She started thinking about her, of what she would say if she came home with a broken nose.

Focus. The invading thought interrupted her musings and she forcefully moved back to the assessment of her condition.

She tried to calm herself down, closing her eyes and concentrating on her body, soon feeling the thin stream of liquid that was draining down the back of her throat, most likely the blood that couldn’t escape through her nose, if she were to trust the weak metallic flavor on her tongue.

Putting her physical condition out of her mind for a moment, Alice actually stared at her surroundings for the first time since waking up.

She could see that she was beneath the fungal forest she and Chillushrith had spotted just a few hours before when they had first entered the cave, before the giant spider had left her to return to her colony.

The wide and variegated caps of the tree-like mushrooms towered over her, hiding the stone vault many meters above it with a ceiling of spongy and lamellated undersides filled with spores that, with her current sight issues, blurred and swayed into an indistinct mesh of different colors and textures that bore down on her confused mind.

The stalks supporting the caps burrowed deeply into the muddy ground, its surface equally invaded by the many smaller specimens of toadstools that formed a thick undergrowth between the fungal giants, covering every inch of space available to them.

Well, they did before. she thought as she stared at a vast portion of the ground in front of her that seemed to have been stripped of its living cover, now devoid of everything but the strongest sprouts, and even those barely hanging upright in the exposed mire.

The entire area showed evident signs of recent destruction, with soggy, uprooted mushrooms lying in small, decomposing heaps against the trunks of the larger fungi as if a sudden flood had passed through the place and torn away anything that wasn’t strong enough to resist its flow.

I bet that was somehow my fault. I just wonder what I did.

For a few seconds, Alice tried really hard to remember why she was there, soon relenting when the previously subdued migraine decided to suddenly flare up, her struggling brain’s way of showing its displeasure to the one trying to overuse it, a mess of confused images the only things appearing in her mind, soon jumbling together in a confusing movie with no start or end.

I just hope this is temporary.

After a few more minutes of waiting for the agony to fade, Alice started wondering whether it would be safe to check herself up with her powers.

Gently reaching for her well of magical warmth, she had just started the first attempt to heal her nose when a loud and halting chittering sound reverberated through the trees in front of her, causing a shiver to run down her spine as a cacophony of alarm bells started ringing in her mind.

Alice instinctively reached for her mace at her side and whispered a barely-audible swear word when she found it missing.

After a bit of panicked looking around for something to defend herself with, the girl finally took notice of the reassuring weight of the metal and obsidian knife that was still hanging on the bandolier across her chest, unsheathing it with a relieved sigh and then looking around for signs of the creature that had made that noise, ready to strike at the smallest sign of danger.

The young woman waited for a long time without spotting any trace of whatever monster had produced the sound, her body increasingly tired and her mind so muddled that, for a moment, she started doubting of having actually heard anything.

Despite her doubts, she nonetheless forced herself to stand up, using the trunk of the mushroom tree to keep herself upright as her legs had turned into wobbling jelly and seemed unable to support her full weight.

After a dozen of careful and tentative steps around the stalk, slowly regaining a bit of her balance, the young woman was finally getting ready to move away from the destroyed clearing; she had barely made more than two paces in the random direction she had chosen when a sudden glimpse of metal just a few meters away caught her attention.

Slowly turning her entire body as not to increase her headache, Alice focused on the reflection, ignoring the bright spots dancing in front of her retinas until she finally made out the blurry shape of her mace’s silvery shaft, barely visible behind the trunk of another fungal tree.

Even if she couldn’t see the rest of the weapon, hidden by the plump stalk of the mushroom as it was, the confused woman still noticed that, for some strange reason, it was somehow hovering around half a meter over the ground.

She briefly thought of leaving the weapon where it was and proceeding without it but the idea of leaving her main fighting tool and the core hidden within it didn’t sit well on her mind. She would get it back.

No littering. She told herself.

Carefully, straining her ears as much as she could, and ignoring the fuzzy double images wobbling over her eyes, Alice slowly moved through the fungi in a semicircle, trying to get a good view of the area she wanted to reach before actually approaching the mace.

After making sure that it was not some kind of trap, the young woman closed the distance to her weapon, finding it deeply embedded in the hard flesh of the tree, one of its flanges bent and twisted by a previous impact.

When she got there, she gripped the shaft with both hands, trying to pry it off the tree with a grunt.

The sudden exertion immediately caused more bright spots to appear in front of her retinas, the migraine spiking once more while a sudden twinge of pain erupted from her left shoulder and traveled all the way down her arm, slightly numbing her fingers in the process.

The mace, in the meanwhile, was still stuck.

Forcing herself to ignore the pain, Alice took a number of deep, calming breaths, trying not to choke herself with the thin stream of salty and metallic fluid still flowing down her throat. When her headache had turned once again into a calmly, if pulsating, blob of discomfort behind her left temple, Alice placed the entirety of her weight against the shaft, using gravity itself to tear the object away from the stalk.

After just a couple of seconds of pushing, the weapon was finally liberated from the fleshy embrace of the trunk.

The moment that happened, however, the already-unsteady girl found herself losing the pitiful remains of her balance, falling into the large puddle of foul-smelling mud that was the ground around the mushroom.

Her body hit the sludge with a wet smacking sound that resounded in the silence, immediately followed by her pained gasp when the headache she had been nursing returned at full swing, growing even worse as the chittering wail of before echoed in her ears once again, the throbbing sensation increasing tenfold and her fear spiking when she realized that the noise had come from far closer now.

The girl forced herself to stand completely still and, after blinking muddy tears out of her eyes, slowly scanned her surroundings, trying to get a clear image through her unfocused double vision and the sparks of white light that danced over her retina, her breath catching in her chest when she finally found what she was looking for, its broken form lying on the ground just a few meters away.

She was staring at some kind of huge water bug, its horrid shape only partially obscured by the remains of a huge, yellow mushroom, its funnel-like cap lying broken on the ground and half-submerged in a small pool of mud and broken mycelia.

The monster wasn’t faring much better than the already-rotting fungus. The right side of its small head had been turned into a gory pulp that dripped thick, blue blood on the ground and most, if not all, of its legs were broken, along with some kind of pincer-like forelegs that should have been placed over its head but that were now embedded in the ground a few meters away.

As she stared at the broken chitinous wings that protruded from the twisted exoskeleton on its back, Alice’s mind suddenly recalled a thrumming sound of huge insectile wings and a brown shape emerging from some dark, watery depths, she remembered running away and jumping in even more water.

I was escaping from this thing. She suddenly realized.

Her musings were interrupted when the horror screeched once more, ineffectually trying to crawl away from what was sure to become its tomb.

I need to get the heck away too. If this thing was living over the mushrooms, it might be best if I go through the undergrowth.

She was just getting up on her feet when her hypersensitive ears suddenly perceived a small, splashing sound coming from one of the miry puddles a few stalks behind.

She stopped moving, pushing herself back into the mud with her knife at the ready in her right hand and the mace held in the left one, ready to be swung at anything that decided to attack her.

A couple of seconds later, a small, bipedal creature emerged from behind one of the larger toadstools and stopped at the edge of the new clearing that had been formed by the funnel mushroom’s fall, Alice’s eyes widening in surprise at the sight of a creature she had not only already seen, but whose flesh she had also tasted.

Looking like some kind of walking tadpole, with a large, bulbous head and a very short tail that it probably used for balance; the somewhat small, labrador-sized beast started carefully circling around a being that would have normally killed it without an issue, keeping its distance from the increasingly agitated monster and carefully searching for the best spot to attack the felled bug as it started screeching and flailing around.

A pair of very small earholes peeked from behind two round, skin-covered mounds that protruded from where its eyes should have been while, on its snout, two deep and rhythmically pulsating nostrils twitched over the thin slit that was probably its mouth, barely visible through the mottled green texture of its slimy skin.

As the smaller pollywog continued its dance without a sign of wanting to attack, Alice started wondering whether she should silently move away from the two creatures. She was once again preparing to get up from the puddle when another sound to her right made the blood freeze in her veins.

Silently and ever so slowly, the girl turned her head to the side and stared at a second tadpole that had just emerged from the darkness, soon followed by a dozen more of its siblings, all of them quickly moving towards the injured water scorpion.

Pack Hunters. She suddenly realized, another shiver running down her spine as she thought of what would have happened if they had found her unconscious on the ground.

More and more of the smaller monsters materialized from the shadows and populated the area around her. She could hear the increasingly loud wails of the bug and the barely audible sounds of the pack moving around it in a continuous and mesmerizing revolution of blurry shapes.

Her eyes glued open, she saw the tiny monsters get more and more agitated the more of them appeared around the creature, twitching every time it chittered and wailed and getting a tiny bit closer every time a droplet of its blood fell on the ground; she could hear the slimy sound of their frontal slits slightly widening as they smelled the scent of its ichor wafting in the air of the clearing.

Noise and Smell, that’s how they hunt. She realized, panic slightly helping her clear her fuzzy mind.

Finally, as the pack’s movements became frenetic, the first and most daring of the creatures jumped forward and landed on the exposed red abdomen of the monstrous bug who, for its part, ineffectually tried to shake it off.

The tadpole ignored its flailing and instead finally opened its mouth hole, letting out a single, hollow tooth that it then sank in the soft flesh of the creature, starting to suck the hemolymph contained within.

The moment it happened, the monster’s shrieks suddenly faltered and the rest of the swarm jumped as one on the soon-to-be carcass, extending their straw-like teeth and plunging them into the exposed gaps of the insect’s broken shell.

The monster struggled, using the sharp beak it had for a mouth to rip into the pollywogs in front of it, tearing their weak, fleshy bodies into pieces in a matter of instants. The fight, however, had been over the moment the tadpoles had found it.

Alice, in the meanwhile, was silently and carefully covering herself in as much mud as possible, making sure to completely soak her bloodied face in the rotting sludge and thanking The Whispering Mother for the fact that it was pretty much impossible for her to get an infection now.

She waited.

And waited.

The bug stilled minutes later but the ravenous pack feasted on its remains for hours, sometimes detaching and running away from the area when their bodies were bloated and full but soon returning once more, as empty and hungry as before.

She had even spotted one of the tadpoles move away from the beast and start ambling around, slowly moving closer and closer to the spot where she had awoken not long before, seemingly to sniff at the mix of mud and blood she had created while bleeding out on the ground.

Alice could do nothing but watch, feeling her temperature dropping more and more as her body heat was sapped by the cold mud, not daring to move away from the spot, lest they heard her or sensed her own scent.

Morning finally came, a few rays of light breaking into the darkness of the cave and shining down on the muddy ground through the hole created by the fall of a giant of the fungal forest.

Only when the first flying swarms took to the air did the pod of tadpoles finally retreat, leaving on the ground the desiccated husk of the water scorpion as their surprisingly nimble shapes disappeared in the shade of the trees, their departure accompanied by the buzzing drone and early chirrups of the many different species of insects of the cave.

Alice waited a few more minutes to be sure of her safety before rising from the mud like some kind of swamp monster and taking a few steps towards a more intact area before sitting down once again on a comfortably low toadstool.

Without a single word, the Biomancer of Symbiosis forced any Lumen that remained within her stomach and intestines into a large, glowing tendril that crawled out of her mouth and set out to digest the thick coat of grime that was covering her, slowly exposing the pale and spotless flesh and silk hidden beneath.

Her migraine had slowly abated over the hours, turning into a quite painful headache that she completely ignored, a small droplet of pain in the sea of agony that was her face.

On top of that, even if the bright spots swimming over her retina had definitely become less pronounced, her sight had not improved and she still saw a mess of blurred edges, fuzzy lines, and double images that grew worse the faster she moved her head around.

She knew that she needed to find a place to heal herself and carefully plan her next move.

Hopefully, a bit of rest would help her remember the past few hours, the details still uncertain and confused in her mind.

She was quite positive she had reached her current position by walking on top of the caps and, if that horror had lived up there, she wasn’t keen on encountering a vengeful relative or something like that. She would try to proceed from below.

By the time she was clean, the amount of Lumen she had under her control had more than tripled and she had decided to use half of them to coat her naked feet and legs in order to keep them clean while she walked, electing to then hide them under her clothes if needed.

Moving around the area, she happily retrieved from the sodding ground the precious coil of rope and the silken sack she normally carried over her shoulders, smiling lightly when, inside of it, she found her belongings dry and intact along with her chitin shoes.

At least one mystery has been solved.

After that, Alice glanced in the direction of the sparse rays of sunlight that managed to filter through the cover of mycelia and then started proceeding towards their point of origin, slowly traversing the dense undergrowth, careful of ambushes and signs of tadpoles.

She didn’t walk for a very long time, her tiredness growing as she was forced to move around larger sprouts and breath clouds of bitter spores that rose from the ground every time she took a step, mixing with the continuous trickle of liquid that flowed down her throat and that was starting to worry her.

Thus, when she finally spotted a large cluster of very promising giant, oyster mushrooms, the girl checked them for predators and then started climbing on their many waterfilled platforms, grunting and stopping for breath on each of them until she managed to find one that seemed to be hidden and comfortable enough to become her temporary hideout.

Shooing away a bunch of very colored and definitely poisonous tree frogs, the biomancer sat down with her back against the fleshy wall and forced herself to remain awake.

She had to heal herself, even if she really wanted to sleep and forget about it until the next day.

What she saw when she entered her own body wasn’t particularly good.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by Joshua G.! Thank you for your support!