Unbroken was now close enough to the dam that it seemed to loom over them. Jayden couldn’t see any way of making ingress, but it was the dead of night now, and the dam was still far away. Besides, there had to be some way in. Near the top of the dam, evenly spaced from end to end, were artificial waterfalls flowing down the dam’s surface and into a pond at the base of the structure. There was a one in a million chance those waterfalls were just decorative, but far more likely, their passage through the dam was being used for hydroelectric power. If the machinery to do that was in the dam, there would have to be a way inside so it could be maintained. Considering the waterfalls were near the top of the dam, that way in probably was as well, meaning that what they were really looking for was an elevator. Accordingly, Jayden was leading his team to the far east side of the dam, which he calculated was the most likely place for such an elevator to be. The west side would have been equally valid but was farther away.

Jayden smelled something. He stopped walking. Crap. “Spores!” he said. The rest of the team stopped as well. An Ichaboth emerged from the trees to their right and flew toward Unbroken. They activated their masks. Jayden pulled out his flamethrower and ran toward the monster.

“Has Reigning Fire been following us this whole time?” Sophia asked. It would be a strange thing for them to do. Jayden blasted the monster with his flamethrower as soon as he reached it, then dodged back to avoid a counterattack.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Jayden said. “Maybe this is the other Ichaboth?”

“Epidemic’s?” Sophia said. “Their Mog’Inub isn’t around.”

“Maybe it was killed.” It would make sense for Ichaboth to be the only Gray Fungus to escape a lost battle.

This Ichaboth didn’t retreat from Jayden’s hit and run tactic like the other one had. On the contrary, it was barreling toward the rest of Unbroken. Mitch tossed a red disk onto the ground and it unfolded into a flame-throwing turret. He used his jetpack to jump onto a nearby tree. Sophia stayed near the turret, and Jayden retreated to her side. No other Gray Fungi seemed forthcoming, so grouping together to tempt the Ichaboth into braving the turret’s damage was worthwhile. It wouldn’t have any way of knowing about their masks, so it probably thought it would have a significant chance of infecting them and gaining itself a crop of new allies. The turret fired on the Ichaboth as it enveloped them. The creature’s shriek was horrible, and it was hard for Jayden to suppress the instinct to cover his ears. They weren’t taking hit-point damage, so the monster must have been trying to infect them. Sophia tossed a damage-boosting buff at Jayden, who turned on his flamethrower and ran outside the Ichaboth. He fired on it, his flames glowing blue with the power of Sophia’s magic. Ichaboth shifted to envelop him. Jayden ran laps around the monster, just barely avoiding its edge. The whole time, the flame-throwing turret ate it from the inside.

It was shrinking. Soon, it realized that possibly infecting Sophia wasn’t worth taking more damage from the turret and it flew toward Mitch.

Mitch flew away from the monster, boosting himself toward another tree with his jetpack. Ichaboth followed him and enveloped him. Mitch launched himself up to a higher branch, but he was followed and re-enveloped. The Ichaboth’s maneuverability surpassed his. Jayden dashed toward the two. Sophia followed but couldn’t keep up with them. Jayden reached Mitch and Ichaboth in seconds.

Moving fast enough that his presence might not be noticed before he could get a hit off, he ran to the tree Mitch was flying toward. He didn’t climb as fast as he ran, but he still reached the branch before Mitch did. Mitch landed next to him, and Jayden shot at the approaching Ichaboth. The creature screeched and recoiled. He leapt after the creature and blasted it as he fell to the ground. Mitch followed him down. Sophia caught up to them and threw a speed buff at Mitch. She missed.

Ichaboth swerved downward, enveloping Sophia. Jayden dashed over and blasted it. The monster was small enough now that he couldn’t hit it without harming Sophia, but that was an acceptable loss. The creature didn’t flee. There wasn’t much of it left to flee. As it shrunk, it moved upward to envelop Sophia’s head. Jayden blasted her in the face to get at it, causing her to reel backward and fall on her back. “Fuck!” she shouted. The creature wasn’t even able to follow her down before the last puff of it was incinerated.

Sophia took deep breaths. She stood up. “One percent,” she said.

“Fuck,” Jayden said.

Sophia took a deep breath. “It’s alright. Potion.” She used her anti-infection potion and was restored to normal. For now. If they encountered Reigning Fire again later, her not having that potion would hurt them a lot. Hopefully, though, their plan with the dam would work, and that wouldn’t be an issue. Sophia got everyone healed up, and they resumed their march.

//////////

The remainder of Sad Cake Binge Gaming had an easy time locating Reigning Fire. The fungi left a gray scar in their wake. Finding them was as simple as flying high into the air and looking around for that scar. They found it at once. Actually, they found two such scars, but one ended with a dead Mog’Inub, so they knew they wanted the other one. The Mog’Inubless scar outlined a straight-forward path from a spot near the center of the valley to a spot near the dam. The Pickceiz flew to the end near the dam, and there Reigning Fire was. Xig’zah hopped from tree to tree, Avaggdon lumbered along the ground, and Ichaboth flew above them, keeping an eye on their surroundings.

“Where the hell is Huel-drark?” Spukee asked.

“He must have gotten offed,” Cloun said.

“That sucks.”

“Maybe it doesn’t suck that much. Without his cannon, Ichaboth is the only one who can hurt us while we’re up here.”

“Dude, we’re like, super injured. We’ll die to a second of Ichaboth exposure.”

“Oh, right. Crap. Who do you think offed him?”

“Doesn’t matter now. Could have been anyone. The better question is: How do we prank these clowns?” All three of the remaining characters had trivial ways of escaping a pit, and none of them could shoot projectiles, so Cloun’s reflective wall would be useless.

“That’s a hard one,” Cloun said. “I think your raven is the only thing they’ll be vulnerable to. Maybe we can set up some kind of hazard to scare them into?”

“That could work. I’m not sure how we would set one up, though. Maybe there’s something hazardous around here we could take advantage of? Like that pit with the tentacles?”

Cloun nodded. “Yeah, like the pit. Maybe we’ll even be able to find it again. Split up and search?”

“Sure. Meet back at this exact spot.”

They explored the area. There was a pond back toward the center of the valley, which Reigning Fire had already passed. In not-quite the same direction, there was a hill with a small cave in it. Breach-bot showed Spukee exploring the cave. He saw something inside, and Breach-bot cut to a close-up of his face, lit up with glee. He rushed back to their appointed meeting place. Cloun showed up a few minutes later. The camera cut to a wider shot as Spukee explained what he’d found in the cave, then cut back to the tighter shot as Cloun sprung up higher into the air, chuckling joyfully. The two agreed that they’d found their hazard. Cloun zipped back over to the cave while Spukee zipped down toward Reigning Fire, deliberately attracting Ichaboth’s notice as he flew through the tree line. The creature fell for it. it followed Spukee below the tree-line, joining both of its allies, ensuring all three of them could see the raven Spukee summoned. They did. They fled from it, directly toward the cave.

Their vastly different speeds forced them to split up. Xig’zah sped through the forest, effortlessly hopping from tree to tree. Ichaboth lagged behind him. As the cloud moved, he expanded and rocketed into the air. Avaggdon waddled far behind the two of them. It was only seconds before the Xig’zah was twice as far from the raven as he was. Several seconds later, the spider was in sight of the cave. Cloun, who was sitting on a nearby tree, waved at Xig’zah as it passed. Xig’zah was just outside the mouth of the cave when the raven’s effect wore off. The spider turned around and charged toward Cloun. The Pickcei darted into the air and pulled an air-horn out of his jacket. HONK! Xig’zah probably realized something was going on, but he didn’t abandon his pursuit of Cloun.

The ground shook. Out of the cave charged a monster with dark green fur. The thing looked like a giant green bear, with dagger-long claws and snaggled teeth. It rushed at Xig’zah as Cloun flew into the air to join Spukee, laughing.

Ichaboth condensed and rushed toward Xig’zah. Both of them, in turn, rushed toward Avaggdon, who lumbered toward the rest of his team. As soon as they were close enough, Avaggdon plugged into the ground and raised a wall of earth between them and the monster. The animal bashed into the wall. It didn’t even shake. The beast tried again, and again, but it couldn’t break the wall.

Had it been a little smarter, it might have thought to go around the wall. Given how thick the wall was, it probably wouldn’t have to go far. Avaggdon and Terraemotus could only displace a certain volume of earth. Once it became clear that the monster wasn’t coming for them, Reigning Fire allowed themselves to catch their breaths.

“Rats,” Spukee said. “Is there any way of salvaging this one?”

“I’m not sure. Not without getting rid of that wall. Should we lead the critter somewhere else?”

“Where? I don’t think any of the other teams are close enough for that.”

“Rats.”

Avaggdon spun, and two sharp, thin stone pillars shot up from the ground. Cloun, who had been facing Reigning Fire and so had seen Avaggdon spin, dodged to the left. Spukee was impaled. He went limp. Cloun dashed away. “Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!” Ichaboth flew upward and barreled toward Cloun. Spikes were shooting up all around the fairy. One shot up just to his left. Another right behind him. Another rose directly in front of him, and he crashed into it. Ichaboth was on him by the time he pulled himself away from the pillar, and it only took a second of exposure to the monster’s damaging vapors to end him.

The camera followed his drained husk as it fell. It landed in a tree, startling a flock of birds. There was a fit of booing from the crowd in front of Sad Cake Binge Gaming’s screen as it switched to displaying the general broadcast. Ryan ate his last pastry as the camera panned back to Reigning Fire and began to follow them as they moved through the forest, on their way to the dam.

//////////

Unbroken reached the dam before anyone else. There was an elevator upward, just as Jayden had hoped. The mechanism was simple: a platform attached to a metal pole. The platform was at the top, barely visible in the distance, when they arrived. The mechanism to summon it had been disabled, perhaps by evacuating civilians, but it was a simple matter for Mitch to hack the device and re-enable it. In the distance, the platform descended. “And we’re sure there is going to be a way to burst it open?” Mitch asked.

“Not completely,” Jayden said, “but even if Breach-bot didn’t build a way in deliberately, some well-placed explosives might manage it. If we make any hole at all, the valley floods, and most of the other players die.”

“Everyone who can’t fly,” Sophia said. “That just leaves Pickceiz and Ichaboths.”

Barring the ones he’d encountered, Jayden had no way of knowing which players were left and which ones had been eliminated, but presuming it was only flyers who had survived, the only remaining threats would be Sad Cake Binge Gaming, who’d lost their healer, Reigning Fire’s Ichaboth, who wasn’t much of a threat on his own, and Dying Gravity.

The platform reached the bottom of the valley. Unbroken stepped onto it, and Mitch activated it again. It rose. Jayden looked out over the misty, moonlit forest. Not too far from the dam were the remains of a collapsed wooden structure. Had there been a battle around there, or had that been that way when Breach-bot created the map? If the former was true, at least one other team was close to the dam. A bit further, Mog’Inub’s L-shaped body was lying on its side in a clearing.

Jayden caught some motion in the corner of his eye. He looked down. In the moonlight, he could just see something like a patch of mist moving toward the dam. Was it an Ichaboth, or just a random patch of haze? He pointed it out to the others. “Is that Ichaboth?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Sophia said.

They watched it for half a minute, but still weren’t sure what it was. “If it is Ichaboth,” Jayden said, “we’ll just have to work fast once we’re up there. Once we find the entrance, I’ll go in alone and search for a place to plant the bomb. You guys stay outside and keep watch. Call if you need me.” He turned to Mitch. “Once I find a place to plant the bombs, I’ll come back out and lead you right to it. Once the bomb is planted, we’ll run to the valley wall.”

By the time they reached the top of the dam, they could no longer make out the suspicious patch of mist. They found an entrance hatch right away, and Jayden climbed inside.

Normally, splitting up was a terrible idea, but Dash would be able to get back to his teammates in no time if they alerted him. That same speed allowed him to survey the dam’s interior quickly. He already had a likely weakness in mind. He went straight to the mouth of the nearest artificial waterfall. There, he found a facility filled with hydroelectric generators collecting power from the passing water. They were large, impressive machines, rusty like Zap’s plating. “I found a generator room by the nearest waterfall,” Jayden said. He darted around the room, looking either for something that would amplify an explosion, or an obvious structural vulnerability. He found neither.

But there would be one below. The generator was in this room, but the water itself flowed through pipes underneath it. If the explosives could be placed in such a way that a pipe would burst, the water would escape into the rest of the dam, and the dam would probably fail.

There had been a ladder outside the generator room. As Jayden had hoped, it led him to a round, bulging wall. Jayden put his ear up to it. Water was flowing on the other side. “Mitch, come down here,” Jayden said. He did. Mitch had three bombs left. He planted all of them, setting them up so that he could detonate them remotely.

“Guys, hurry up,” Sophia said. “Ichaboth is at the bottom of the dam.”

“We’ve got the bombs planted,” Jayden said. “We’re coming right up.” By the time they were up, the elevator platform was moving down. Should they destroy it? They should have done it earlier. If they did so now, it would doubtless alert Reigning Fire to their presence. Maybe that wasn’t a problem, though. Ichaboth was the only one who could get up here without it, and he couldn’t take all three of them on at once. “Mitch, toss a grenade on the elevator.” He walked up to the edge where the dam overlooked it, and gently tossed a frag grenade onto it. The grenade clattered as it fell onto the elevator. The explosion tore the platform off of the rail it had been clinging to and sent it plummeting to the valley floor. Unbroken walked off the dam and onto the cliff that overlooked the valley. They wanted to get as far away as they could. If water rushed through the gap where the dam was now, it could erode the land nearby. Ichaboth emerged over the edge of the cliff but retreated as soon as it saw them.

Once they had been running for several minutes, Jayden gave the order to blow the dam. Mitch pressed the little green button on his detonator. A fireball burst out from the dam, ripping a hole in it. Water gushed through that hole like it was emerging from a faucet. As it did, the force of the flowing water ripped the hole open wider, allowing more water to flow into the valley.