“Let me go! Who are you? Let me go!”

Elara woke to find herself stuffed inside a sack. She thrashed with all her strength.

“Perrin, did you water down that Sleep spell? She’s awake already.”

“Idiot. Don’t use my name. Her father is a duke, and he’s poured a fortune into her. You think her resistances would be low? We’re lucky she stayed unconscious this long.”

Elara went rigid. She knew both voices.

“Perrin? And you, Roderick! You ambushed me? You betrayed my father?”

“See what your big mouth did? She recognized us,” Perrin snapped.

Roderick sounded unconcerned. “What are you afraid of? She won’t be getting out to tell anyone.”

What did that mean? Was this more than a kidnapping?

“What are you going to do?”

Once Elara realized her life might be in danger, fear sharpened her temper instead of dulling it.

The sack was ripped from her head. Roderick’s vicious face was the first thing she saw.

“What are we going to do? Why, Lady Elara, today you’re going to be a monster’s dinner!”

Elara looked around. Amethyst Crystals of every size studded the walls of the dim passage.

They had brought her to the Amethyst Deep?

“You two are Mill Rats in human skin! The old man never mistreated you, and this is how you repay him?”

“Your father is finished. Do you really think he can stop the empire’s advance? Killing you will be the final blow that breaks him, and whoever arranged it promised me a title for the trouble.”

The thought of his promised nobility sent Roderick into a fit of laughter.

“Stop laughing before you draw a monster,” Perrin said impatiently. “This will do. Put her down.”

They dumped Elara onto the ground. She still looked ready to bite someone.

Roderick studied her lovely face with genuine regret. “Such a beauty, and every bit as foul-tempered as her father. I’d been looking forward to finding out what a duke’s daughter was like.”

“This is the Sixth Stratum. If you don’t mind a monster chewing on your naked backside, feel free to have your fun right now.”

“It was a joke. Once I’m a noble, I’ll have all the women I want.”

Perrin raised his wand, pointed it at Elara, and began an arcane incantation.

“Polymorph?”

Elara recognized the spell at once. She kicked at Perrin with her bound feet, desperate to interrupt him, but Roderick caught her legs.

“If you have the nerve, kill me! Kill...”

Her voice faded as the spell took hold. Elara shrank into a Puffcap with a pair of stubby legs, the creature common folk called a walking mushroom.

When the incantation ended, Perrin reluctantly produced a potion that shimmered like starlight and poured it over her. Roderick clicked his tongue in wonder.

“Polymorph Fixative? You spared no expense. Why go to all this trouble? We could just kill her and throw the body down for the monsters.”

Perrin stared at him as if stupidity might be contagious.

“Go ahead, then. See whether the Duke’s Vengeance Mark attaches itself to you when she dies. When her father abandons his territory to hunt you down, don’t you dare give him my name.

“There’s no chance she doesn’t have tracking magic and a Vengeance Mark on her. Letting the monsters below devour every last bit of her is the safest option.”

As yet another thoughtful precaution, he cast an extended Featherfall on the Puffcap Elara had become. They did not want the fall itself to kill her.

“Forget I said anything.” Roderick took the insult without complaint and walked over to Elara. “Farewell, Lady Elara.”

He kicked her into the chasm and watched the darkness swallow her.

The fissure led straight into the dungeon depths. No one who fell into it had ever climbed back out, least of all a defenseless Puffcap.

* * *

Bastards!

They had lured her out in the old man’s name!

She would kill both traitors with her own hands!

...

It was so dark.

The chasm seemed truly bottomless. Even the extended Featherfall had not carried her to the end of it.

As her descent grew faster, Elara’s rage cooled. At sixteen, she had never faced death so directly, and fear finally found her.

Was she really going to die like this?

Poof!

Elara landed on something soft and springy. It flung her high into the air, caught her again, and bounced her several more times before she finally tumbled onto the ground.

She was alive! Fate had not abandoned her after all.

But where was she?

A Puffcap had no eyes or other visible sense organs, yet she could still dimly perceive her surroundings. The thing that had caught her appeared to be an enormous mushroom, nearly ten feet across.

What was making all that noise around her? The figures moving past felt strangely familiar.

Were those Puffcaps just like her?

Why would so many creatures from the very bottom of the food chain live in the deadly dungeon depths?

And why were they closing in on her?

* * *

Evan, master of the Mycelial Garden, suspected he had been spreading his attention too thin lately. He kept making careless mistakes.

Case in point, an uncontrolled Puffcap had somehow appeared in the garden. Perhaps it had matured and dropped from the mushroom patch before he could connect it to the Mycelial Network.

Its cap was pink, too, making it stand out amid all the cyan and gray caps.

Was it a mutation?

Fortunately, the problem was easy to fix. He only had to connect it with his hyphae and tune it to the frequency of the Mycelial Network.

Why was it resisting so fiercely?

The uncontrolled Puffcap fled from the one Evan sent to establish the connection. It knocked over several Puffcaps, trampled through a mushroom patch, and left chaos in its wake.

Once Evan lost patience, he ordered a swarm of Puffcaps to surround the newcomer and pack in until it could no longer move. Only then did he connect his hyphae to it.

“Aaaah! Get away! Get away from me!”

What in the world?

The instant the Puffcap came online, its screams blasted through Evan’s mind so loudly that his hyphae nearly recoiled.

“Quiet!”

The irresistible command swept through the Mycelial Network to every Puffcap. The entire Mycelial Garden stopped at once.

“Damn it. No, not all of you. Resume work in every sector.”

It took him a while to get the garden running again. Only then did Evan focus on the unusual Puffcap.

He had figured out the obvious by now. This was no homegrown Puffcap. It was an outsider.

How had a foreign mushroom reached such an isolated corner of the dungeon?

“Talk. Where did you come from?”

“Who are you? How are you speaking to me? Wait, how am I speaking?”

Wonderful.

The newcomer was so confused that she could barely form a coherent sentence. Evan decided it would be easier to inspect her Status Panel.

Well, then. A superpowered pink Puffcap with more than 3,000 HP and LV6 across the resistance board.

Evan felt almost blinded. That was impressive, considering he had no eyes.

His Mycelial Garden might be full of Puffcaps, but the basic variety sat firmly at the bottom of the food chain. Every one of their Stats began at 1, and they had a mere 10 HP. What ordinary Puffcap could ever reach 3,000 HP?

Evan could subdue her easily enough. It was the long list of Permanent Effects that truly inspired envy.

Enough envy to make him want to eat her and plunder her abilities.

Still, something novel had finally dropped into this dreary underground world. He would let her live.

Besides, the Status Panel suggested the Puffcap before him was probably human. Eating someone alive was a step beyond what Evan was prepared to become, at least for now.

“Calmed down yet?” Evan had the Puffcaps pinning her ease away, giving her a little room.

The sudden voice inside Elara’s head had left her badly shaken. She still did not know whether the speaker was human or monster. All she knew was that every nearby Puffcap obeyed him.

Was this the next part of the conspiracy? Had someone been stationed here to execute her?

“If you’re going to kill me, then do it!”

“Why would I kill you? Could you please calm down?”

“Huh?”

Outsider mushrooms had no manners. She had wrecked part of his Mycelial Garden and had not even apologized.

“I’m the lord of every mushroom on this stratum. You can call me Evan. What’s your name?”

“The... lord of the mushrooms...”

Elara could not imagine how those words belonged together. As far as she knew, mushrooms were bottom-feeders with a Level Cap of LV10. Even at max level, they could become meals for monsters only a few levels above them.

Nothing she sensed here resembled the territory of an LV10 monster. Then there was this method of communication, which felt similar to a Tier 7 Telepathy spell.

No, it was clearly more than Telepathy. Before the connection, Elara had been able to sense only a few yards around herself. Now her awareness stretched far into the distance with astonishing clarity, as though she were receiving the senses of every mushroom nearby.

She had no way to judge how powerful this Mushroom Lord might be.

Her best option was to pretend she was an ordinary Puffcap and bluff her way through.

“I... I’m a Puffcap too. I don’t have a name.”

“Then why don’t I give you one? How about Elara?”

“...”

What?

How did he know?

Could this Telepathy-like skill read minds as well?

The Puffcaps that had backed away began closing in again. Was he going to kill her for lying?

No!

They stopped when only a sliver of space remained. Evan’s voice returned inside her mind.

“I’m very friendly, as long as you don’t play games with me. Otherwise, I won’t mind having a little more fertilizer for the soil. Understand?”

Elara bobbed her cap frantically.

“Let’s try that again. Name?”

“E-Elara St. Clair...”

“Identity?”

“The daughter of... Duke Alaric...”

A duke’s daughter?

So the outside world had something like a medieval social order.

No wonder she possessed a Church Blessing and a Fruit of Vitality, and still had 3,000 HP after being transformed into a Puffcap.

In any world, having the right father was life’s greatest shortcut.

“Tell me, then. How did a duke’s daughter fall all the way down here?”

Now that he knew the truth, Elara saw no point in hiding anything else. She told him how she had been betrayed and sent into the chasm, then answered each of his questions honestly.

Evan learned a great deal. The place he occupied was a dungeon within House St. Clair’s territory, and he lived in its Deep Strata. That explained why monsters seemed to be everywhere.

He also learned that the outside world contained all manner of species. Humanity was currently at war with the Vampires of Demonkind, and the two traitors who had tried to murder Elara were most likely working with them.

More importantly, Elara seemed unable to see a Status Panel despite being native to this world. Otherwise, she would never have tried to conceal her name.

Perhaps the Status Panel was a hidden privilege granted to a Hero.

Whatever the explanation, Evan found the pink Puffcap much more agreeable now that he had learned so much from her.

“Elara, you’re a Puffcap now. What do you plan to do next?”

“Next...” The earlier intimidation had left its mark. “You truly aren’t going to turn me into fertilizer?”

“You have my word.”

“I want to return to the surface.”

She wanted more than that. Elara intended to find her father, undo the Polymorph, and take revenge on the two traitors.

“The surface?” Evan found that genuinely amusing. “I’d like to reach the surface too. But as you can see, you’re a mushroom and so am I. How are we supposed to fight our way through an underground world full of terrifying monsters? We don’t even need to look beyond this stratum. The passage upward runs through the Magma Fiend Lair.”

A Magma Fiend was a high-tier monster of at least LV55. Elara could not have defeated one even before her transformation. She was not sure she could have escaped alive if she encountered one.

“Come to think of it, won’t your father come to rescue you?”

“I think he will...”

Elara remembered what the traitors had said about her father being finished, and her certainty wavered. Her pink cap visibly drooped.

She had lost access to the magic that had once been her greatest strength. How could she possibly return to the surface as a Puffcap?

“All right, that’s enough gloom. You must be hungry after causing such a commotion. Let’s get you something to eat.”

The newcomer he had only just found would be no fun if she starved to death.

A cyan-capped Puffcap hopped out of the mushroom patch and came forward to guide Elara. She had to admit that she was hungry.

“Is this one you?” she asked.

“It is, and it isn’t. Every mushroom here is me.”

Evan did possess a true mushroom body, but he had no intention of mentioning it.

Elara bobbed her cap with only the faintest understanding. The two of them soon reached a mycelial mat formed from a convergence of hyphae.

Evan thoughtfully demonstrated how Puffcaps ate. The Puffcap under his control lay down, allowing the hyphae below to connect with its body and deliver nutrients. In less than five minutes, it was full.

The color of Elara’s cap shifted as she watched.

What was that?

A mass of hyphae pierced its body and injected some unknown substance. After sixteen years of eating with her mouth, Elara found the spectacle difficult to accept.

Evan did not rush her. If a child refused to eat, it simply was not hungry enough. Once hunger truly set in, the child would figure it out.

Her weakening body eventually forced Elara to lie down on the mycelial mat.

The sensation astonished her.

Nutrients surged into her through countless points of connection beneath her body. Warm satisfaction bloomed as she was fed and filled.

It felt wonderful.

Only when she had absorbed all she needed and the hyphae stopped supplying her did Elara rise, still reluctant to end the experience.

Being a mushroom was unexpectedly pleasant.

No, no. What was she thinking?

Elara, had even her brain turned into a mushroom?

Technically, her brain really was part of a cap now. A pink one.

Evan knew nothing of her inner struggle. Once she had finished eating, he began introducing the various sections of the Mycelial Garden.

“You know the Feeding Ground now. You’ve already seen the Puffcap Nursery too. That was the place where you knocked over my Puffcaps.

“See that rock wall? The Mining Zone is beneath it.

“Over there is the Breeding Zone. We keep Roller Beetles and Slimes there. They’re aggressive, so don’t wander too close.

“See the giant mushroom on the right? That’s the Specialization Chamber. It’s rather complicated, but you’ll understand once you visit it yourself.

“And don’t go that way. It leads beyond the Mycelial Garden, and it isn’t safe.”

Evan continued with his tour, but Elara’s thoughts had stalled at the very first term.

A Puffcap Nursery? A Breeding Zone?

Evan did not sound as if he were describing part of a dungeon. He sounded as if he were presenting a fully functioning town.

Was she still inside the Amethyst Deep?

Where were all the other monsters?

How could a collection of mushrooms claim so much territory in the deadly Deep Strata?

The more Elara thought about it, the less she understood. The Deep Strata seemed impossibly strange, a place where common sense itself had ceased to exist.

“Say that again.”

Duke Alaric St. Clair’s knuckles whitened around the arm of his mahogany chair. The wood groaned under the pressure.

Cold sweat gathered at the nape of Steward Edmund’s neck, but he enunciated every word.

“After Perrin and Roderick lured Lady Elara away in your name, they went first to the Amethyst Deep. They have since crossed the border and fled into the Veiled Empire. Judging by their route, they are most likely seeking refuge with Duke Severin Voss.”

“Damned traitors! Damned Vampires!”

The solid armrest shattered in Alaric’s grip. Blood-red flame churned in the duke’s eyes.

“Elara is still alive. Her Tracking Sigil remains, and the Vengeance Mark has not transferred. I’m going to save her.”

“Your Grace!”

When the duke seized his greatsword and made to leave without another thought, Edmund had no choice but to shout.

“The moment you depart, Severin will bring the Crimson Knights down on Highfort Keep. If the keep falls, there will be no defensible ground behind it. Your duchy will not be the only territory in danger. The entire Southern Federation will be exposed.”

“And you would have me stand by while Elara dies?”

Flagstones cracked beneath Alaric’s boots. Webs of fractures spread across the floor as the aura of an LV70 human, one of the most powerful alive, forced Edmund to one knee.

“The Diamond-rank adventuring party Silverthorn Company is operating nearby. We can commission them privately to search the Amethyst Deep for Lady Elara. Here at Highfort Keep, you can create the appearance of leaving. When Severin takes the bait, you can strike him head-on and repay this attack.”

By the time Edmund forced out the last word, he was close to collapsing.

The pressure gradually receded. Alaric sat once more, raised one hand, and condensed Elara’s tracked coordinates into a crystal. He passed it to his steward.

“Do it. Tell those adventurers that if they bring Elara back alive, I will give them a city.

“But if anything happens to my daughter...”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

* * *

Far below, in the Mycelial Garden of the dungeon depths, Elara knew nothing of her father’s search. She stood at the edge of the Breeding Zone, watching the scene before her with mounting horror.

Beside a deep slime pit, a hollow-bodied Puffcap had arrived with a load of ordinary mushrooms. As it tipped the mushrooms in, one of the Slimes sprang up, latched onto its leg, and dragged it over the edge.

The other Slimes swarmed it in the next instant, sealing the Puffcap inside a quivering mass.

The trapped creature was still struggling. It looked as though there might be time to save it.

“Evan! Evan, your Slimes are eating a Puffcap.”

Evan was busy, but he spared the scene a moment of attention.

“I know. I’m sending a new Puffcap to replace it. I told you the Breeding Zone was dangerous. Stay away from it.”

Elara wanted to explain that this was not what she had meant. Then the Puffcap inside the Slime stopped moving and began to dissolve, and she swallowed the words.

The underground world was a cruel place.

* * *

It truly was cruel, and Evan was never idle if he wanted to survive it.

At best, a Puffcap possessed enough Intelligence to find its own way after receiving an order. Both breeding and mining required Evan’s constant supervision. Worse, monsters regularly harried the borders of the Mycelial Garden.

Even with Cognitive Coordination LV5, managing everything strained him.

Finding enough attention to show Elara around had been a rare luxury. He had not shown it, but Evan was delighted to have someone capable of conversation. At the very least, he no longer had to talk to himself to keep his command of language from fading.

After the tour, however, he had been forced to leave her to explore on her own. A swarm of Ember Gnats was approaching the garden’s border, and he needed all his attention there.

The insects resembled mosquitoes but were slightly larger than Puffcaps. Their average level was around LV20.

They were far from the strongest monsters in the area, but they were unquestionably among the most troublesome. They could fly, they were agile, and they traveled in swarms. Whenever they found an isolated Puffcap, they skewered it on their long mouthparts and carried it away. In the early days of Evan’s development, they had been his greatest enemy.

By now, he had perfected a response.

As the Ember Gnats descended in formation, several Puffcaps whose caps had been modified into nozzles sprayed a cloud of slime ooze. The substance was both adhesive and corrosive. Any gnat it touched lost the ability to fly and tumbled to the ground.

Beds of purple mushrooms released hallucinogenic spores across the landing zone, incapacitating the fallen insects.

After losing seven of their number, the surviving Ember Gnats fled without looking back.

Evan knew they would learn nothing from the defeat. They would return.

Armored Puffcaps moved among the unconscious gnats and finished them one by one. The monster carcasses were then hauled into the Mycelial Garden as fresh fertilizer.

An upgrade.

Excellent. Once Heat Resistance rose a little higher, Evan could try slipping through the Magma Fiend Lair and see what lay on the stratum above.

He opened his Status Panel.

Evan’s Status Panel did not even list conventional Stats. His true body looked like an utterly ordinary mushroom, and having only 420 HP at LV42 was proper for a mushroom. Elara’s total of more than 3,000 HP was absurd.

His unusually vast Mana reserve included the entire Mycelial Garden.

The most ridiculous part of the panel was the Hero title. Even Evan found it impossible to take seriously.

How did a mushroom end up with a title like that?

He had never seen his Summoner. Perhaps it had been a deranged Archmage or a Deity with an appalling sense of humor. One fact, however, seemed beyond dispute: whoever had done it was not right in the head.

Who deliberately summoned a Hero in the form of a mushroom?

Still, Evan owed everything to the title. The Hero privilege had given him Greed, and Greed allowed him to steal skills from underground monsters and use them to arm his Puffcaps.

He had gone from fleeing Slimes determined to make a meal of him to cultivating territory in a corner of the stratum. The journey had been nothing but hardship.

Without Greed, he would probably have become monster dung long ago.

So why had he been summoned as a mushroom?

The question had become an obsession, second only to reaching the surface.

...

With the Ember Gnats dealt with, Evan finally had time to see what the newcomer was doing.

Ah.

She was stealing freshly mined Amethyst Crystals.

Rock walls bordered two sides of the Mycelial Garden. They looked like bones gnawed by some colossal beast, their dark gray layers riddled with honeycomb pits.

Clusters of deep purple crystal had formed in some of the hollows, scattered across the stone. Mana was always more concentrated around these Amethyst Crystals than elsewhere.

The so-called Mining Zone existed to harvest them.

Burying an Amethyst Crystal in the soil did not turn it directly into nutrients. Instead, it drew ambient mana from the air, increasing the efficiency with which the hyphae harvested it.

Many of the Puffcaps in the Mining Zone possessed the Chitinous Shell skill. They formed thick armor over their caps and used it to chip crystals from the wall.

At only LV4, the shells were not especially hard. Mining was slow, and the impacts sometimes killed the Puffcaps themselves. Evan’s resources were limited, however. Extracting any crystals at all was achievement enough.

Elara had set her sights on a fist-sized Amethyst Crystal and was struggling to clasp it between her short legs.

“What are you doing?”

“E-Evan?”

The pink Puffcap jolted so violently that she tripped over the crystal beneath her.

“Don’t start talking inside my head without warning...”

“Do we have another way to communicate? Get used to it.”

Elara considered that and had to admit he was right. She still doubted she would ever grow accustomed to someone speaking into her mind whenever he pleased.

“You have so many Mana Crystals here.” She picked up the Amethyst Crystal again, unable to keep the excitement from her voice.

“Mana Crystals? You mean the Amethyst Crystals I use to enrich the soil?”

“Enrich the soil?”

A green-capped Puffcap hopped forward and lifted the cap of a large mushroom nearby. Half an Amethyst Crystal stood buried beneath it.

“You use Mana Crystals as fertilizer?”

“What else would I do with them?”

“They’re Mana Crystals! You can use them to make magic items or as the foundation of a magic circle. Even small fragments can serve as spellcasting materials. How can you waste them on soil?”

Elara sounded heartbroken, as though Evan were destroying priceless materials in front of her.

“Have you forgotten that this is a dungeon? They do have another use, though.”

A tendril woven from hyphae emerged beneath a mushroom and activated the skill [Bind LV3]. It wound around an Amethyst Crystal half the size of a palm, fastening crystal and Puffcap together.

Mana poured steadily into the crystal. Its dull surface brightened, then began to flicker. The Mana Crystal became dangerously overloaded.

Once cracks appeared and the crystal began to shriek under the strain, the Puffcap bounded into an empty patch of ground with its burden.

It exploded.

The shock wave knocked Elara over again.

“Powerful, isn’t it? These are excellent against monsters.”

Elara lay on the ground, unable to find words.

She had just watched Evan expend a C-grade Mana Crystal as a disposable weapon, producing an explosion comparable to an LV4 Fireburst. With a little refinement, that same crystal could have become the core material of a wand used by a Silver-rank adventurer.

Not even the most ignorant newly rich noble in the Southern Federation would squander precious magical materials like this.

The crystal set in Elara’s personal wand had only been B-grade.

“You still haven’t told me why you wanted one,” Evan said.

The abrupt return to the question caught Elara while she was still silently condemning his extravagance. The truth slipped out.

“I want to try casting through it.”

She grew nervous as soon as she spoke. Elara did not know whether Evan would regard her magic as a threat. If he did, her life might be over.

“Oh? Didn’t you say you couldn’t cast after becoming a Puffcap?”

There was no suspicion in his voice, only curiosity. Elara relaxed.

“I only want to try. Casting through a Mana Crystal might let me bypass the limitations of a Puffcap’s body.”

“Go ahead.”

Another tendril emerged beneath a mushroom, curled around the Mana Crystal beside Elara, and extended it toward her.

Elara instinctively retreated two steps, but it caught her and tied the crystal to the top of her cap.

“Be careful. These tendrils are fragile. Don’t break it.”

Bind was a stolen skill being forced through hyphae, so Evan could hardly expect the result to be sturdy.

Elara held herself still and focused on a spell: Glimmer, something even an apprentice could cast with ease.

An orange-yellow orb appeared above her cap. It brightened and dimmed as the mana sustaining it fluctuated.

After flickering for a while, the light stabilized. Elara had found the trick.

“It worked! It really worked!”

She jumped in excitement.

The tendril snapped instantly. The Mana Crystal fell to the ground, and Glimmer went out with it.

Mycelial tendrils truly were very fragile.

“S-sorry...”

Evan did not care about the lost hyphae. All his attention remained on her spellcasting.

“Try casting it again.”

“I can’t without the Mana Crystal.”

“It doesn’t matter if you fail. Cast it so I can see the difference.”

See?

Elara did not understand what he meant, but she attempted Glimmer on her own.

It failed, just as every previous attempt had.

Evan, who had been observing her closely, saw more.

He had plundered the skill from a magical vine called the Noctis Tendril, which had once lived in this part of the garden. The vines used Mana Sense to find prey before crushing it with their tendrils. Bind had come from them as well.

Although the magical plants had been fairly high-level, they could not move. To Evan, they had been meals waiting to be harvested. They were now extinct in this region.

He regretted that. Both of the Noctis Tendril’s skills had proven extremely useful. At the time, he had cared only about claiming territory and had not planned ahead. If he had preserved some seeds, he could have raised the vines in the Breeding Zone alongside the Roller Beetles and Slimes, periodically slaughtering them to extract skill proficiency.

Through his mana sight, Evan watched the energy flowing through Elara. It moved smoothly at the beginning of the spell, but stalled at every node and never formed a complete circuit. It was as if she were using the wrong casting method.

That was impossible. She had successfully cast Glimmer through the Mana Crystal only moments before.

The likelier cause was the difference between human and Puffcap anatomy. In simple terms, her hardware no longer matched the system she was trying to run.

The Mana Crystal provided an independent environment better suited to the spell’s operation.

It reminded Evan of the way he had to modify Puffcaps before they could use a given skill.

“Can you cast any other spells now?”

He knew from the panel that she was a dual-affinity Tier 4 mage, and he wanted to see more magic.

“I’ll probably need practice. I’m not used to channeling mana through a Puffcap’s body, and the cloudy areas inside this unpolished Mana Crystal interfere with the spell. I need time to adjust.”

“Cloudy? So the purer the Mana Crystal, the better?”

Evan had never understood that. He knew only that burying the crystals gathered mana. When some worked better than others, he had assumed size was responsible. Purity did not appear to matter when using Detonation.

“Of course. Archmage Zorya’s staff is said to hold a perfectly pure S-grade Mana Crystal. Any spell cast through it becomes three times as powerful!”

“S-grade? They have grades too? Wait here.”

A short while later, two Puffcaps appeared before the puzzled Elara, carrying a huge crystal of flawless clarity between them.

“An A-grade Mana Crystal? And it’s as long as an arm?”

“Why do you have a Mana Crystal this good?”

“How long do you think I’ve been here?”

Evan did not know exactly how much time had passed since he arrived in this world. The dungeon depths had neither day and night nor changing seasons. By his own estimate, however, it had been at least two or three years.

Even if he counted only the time since founding the Mycelial Garden, he had been mining for a long while. The entire rock face belonged to him. Given enough excavation, a few high-quality Mana Crystals were inevitable.

He had not collected them because he understood their value. Pure Amethyst Crystals simply looked prettier, and placing them around his true body allowed them to gather mana while serving as decoration.

“Can you cast other spells more quickly with this?”

“You’re letting me use it? Truly?”

Evan had not known Elara long, but even he could tell that she genuinely loved Mana Crystals, or perhaps everything associated with magic.

“Of course. I want to see more spells. Come to think of it, Elara, what spells do you know?”

Her Status Panel listed [Light Magic LV4], but that only indicated the highest tier of Light Magic she could use. It did not reveal the individual spells she had learned.

Every school of magic contained a multitude of spells across its tiers, and many spells had countless variations. A living-creature Polymorph, for example, might turn its target into a hawk, a dog, a Puffcap, or any number of other forms.

Elara stood still for a moment as she searched her memory. Evan imagined that, in human form, she would be counting them one by one on her fingers.

“Let me think... Water Serpent, Refracting Water Mirror, Ice Blade, Purify, Healing Light, Revelation, Illumination, Create Water, Energy Ward, Mire... I think that’s all.”

That was quite a collection.

“Try Mire on this Puffcap.”

Evan summoned a mining Puffcap from the rock wall, where it had been hammering stone with its armored cap, and sent it to the clearing used for Detonation. Another tendril extended beneath a mushroom and tied the A-grade Mana Crystal to Elara’s cap.

“Be careful not to break this one. It’s the last tendril here.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Mana surged from Elara into the crystal. This time, the moment she began casting, ambient mana rushed toward her. The A-grade Mana Crystal above her cap became a tiny vortex, devouring mana from every direction.

No wonder such crystals were used in wands. With that much mana reinforcing a spell, its power was bound to multiply.

“It worked!”

The mining Puffcap sank slightly. The firm ground beneath it had become a pool of mud. It tried to lift one foot, but the mire held it fast.

Mire was normally supposed to slow its target, and even with the A-grade Mana Crystal, the enhancement should have expanded the affected area rather than made the spell restrain a creature completely.

The mining Puffcap was trapped only because its shell was too heavy and its body too weak to lift it free.

“Now try Ice Blade.”

“What? Are you sure? It might...”

“It’s fine. Cast it.”

It was only a Puffcap. If one died inside the Mycelial Garden, it would return to the cycle as fertilizer. The loss would be negligible.

“All right.”

An Ice Blade formed before Elara. This time, even she was startled.

Unlike Mire, the crystal’s effect on Ice Blade was immediately obvious. The spell was normally less than three feet long. The enhanced blade stretched past seven feet, and the bitter cold rolling from it promised a corresponding increase in power.

“Go!”

Ice met chitin with a crisp crack. The blade cut into the shell and passed through three-quarters of its thickness before stopping.

Even Evan found the result impressive. That was Chitinous Shell LV4. It took two strikes from his Spore Cannon LV6 to break through, yet an Ice Blade of the same level had nearly severed it in one.

Whether the spell itself or the A-grade Mana Crystal deserved more credit, he could not say. Probably both.

Magic was remarkable. If Evan had possessed spells in the early days, he might have avoided a great deal of suffering.

It was not too late. He still could not cast, but he now had an ally who could. Certain plans for reaching the upper strata might finally become possible.

That did not mean killing the Magma Fiend guarding the passage. Evan had seen the creature through sacrificial scouting Puffcaps. The level gap was too great for its Status Panel to reveal any details, but LV64 alone was enough to discourage every ambitious thought.

Who said the only way upward was through the existing passage?

“Elara, do you want this Mana Crystal?”

“You’re giving it to me?”

Why was this mushroom treating her so well? Was it a trap?

After her recent betrayal, Elara had become cautious, especially around a monster whose true body she had never seen.

“Not for free. Help me hunt a few monsters, and it’s yours.”

“Agreed!”

The condition reassured her. She wanted the crystal desperately, but if Evan had simply offered it as a gift, she might not have dared accept.

Monsters, though?

She was in the Deep Strata. The Mycelial Garden was so strange that she had almost forgotten.

But how did mushrooms hunt monsters? With Puffcaps?

“What kind of monster are we hunting?”

“An Earthborer. Do you know them?”

Earthborer.

The name was familiar. Where had she heard it?

Then she remembered.

“Do you mean those enormous creatures with stone-like skin that tunnel through the depths and eat ore all day?”

Evan considered the description. “That’s the one.”

“We’re hunting an Earthborer larva?”

“An adult.”

“Adults are at least LV45! They’re large monsters that require a complete Gold-rank adventuring party to hunt safely. Mr. Mercer, I’m only LV28!”

Elara’s thoughts reduced themselves to one incredulous question: he wanted her to fight an Earthborer?

Even in her human form, she would have been swallowed in a single bite. Had something gone wrong with this mushroom’s mind? A mushroom wanted to hunt an Earthborer?

“You appear to have misunderstood what I am capable of.”

Only after seeing the disbelief of the pink Puffcap did Evan remember that he had never shown her the borders of the Mycelial Garden. No wonder she doubted him.

He had wanted to hunt an Earthborer for a long time. The creatures possessed the skill [Thermal Burrowing].

They generated intense heat to weaken rock, then crushed it with rotating mouthparts and swallowed the fragments. Anything they did not need was expelled through gills along their sides, reinforcing the tunnel walls behind them.

If Evan could plunder that skill, he could carve a new passage through the rock directly to the stratum above. There would be no need to sneak under the Magma Fiend’s nose.

Unfortunately, Earthborers were exceptional diggers. If a battle turned against one, it vanished underground. Their enormous bodies could absorb tremendous punishment, and even a mortally wounded adult took a long time to kill.

Evan had attempted the hunt once before. He had suffered heavy losses and gained nothing.

Elara’s Mire gave him new hope. An Earthborer would not move quickly through mud.

Before that, however, he needed to learn how well his new member worked with the others.

“We aren’t hunting the Earthborer immediately. You need time to become comfortable casting through that Mana Crystal. Join the Expeditionary Force on its next outing and use the opportunity to practice.”

“The Expeditionary Force?”

“What... what is all this?”

At the border of the Mycelial Garden, 120 Puffcaps stood in six orderly ranks.

40 artillery Puffcaps: [Mana Storage LV4] + [Spore Cannon LV6] + [Precision LV4]

40 ooze Puffcaps: [Mana Storage LV4] + [Spore Cannon LV6] + [Digestive Ooze LV3]

20 spore Puffcaps: [Hallucinogenic Spores LV4] + [Chitinous Shell LV4]

20 pack Puffcaps: [Storage Sac LV4] + [Bind LV3]

This was the composition of Evan’s fourteenth Expeditionary Force.

It was not that he had never considered giving every skill to a single Puffcap. The more skills a Puffcap possessed, however, the more mana and time it required to create. Those costs rose along a curve. Keeping each unit to four skills or fewer offered the best balance of utility and efficiency.

“I never knew there were so many kinds of Puffcap!”

Elara felt embarrassingly ignorant. How had she never heard of all these Puffcap subspecies?

Some had caps shaped like pitchers. Others were covered in chitin like the mining Puffcaps, except their shells were riddled with vents. A few even had tendrils.

Those looked wonderful. If she had tendrils of her own, she would not need to tie the Mana Crystal to her cap.

“Evan, you called them an Expeditionary Force. What are they going to do?”

“This is a dungeon. They’re going to hunt monsters, of course.”

“An E-Earthborer?”

Elara’s tone made it clear that if the answer was yes, she would not be joining them. She could not imagine killing an Earthborer simply by throwing enough Puffcaps at it.

“I told you, not yet. This time, our target is the Ember Gnats. Those parasites keep raiding the Mycelial Garden instead of producing anything for themselves. Today, we wipe out their nest!”

Evan had endured enough attacks from the air. He had discovered the Ember Gnat Nest long ago. The only reason he had not destroyed it was that it provided a renewable supply of Heat Resistance proficiency.

Heat Resistance had now reached LV6. Eradicating the swarm in a single strike might raise it to LV7, which would be more than sufficient.

Besides, his preferred escape plan had changed. He intended to use Elara to help kill an Earthborer rather than slip past the Magma Fiend. There was no longer any reason to tolerate the pests.

They could make themselves useful one last time by serving as a whetstone for his forces.

“Elara, stay in the center of the formation and follow my orders.”

“Understood.”

Elara relaxed once she heard they were hunting gnats.

She knew Ember Gnats. Their average level was LV20, and their attacks were simple and direct. What made them difficult was their combination of flight, the Dodge skill, and their tendency to move in swarms.

Even if her magic could not defeat the entire swarm, she was confident she could protect herself.

This counted as a war of sorts, even if it was a war between monsters. Her father had never allowed her near military affairs or adventuring. The thought of experiencing battle for the first time filled her with nervous excitement.

The Puffcaps marched in such perfect formation that few armies could have matched them. Was it because Evan controlled every one?

* * *

That was exactly the reason.

With Thrall Command, Mycelial Network, and Cognitive Coordination, Evan controlled the Puffcaps like units in a strategy game, although doing so demanded far more concentration.

That unified command was the only reason he had established a foothold in the dungeon using creatures whose Stats were all 1.

Feints, diversions, and encirclements were devastating against monsters with almost no intelligence. The difference was like fighting opponents incapable of thinking beyond a training dummy.

This time, however, no elaborate strategy was necessary. Strategy was how the weak overcame the strong.

Compared with the Ember Gnats, Evan was the strong one now.

Why not select every unit and launch a full assault?

It would also demonstrate his strength and give the pink newcomer a little confidence.

* * *

The term Deep Strata referred collectively to every stratum below the Tenth. From that point downward, no clearly defined passages connected one level to the next.

Instead, innumerable three-dimensional tunnels crossed and intertwined, linking one enormous cavern after another. A passage more than fifty yards across connected the Ember Gnat Nest to Evan’s Mycelial Garden.

Scattered mushrooms grew in secret among cracks along the route. They served both as Evan’s eyes and as relay stations that extended the Mycelial Network beyond the garden.

Thrall Command allowed him to send a single Puffcap far beyond the network to scout. Large-scale control, however, required the Mycelial Network.

An intelligent enemy could circle behind him, destroy the relay points, and sever his control over the Expeditionary Force.

Fortunately, his enemies reacted to threats with about as much sophistication as training dummies.

The soft puff-puff of short legs against stone echoed through the passage. Three hundred yards ahead, several crimson lights rose into the air. A handful of Ember Gnats had discovered the advancing force.

“Ice Blade!”

A six-foot blade of ice shot forward without the slightest accuracy. The Ember Gnats did not even need to use Dodge. The spell buried itself in the ceiling above them.

“Recruit, stop wasting mana.”

“S-sorry.”

Only then did Elara notice that the Puffcaps continued forward at a steady pace. The appearance of the Ember Gnats had not slowed them at all.

The scouts made no attempt to approach. Faced with the advancing Expeditionary Force, they turned and fled.

Elara watched them vanish with growing concern. “Won’t they go back and warn the others?”

“Of course they will.”

“They may be low-intelligence monsters, but they still have the instinct to defend their nest. We’ll be facing the whole swarm soon.”

Elara very nearly pointed out that Evan was a monster too.

“Then why did you let them escape?”

Because they were too far away for him to hit.

“So we can eliminate them all at once.”

* * *

Beneath a vault churning with steam, hundreds of Ember Gnats circled a great pool. Their droning wings filled the cavern with a deafening buzz.

The insects required a hot pool like a natural spring to reproduce. Their larvae spent the entire immature stage beneath the surface, waiting for adults to bring them food. Destroy the pool, and the Ember Gnats in this region would eventually disappear.

The swarm would naturally defend its nest with everything it had.

When Elara and the Puffcaps reached the end of the passage, the luminous glands in every gnat’s abdomen flared orange in warning.

The closest Ember Gnats surged forward.

“Water Serpent!”

Once again, Elara attacked first.

At least she had improved. Water Serpent could adjust its course to some degree, unlike the straight-flying Ice Blade. Unfortunately, that improvement was not enough.

Her target possessed Dodge. The Water Serpent clipped one Ember Gnat, but it fell only a few yards before regaining its balance.

Evan could only watch in exasperation.

“Honestly, recruit.”

Evan felt no panic as the Ember Gnats approached. They had been his neighbors for far too long to frighten him.

He waited until they came within about 165 feet. Then several ooze Puffcaps unleashed Digestive Ooze, drenching the unsuspecting insects and knocking every one from the air.

The fallen gnats tried to shake off the slime and take flight again. Before they could, spore Puffcaps blanketed them in a hallucinogenic haze. Their resistance ended. The armored Puffcaps moved in and crushed them one by one.

The battle was only beginning.

More Ember Gnats poured forward. Evan’s forces met them at the mouth of the passage, and the fighting became a slaughterhouse.

The swarm outnumbered his troops several times over. Hallucinogenic Spores sealed off the lower air and restricted the directions from which the gnats could attack, but Evan could not intercept every enemy with Digestive Ooze.

Again and again, an Ember Gnat broke through the barrage and plunged its proboscis through a Puffcap. It would pin its victim to the ground, only to become paralyzed by the hallucinogenic spores below.

“Ice Blade! Ice Blade! Water Serpent!”

There was good news from Elara’s position. She had finally killed several Ember Gnats.

With insects filling the air, she could have attacked with her eyes closed and still struck something. The gnats’ Dodge skill was nearly useless in such a crowded battlefield.

Elara laughed with exhilaration after killing monsters with magic in a real fight for the first time. The organized hunts she had attended in the past could scarcely be called battles by comparison.

Her excitement ended when a gnat burst through the barrage and drove its mouthpart through an artillery Puffcap beside her, pinning it to the ground. Elara shuddered.

What if it had chosen her?

“Evan! What do we do? So many Puffcaps have died!”

They had lost only a dozen or so. The battle had barely started.

Safe in the depths of the Mycelial Garden, Evan privately lamented the recruit’s lack of nerve. He still offered useful advice.

“Stop using attack spells. Cast Illumination.”

Illumination?

What good would that do?

Elara could not see the point, but she had promised to obey orders. The spell consumed little mana, so she cast it.

The result took her completely by surprise. The instant Illumination appeared, disorder swept through the swarm.

Ember Gnats in the front ranks darted around like flies without heads. Some crashed into those behind them. Others plunged straight into the hallucinogenic haze below.

Elara stared.

“It really works!” Evan exclaimed.

“You didn’t know it would?”

“I didn’t expect it to work this well. Dismiss it, then cast it again!”

“All right!”

The Deep Strata had remained dark for ages, illuminated only by the faintest natural glow. Evan had noticed that Ember Gnats possessed eyes and wondered whether a sudden flash might disorient them. Even he had not expected such a dramatic effect.

At times like this, the advantages of a mushroom that did not rely on eyes became obvious.

With Illumination supporting Evan’s forces, the already outmatched Ember Gnats became helpless. They dropped from the air in waves.

Once their numbers could no longer seal the passage mouth, even these nearly mindless monsters seemed to rediscover fear. They scattered into the surrounding tunnels, leaving behind an empty nest and a steaming pool packed with larvae.

“It’s finally over.”

Elara sat down hard.

They had held the advantage throughout the battle, but she had cast several attack spells followed by more than twenty uses of Illumination. She was exhausted, and almost none of her mana remained.

Her body was tired, but the thrill of participating in such a large battle for the first time had not faded.

“Evan, what do we do next?”

“Next? We collect the spoils, of course!”

The twenty pack Puffcaps that had remained behind the formation went to work. Their tendrils bundled Ember Gnat carcasses into the storage spaces inside their bodies.

The number of corpses was close to Evan’s estimate. Two trips would be enough for the pack Puffcaps to carry them all. Once Evan decomposed the Ember Gnats, Heat Resistance should rise another level.

He had no intention of extending the Mycelial Garden into the nest. Too many passages opened into this cavern. Defending them all would be impossible.

Evan had selected the site of the Mycelial Garden with great care. Only one side was exposed, and even there it had just four passages. The place was perfect for hiding while he grew stronger.

As for the pale mass of larvae in the pool, Evan ordered the artillery Puffcaps to expend their remaining mana on the water. When the bombardment ended, fragments of Ember Gnat larvae floated across the surface.

“Those are the spoils?”

Elara watched the Puffcaps carry away gnat corpses. They looked nothing like the treasure she had imagined.

“What else did you expect, Lady Elara? We hunted monsters. What sort of treasure should they leave?”

Did she expect them to split open a gnat’s belly and find swords and gold coins inside?

On second thought, perhaps the pool did contain something valuable.

“Actually, there might be something good in the water.”

“The pool?”

Steam still rose from the