Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty-Three – Mu, Drow, Muuuuuu

The bulk of the Mu Spore quickly closing in on our company definitely had hostile intent. Given that we had to carve our way through a hostile field of lethal fungus, and were creating a ruckus as we did so, not to be unexpected.

We were just pests busting up its garden, after all.

It came crashing down as it hit the edge of the Interdiction, King Gravity proclaimethed His sovereignty over primordial mushroom nightmare, and down it went.

Trella took over, her ladyglaive Sing in her hands. She had the Monk Levels to get some real acceleration there, the Flowing Waters lightfoot for not losing her footing on slick moss and mold, and Spirited Charge and Death from Above to make the initial charge up onto the mass of its body, and cut down on it with a lethal blow.

And nicely surprised me by blowing Child of Water, the capstone Feat of the Ocean Dragon. At the beginning of an encounter, burn some Ki to double your Base Attack Bonus for the round... extremely powerful Feat, could only be taken at Ten, lots of pre-reqs.

For six seconds, she'd have a BAB of +20. There was all sorts of stuff an Ocean practitioner could do with all that BAB.

She carved deep into the thick fungoid shell of the massive Mu Spore, and naturally the tentacles there lashed out at her as she landed and kept going.

The lashing tentacles were targets, effective Sundering attempts, about 50 Health each, enough damage to hack through a small tree, enough to chop right through them, and Improved Sunder meant the blow continued through to the Mu Spore itself. Supreme Cleave meant she could take a step between the Sunder and the Cleave, if she so desired, putting her in range of other tentacles.

The path of Sing was an aria whirlpool of liquid Banefire and pure Ocean Dragon glaivework, rending a path through the shell of the Mu Spore as she danced across it. Tendrils went flying, and spores, fires, and flames of exploding mold, lichens, and crackerballs ignited underneath her like bio-bombs. The initial rent she had made in its hide lengthened in an unbroken stream of hacking Glaive blades coming down, literally carving it open as banefire lashed along whatever semblance of a nervous system it had.

The panicked alarms of 'oh shit she's cutting me open because I'm trying to wrap her up in mucous-laden pseudopods and eat her' weren't quite processed before it was all too late, and the Mu Spore had quite literally been cut open along a sixty-foot length. Whatever passed for gastric apocalypse vented out a very unwholesome gout of burning slime, spores, and all kinds of organic things with distressingly long names and descriptions as it died.

Trella didn't stop running, jumping right off the top of its shell forty feet up there, and turning on her Cloud-stepping Sandals to ski back down through the air in our direction, looking rather red-faced and quite pleased with herself, regardless. Her Vajra had dealt with the fire and cold, and the Adamant Pauldrons Tat on her shoulders with the invasive spores.

----

Now, we didn't just watch on as she did all that, of course, because the Mu Spore had some assistants along.

These were drow, following after the Mu Spore in a hoverboat, based on the Disk magitech, except it looked like it was made out of several fallen and patched-together Mu primary tentacles. Given that Mu hide was at least as strong as ironwood, it was actually pretty smart.

They looked to be harvesting the spores and drops of stuff the Mu Spore was constantly oozing and dropping, sometimes retrieving them, otherwise spreading them out on the surfaces of the fungi they found on, or areas of open ground. Totally cowed by the presence of the Spore, the fungi gave the gardening crew no problems at all.

The fact the drow all had mushrooms growing out of them, to the point of covering some limbs with cilia and grey moss and little clusters of stools, might have had something to do with that, too.

They didn't much like us there, and the three ships of them all moved to attack us. The first thing they did is lose all their altitude, crashing down to the ground... Should have used Disk geomagnetism as a back-up, I thought, as a wave of rather impossibly accurate arrow fire hatracked them with prejudice. The Ironblood and monkeys who came racing up for some action didn't have much work to do, which earned a lot of thumbs-up for the elves.

---------

Still in 20. There's money to be made...

"Is there anything worth salvaging off this?" Amber had to ask, wrinkling her nose as Trella swooped down to the rest of us. To say the Mu Spore had a distinct aroma to it was like saying the sun is bright. It made the eyes water before you even smelled it!... which nobody who didn't have a Vajra was stupid enough to do. Alchemical Masks for just this situation were fitted on everyone's faces who couldn't filter the air. Nobody wanted this atmospheric soup inside of, or on, them.

"Yeah, the fluids and spores in its internal cavity are next to priceless for some very high-end alchemical work, among them orichalcum production." Wincing faces suddenly got very interested and were wiped clean. "Get some stone jars and let's see how much we can take of the good stuff. And for heaven's sake, don't get any of it on you!"

There was absolutely no doubt that was going to happen. Stone Shaping Rockborn Clerics were quick to make containers and rough stone tools, and the elves happy to manipulate them from a safe distance as we turned the dead elder abomination into something worth goldweight at high speed, being raced by the vivus that was devouring it, also at high speed.

AA cleared his throat, and I glanced in that direction, seeing a Mu Spore some miles off turn from its normal path and proceed in our direction.

"Brother, you've got a guest coming to dinner," I commented, and he smiled expectantly.

"What do you figure it's worth?" he asked casually.

"Its psionic nexal can be carved into a self-empowering Greater Mythic Plant or Phrenic Baneskull. The goo in its guts... probably a thousand gold a gallon."

Everyone looked at the ten-gallon stone jars lined up. There were a bunch of them.

"We're going to have to Tapestry them and send them out with Hazé. There's gonna be tons of the goop," Briggs said, watching stone scoops in glowing magical hands dipping and dunking into the vile, active stuff, still moving and oozing around as they salvaged it quickly.

We could Itemize and shrink the stuff down in the short term...

"Ten pounds to a gallon, ten gallons to a jar, twenty goldweight a jar..."

It was a lot of freaking money, even if it only was for alchemical usages. Each jar was worth diamonds. We'd definitely be splitting it among all the Alliance members, who were already chaffing to get their hands on some. They'd still need some post-Tens with Skill Ranks in Alchemy to use the methodology for orichalcum and the high-end uses, but just having the shit was half the battle.

"Murderhoboing for fun and profit is a great lifestyle," I said with a perfectly straight face, and Briggs couldn't help but chuckle.

"<Pah, we did not even get to fight," Wayfair said aloud through my lips. Didn't have to move them, of course, just spoke out. Possession, you know. Weird stuff...

"You ever been involved in any of those epic, slam-bang, down-to-the-wire, skin-of-your-teeth battles, Wayfair?" I asked.

"<A few." She sounded amused. "<What of it?"

"Do you remember how much of a damn pain they were?"

"<Mmm, now that you mention it..."

"They make wonderful tales. They suck to live through. We don't want an epic tale here. We want cunning efficiency and everyone possible getting home, as long as we can get the job done. Fair fights are wonderful if they are in our favor. If they are not, we aren't going to fight fair." I eyed the slowly approaching Mu Spore. "And a human-sized creature fighting that is not fair in the slightest, so we cheat for all get out. That's how our unimportant little selves slaughter these things."

"<How very appropriate. But do get into a fight soon. I wish to try out these tails." They all danced sinuously behind me.

"Well, there's definitely going to be shit around the Obelisk to pop. Brother?" AA pointed ahead and to the right. "Sounds like a plan to me. We aren't going to be able to just race through this place, given the amount of hostile mycoforms around..."

"What about the flying ships? Seems a shame to leave them..." spoke up Verd, probably thinking they could hold jars of Mu goop.

"They can't fly in the Interdiction we have to keep up, and who wants to ride in the ship made from the tentacles of a Mu Spore?" Crickets... "Right. I think a demonstration of everyone's Sundering capabilities is in order, don't you?"

Briggs, AA, and I abstained from the quick contest that erupted. Sir Harbrom actually won, with a Crack of Thunder AoE Sundering that rendered the entire side of one of the ships into molding splinters, drawing much polite applause.

Five minutes later, the next Mu Spore and its entourage was on top of us. Two minutes after that, Ironblood were pouring over the decks of its garden assistants to hang their helms on them, tree-sized tentacles were mashing stuff spasmodically as the Spore gooed out, and hey, we were going to be even richer.

--------------

Several days later in 20...

It was raining dark elves.

A BF Mu Spore nearly a hundred yards across had been swooping in after us as we closed in on this City in Da Toadstools. Then it had hit the ground and gone rolling along, with the requisite earth-shaking impact, and mushroom-flattening tentacles and high-school sized shell sent everything every which way.

This was a mushroom city, as opposed to a tree city. The fungi-worshipping dark elves lived inside massive mushrooms, toadstools, puffers, tubes, and banks of pulsing, oozing, undulating fungi. Yes, it was quite singular and unique. Yes, it smelled head-swimming and eye-watering, and the colors were a phosphorescent nightmare before you added in the symbols nobody mortal should be playing with...

I finished ripping the damn thing open, my first run taking me to the top of its head where its lower-mounted jaws and freaking massive tentacles couldn't reach. As I kept going, the massive wound behind me shuddered with sympathetic resonance as my arc continued up the opposite side from where I started, it was already on the ground and oh, my, that looked like a tenement of stoned-out drow, eww...

Flailing tentacles ten feet thick plowed through shrooms and stools, splat-whack-whee, so many things went flying... well, not flying, that was kind of impossible at the moment. Executing unwilling aerial acrobatics, that was more like it...

There was a sound like a million people farting through a tight ass all at once, and a whole section of street and its inhabitants suddenly came apart as exploding spores and compressed air drilled right through them. Half a second later the whole area and natives exploded in ten thousand different kinds of we'll-eat-everything fungus.

Happily, the lads had kept a properly chipper pace, knees up, there you go, boys, and were just outside the area of effect, as if someone had calculated all that and sworn at them in six languages to get their asses moving in the right direction or become fertilizer.

Oh right, someone had.

In the meantime, of course, everyone who had missile weapons was having a field day.

The Rockborn had the middle, the Ironblood had the sides, and the elves, hyn, gnomes, and champa-ka had everything else, while the chakon rumbled along behind with Big Sticks making sure anything suspicious didn't get up, and well, everything looked suspicious, 'cause it was always twitching and pulsing and oozing and ughsmashitnow.

The Marks-Up Display was painting everything that was a potential target, drow wearing fungal growths like proud shroom-heads were coming out of shroom-buildings all over the place at all the commotion. I was sliding down the air after the lads, sending Banestars in every direction, Fall's trigger held down and pumping out bolts, and Sparky and Wayfair were competing on sending out lots and lots of burning Spikes into unlucky drow bodies.

Admittedly, I didn't have an unlimited number of targets. The elves, hyn, gnomes, and champa-ka were actually doing a rather explosive lethal job ahead of me, non-stop streaks and arcs of fire smashing into the drow around and above them. Those were some heavy spiked shotputs the monkeys were slinging around.

There Briggs ran up, oops, the Mu Spore was falling, crash!, tentacles flailing, 'stools and 'shrooms were getting pulverized in an area the size of a city block, and it was raining dark elves, who found to their dismay they couldn't levitate, and who bothered to memorize Featherweight when they could Levitate? Well, if they did, they kind of stood out and grew a hatrack as they drifted down, anyway...

There were three more Mu Spores coming in from behind, two from the left, five from the right, and two more straight ahead.

It was going to be a very profitable day of elder abomination killing!