[DAY FIVE…]

  Mongrel

  Luckily, the only thing that sprang on them that night was a rather welcome surprise. Mongrel woke up in the morning and discovered that Number Two had found his way to them in the night. Sam had also allotted her dual level-up rewards, putting points in Strength and a rank in Healing Factor.

  Before setting out, Mongrel and Price and a reluctant Oatmeal ventured inside the den, since Sam had mentioned that the nettlegeist had apparently been sitting on some kind of treasure hoard in there.

  What they found was a rather gruesome scene. Making their way to the center of the den did not prove difficult, since they could just follow the steady trail of twisted and dismembered grumpling bodies that Sam had left behind. If there were any still living in there, they stayed well hidden.

  The supposed 'treasure hoard' itself turned out to be more of a garbage heap. Most of the stuff heaped in there was either disgusting and/or unusable. Mongrel rifled through the pockets of old corpses for some cash. The cloth paper bills were all badly rotted, but he figured he might be able to get the chimps to Repair them back to usable condition.

  Aside from that it was all useless, and Mongrel quickly tired of rooting through stinking, moldering detritus. He'd hoped to at least find some jewelry or a bit of gold or something, but no, nothing like that.

  Oatmeal persisted longer than Mongrel did, but came up just as empty-handed, except of course for the filth that covered him up to the elbows. Ah, the folly of youth.

  Mongrel was about to turn his back on the place in disgust when he happened to take a closer look at the headless nettlegeist that lay draped across the floor like a bad rug. Now that he was paying attention to it, there was something really rather strange about the beast, and he knelt with a frown to inspect further.

  He'd never seen a nettlegeist up close before, but he didn't need to be an expert to know that there was something amiss. It was as though someone had gone and pasted two creatures together into one. It was mostly nettlegeist in form, long and slug-like and glistening wet, but the back part of it had something else grafted to it. Some strange structure of hardened fungus, surrounded by drier, almost bark-like tissue. He could even see a seam where the two pieces connected, the sutures that held them together.

  He'd never heard of anyone putting two monsters together into one like that, but he supposed some mad Physician out there could probably get it done. The why of it he wasn't even going to start guessing at—the Frontier had a thousand different varieties of crazy, most of them trite and uninteresting. The effect, however, stood out clear as day.

  Judging by the copious fungal infestations that coated the inside of the den and had even been growing on the grumplings, Mongrel could only assume that the nettlegeist had been responsible for this in addition to the supernatural fog that had lured them out into the middle of nowhere.

  Meaning that some bastard had seen fit to create a monster with two innate abilities.

  Now that was a slightly terrifying thought, one he was eager to put behind him as he hurried out of the abandoned grumpling den and ordered the others to break camp.

  They were getting the fuck out of this place—preferably before some other nightmare creation decided to wander along and help itself to their unprotected posteriors. He rather liked his posterior unmolested—unless of course he found himself in that sort of mood, and it was a paid-for service carried out by professionals.

  It took them most of the day to get back onto the road, still less than halfway to Talltop. By then, the affliction they were all suffering had begun to manifest equally telling and terrifying symptoms. Noticeable infestations in the form of uneven rings of fuzzy mold, had begun growing at the sites of the rashes all over their bodies.

  The obvious conclusion to draw from this was that their affliction was a gift courtesy of their friend the nettlegeist, continuing to pay dividends even after its death. They cleaned and scrubbed and disinfected themselves as best they could, but in the morning things were looking even worse. Oatmeal and the working lad were getting delirious, breathing shallow and raspy.

  Even Sam and the troll had started to become affected, the kid especially. Mongrel guessed that she had gotten a bad dose of infectious spores.

  They set out as early as they could and traveled with all haste, all but running toward Talltop. By noon, little actual mushrooms had begun sprouting from their skin like tiny pale fingers. Mongrel spent much time clawing them off—they only grew back when he did, but he refused to let some damn shroom have its way with his body uncontested.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  With no antibiotics or relevant healing skills, there was practically nothing they could do to halt the spread of the infestation. They needed a proper Physician, and fast, or he feared they might suffer permanent damage or even start dying off.

  The working boy passed out at some point, and the troll volunteered to carry him. The fact that Sam didn't showed that she was doing rather badly at this point, eyes pointed directly at her feet as she focused on each dogged step.

  The road seemed to be going on forever. They passed the halfway rest stop at some point, but he quickly lost track of how far they had left to go once the letters on the mile markers stopped making sense, bled together into a confusing jumble of nonsense symbols.

  Things got weird. Funny. His vision was too bright and too blurry at once. Soon he couldn't see much of anything anymore, tripping over every other bump in the road, but he didn't say anything to the others. He worried they'd say the same thing.

  They didn't stop to eat. There was no time, and he doubted anyone had much of an appetite anyway. Keeping down a mouthful of water here and there was difficult enough.

  Oatmeal was vomiting. Half of Sam's face was hidden behind a scaly fungal mask. Mongrel was having a hard time breathing, feeling like he had a fat hairball tickling his throat no matter how much he hacked and coughed and retched.

  In what had become an annoyingly frequent occurrence lately, Mongrel found himself wondering where a demon was when you needed one. He could almost hear her now, that bitch, laughing at his misery.

  No, wait… that was his own laugh. He was laughing at nothing. He tried to make himself stop, but that only caused him to start laughing harder. That made him start coughing, and that made him start retching up bloody pieces of fibrous plant tissue.

  "Now that I think about it, are mushrooms even plants?" Mongrel asked, directed toward the group at large.

  No one replied.

  Getting dark.

  Had to keep going.

  Had to…

  * * *

  [DAY SIX…]

  Will

  As her recovery progressed, Serene's condition steadily worsened. She was wracked by fevers and powerful delusions, her deranged thoughts often manifesting as unintentional casts of Illusion. Will hated the fact that he was now on a first-name basis with most of her imaginary friends. Not willing to waste AP on a Cancel every time he came to check on Serene, he was forced to simply navigate around them, ignoring their incessant babbling as much as humanly possible.

  Anathema had a Cancel Enchantment baked into it, which he might have used to cut the Illusions apart, but he had not yet mastered that particular trick, and Serene's delusions were not quite annoying enough to justify dealing with his own ghosts every five minutes.

  He really ought to have been spending his time in the city, trying to coordinate some sort of recourse for the clusterfuck that was about to fall on his head. Then again, Serene was currently going through the worst of her withdrawals, her survival at its most precarious, so he reckoned it would be irresponsible of him to leave her alone for too long.

  After all, he had brought the puppy home, which meant he was responsible for feeding it and watering it and ideally making sure it didn't die straight away.

  So he stayed put. Hanging around the farm gave him some time to tinker with an idea he'd been considering as a just-in-case contingency—a poison potent enough to burn through Brimstone's two ranks of Poison Resistance.

  Using the supplies already in his workshop, he mixed a nasty little cocktail of curare, cyanide, and atropine. It was a fairly indulgent piece of work—the poisoner's equivalent of putting ice cream on your pizza. He almost felt stupid making it. It didn't need to be elegant, though—as long as it could kill a motherfucker deader than dead, that would be good enough.

  For good measure, he also mixed in the entirety of his minuscule stock of thallium—an ingredient he had acquired at great cost nearly two years ago for just this kind of situation. Being a metal, he reasoned that it might interact differently with Poison Resistance than an organic toxin.

  His rough mixture prepared, he put it through several rounds of reduction, purification, and Preparation. It was an exhausting and time-consuming process that took him nearly a full day, but the electric feeling that went through his fingers and up through his spine on the final cast of Prepare told him that he had created something special. A masterwork—it had to be.

  This assumption was all but confirmed by the fact that he leveled up just moments after completing his evil little decoction, putting him at sixteen. Certainly a welcome benefit. He'd put the attribute points in Processing to put him at six, mostly to improve his reaction time.

  What he was left with for his efforts was a tiny volume of an angry black residue, barely a thimbleful. It had a strongly bitter odor, and he imagined it would taste even worse. It certainly wasn't a subtle method of killing—then again, it didn't need to be.

  For the sake of labeling and personal reference, he dubbed his substance 'the prince of poisons'. To test its effectiveness, he laced a bit of cured meat from the pantry with it and tossed it into the woods at a reasonable distance from the farm. Then he simply returned home and maintained a long-range Detect [Life] to monitor the bait he had set out. The first taker was a large grinner, which died in seconds. After that, all other animals and monsters avoided it.

  Grinners had infamously strong stomachs. Thanks to their innate ability, they could eat just about anything without suffering ill effects. It worked, all right.

  Its efficacy confirmed, Will smeared most of it onto Anathema. The blade Absorbed the residue greedily, leaving a completely clean mirror-shine surface in seconds. Next, he coated a single throwing knife in it. And lastly, with the last scrapings, he laced one happy puff with the stuff. Just in case.

  All in all, not a bad day's work.