The Nexus moved slowly.

  If the massive boss had been the only foe Tori and I had to deal with, retreating would have been easy. But it wasn’t. Myconid Travelers surged toward us, and my rail gun dropped the first three. Mycopopos—the black, scale-headed mushrooms we’d fought during the Node Two fight—exploded as my grenades went off, filling the ‘streets’ of the Mycopolis with fleshy, tofu-colored gore and dark green, wrinkled Mycropops.

  Tori dropped a Gravity Well, gathering the tiny fungal monsters into one place. I brought the still-reloading grenade launcher around to take a shot as soon as I could, but before the trigger button reactivated, she Crushed the whole pile. They didn’t die—at least, not all of them—but they weren’t chasing us, and that was good enough.

  “Keep going!” I yelled. “Left, then to the ramp!”

  Tori’s head whipped toward me, and her eyes narrowed. “The whole place is fighting us!”

  I looked down. She was right; tiny tendrils of fungi had wrapped themselves around my mech’s legs, and Tori’s Doc Martens had all but sunken into the mat below. I pushed the mech’s legs forward and pivoted its body, then reached out with one massive fist. “Get on!”

  She grabbed it in a hug. “I hope you know what you’re—“

  “No idea, Tori! Now let’s go!”

  The grenade launcher went active again. I put two explosive rounds into a vertical wall of fungus, then followed it up with a concussive one. It ripped open, and as I pushed the mech forward, its legs tore free from the fungal growth. So did Tori’s boots. We were moving.

  “I’m going to kill you, Hal!” Tori yelled as the mech’s stride shook her back and forth like a pi?ata. “We tried this earlier, and it didn’t work!”

  “I’ll let you kill me if we survive this,” I muttered back, then kept running.

  By the time we got to the exit, I was covered in gore, even inside the mech. Something had stabbed through its armor and into my shoulder, and while it had pulled itself out almost instantly, a different something was growing inside the wound. Tori wasn’t any better off; she was covered in cuts and barely casting from her perch in the mech’s arms.

  I poured Body points into fixing myself the moment we stepped through the dungeon’s fog wall and appeared in the spore-filled, fog-lined room. “Tori, do you have any points?”

  “Do I have any points, Hal?” she asked. Her eyes closed, and a moment later, her wounds slowly started to heal. “Of course I do. I’ve been holding them since we beat the Fireborn Crusader. It’s too powerful to miss out on a level-up when you want it. The healing’s great.”

  We sat there—me in my mech, and her in the machine’s arms—for a minute, breathing. Then she ripped off the mask I’d built for her and breathed deeply. “So good not having that on my face.”

  “It did help, though.”

  “Oh, it definitely did.” Tori slid down to the ground, wobbled a little, and recovered. “What do we do now, Hal? We didn’t get the full-clear.”

  “We didn’t need it. The goal was never to full-clear this one. All I wanted to do was find a possible solution for the Rat’s Nest, and I think I got one.”

  “Oh?”

  I nodded and climbed out of the mech, then pulled it into my inventory. “Yes. It’ll only work if the Rat’s Nest folks have someone who’s the right class, but they’ve got a lot of people there. They might be able to make it work. Let’s go talk to them.”

  As we worked our way back through the pipes, I let myself focus on the conservation of energy problem. There were other answers, of course. It was very possible that the Mycopolis dungeon was ‘producing’ energy through Charge influx. It was a dungeon, after all, and other dungeons got their Charge from somewhere. But that didn’t feel right. From the Stronghold to the Whole New World and all the way to the dungeon we’d gotten our Waypoint Beacon from, dungeons had always felt…static. They were created to do a specific thing, and that thing was to challenge us as we fought through them. To kill us. So they could harvest our life force as Charge.

  Dungeons weren’t supposed to use more Charge than they harvested. And harvesting wastheir core function, from a design standpoint.

  This one, though…there was no way the Consortium had built it to be a net loss of Charge for them, and yet…the Mycopolis was growing. It was—or had been—a living thing. I wasn’t sure if Tori and I had killed it or not, but it was consuming, growing, and spreading. And it was consuming Charge. I’d seen it.

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  That implied ever-increasing Charge needs.

  We followed the tunnels up, and as we did, I slowly tinkered with a design in my head. Two, actually. The first was something like what I’d seen in the Mycopolis. I knew that building something to generate Charge from nothing was impossible. But even so, on a large enough scale…maybe I could make it work.

  But the other design was much more interesting, because it was much, much more possible. I’d been working on it for a while now.

  It needed a massive source of Charge—the Waypoint Beacon and the gigantic Charge battery inside might be enough for the prototype. And it needed the projection device I’d taken from the Whole New World dungeon. I’d figured out those two parts and how to connect them to each other, but until now, I’d had a missing piece. A catalyst to get it started.

  It could still be missing. The elixirs were going to be a complicated project, but now that I had all three, I was happy I hadn’t used the first one. The Voltsmith’s Grasp was a functional arm, and the regrowth potion had clearly been a trap set for me. Now, though…

  Well, as soon as I was done with the Rat’s Nest, it’d be back to Museumtown, then to Cindy’s Garage. I had some alchemy to do, and maybe, if I was smart about it, I could—possibly—convert all three elixirs into Charge components. Either way, that forty-eight-hour timer was ticking down, and it was doing it fast.

  The Rat’s Nest stank.

  And it wasn’t just the lingering smell of sewage from its central pit.

  In the hours we’d been gone, something had shifted. The looks Tori and I got from people as we climbed up the pipe and walked toward the room we’d met with Theresa in ranged from mistrusting to downright murderous—not that the Rat’s Nest had ever been a friendly place. The shift was noticeable, though. Tori squared up, glaring daggers right back at a group near the Norse Town entrance. “What’s your problem?” she asked.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Tori…”

  “No, Hal, not ‘Tori.’ They don’t get it.”

  “You’re right, they don’t,” I said. I didn’t know what the Rat’s Nesters didn’t get, but I had a pretty good guess. We’d just fought for our lives—we’d been fighting for our lives—and they were hiding in their hole. “But they’re going to have to change one way or another. Picking fights with them isn’t going ot help anything.”

  “It’d help me feel better,” Tori said. “I don’t like it here. It feels…wrong.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, too. Let’s just get through this meeting and get over here. We can link up with Carol and Zane.”

  “Okay. Fine. Whatever.” Tori fell in behind me, but I couldn’t stop her from returning glares when they shot at us, which was frequently.

  We disappeared up the narrow stairs, then past a pair of Level Sixty-ish guards and into the tiny room with the two chairs. As we walked past them, one of the guards disappeared. “They didn’t have guards here last time,” Tori said nervously.

  “No, they did not.” I tried to relax as I leaned against the wall. There was no one in the Rat’s Nest who could fight the two of us, but if they swarmed us down, we might be in trouble—especially in the narrow pipes, where my mech wouldn’t be able to maneuver at all. Our best bet was to make sure that the obvious worst case—a betrayal—didn’t happen. It didn’t help that we really couldn’t trust the Rat’s Nest people, though. Time ticked by painfully slowly.

  Theresa joined us only five minutes later, but it felt like an eternity. “What did you find out?”

  “You’re sitting over a Tier Five dungeon,” I said before Tori could get going.

  “What do you mean? We’ve scouted all the pipes. They should have been clear.” Theresa sat down and unfurled her paper. It was schematics. Schematics for the pipe system—and more importantly, it was covered in red pen that represented the new additions the Rat’s Nest had found. “See? We know everything about this place.”

  “Do you have a pencil? I’ll trace where we went.” I said.

  She signaled to the guards, and a minute later, a stubby end of pencil was in my hand. I started doodling, and eventually, drew a circle over the wide, spore-and-fog-filled room. “It’s right here. The dungeon’s called the Mycopolis. Monsters range from Level Seventy-Five-ish up to Level Ninety-Two for the final boss. We left that one alive, though.”

  “Why? If this thing’s a Tier Five, that’s a massive threat to the Rat’s Nest. We can’t clear it with what we have.” Theresa balled her fists over the schematic. “You’re trying to force the issue, aren’t you? This is the takeover you’ve been planning?”

  “Theresa, I—“

  Tori cut me off. “If we wanted to take you over, we’d just do it. We’re twenty levels higher than you.”

  “Okay, rude, but also true.” I sighed. “We don’t need to play games, Theresa. The Mycopolis has some very high-level enemies, but I think if you went in with a full, well-thought-out team that was ready for the spores, had a plan to handle the enemies, and knew what they were doing, you could check the outskirts for edible fungus. That’s what the whole thing’s made of. Fungus. I don’t know what your resources are like here, but you’ve got a lot of people. If I were you, I’d put that team together, start searching, and try to find an expert in mushrooms.”

  “Or, I don’t know, a god-damn mushroomancer. That’s gotta be a class, right?” Tori asked.

  Theresa’s glare only deepened. Then, just like when we’d talked to her the first time, it vanished, and she slumped back, defeated. “I personally can’t stand mushrooms. The little ones you buy at the store are awful.”

  “Theresa, I’m trying to give you something.”

  “I know.” She went quiet again. “It’d be better than starving, I guess. I’ll ask around. You two can go.”

  Tori cleared her throat. “We need to talk about this phase, and about what you told your people. They all hate us for some reason.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said quietly, but Theresa interrupted me.

  “Yes, we do. But not right now. If this works, I’ll have my work cut out for me getting the Rat’s Nest in order. People to promote, a possible whole new industry…it’s going to be a mess, and I don’t have time for this conversation.” Theresa stood, offering a hand. I shook it, and she stared me in the eye. “Come back later. We’ll have a real conversation about Phase Three, I promise.”

  I stared her back in the eye. There was something there, under the fear and frustration. It was anger, but I didn’t think it was aimed at me. “I’m going to hold you to that, Theresa.”