I patted my pockets. My jacket pockets. My pants pockets. The hidden pocket in my boot where I kept emergency snacks and also sometimes important keys."I..." I patted my other pockets. "I don't...""You lost the key.""I didn't lose it. I relocated it. To a place I don't currently remember.""That's the definition of losing.""That's the definition of temporary memory challenges."Herbert walked up to the door, examined the lock for approximately half a second, and then pulled. The door didn't break, Herbert didn't break things, Herbert fixed things, but the lock did. It snapped clean off, rusted through, and fell to the ground with a sad little clink."The lock was already broken," Herbert said. "I just helped it along, boss.""You're a hero.""I'm a handyman. There's a difference."The door swung open.Inside, the shop was exactly as I'd left it.Dusty. Silent. The mana lamps dark, the fans still, the shelves lined with products that had probably expired months ago. But mine. Every

The rift grew closer. The mushrooms grew louder. A massive fungal tower, one of the big ones, the ones that scraped the sky, bent down and opened its mouth.Its mouth was the size of a house. Its teeth were the size of swords. I screamed. It screamed. The whole forest screamed. I dove through the rift.I landed face-first on the stone floor of the cavern.The rift closed behind me with a sound like a sigh, relieved, maybe, or disappointed that its meal had escaped. I lay there for a long moment, breathing hard, my face pressed against the cold rock, my body trembling, my jacket smoking slightly from the mushroom spit."I'm alive," I whispered."Barely," the echo whispered back."Shut up, echo.""You shut up, echo.""I hate you.""I hate you too."I crawled back through the tunnels, slowly, carefully, checking every corner for mushrooms with teeth, and emerged into the daylight like a man who had seen hell and found it full of fungi.Elsa was standing outside the mine entrance, her arm

We entered the mine at dawn.Not because dawn was strategically advantageous, it wasn't, the mine was dark no matter what time of day it was, but because Barnaby had made "breakfast" again and we needed to leave before he offered seconds. The man had somehow turned scrambled eggs into a weapon of mass destruction. I was pretty sure the Geneva Convention had a clause about whatever he'd done to those poor, innocent eggs. I wanted to chat with Kylan the Chef but it's been weeks, I couldn't reach him, something about System Upgrade, his system. I want his food but do I have a choice other than eat Barnaby’s burnt eggs."Everyone ready?" I asked, cinching my Red Aphrodite suit tight. The leather creaked, familiar, comforting, slightly humiliating because it still clung to my skin in ways that made me question my life choices.Elsa stood beside me in her Pink-Black-Pink armor, her mirrored visor reflecting the flickering torchlight. She looked like a warrior princess from a very fashiona

Not the small ones. Not the medium ones. All of them. The towering ones pulled their stems from the ground and ran. The rolling ones rolled faster. The ones with teeth closed their mouths and sprinted.Within thirty seconds, the mushroom forest was empty. Just us. The glitter. The purple sky. And a whole lot of confused silence."Did we win?" Barnaby asked."I don't know," I said."Did we lose?""I don't know that either.""We did something," Elsa said, sheathing her sword. "That's the important part."Red the robot beeped happily and punched one last mushroom—a tiny one that had been hiding behind a rock—for good measure.We found my jacket.It was draped over a mushroom stump, completely intact, somehow free of mushroom spit and teeth marks and the general chaos of the last hour. It looked like the mushrooms had been using it. Like they'd hung it up carefully, almost reverently, like a trophy or a warning."They kept your jacket," Elsa said."They stole my jacket.""They preserved yo

Three days later, we decided to go deeper.Not because it was smart. Not because it was safe. Because the mushroom person's words kept rattling around in my skull like a loose marble, something old, something hungry, sleeping beneath the roots of the world, and I couldn't just sit around eating Barnaby's terrible stew while the apocalypse took a nap."We need to find the source," I announced at breakfast. "The thing that's waking up. The thing the mushrooms are afraid of.""The mushrooms are afraid of you," Barnaby pointed out, gesturing at me with a burnt pancake. "You turned their children into glitter.""The little mushrooms are afraid of me. The big mushrooms, the ones with legs and voices and too many teeth, they're afraid of something else."Elsa nodded, her Pink-Black-Pink armor already strapped on because Elsa slept in her armor like the paranoid assassin-trained warrior queen she was. "The mushroom person said the rift is a symptom. We need to find the disease.""Beautifully