Fifth floor, mushroom forest.
Standing three meters tall, clad in scale armor with heavy rock armor layered on top, and even capable of spewing poisonous mist—the Heavy Armored Puffshroom made its dazzling debut with 50 Health Points and 30 Strength!
Worth mentioning was that to save on skills, the rock armor was created by having other chubby puffshrooms use [Stone Consumption] to eat it into existence, then stripping the armor off afterward.
Of course, this process inevitably required peeling off a layer of mycelium from the unfortunate chubby puffshroom, but since it could regenerate anyway, it wasn't a big problem.
Among the Heavy Armored Puffshroom's various evolution branches, Lin Jun had ruled out [Mushroom Cannon] first.
The main issue was too many supporting skills required, making the equipment cost too high. Plus the attribute requirements leaned toward Intelligence, which really didn't match the Heavy Armored Puffshroom's positioning.
[Hallucinogenic Spores] was relatively more suitable, at least not restricted by attributes.
Actually, the most fitting should be [Self-Destruct]—the higher the Health attribute, the stronger the explosion.
But... these Heavy Armored Puffshrooms were meant to serve as meat shields.
With all his own damage dealers positioned behind them, one self-destruction would probably cause friendly fire across the entire screen.
The reason this Heavy Armored Puffshroom was generated on the fifth floor rather than the deep zone was because Lin Jun needed Little Black's help testing its defensive capabilities. This Heavy Armored Puffshroom was equipped with [Physical Resistance LV7] rather than [Magic Resistance LV6].
"Little Black, wake up, stop sleeping."
"Mmm..."
In the room hung with silver scales, Little Black's head emerged from a pile of glass beads.
She groggily took half a day to realize her master was calling her.
Carefully trying to extract her body from the glass bead pile, even though her movements were extremely gentle, she still heard two crisp "crack" sounds.
Holding up the two crushed beads she'd stepped on, Little Black's mood visibly plummeted.
Lin Jun watched speechlessly.
Ever since the glass bead collection had piled up to fill the room, Little Black went through this routine every morning when she woke up.
Usually he'd wait for her to feel sorry for herself for a while before she'd settle down, but today Lin Jun was waiting to run tests, so...
"Little Black, come help quickly. When we're done, I'll give you a ruby!"
Little Black immediately stopped being sad, and even the brightness of her golden pupils increased by three degrees!
A gemstone!
She knew those were even prettier sparkly things than glass beads!
Just like the pair of earrings hanging from the scales on her tail!
Unfortunately, gemstones were much harder to find than glass beads—usually only Master had them.
Though she stopped crying, Little Black still sorrowfully buried the two broken glass beads in the small dirt pit beside her mushroom house before hurrying to the small clearing as Lin Jun requested.
The Heavy Armored Puffshroom in its thick rock armor stood twice Little Black's height. Standing together, it seemed like it could kick Little Black away with one foot.
"Little Black, hit it!"
"Hit the puffshroom?" Little Black was very confused.
Though she loved eating puffshrooms, she never actually hit them—puffshrooms were too fragile and would break with just a light touch.
"Right, hit this puffshroom in front of you hard, and I'll give you a ruby!"
Little Black was confused, but Master had said if she hit hard she'd get sparkly things, so she obediently raised her not-insignificant claws and pulled her body into a bow shape.
Lin Jun was still quite confident. Just in terms of defensive power alone, this puffshroom even had higher defense than his knights.
After all, considering mobility, he hadn't equipped the knights with a layer of rock armor.
And this rock armor wasn't ordinary stone—the armor produced by [Stone Consumption LV8] had extremely high density and defensive power. Combined with the natural scale armor and resistance, even under the baptism of Lin Jun's own mushroom cannon barrage, it could hold out for quite a while.
Even Little Black's full-power attack should be able to take several punches!
A black shadow flashed past.
BOOM————!!!!!!!!!
The three-meter-tall Heavy Armored Puffshroom, along with its supposedly indestructible rock armor, exploded completely and thoroughly without warning, as if someone had stuffed it full of dynamite and detonated it!
Smoke filled the air as fragments of stone and puffshroom pieces rained down like droplets, shattered into pieces that could never be put back together.
"Ah... well... you didn't need to use quite that much force..."
This time it was Lin Jun's turn to cry.
No way—was his strongest defense really this pathetic?
Was level sixty really this fierce?
Little Black stood in the middle of the debris field, her two claws twisted together.
"Can I have the gemstone?"
"Yes, yes, yes..."
A nearby puffshroom produced a crystal-clear ruby. Little Black joyfully extended her claws, hugging both the puffshroom and the ruby back to her nest.
Lin Jun noticed that one of the black scales on the back of her claw was slightly askew, with a tiny bit of blood seeping out nearby.
Checking the status panel, she had indeed lost a few drops of health, though it immediately regenerated to full.
So... it was a full-power strike that barely managed to destroy it?
That felt slightly better.
After all, it was a high-cost unit—if it got one-shotted like trash mobs, wouldn't that mana have been wasted!
...
Deep zone. The 20 Heavy Armored Puffshrooms that Lin Jun had put his full effort into creating had just landed when good news arrived from the front lines.
"Master! I... our army was defeated!"
The disheveled Piglet led the remaining hundred-odd puffshrooms in a desperate retreat back to the forward base—the former snake den.
Behind them, Chess's fierce pursuit force followed relentlessly.
However, the snake den had long since been transformed beyond recognition.
Under the puffshrooms' day-and-night frenzied reconstruction, this naturally winding maze of narrow passages had been transformed into a fortress of death.
The narrow corridors had been reinforced layer by layer, filled with concealed mushroom cannon firing ports and deadly crossfire positions.
Self-destructing puffshrooms were buried beneath the passage floors, while hallucinogenic puffshrooms capable of releasing poison mist hid in the ceilings.
Combined with the hundred puffshrooms already stationed in the fortress, Louisa managed to hold off the pursuing Chess forces using the defensive fortifications, and after reinforcements arrived, successfully repelled the enemy unit.
"Mas... Master..."
The defeated general Louisa hung her head low, obediently kneeling on the ground, while behind her stood five Heavy Armored Puffshrooms that had rushed to provide emergency support.
Lin Jun didn't give Piglet a hard time—this really wasn't her fault this time.
While the expedition force was fighting miscellaneous monsters in the caverns, Chess forces had suddenly burst out from a rear passage, catching the expedition completely off guard.
This time it wasn't a single unit type either, but a mixed force centered around Evil Eyes. Besides the known beetles and six-claws, Lin Jun spotted many other varieties of Chess creatures.
The Evil Eye's arrival was nothing short of a disaster for the puffshroom legion—the cannon fodder puffshrooms were turned to stone in droves.
Louisa attempted to launch a surprise attack but was desperately blocked by equally fearless Chess forces using flesh and blood.
The closest she came to success was when Louisa used the complex terrain and the self-destructing cover of several elite guard puffshrooms to forcibly tear open a bloody path, breaking through to within a hundred meters of the Evil Eye!
She condensed the blood of surrounding Chess creatures into a purple spear and launched it at the Evil Eye.
However, the magic shield successfully delayed it briefly, and this fatal strike ultimately only pierced the tip of one of the Evil Eye's writhing tentacles.
The surprise attack failed, the puffshroom army suffered massive casualties, and Louisa could only lead the remnants in a panicked retreat from the battlefield under Chess pursuit.
These Chess creatures couldn't wait to start their revenge after taking a hit.
What they didn't know was that originally, Lin Jun had only planned to use six hundred puffshrooms as combat units to play small-scale harassment games with them in the deep zone, trying not to affect the expedition force.
Now Chess had directly targeted the expedition force.
In that case, the scale of war would be cranked up to maximum!
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