The border between the Mushroom Fortress and the Empire.
Battered by the Mist surging in from the Empire's direction, the fungal mat across this whole region had been eaten away to tatters and had all but lost its ability to keep watch.
On one relatively intact patch of fungal mat, the Sword Saint Puchi, freshly topped off with mana, slowly rose to its feet. Behind it, the mycelial threads linking it to the mushroom body snapped loose one by one.
Out of habit, the Sword Saint spread its senses wide. There wasn't a living soul anywhere nearby.
He already knew what had happened on the dwarves' side, and his read on it matched the Boss's almost exactly. The Empire would surely seize the chance to strike at the Mushroom Fortress. Attacked on three fronts, the Fortress would face the gravest crisis since its rise.
The reality, though, turned out a little different from what they had imagined.
Each wave of the Mist had crashed in harder than the last. But after the Sword Saint beat it back a third time, the gaps between its assaults grew longer and longer. Clearly the Mist had entered its ebb. And yet the Empire still made no move.
Had something gone wrong inside the Empire too, costing them the opening? Or did they have some other plan?
Unable to puzzle it out, the Sword Saint could only turn his attention back to the present. The Mist was rolling in once more.
All around him went a milky, blinding white. With practiced ease, the Sword Saint coiled a tentacle around a sword hilt and held himself ready to fight at any instant, waiting for the Mist to finish building its scene.
Only this time, the sight before him left the Sword Saint dazed for a moment.
It was the deep layers of the Puchi underground city, familiar beyond words.
But the desolate cavern with its fungal mat torn to shreds, and the huge spatial rift lying across his path, both told him this was the underground city as it had been at the moment he led his team toward its core.
"So it's this scene, is it?" the Sword Saint murmured. "I wonder whether the core this time will be a Puchi, or Qisi."
From the distant passage came the faint sound of a great many "puchi, puchi" cries. The Sword Saint slowly drew a longsword.
Wherever the core was, cutting apart everything he laid eyes on was never the wrong call.
At the last moment, though, the Sword Saint seemed to think of something.
He quickly cast down his four longswords, then buried himself completely in a mound of earth. When the Puchi army passed by overhead, he quietly dug his way back out and slipped in among their ranks.
A strange thing happened. The Puchi didn't seem to notice that an outsider had joined their number. They pressed on along their set route just as before.
The illusion the Mist conjured had probably never accounted for someone whose very race had changed.
Of course, blending in like this could only buy him time. The moment he attacked, he would give himself away all the same.
The Sword Saint hadn't done this to clear the Mist itself. He was simply a little curious.
He had wondered, countless times, what exactly the Boss was.
The fungal mat itself? Some particular Puchi? Or a human, an elf, or a demon, hiding in the shadows and controlling it all through the mat?
One thing, at least, seemed certain. If there truly was a true body, it had to lie somewhere within the reach of the fungal mat. That was the necessary condition for connecting to the mycelial network.
Even so, knowing that much was of little use. After all, the fungal mat now covered very nearly the whole world. To hunt across the entire world, against the mat's own surveillance, for a thing that might not even exist, was nothing but wishful thinking.
But at this point in time, the fungal mat existed only within the underground city. Didn't that mean there was a chance to find that possibly-real true body?
Mixed in among the Puchi, the Sword Saint quietly spread his senses outward.
He could only hope the Mist would also restore the details of the scene that he hadn't known about back then.
That the Empire hadn't immediately joined the Mist and the dwarves in striking at the Mushroom Fortress came as something of a surprise to Lin Jun. It didn't, however, make him ease up on his defensive deployments facing the Empire.
It wasn't only the Sword Saint, No. 4, and the Norris-Jida squad. Even Little Pig, who was currently directing the campaign against the dwarves, was personally holding station at Dragon Horn Fortress to meet any threat the Empire might pose.
The pressure from the dwarves wasn't all that great. The forces Lin Jun had sent were mostly Puchi Master squads. The two sides looked to be locked in a brutal fight, but the Fortress's losses were in truth very low.
No. 10 was holding up its end admirably too. It kept the upper hand over Badul, that useless dwarf who had so easily fallen to the Charm. Earlier, if the Blacksteel Clan's general hadn't come up with his personal guards to reinforce, No. 10 might well have finished Badul off.
The strange thing was, Lin Jun couldn't shake the sense that there was something special about Badul, even though the man didn't carry so much as a thread of mycelium.
He had no time to study a small matter like that just now. Dealing with the dwarves' psychic field was the pressing concern.
Winning the defensive battle against the dwarves wasn't hard for Lin Jun. The hard part was what came after.
If he didn't resolve the psychic field, the Fortress would either have to keep an army permanently stationed at the mountain border to guard against the dwarves, or march straight into the mountains and settle the dwarf problem once and for all.
The latter looked like a permanent fix, but it wouldn't be easy.
When it came down to it, the Puchi advance still leaned too heavily on the fungal mat.
The treants of the Elf Forest could solve the problem of extending the mycelial network. But the elves obviously weren't likely to back a war between the Fortress and the mountains, and he could hardly start a fight with the elves just to get the treants out.
Advancing the honest way, laying down fungal mat as he went, made for a far slower march. Somewhere along the way, there was no telling what trouble the Empire might cook up.
The best option was still to break the psychic field, then ride the momentum of "saving" the mountains to completely flip the mycelium's reputation among the dwarves. A peaceful assimilation was the surest path of all.
Luckily, the Yellow Codex, being one of the same trade, seemed able to pinpoint the direction of the source from inside the enemy's psychic field.
The only problem was that the dwarves' army blocked the way.
So the present goal was this: shatter this dwarven army completely!
The dead Puchi Masters climbed up out of the fungal mat once more, and the snow-white Puchi army appeared again outside the dwarven position.
Under the tense gaze of Badul and the other dwarves, No. 10 hovered before their line. It extended all eighteen tentacles and set them against the fungal mat around it.
Vast mana began to gather toward the top of No. 10's mushroom cap through those mycelial tentacles. A huge ball of lightning slowly took shape, and every spellcaster present could feel the terrifying power held inside it.
Lin Jun found the lightning ball oddly familiar. It looked a great deal like the one No. 10 had faced during its "tribulation," back when it first emerged from the Hypermagic Library.
Had it analyzed the thing and learned it for itself?
Close as it came, it still fell a hair short of the original. For dealing with these dwarves, though, it should be more than enough.
No. 10 clearly meant to simply blast a breach straight open.
The dwarves, naturally, had no intention of waiting to die.
With a furious roar, Badul led a squad of elites charging out from the flank, making straight for No. 10.
What he had to get through, though, were the countless Puchi at No. 10's feet.
The round little Puchi cared nothing for their own lives. Even at the risk of hitting their own kind, they would do whatever it took to hold him up for one more instant.
Up on the high ground to the rear, Zafa Clan Leader Bretta could no longer hold to the timing in her plan. She turned her head and shouted, "Quick! Start that thing up!"
Three metal blocks, shaped like coffins, were pushed up onto the high ground.
They were longer than coffins, their shells a dull iron-grey. Mana conduits as thick as a man's arm ran from their backs, runes flowing across the conduits' surfaces, each one lining up with a still-sleeping pattern on the coffin bodies.
Bretta swept her hand, and the mana inside the conduits began to surge. It drew a vast flow of energy from the mana pool behind and poured it into the coffins, and the runes on their surfaces lit up one after another.
The sudden high-mana reaction naturally drew No. 10's attention. Its mushroom cap tilted slightly, and the lightning ball, on the verge of firing, swung around to aim at the high ground where Bretta stood.
"Don't even think about it!" Surrounded by Puchi though he was, Badul flung his battle-axe from his hands without a care for his own safety. It spun through the air and came chopping down at No. 10.
No. 10 didn't so much as stir. The instant the axe struck, its form shattered and scattered like a reflection broken on water.
The light in the air twisted, and the real No. 10 appeared three meters away.
Badul realized with a start that he had been tricked, but there was no time left to strike again and break the cast.
At last the lightning ball tore free of No. 10's mushroom cap and shot out.
Everywhere it passed, arcs of electricity sprayed outward. The broken stone on the ground floated up beneath it, then crumbled to powder the moment it was drawn into the edges. Even the other spells the dwarves loosed were canceled and swallowed whole, unable to slow it in the slightest.
Just as despair was setting into the dwarven soldiers, the lid of one coffin toppled to the ground. A blurred afterimage burst out and plunged headfirst into the heart of the lightning ball.
The lightning ball snapped inward. All its light, all its arcs, all that destructive energy was crushed to the very limit, and then it blew apart with a roar.
The escaping arcs swept across the high ground, plowing charred black furrows into the earth. Those unlucky enough to be caught in it were killed or maimed in droves, even the mages who had raised their shields.
The force was immense. But it fell far short of what No. 10 had been after.
More importantly...
Before the arcs had even faded, that earlier figure reappeared right in front of No. 10, riding the lightning along with it.
It was a metal puppet, its whole body inlaid with S-grade magic crystal. Light flowed through the seams of its armor, like a suit of plate that was breathing.
It had no flesh and no face, only two long, thin slits in the visor of its helmet, with the glow of mana shining through them.
Sharp foot-blades sliced through the air, driving straight for No. 10.
A gale lifted No. 10 and carried it drifting backward, out of the puppet's reach.
"A battle golem?"
No. 10 seemed to realize something. It looked toward the hilltop. Of the three metal coffins, two had already opened, and the second now stood empty as well.
The second battle golem appeared behind No. 10. In that hair's breadth of a moment, No. 10 cut it close again, working the gale once more to blow itself downward and out of the strike's path.
Boom, boom, boom. A rough, huge hand reached up out of the self-detonating Puchi below and seized the falling No. 10.
"Got you!" Badul, his body covered in wounds, didn't pause for an instant. Gripping No. 10, he hurled it down hard against the ground. The enormous impact smashed out a crater a hundred meters across.
At the crater's center, No. 10, its mushroom body broken, pulled out its last two remaining tentacles and tried to gather mana once again. But the two battle golems had already reappeared at its side.
Shk. No. 10's shattered mushroom cap flew off a long way, hit the ground, and rolled a couple of turns before it came to rest.
"We... we got it!"
"That magic Puchi is dead!"
"Charge!"
The position erupted in fierce cheering. Their morale soaring, the dwarves poured out of their lines and threw themselves at the swarming Puchi, rushing to support their hero Badul!
Robbed of their high-end fighting power, the remaining Puchi Masters fought on stubbornly, but in the end the counter-charging dwarves wiped them out almost to the last. Only a small portion pulled back through the underground tunnels.
Standing atop the fungal-mat-strewn ground, the dwarves' cheers rang out across the wilds!
After this victory, the Mushroom Fortress's position had no choice but to fall back, while the dwarves kept on steadily advancing, clearing away the fungal mat and building fortifications as they went.
Until, on the third day, No. 10, as if nothing at all had happened, came floating before the two armies once again at the head of its Puchi host.
(End of Chapter)
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