"What's this? Dinner?" Norris, on standby inside Dragon Horn Fortress, eyed the two halves of a Puchi the Boss had abruptly teleported in front of him.
"Hm? You want to eat it? Well... I suppose that's allowed."
With the Boss answering like that, Norris leaned back instead. "This isn't No. 7, is it?"
"Meh. Piece it together yourself and find out." With that, Lin Jun switched into observation mode and said nothing more.
Figuring that the consequences of ignoring this would probably be worse, Norris hesitated a moment, then set about reassembling the Puchi. [Mycelium Reorganization LV10]
Norris lined the halves up neatly. Along the cut, mycelium knitted together at speed, and in no time at all the Puchi was whole again.
Still no reaction, though. Norris couldn't resist giving it a poke.
Who knew that one poke would be like flipping a switch.
"Aaaaah!"
The Puchi's two short legs pedaled wildly, four tentacles flailing every which way; it even smacked Norris twice.
"Wha... where..."
"Why can't I get up?"
Watching the Puchi thrash, listening to its broken cries over the mycelial network, Norris wasn't the least bit frightened. If anything, a knowing look settled over him.
He'd dealt with plenty of Mushroom Converts, and some of them, freshly revived as Puchis, really did flop about in exactly this fish-out-of-water panic.
Norris reached out and tapped gently along the soft zone under the rim of its cap to settle it, a little trick Inanna had taught him. The effect was immediate: the Puchi shivered once, then gradually went still.
Very quickly, though, as if it had just realized something, it scooted away and wound its own tentacles around itself several times over, the very picture of distress.
That puzzled Norris a little.
After all, those who managed to revive as mushrooms almost all believed in the Boss, and knew how conversion worked.
As a rule, once the early confusion passed and a Convert had worked out their situation, they tended to be overjoyed at the chance for Mushroom Ascension. Not frightened.
Considering the Boss had delivered this Convert to him personally, Norris lowered his head and asked as gently as he knew how: "Hello there. I mean you no harm. I only want to help with the discomfort. Have you run into some kind of trouble?"
The voice appearing out of nowhere in her consciousness made Fayling's mushroom body jump. Luckily, she had experience talking with No. 5 through a telepathy stone, and she gathered herself quickly, probing back: "Where is this? And what has happened to me?"
"This is Dragon Horn Fortress, a stronghold in the Mushroom Fortress's territory. As for you... you died, most likely, and the Boss revived you."
"Died? Revived?" Fayling ran a tentacle from her smooth, slick cap all the way down to her round bottom, and somewhere in her sheer disbelief, the last memory finally surfaced. "I see. I was struck by that thing... and died, then..."
After one brief moment of grief, Puchi Fayling suddenly bounced up, four tentacles tangling themselves in a mess around Norris's shin. "Wait! Vera, and Fayin? How... how are they?"
"Vera and Fayin?" The Convert abruptly producing names he knew threw Norris completely. "Easy, easy. There's only you here. Your name is?"
"S-sorry." Realizing she'd lost her composure, Fayling spent a laborious while extracting her knotted tentacles. "I'm Fayling. Vera and Fayin are my family. I... I need to know if they're all right."
Fayling...
The corner of Norris's eye gave the smallest twitch. He looked at the Puchi that had been the brave, upright girl in his memory, and for a moment he had no words at all.
He understood at once why the Boss had sent her to him, of all people. And at the same time, a question rose in his mind: since when did the Boss know he'd ever crossed paths with Fayling's group?
All of that was from before he joined the Mushroom Garden, and he'd never once mentioned it to anyone after joining, either.
He turned it over for a while, found no answer, and could only chalk it up to the Boss's omniscience.
What Norris didn't know was that Lin Jun had never needed to ask. He'd known every last scrap of this little secret ages ago, from his routine sessions toying with Norris's dreams.
Norris's silence, meanwhile, bred a misunderstanding.
Puchi Fayling's cap began to tremble. "Don't... don't tell me they're already..."
"Ah! No no no!" Norris snapped out of it and hurried to reassure her. "I was thinking of something else. As for your two family members... let me ask around for you."
With that, Norris sank his attention into the mycelial network, and before long, he had the answer.
He turned a smile on Fayling. "Rest easy. They're both alive and well, and they're in the Mushroom Capital right now."
"Really? Oh, thank goodness!" At the news that her sister and Vera were safe, Fayling forgot all about having become a Puchi and jumped for pure joy.
When the joy had settled, she asked, a little embarrassed: "Um... I'd like to go find them. I don't know if I'd be allowed to..."
"Relax. Nobody restricts where you go. You're free." Norris's words put her heart back in its place. "I'll ask the Boss whether we can teleport you over. If not, I'll have someone take you back through the underground city rift."
"The underground city rift!" Fayling bobbed her cap. She knew that rift. She'd even gone through it once with Vera and the others, to attend one of the Mushroom Fortress's marvelous execution events.
Marvelous, because it was the first time in her life she'd seen the condemned strut up onto the scaffold proudly, under their own power.
Norris obtained permission once again, and to Fayling's astonishment, a small temporary teleportation array was sketched out on the fungal mat right before her eyes.
"You know, I think I remember you." Standing on the array, Puchi Fayling spoke up suddenly.
Norris raised his eyes to her and said nothing, but something hard to name, something like hope, crept into his gaze.
Puchi Fayling went on: "You used to keep order at the underground city entrance, didn't you? No wonder I kept feeling you looked familiar."
"Hahaha." Norris turned his head away and scratched at the scales on his neck. "Sorry. So many people passed through back then... I don't remember who you were."
"Either way, thank you!" Puchi Fayling drew herself up straight and dipped her cap toward Norris, as deep a bow as a Puchi body can bend. "Oh, that's right, I never asked your na..."
Light flashed across the fungal mat, and Fayling vanished into the teleportation array.
Norris watched the temporary magic array fade, slowly rubbing his claws together, and murmured: "No. Thank you."
A little while later, he added over the mycelial network: "Boss. Thank you, too!"
In a corner nearby, a Puchi smashed a recording crystal against the ground.
This was not the plot Lin Jun had come to watch!
The tailless lizardman, after his moment of shock, was supposed to face his utterly helpless first love, plunge into an inner war between possessiveness and conscience, and then commit all manner of mortifying acts. That was how this was supposed to go!
How did it turn into a thank-you exchange?!
A recording crystal, wasted!
The Puchi turned and stormed off in a huff. Two steps later it stopped, though. On the principle that footage already shot must not go to waste, Lin Jun went back and picked the crystal up.
Elsewhere, Fayling finally returned to Vera and the others, who had been waiting on pins and needles... in the form of three separate pieces.
"Sister... is she..." Fayin stared at what looked like a Puchi corpse, her face draining white.
"It's fine, it's fine! That's just how our Mushroom Tribe teleports." No. 5 puchi-puchied over and expertly pieced Fayling back together.
Waking from death yet again, Fayling at last saw Vera and Fayin, and threw herself straight into Vera's arms.
No. 5 thoughtfully wedged a telepathy stone in between them.
"Vera! Fayin! You really are both all right!"
Vera held her, patting her mushroom body gently. "We're fine. We're fine. And thank the heavens you came back to us."
Fayin pressed in, and the three of them held each other tight.
No. 5 hesitated for a moment, then burrowed into the middle of the pile.
Only a certain elf stood off to the side, entirely out of place.
A long while later, when the feelings Fayling had dammed up were finally all poured out, No. 5 towed her away to one side. It had a new mushroom to educate in the fundamentals of being a Puchi.
And only when No. 5 and Fayling were well out of earshot did Vera, looking a little sheepish, ease back a step from Fayin and ask: "Well? I didn't give myself away anywhere, did I?"
Sirian sighed softly.
Fayin looked up at Vera, and the tears escaped her all over again. "No... nowhere..."
Vera smiled wryly and patted the girl's head. "There, there. You'll just have to tell me plenty of stories about the old days. That will fix it, won't it?"
(End of Chapter)
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