The pass at Windrest Gorge sat wedged between two sheer stone mountains, like a crack split open by a giant's axe.
Its wall rose straight out of the valley floor, a rank of ballistae mounted along the battlements, and several magic towers standing on the inner side of the pass.
Wind poured in through the mouth of the gorge and moaned as it came, like something crying somewhere far away.
Inside the pass, a demon soldier leaned against the wall and spoke to his companion in a low voice: "I hear those Mushroom Fortress Puchis are eerie, and strong. His Lordship the Count took every one of his elites away, leaving just the Viscount and the handful of us here. If the Fortress truly attacks, we can't hold this place, can we?"
The other soldier slouched in the corner, arms wrapped around his standard-issue explosive crossbow, eyes half shut. "Who says the Fortress is even coming?"
"And even if they do invade the Empire, do you take them for fools? Why would they gnaw on the hardest pass in the region?" He jutted his chin toward the land beyond the gorge. "Detour a little, take the gravel flats to our west. That whole route is a string of small towns that fall at a poke. Once they've eaten everything behind us, this place is stranded in the middle of nowhere, and attacking us stops meaning anything at all."
With that, he shifted and tucked the crossbow under his other arm.
"Besides, didn't the Viscount personally lead men out to scout? When his lordship returns, we'll know exactly what the Fortress is up to. Standing here scaring yourself helps no one."
The first demon nodded at the sense of it, but still turned a worried gaze north.
He stared for a good long while. Then, suddenly, he elbowed his companion. "Hey! Up! Look, what's that?"
Below the pass, several riders came out of the far mouth of the gorge, wrapped in dust.
The lead rider wore a dark travel robe, hood pressed low, hunched slightly over his war beast as if from a long, hard road, a few attendants trailing behind him.
"It's the Viscount! His lordship has returned!"
The soldier moved to go release the magic seal on the gate, but the captain of the gate watch pressed him back down.
The captain was in no hurry to open up. First, he activated the detection array at the gate.
A ripple of mana, nearly invisible to the eye, spread from the array's focus and washed over the riders below.
Soon enough, the array confirmed the Viscount's registered mana signature.
Only then did the captain wave a hand. "Raise the gate!"
The iron portcullis rose to its full height, the gates swung open, and the Viscount rode in, attendants close on his heels.
To the captain who came trotting down to meet him, the Viscount said, displeased: "What took so long?"
The captain piled on a smile. "My lord, have you forgotten? His Lordship the Count left strict instructions before he departed: anyone entering must first pass the mana lock. That's all the delay was. Please don't take offense."
"I see. You are very diligent."
The captain bowed and scraped, but something itched wrong at the back of his mind: the Viscount sat mounted on a war beast, yet the voice had seemed to come from straight ahead of him, level with his own chest, not from above.
He raised his eyelids carefully, his gaze creeping from the Viscount's boot-tips to the hem of the robe, from the hem to the belt, from the belt to the face half-buried in the hood.
And then he saw it: beneath the hood, a gray, lifeless face, overgrown with a riot of mushrooms.
Of the Viscount's two eyes, one had been replaced outright by a mushroom. The other was an empty, sightless socket, and it was fixed dead on him.
"Hrk..." The captain's voice jammed in his throat. He wanted to back away, but his shaking legs had rooted to the ground and would not take a single step.
And then the Viscount spoke again.
"You saw, didn't you."
This time he heard it clearly. The voice was not coming from the Viscount's mouth. It came from the bundle hanging at the war beast's flank.
At some point, a slit had opened in the bundle, and through the gap peeked half of a small, round mushroom cap.
The lance in the hands of the mushroom puppet that had been the Viscount thrust out and ran the captain through the chest.
"What's happening?"
"Why would the Viscount..."
Under the stunned eyes of the remaining gate guards, the "attendants" behind the Viscount tore away their robes, revealing what they truly were, and a storm of blood erupted.
The puppets seized the gateway in moments, and using the gate's own defensive magic arrays, held off the garrison troops who came scrambling at the commotion.
And outside, at the far end of the wasteland, countless Puchis came rolling toward the wide-open gate!
Start to finish, it took less than three hours. Windrest Pass, the strongest point along the First Fungal Legion's line of advance, had fallen, and the cost to the Mushroom Fortress was next to nothing.
Norris piloted Jida into the pass, and over the mycelial network drilled the standing orders into the soldiers one more time:
"Destroy every slime generator. Kill all who resist, and every slime. Everyone who surrenders is to be escorted together to a point outside the pass. No destroying buildings or facilities without cause!"
Having run through it twice, Norris climbed out of Jida, turned his head, and came face to face with those battered mushroom puppets. His neck shrank in on itself.
No matter how many times he saw them, these puppets made his scales crawl.
Just then, Ming came over, covered in blood, dragging a beaten-half-to-death holdout along to make his report.
Norris instinctively stepped in front of the puppet, afraid of frightening Ming.
But Ming had already seen it, and showed not the slightest discomfort.
He even chattered on about the fight he'd just had while idly snapping a piece of mushroom off the puppet and kneading it in his hand like a toy.
After Ming left, Norris smacked his lips and arrived at a realization: he himself might just be the most delicate creature in the whole Mushroom Garden...
After breaking Windrest Pass, the First Fungal Legion drove onward at full song, heading straight for the Empire's capital, Duskfall Keep.
The Second Fungal Legion, on the other axis of advance, was far slower.
Not because they had met some hard bone to chew.
The Empire had thrown its elites south; the cities and forts of the north could do little more than delay the Fortress's advance.
No, the Second Legion was slow mainly because of No. 4. It walked too slowly.
As for the cities and strongholds barring the way?
No. 4's present bulk still couldn't compare with the Qisi of the old days, but in ordinary eyes it was already a colossus that blotted out the sky, the kind of thing that could wreck an entire city just by stepping through it.
Facing a leviathan like that, the great majority of ordinary soldiers couldn't even summon the will to resist.
And so, after No. 4 flung its whole body at one mountaintop fortress that had loudly sworn to resist to the end, and flattened it...
Every city and fort after that either sent envoys begging surrender the moment No. 4's cap rose over the horizon, or was already an empty shell by the time No. 4 arrived.
To the point that the glorious march No. 4 had dreamed of for so long turned, step by plodding step, into a walking tour.
Last, the Third Fungal Legion.
This was the army that had just finished beating the dwarves, and given where it started, it would be somewhat late to the Empire's war.
They were not heading west at all, but toward the Stone Fortress dungeon. They would cross through the rift to reinforce the United Kingdom.
They probably could not reach Oath City in time. But they could still make it in time to protect the Mushroom Capital.
While the Mushroom Fortress's armies swept through the Empire's territory as if through open country, the Empire's armies were rampaging through the United Kingdom in turn, and the humans could only huddle inside Oath City, passively waiting for the decisive battle to come.
(End of Chapter)
Comments