The air thickened as soon as Arin stepped through.

  Not with fog or smoke—there was nothing visible—but Mike felt it all the same. A weight behind his eyes, a faint buzzing along his skin, the sense of walking into a room someone else had been in for a very long time.

  The Verdant mana here wasn’t just dense.

  It was invasive.

  Masks on, they pushed forward.

  Arin led with her shield up, boots rolling from heel to toe with the stubborn inevitability of someone who refused to stop just because her instincts screamed at her. Mike kept half a step behind and to the side, one hand close to the root wall so he could steady himself if things went sideways fast. Marina and Vex stayed in the pocket between them, Lumi trotting at Marina’s heels like a small, disgruntled storm cloud with a leaf strapped to her face.

  The tunnel didn’t change shape.

  Same roots. Same faint glow. It was the world inside their heads that shifted.

  The first hit was sound.

  Footsteps that weren’t theirs, somewhere behind Mike. A printer warming up. The distant clack of a keyboard.

  He knew those sounds.

  He’d heard them every day for years.

  He did not turn around.

  Not real.

  A System icon flickered into the edge of his vision.

  [Status: Mild Hallucinogenic Influence]

  Source: Verdant Maw — Spore Layer.

  Transcendent Soul: Preventing severe cognitive distortion.

  He focused on the lightning crawling lazily under his skin.

  Electric potential didn’t care about fake offices or bad dreams. It just wanted to move from high to low, from tension to release. Simple. Honest.

  He latched onto that simplicity like a lifeline and kept walking.

  Ahead, Arin’s shoulders were tight, but her stride never faltered.

  “What are you seeing?” Mike asked quietly.

  “Not giving it words,” she said. “Words make it real.”

  Fair.

  Behind him, Vex let out a humorless little laugh.

  “Alleyways,” the rogue muttered. “Old ones. Lots of doors that never opened and a lot of people who didn’t bother to look down.”

  “Any of them have glowing roots?” Mike asked.

  “No.”

  “Then they’re not here,” Mike said. “Stick with what has roots.”

  “Never thought that’d be good advice,” Vex said, but his breathing steadied.

  Marina’s voice was flatter than he liked.

  “I’m getting… branches,” she said. “Not trees. Choices. We die here. We die later. We live and it still hurts. We split up. We don’t. Somebody always—”

  “Hey,” he cut in. “Those aren’t prophecies. They’re noise with good special effects. The dungeon doesn’t see the future. It just pokes old scars.”

  Her hand tightened on her staff.

  “Feels real,” she said.

  “So did the office,” he muttered. “Didn’t mean it got to keep me.”

  The spore pressure climbed.

  His peripheral vision started throwing things at him. The glow of his old monitors. A notification ping from a messaging app that didn’t exist anymore. His phone buzzing with a number he didn’t remember.

  He refused to look.

  Lightning, he reminded himself.

  Two points, a path, that’s all it is.

  A small weight bumped his calf.

  Lumi.

  The fox’s steps were getting sloppy. She veered closer to him than usual, tails drooping under their static.

  Then she stumbled.

  “Got you,” he said immediately.

  He scooped her up one-armed, settling her against his chest. Her little heart hammered against his ribs, way too fast.

  She made a soft, miserable sound and pressed her nose into his collarbone, as if she could burrow out of the air.

  “Marina,” he said.

  “I see her,” she answered.

  Her hand found Lumi’s back, fingers sinking gently into the fur between her shoulders. A soft green pulse spread out from her palm—not a full spell, not the aggressive push of healing, but a steady, grounding thrum.

  “Easy, girl,” she murmured. “You’re not built for this. Let us do the stupid part.”

  The System’s icon flickered again.

  [Hallucinogenic Influence] — Severity Reduced

  It hit Mike, too.

  Not as a cleanse, but as a second rhythm under the lightning—Verdant mana, carefully directed, telling his system what was his and what was not.

  The spores pushed harder.

  For a moment the tunnel lurched sideways, roots blurring into server racks. Arin’s shield became a whiteboard covered in half-erased diagrams. Vex’s silhouette flickered into the outline of some guy from Mike’s old team, the one who always pawned his bugs off.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He did not blink.

  “Eyes on the floor,” he said. “Count steps. Arin, call them.”

  “Ten,” she said immediately. “Nine. Eight.”

  They walked.

  He matched his breathing to her count.

  “Seven.”

  Footsteps behind him got louder. Someone called his name in a voice he hadn’t heard since high school.

  “Six.”

  His mother’s face flickered at the edge of his vision, disappointed in a way she’d never actually been. He almost laughed.

  “Five.”

  Vex muttered something under his breath in a language Mike didn’t know. The tone said the meaning clearly enough: you don’t get to have me.

  “Four.”

  The roots above them rippled like a ceiling fan.

  “Three.”

  Marina’s voice was thin but steady. “Not real. Not real. Not—”

  “Two.”

  Lumi made a tiny, angry growl. Sparks snapped against Mike’s chest.

  “One,” Arin finished.

  The pressure broke like a surface.

  The air ahead suddenly felt… normal. Heavy, yes, thick with Verdant saturation, but without the weird angles. The world snapped back into proper alignment: roots, fungi, faint glow, his team, nothing else.

  They stepped out of the sporefield like breaching from dark water.

  The System’s icon turned gray, then blinked away.

  [Hallucinogenic Influence] — Cleared

  No one spoke for a few breaths.

  Then Vex yanked his mask down and spat to the side.

  “I’d like to formally file a complaint,” he said hoarsely. “With whoever designed that. With the System. With reality.”

  “Accepted,” Arin said. “Filed. Denied.”

  Marina slid her own mask down, inhaling the less-poisonous air like it was the finest mountain breeze.

  “I hate that kind of magic,” she muttered. “At least when someone’s bleeding, I know what to do with my hands.”

  “You held,” Mike said. “That’s what matters.”

  Lumi wriggled in his arms, claws digging lightly into his chest in protest at being carried. He set her down gently.

  She shook herself from nose to tail-tip, fur puffing back up, then glared over her shoulder at the corridor they’d just come through.

  “Same,” Vex told her. “Wholeheartedly.”

  The chamber they’d walked into wasn’t big, but it was different.

  The ceiling arched higher, letting the glow spread more evenly. The root walls were less constricted, braided in wider bands instead of claustrophobic tangles. The floor was more or less level and mostly free of treacherous knots.

  A small spring bubbled in one corner, clear water trickling out from a crack in the stone into a shallow pool before soaking into the earth.

  The System chimed.

  [Stabilized Mana Pocket Detected]

  Classification: Minor Rest Node

  Effects while inside:

  ? Slightly increased HP / Mana / Stamina regeneration

  ? No monster spawns

  Duration: Limited (Dungeon Adaptive)

  “Finally,” Vex sighed. “Somewhere that isn’t trying to eat my brain.”

  Arin leaned her shield against the wall and dropped onto a thick root with a long exhale.

  “We use it,” she said. “Fast. The dungeon doesn’t leave gifts on the table for long.”

  Mike sat beside her, rolling his shoulders, letting the low-key regen work on the lingering ache in his muscles. His mana was more than half full but not comfortable. Stamina ticked upward in visible degrees.

  Marina went straight to the spring.

  “Careful,” Mike said automatically. “Check it.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She dipped her fingers in, held the water up for the System to scan.

  [Springwater — Verdant-Touched]

  Potable after boiling / purification.

  Minor positive interaction with Verdant-aligned skills.

  She smiled faintly. “Usable,” she said. “Good. I can work with this.”

  She dug in her inventory, pulling out a small pot, a handful of fungi caps she’d carefully catalogued earlier, a twist of Bitterleaf, and some thin, pale roots.

  “What now?” Vex asked.

  “Something to help with the next round of ‘the dungeon wants in your head’,” she said. “Those spores were only the warm-up.”

  “Love the optimism,” he said.

  She set the pot near a conjured flame—simple, System-tutorial fire-making kit, nothing fancy—and started adding ingredients.

  The smell that rose was… not pleasant.

  Sharp. Bitter. Underneath it, something resinous.

  Mike wrinkled his nose.

  “If this tastes like you’re boiling regret, that’s on purpose, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Good medicine is allowed to be mean.”

  While she worked, he checked his log.

  No level-up yet.

  One more serious fight would probably push him over to 14. A couple more and 15 was in reach.

  He didn’t know why that number tugged at him.

  Maybe it was just the neatness. Maybe it was some buried System threshold waiting up ahead. Either way, he could feel the stretch coming, the way he’d started to feel before big jumps: body wanting to move, lightning a little more restless, Chaos a little more interested in the edges of things.

  “Thinking too loud,” Arin said beside him.

  He snorted. “How can you tell?”

  “Because you make that face,” she said. “The ‘I’m about to go pick a fight with the concept of reality’ one.”

  “I only do that on weekends,” he said.

  “Every day is weekend now,” Vex pointed out from where he lounged, back against the wall, legs stretched out. “System ate the calendar.”

  “Then I’ll recalibrate,” Mike said.

  He fell quiet, watching Marina work.

  She moved differently now than on the surface or in the early tutorial. More confident, more efficient. She didn’t ask the System for permission before combining herbs; she used its tags as a guide, not a crutch. Their profession choices were starting to show.

  After a few minutes, she poured four small portions into rough cups.

  The System slapped an identification on them.

  [Focus Tonic — Minor]

  Effect: Slightly increases resistance to mental and perception-based interference (30 minutes).

  Side Effects: Bitter taste, mild dry mouth.

  “Wonderful,” Vex said. “My tongue’s been having too easy a time lately.”

  They drank.

  It was indeed bitter. Like someone had steeped stress and bad coffee grounds and then added more stress.

  But as it went down, the edges of Mike’s awareness sharpened. The lingering afterimage of the hallucinations in the spore corridor faded further.

  Marina soaked a bit of cloth in a diluted portion and let Lumi gnaw on it briefly before tugging it away.

  Lumi made an offended little chirp, then shook herself and settled beside Marina’s feet, tails wrapping neatly around her paws.

  Arin rolled her neck, then stood, stretching.

  “I needed that,” she said. “My knees are less interested in unionizing.”

  “Feels like my head’s been washed out,” Vex said. “In a good way. A harsh aunt kind of way.”

  “We won’t get a better window,” Arin said. “We move before the dungeon decides this node would be better as a Rootweaver nest.”

  Mike pushed himself up, feeling the regen trace a final comfortable line through his muscles.

  “Check-in,” he said. “Physical, mana, stupid-dungeon-mind-games level.”

  “Physically fine,” Arin said. “Mana around half, but I can work with that. Mentally, I’ve had worse days. None of them involved spiders, but still.”

  “Physically I’m okay,” Marina said. “Mana’s… not great, but the tonic helps. Mentally?” She hesitated. “The spores hit the ‘what if’ centers pretty hard. I’m still mad about it. That’s good. Anger helps boundary-setting.”

  “I’m good enough to stab things,” Vex said. “If I start describing alleys out loud, just hit me.”

  “Accepted,” Arin said.

  Mike checked his own status at a glance. Health green, stamina rising, mana solid, mental influence cleared.

  The awkward part was that the more the dungeon threw at him, the more some piece of him… liked it.

  Not the fear. Not the risk.

  The growth.

  Every fight was a new way to push lightning, a new angle on Chaos he could feel nibbling at the edges of his skills. Each encounter where he didn’t die felt like proof that he wasn’t just fumbling around in god-tier content by accident.

  He wasn’t sure yet if that was healthy.

  He was very sure it was necessary.

  Arin strapped her shield back on. “Alright,” she said. “Rest time’s over.”

  They filed out of the node.

  The air outside felt heavier again, but without the psychic bite of the spore corridor. Verdant mana clung to everything, richer now, as if the dungeon had taken their progress as permission to lean in.

  The path narrowed, then widened into a sloping tunnel.

  Sound changed.

  The omnipresent creak of wood and faint drip of water gained a new undertone—a low, barely audible rumble. It vibrated through the roots under Mike’s boots.

  Lumi froze.

  Her fur fluffed again, every tail puffing. A low, involuntary growl rolled out of her chest.

  “Something big?” Vex asked.

  “Several somethings,” Marina said quietly.

  The System answered a second later.

  [Approaching Threat: Verdant Stalker Pack]

  Class: Coordinated Predator Group

  Traits: Fast, stealthy, regenerative.

  Recommendation: Do not be surrounded.

  Arin squared her shoulders, lifting her shield.

  “Pack tactics,” she said. “We lock down lanes and don’t let them set the terms.”

  Vex rolled his wrists, daggers flashing in the dim light. “I’ll take ‘not being surrounded’ for a hundred, System.”

  Marina’s fingers tightened on her staff. Verdant mana coiled around her like vines, ready to lash out or heal as needed.

  Mike exhaled once, steady.

  Lightning rose under his skin, eager, tasting predator in the air. Chaos stayed quiet for now, a sleeping knife somewhere deeper.

  “Same plan as always,” he said. “Hit first. Hit hard. Adapt faster than the dungeon.”

  The rumble grew into distinct footfalls—padded, heavy, measured.

  Eyes opened ahead in the gloom.

  Four, then eight, then more, pairs of green light at low height, creeping forward with the confidence of things that belonged here and knew it.

  Mike stepped up beside Arin, bare hands already crackling.

  “Round two, Verdant Maw,” he said under his breath. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

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