"No, no, no..." Ren jumped up when the metallic hiss resonated in the distance, but closer.
The mushrooms in his hair pulsed with a now strange yellowish glow, but he barely had time to wonder why.
The tunnel stretched before him like a black throat.
There were no side exits, no places to hide. Just smooth, ancient stone, and those mysterious symbols...
Those symbols that seemed to increasingly glow under his mushrooms' brighter, yellower light.
"Come on, come on," Ren urged himself.
Another hiss, closer.
Whit the Excavator's flesh providing it with new energy. The Mantis moved faster.
Ren ran.
His feet struck the ancient floor as he descended into the tunnel. The air grew colder, denser. His breathing echoed in his ears, mixing with the ever-closer sound of scythes against stone.
Scriiitch. Scriiitch. Scriiitch.
The Mantis didn't even need to run. Its steady, relentless pace was enough. It knew that sooner or later, like any other hole, the tunnel would end.
Sooner or later, Ren would run out of space to flee.
A flash, reflected from the mantis's body illuminated the tunnel behind him.
The beast was so close now that the mushrooms' light revealed the sickly gleam of the irregular pattern from its broken plates.
It didn't matter that it was injured.
It didn't matter that it had been expelled from its territory. It was still a Bronze-rank creature, and he... he was just a child with the world's weakest beast.
The tunnel began to narrow.
The yellow light casted strange shadows on the walls, making the ancient symbols seem to dance.
Scriiitch. Scriiitch. The mantis's large, slender body struggled forward, scraping more and more against the tunnel walls… SCRIIITCH.
Closer. Ever closer.
Ren stumbled, his knee struck against the stone. Pain exploded in his leg, but terror kept him moving. He rose and kept running, limping, crawling forward.
The mantis hissed, the sound now so close he could feel the vibration in his bones. Its broken plates created a nightmarish sight on the tunnel walls, reflecting the mushrooms' yellow light in fractal patterns.
And then, the tunnel ended.
A smooth, solid wall rose before him, covered in ancient symbols that seemed to mock his fate.
No way out.
The metallic hiss stopped.
In the brief silence that followed, it hesitated, unsure to fit in the cramped space… Yet the unquenchable mana famine made it start to dig and push.
Ren could hear the scythes scraping against stone as the mantis approached slowly, as if savoring the moment.
It no longer needed to run. No longer needed to hurry.
Its prey had been cornered, only a few more meters...
The mushrooms' yellow light intensified, as if responding to Ren's terror. Almost at the same time the wall's symbols started glowing, with the same hue, peeling off in small clouds, creating patterns that reminded him of...
'Spores?'
The Mirror Mantis stopped.
Its eye facets reflected the yellow light. The creature raised its scythes, preparing to deliver a blow.
But something was wrong. The beast tilted its triangular head, confused. Its broken plates tinkled with a new rhythm, more erratic, more... frightened?
The air grew dense, heavy with a smell Ren had never experienced before.
It was like damp earth and rusted metal, like rotting leaves and something older, deeper.
The clouds that came from the symbols on the wall began to move.
No, not move.
They were stalking.
"They were never symbols," whispered Ren, the horror of realization hitting him like an icy fist. "They were dormant spores."
The mantis tried to crawl back, its metallic hiss transforming into something closer to panic.
Its plates now reflected the thousands of specks of yellow light detaching from the walls, ceiling, floor, spores that had been waiting for centuries, awakening to the resonance of the mushrooms in Ren's hair.
The entire tunnel was alive.
And it was hungry.
The ancient spores swirled in the air like a golden storm, enveloping the mantis first. The beast shrieked, a sound Ren never imagined such a fearsome creature could make.
Its broken plates created a horror show as the spores found every crack, every fissure in its exoskeleton.
Ren pressed himself against the back inclined wall, his heart beating so hard he thought it would burst.
The mantis writhed, its scythes cutting the air uselessly while the golden cloud consumed it. Its metallic shriek faded, transforming into a wet, muffled, terrible sound.
And then, silence.
Where the powerful Bronze beast had stood, now lay only a mound of broken plates covered in yellowish mold.
The spores turned toward Ren.
The golden cloud swirled like a wave of ancient hunger.
The mushrooms in his hair pulsed frantically, but this time there was no confusion, there was no salvation.
The ancestral spores weren't normal predators, they were vestiges of a forgotten age, and everything living was their prey.
The first contact was like frozen fire on his skin.
Yellowish fungi sprouted from his arms, legs, neck, each pulsing with a sickly rhythm that drained his energy. The pain was indescribable, as if every pore in his body was being devoured from within.
"No... please..." he gasped, falling to his knees.
But then he saw it, where the spores had detached from the ceiling, a ray of light filtered through like a promise of salvation.
An exit, barely large enough for a child to pass through.
Ren stood up, his legs trembling with effort. The invasive fungi kept spreading across his body, but something was different.
Where the Mantis had succumbed in seconds, he remained conscious. His own spore, the "world's weakest beast", pulsed with its light, as if it were... fighting.
Every effort was agony.
He pushed himself upward, his fingers finding the hole's edge just as his knees threatened to give way. The light blinded him momentarily as he crawled out of the tunnel.
It wasn't the outside...