Eugene flew like the city was on fire.

  His knuckles were white around the broomstick as he tore through the sky, rooftops blurring below him in streaks of stone and shadow. The wind ripped at his sleeves, his hair, his breath. The scene at the Shroom Zoo replayed in his mind—Spib’s slack-jawed chanting, the twitching limbs, the mycelium threading out of his eyes—until the image of him exploding into fungal dust snapped back into focus. Tendrils like seeking fingers.

  He’d seen some weird things since arriving in the City of Cities, but this was something else. This was wrong.

  [VOID INTERFACE: ACTIVE]

  STATUS: INFECTED PATHOGEN: FUNGAL NETWORK - CLASS: UNKNOWN (EXOPARASITIC) SYSTEM LOAD: 71% (NEURAL: 23%, RESPIRATORY: 14%, DERMAL: 34%) SYNC ATTEMPT: BLOCKED [RETRYING...FAILURE] HOST RESPONSE: SUPPRESSED STABILITY INDEX: CRITICAL

  [RECOMMENDED ACTION: QUARANTINE. HOST MEMORY ACCESS PARTIALLY COMPROMISED. NETWORK BACKDOOR DETECTED.]

  Eugene blinked rapidly as the interface shimmered in the corner of his vision. Glyphs twisted and clicked into language he could understand—barely. The screen pulsed with urgency. Words like CRITICAL and QUARANTINE weren’t just alarming—they were terrifying. The more he stared, the more anxious he became. It felt less like a status readout and more like a countdown.

  The Veiled Pinnacle came into view like a cold monument jutting above the skyline. Eugene barely slowed, dipping low and cutting a hard arc to land at the entry platform. He stumbled off the broom and sprinted inside, not caring how loud his boots echoed through the stone halls.

  “KRUNGUS!”

  The room flared to life—Krungus, Bahumbus, Utopianna, and Cozimia all turning at once, startled mid-conversation. Eugene skidded to a stop, panting.

  “I—it’s Spib—he—he exploded!”

  That got their attention.

  “What do you mean exploded?” Bahumbus asked, already half-reaching for something.

  “Fungus. Chanting. Tendrils out of his eyes. He started walking toward me like—like a zombie or something and then boom, spores everywhere! They just—erupted! I flew. I flew all the way here. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  Utopianna gasped, her expression hardening. “You may be infected.” She extended her hands toward Eugene, but not with healing—her fingers drew in slow, deliberate patterns, weaving diagnostic threads through the air. Her eyes shimmered with layered enchantments as she began to inspect him, divining the source of the contamination and mapping the threads of foreign magic crawling beneath his skin.

  “Wait—infected?!” Eugene yelped.

  Cozimia’s voice echoed from inside her lantern, which hung gently from a carved stand near the edge of the room. The glass shimmered faintly as her words filled the air, sharp and clear. "Don’t move, sugar. I’ll make them feel very unwelcome." The lantern pulsed once with warmth, and the room shifted—heat, pressure, a sudden atmospheric resistance that made the hair on Eugene’s neck stand up. For a moment, it almost seemed to work. The spores recoiled under the shift in energy, retreating deeper into Eugene’s body. But then—subtly, insidiously—they pushed back. The parasites were too strong. Too determined. They began to creep in again, finding new paths, new anchors. They were not done with him.

  Krungus didn’t move at first. Then his eyes narrowed, and he began tracing glowing sigils in the air with one hand, muttering to himself. A thread of greenish mist hovered over Eugene’s shoulder as Krungus tried to isolate and examine it.

  “This isn’t just rot,” he said slowly. “It’s magic—fungal magic, but with precision. It’s new. Or at least… new in the last nine thousand years.”

  “Eugene,” he said sharply. “How close were you to Spib when he exploded?”

  Eugene blinked. “I dunno—like five feet?”

  Krungus turned to the others, furious. “He flew across the entire district like that? Spore cloud exposure and aerial spread—he might’ve just given every rooftop from here to the Garden District a fungal spore shower!”

  Eugene felt his stomach twist. “I—I didn’t know! I was just trying to warn someone!”

  The air turned electric. Bahumbus was already pulling out scanning tools. Utopianna’s hands flared with shimmering cleansing sigils. Cozimia whispered something in a low, venomous tone that made the walls tremble slightly.

  Krungus muttered, “If this is what I think it is, the infection may already be networked.”

  "We need to act now,” Utopianna said. “Or this city will rot from the inside out."

  Bahumbus looked up from his instruments, voice sharp and immediate. "We need the sentries mobilized now. Get them on the streets, every squad, every tier. We don’t have time to think—just act."

  Krungus raised a hand, cutting him off. “I already feel it in the Weave. We’ve got flare-ups across multiple districts. He wasn’t the only one exposed."

  Krungus spun, voice rising. "Qlaark! Inform the Velvet Order that every district between the Garden District and the Veiled Pinnacle is most likely infected already. We need them deployed immediately."

  And with that, the panic turned into motion.

  Spells ignited. Wards flared. The fight to contain the spread had already begun.

  Bahumbus bellowed, loud enough to shake dust from the rafters. "Somebody find that damn elephant!"

  Utopianna knelt beside Eugene, eyes narrowed in concentration. Her magic surged through him in waves of golden light, slowing the fungal growth but not stopping it. She frowned.

  "It’s parasitic," she said tightly. "I've never seen a fungal network take hold this quickly. It’s adapting to everything I throw at it."

  Eugene’s breathing became labored. He tried to respond, but his eyes fluttered and then closed.

  “Eugene?” Utopianna’s voice wavered.

  He slipped into unconsciousness.

  Cozimia’s voice rang from the lantern. “He ain’t dead, but whatever’s inside him doesn’t wanna leave.”

  Minutes later, reports began arriving—sporadic at first, then more frequent. Whole blocks showing signs of infection. People turning.

  Thousands infected.

  And the infected weren’t hiding.

  They were spreading it.

  Even with The Number, the Velvet Order, and every sentry Bahumbus could activate, they were grossly outnumbered.

  The fungal horde had begun.

  On one of the major avenues of the Garden District, the chaos was absolute.

  The cobbled street was littered with abandoned carts and shattered lanterns, but it was the people who made it horrific. The infected raced between alleyways, grasping for the uninfected with wild, animal panic. They weren’t eating them. They didn’t need to. A single breath too close, a hand to the throat, and a cloud of spores would erupt—soft, shimmering puffs that clung to eyes, mouths, wounds.

  A child screamed as her father convulsed mid-run, his chest swelling unnaturally before bursting in a fine mist of glowing spores. A guard tried to raise a warding sigil, only for her partner to tackle her from behind, eyes glazed, mouth agape, already seeding spores from a tongue coated in fuzz.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Some tried to fight back—blades, fire, even rudimentary spells—but it didn’t matter. The infected didn’t bleed. They released.

  Bodies twisted with swelling pustules that opened in soft pops, revealing spore sacks blooming like fungal blossoms. Eyes clouded over with membrane-thin mycelium, and voices—when they spoke—were broken, repeating the same nonsense phrases like echoes of old memories.

  Entire intersections became meat grinders of airborne contagion. Every scream was a warning that came too late.

  The fungus had no interest in stone or steel. It only wanted hosts.

  And it was getting them.

  Utopianna watched the spread of spores in Eugene's body with cold precision. Her sight, honed by centuries of training unknown to the rest of The Number, revealed the fungal networks in startling clarity.

  "They’re creating rhizomorphic bridges," she murmured to herself, almost academically. "Threading through his muscle fibers like highway junctions. There's cortical infiltration in the motor cortex... and they're forming a pseudo-thalamic relay. Gods above."

  She traced the dark, fibrous webs knitting themselves into Eugene’s body. "This isn’t just a biological infection. It’s a synaptic override. They’re piggybacking on his acetylcholine receptors—tricking his nervous system into obeying them. Like a hijacked signal path."

  Her voice was tight, but steady. "They’re using chitinous filaments to sheath the peripheral nerves. Replacing myelin sheaths with fungal analogs. If this keeps going, they’ll turn his reflexes into spore reflexes. Every time he breathes, every time he blinks, he could be exhaling a new wave of infection."

  She clenched her jaw. "This isn’t magic. This is... engineered biology."

  And still the spores pushed, writhed, coiled deeper.

  She doubled down, using not just spellwork but anatomical precision—treating the fungal invasion like a neurosurgeon performing fieldwork in a battlefield. Because that’s what Eugene had become.

  A battlefield.

  Krungus stood motionless for a long moment, the chaos of the command center muffled behind the storm of thoughts in his head.

  He considered obliteration first—a single, brutal spell to vaporize infected zones. But no. Too many innocents. Too permanent.

  He imagined freezing entire districts in stasis, suspending the fungal growth in time. But that magic was unstable, and the last time he’d used it, it had backfired for six decades straight. Chronomancy was for Sharrzaman.

  He cursed under his breath. There had to be something.

  Then the thought came to him—buy time. Move them. Put distance between the infected and the healthy. He didn’t like it, but it might be the only shot they had.

  In a desperate attempt to buy time, Krungus thought about trying a mass teleportation spell—ripping open portals and flinging entire crowds of infected into the far reaches of the desert.

  But as soon as the thought finished its experiment, his eyes widened.

  "No... no, no, no," he muttered, staggering back. "The cankerworms. The screaming cankerworms. I would just be throwing spores into a nest."

  He dismissed the portal with a snarl of frustration, already pivoting. From the folds of his robe, he pulled a polished silver mirror—small, palm-sized, and etched with sigils around its frame. With a sharp flick and a guttural word, the mirror caught the glow of his spellwork and fractured the air like water.

  From its surface sprang dozens of Krunguses—not life-sized, but miniature, no taller than eight inches, each one the exact image of him, robes billowing and red lenses gleaming. They launched themselves from the mirror like darts, swarming into the sky and down the alleys like vengeful wasps.

  Despite their size, they packed a punch—each one wielding concentrated blasts of telemantic force strong enough to knock an infected clean off their feet or bind them in shrinking nets of reality-thread.

  It was chaos—but for a brief moment, it was organized chaos.

  At first, it worked. Infected were stunned, cornered, slowed.

  Then the copies started reporting back.

  “They’re hiding from us.”

  “They’re adapting.”

  “They know we’re watching.”

  The copies turned to him, blinking in eerie synchronicity.

  “They're learning.”

  Krungus cursed under his breath and dissolved the spell, wiping sweat from his brow. The city's skyline burned with smoke and spore-light. Screams echoed in the distance.

  “There’s nothing else to do but build,” he whispered, remembering another time where that was his only option for survival.

  He extended his hands to the Weave again—not to teleport, not to destroy—but to build. Thick stone walls surged up from the streets, boxing in whole neighborhoods, sealing the infected inside.

  He stood alone on the tower of the Veiled Pinnacle, watching his own magic lock people—families—behind walls like tombs.

  “I’ll find a way to save them,” he whispered. “I have to.”

  Below him, the wails of the infected—half-human, half-mushroom—rose like a chorus of grief.

  Krungus and Bahumbus hovered above the city now, high above the walls they'd just raised. Smoke coiled through the alleys. Screams echoed like distant thunder. Fires crackled in the deeper streets. And still, the spores spread.

  Eugene lay unconscious back at the Veiled Pinnacle, his body still a battleground of parasitic rot. Utopianna remained at his side, pouring every ounce of her magic into slowing the infection. But even she couldn’t promise survival.

  "They’re dying quickly," Bahumbus said grimly. "Exploding. Infecting more as they fall. It’s like a chain reaction."

  Krungus didn’t answer immediately. His eyes scanned the skyline, glowing faintly red behind his lenses.

  "I didn’t see it coming," he muttered. "None of us did."

  Bahumbus nodded, jaw clenched. "We’ve been scattered for too long. This city got big while we were gone. Now it’s too big to save."

  A low thud echoed behind them. B'doom landed on a flat rooftop nearby, his breath ragged, his staff dragging against the stone.

  "I got as many as I could outside the wall," he said hoarsely. His tusks drooped, eyes hollow. "But I was too slow. Too curious. Too proud. I thought the garden was waking up because of me. I wanted it to."

  He pulled a battered flask from his belt and took two long gulps. The shimmering liquid inside pulsed with a faint cerulean glow—mana potion. Then another, pulled from a different pocket. He didn’t savor them. He was fueling himself like a broken machine forcing one more run. He wiped his mouth, slung his staff across his back, and looked back toward the burning skyline. "I'm going back out," he said. "Even if it’s hopeless. Even if it’s just one more person I can save."

  Krungus turned. For once, he didn’t have a snide remark.

  "It’s not your fault," Bahumbus said gently.

  B’doom stared at the chaos below. "It is. I placed the spores there initially. I brought them back. My presence. My meddling. I gave it the spark."

  None of them corrected him.

  The three floated in silence, the wind howling past their cloaks as the city beneath them burned with infection.

  After a long, haunted moment, Krungus spoke. "Did the city ever hit a billion people?"

  Bahumbus exhaled slowly, watching a fire bloom in the distance. "Some of the government clerks were saying it did—decades ago. Tried to make it a whole celebration. Posters, fireworks, commemorative mugs. But most folks weren’t sure about the math."

  Krungus tilted his head. "So it was a guess."

  "Pretty much," Bahumbus said. "Didn’t matter long. Not long after that, a massive sinkhole opened up beneath the Third Spiral and swallowed somewhere in the vicinity of three million people. The clerks stopped talking about population milestones after that."

  Krungus said nothing.

  They all just floated there, watching as the chaos spread like veins through the city.

  And none of them—none—knew what to do next.

  Back at the Veiled Pinnacle, Utopianna worked in silence.

  Eugene lay still beneath her hands, his skin pale, the occasional twitch betraying the struggle happening inside him. She had abandoned the idea of healing him through magical restoration. It wasn’t enough. The spores weren’t a wound to close or a poison to neutralize—they were alive, stubborn, and eager to grow.

  So she had changed tactics.

  She was adjusting his body instead—shifting his internal balances, rerouting flows of blood and heat. She coaxed his immune response to flare at precise intervals, slowed his breath, raised his internal temperature just enough to strain the invaders without killing the host.

  Then she did something even riskier.

  She began guiding the infection downward, through his nervous system and bloodstream, concentrating the parasitic growth into his feet. "Localized drainage of parasitic load via gravitational lymphatic bias," she muttered, mostly to herself. "Push the colony out of major organs. Redirect mycoelectric signaling through lower extremity networks."

  Bit by bit, she drew the spores into the soles of his feet—pulling them away from his heart, lungs, and brain. "Minimize neural density, maximize accessibility... feet are expendable."

  All the while, she whispered spells of suppression—not to destroy, but to contain. The spores fought back, their instincts urging them to multiply, to spread, to dig in deeper.

  But Utopianna was stronger.

  With a sterile blade of light and a reinforced charm of stasis, she scraped the gathered mass from the soles of his feet, layer by layer. Slippery, fibrous strands slid away beneath the glowing knife, hissing as they hit the air. "The soles are a natural drainage point," she murmured. "Low vascular density, high keratin resilience—ideal for toxic extraction without risking systemic rebound. Old-world pressure therapy meets modern parasitic detoxification. Gods, I hope it’s enough."

  She did not pause. She did not speak. Her hands moved like a ritual, and her eyes never left him.

  Only when the last of the visible spores was scraped away did she finally let herself breathe again. With a trembling hand, she cast a banishment spell—low, focused, precise—and the remnants of the spores, now sealed in containment wards, were expelled from this plane entirely. Not destroyed, but removed. She wanted nothing of their essence left behind.

  Eugene stirred.

  His fingers twitched, then his eyes blinked open, unfocused at first. The moment they locked onto Utopianna, memory came rushing back like a flood. The spores. Spib. The garden. The infection.

  He jolted upright with a gasp, nearly knocking over Utopianna in the process. "I know how to take care of this," he said, voice rasping but resolute.

  Utopianna blinked in shock. "Eugene, you shouldn’t even be standing."

  "We can’t wait," he said, gripping her hands. "Can you get them here? The infected. To the Pinnacle. I think—no, I know—this place can help. I just need them here."