The walk to the final of the three Nodes felt fast.

  Tori supposed she wasn’t really walking. With Hal in the mech, the best she could hope for was a jog, and the Travelers leading them weren’t strolling, or even moving with purpose. They were practically sprinting.

  And that was fascinating, mostly because of what they carried: absolutely nothing. The inferno Hal had ‘accidentally’ created had wiped out the Third Node in its entirety, but even so…it was weird that none of the Travelers were moving anything toward the First Node. It should still need something, right? Unless…

  “Red blood cells?” she muttered under her breath.

  “Huh?” Hal asked.

  Tori ignored him. She hadn’t paid a ton of attention in her science classes, and Biology wasn’t until next year, anyway. She snorted—next year? The world was over. How about ‘never?’ But while she hadn’t paid much attention in class, she had paid attention when her mom—Jessica, not her real mom—dragged her to the field museum for that traveling exhibit on the human body. The one with the real bodies that one wierdo had turned into plastic. It had been super-gross, super-cool…

  And super-interesting.

  And one thing Tori Vanderbilt remembered from that was how blood worked—especially later in the process, once it was full of toxins or whatever. But also, early on. Mitochondria, just like her teacher had said a hundred times, were the power house of the cell. But it had to get its fuel from somewhere.

  “Hal, if the previous two stations were consuming energy and eliminating waste…”

  The Voltsmith cleared his throat. “Yeah, I thought about that. The next one’s got to be where they get it from.”

  “Yep.” Tori shrugged, trying to keep her cool as they pushed further into the Mycopolis. Hal might’ve figured it out, but he was a farmboy, and he was thinking about all of this as farming. But Tori wasn’t so sure about that.

  From her point of view, this looked more like a single organism.

  The final Node wasn’t a Charge-consuming pillar-held thing with tendrils that consumed Charge.

  It wasn’t a pit for removing waste.

  No, it was a gigantic fungal mat, easily a hundred meters to a side, and…rolling? Yes, rolling. The entire mat seemed to move from left to right in front of us, with the left side looking like half-grown mushrooms suspended on a lattice of stringy, fibrous stuff. As it wriggled and moved, the mushrooms grew until they were almost three feet tall—so tall they couldn’t fit through when the living conveyor belt dipped back underground. That knocked the mushroom heads off, and those…those ended up on the ground.

  The Myconid Travelers we’d been following picked them up. Then, without so much as stopping, they walked toward the right side of the fungal machine and stepped into the gap between the fungal field and the ground around it, disappearing into the depths.

  “What the hell?” Tori asked.

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much to say.

  I had been harboring suspicions, though. The Mycopolis didn’t have a good way to harvest energy in this environment. Without resources from outside of the dungeon, it was entirely reliant on the dungeon itself for fuel—and it was almost certainly maxing out that energy. On the other hand, fungi were great recyclers. It was either harvesting the Travelers to fuel the process, or it was already going haywire.

  We’d done a lot of damage to the Mycopolis’s infrastructure, so haywire was my guess.

  Either way, we had to get to work. I readied the grenade launcher. “Let’s go.”

  Tori nodded, and we went.

  Node One: Level Eighty-Eight Dungeon Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Challenging

  The Nodes are the life-givers for the entire Mycopolis. They stabilize the fungal ‘city,’ regulate it, and provide it with everything it needs. In return, the city will defend them to the death.

  The moment we started fighting, Node One activated.

  I expected a massive rush of small fungi like the other nodes. And in one respect, I wasn’t disappointed. The first grenade crashed into the gigantic fungus, and spores erupted from the far-too-large tear in its body like a volcano fountaining. The neon-orange glow in the air shimmered and shone high above Node One. Then it descended around us.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The danger was obvious—and so was the opportunity. “Tori, get back!” I yelled. The mech suit stomped forward. Tori sprinted away from the cloud of spores, Pushing them back away from her, then dropping Gravity Wells to filter out even more.

  But I didn’t have a solution like that.

  Instead, the mech’s hatch opened, and I quickly slid out and landed on the fungal mat itself. Tori and I had been right. This was an energy-harvester, or a condenser. And if it was a condenser, then based on what the Myconid Travelers were doing, it was harvesting Charge.

  And if it was harvesting Charge, then I could hijack the entire process.

  I coughed as spores started to coat my Air-Charge Filter. The Voltsmith’s Grasp reached out and plunged into the fungal mat spread all around me, and I closed my fist, just like I had when Saul’s or Taven’s swords had crashed down onto me. My arm thrummed with power, and Charge started to flow out of Node One and into the Voltsmith’s Grasp.

  For a few seconds, it felt like standing in a whirlwind of Charge. Those seconds seemed to stretch into an eternity, but at the same time, the speed that Node One decayed was ludicrous. One moment, the fungal mat was intact except for the giant hole my grenade had blown through it. The next…

  Boss Defeated: Node One

  Level Up! Eighty-Five to Eighty-Six

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  The entire mat shriveled up into nothing, falling apart into dust even as it curled around me. One moment, it was there. They next, it was gone—and I was falling toward a pit of sludge that spanned the entire gap below me.

  Tori Pulled me up, grabbed my wrist, and yanked. “Got you!”

  I let her stabilize me mid-air, then Levitate me up until I was safely back on solid ground—or at least, solid fungus. “Thanks.”

  We’d done it. All around us, the Mycopolis was in a state of decay. It wasn’t as fast as Node One had died. Some parts were simply rotting or shriveling away like unwatered corn. Other parts had started choking in waste. But the fungal city was, without a doubt, dying.

  I had six points, but no need to spend them right now.

  Tori headed straight for the loot. Two purple epic light-beams and a single orange legendary one glowed on the edge of the arena. I had a feeling the legendary one was for me—but before I could focus on that, I needed to understand what I’d seen.

  In the moments before it had died, Node One hadn’t just been recycling Charge.

  It had been producing it.

  Energy had laws.

  I hadn’t loved school, but physics wasn’t exactly ‘school,’ was it now? It was really engineering, or mechanics, at a conceptual level. One of the core principles of physics, according to the conservation of energy, was that it couldn’t be created or destroyed. And yet…

  The Mycopolis was a closed system. As far as I could tell, it didn’t have an external source of energy. Oh, there was plenty of Charge resonance. But it was dropping fast. We’d destroyed all three Nodes, and with it, we’d destroyed the source of energy for the whole place.

  Part of me wanted to tear into the pit below Node One, just to prove my theory correct. But we didn’t have time for a massive dig, or to find a break-point like in the Whole New World dungeon. Besides, I didn’t need that. The system was closed. It wasn’t like a car engine, or even a house with solar panels, where the energy came from gasoline or the sun. There was no external power source beyond what it had taken to kick-start the system. It was growing entirely on its own.

  I couldn’t prove that, of course. But I had a pretty strong hunch that the Mycopolis was producing more Charge than it could consume.

  So…two questions arose. Not ‘how?’ That was a good one, but it wasn’t the one I needed. First, ‘why?’ Why would this dungeon need to produce Charge, especially given what I knew about Charge being life force? And second, ‘what?’

  The same kind of ‘what?’ I’d ask in some of my classes when I had no idea what was going on.

  After a moment, I shook my head and refocused as Tori jogged toward me. “Here you go, Hal. You can have it.”

  Forgeheart Elixir (Legendary)

  This Elixir can re-empower and restore any spent magical item. However, it spoils forty-eight hours after being removed from its host dungeon.

  “Thanks, Tori.” I put the third elixir in my inventory with the other two. Then I scratched my head. “Hey, do you know anything that breaks the conservation of energy law?”

  Tori stared at me, eyes narrowing over her mask. “You’re talking about physics, right?”

  “Right.” I explained the law to her in broad strokes, then fielded a few of her suggestions. Nuclear power, the sun, and so on. All were things that looked like they produced their own energy, but none of them actually did.

  Then Tori grinned. I couldn’t see it under her mask, but I saw it in her eyes. “Magic.”

  “No, Charge isn’t infinite.”

  “Not Charge, Hal. Magic. There’s no good explanation for what I can do. Yeah, I get tired out when I Levitate multiple people, but it’s nowhere near as tired as I’d be after lifting multiple people with my arms. I don’t have Charge in me—if I did, I’d be resonant, right?”

  I stopped for a minute. Then I shook my head. “You probably are resonant. I’m going to have to investigate Node One.”

  But even as I did, a massive fungal spire collapsed in the distance. For a moment, I thought it was just the city decaying more, but then a second tower fell apart, and spores filled the air in the distance. And in the haze-filled, spore-choked air, a massive form erupted upward. The fungal mass towered far over the city, its radioactive, yellow glow almost blinding against the slowly decaying, darkening city. It nearly touched the ceiling, then started expanding outward.

  The Nexus: Level Ninety-Two Dungeon Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Extreme

  The Nodes feed the Nexus. The Nexus gives life to the Nodes. Disrupt the balance and pay.

  Broodmother - This boss is nesting and will not leave its lair unless certain conditions are met.

  Insatiable - This boss will feed on any viable food sources within its range.

  New Dungeon Affix: Enraged: All monsters in this dungeon are aware of your presence and will react accordingly.

  Tori stared at the gigantic monster. Then she turned to me. “Time to leave?”

  I tore my gaze from it and slowly nodded, then climbed into the Voltsmith’s Mech and turned toward the ramp in the distance and the dungeon’s exit even as the first fungal monsters surged around the corner and charged us. “Yep. Definitely time to leave. Let’s go!”