The moment the mycelium tendrils started to enwrap me, I began a chain of quick spells. First, I used Transport Item, reaching into Dusk, then into some glass within her.

  Technically, I could pull items in and out of dusk without needing the spell, especially since our bond had strengthened, but I was doing something rather more… difficult… than just transporting something into my hand.

  The spell itself struggled to do what I needed, but linking to the powerful spatial energy and the spatial anchor that existed inside of my body, alongside the massive boost I had thanks to my innate connection to Dusk all came together, and just barely allowed me to pull it off.

  The spell completed, and a flight potion teleported directly into my mouth. I swallowed and felt the spinning lightness rush through my body as the arrays completed themselves within my body.

  Then I teleported straight up into the air, as high as I could.

  Teleporting through the grasp of something else that was rich with mana was a considerable drain on my reserves, but I didn't care. It could consume all of my mana if it needed to – all I knew was that letting the massive true body of the animation fungus grab me was a terminally bad idea.

  My spirit bucked and strained, working to stop me from casting a single spell and I worked to wrestle it down. Normally, I could just catch myself with Immovable Lock, but given the fact that I was currently unable to cast anything, I started to fall.

  Very, very slowly.

  The lift generated by the flight potion slowed my descent. I couldn’t direct or control it until I was actually back in control of my spirit and body, but even its passive state left me the next best thing to being a feather on the wind.

  Beneath me, the main body of the animation-fungus was emerging, and I felt a bit of concern.

  Instead of being interwoven with a skeleton, this fungus had wrapped itself around a war-root, not in the symbiotic relationship that many fungi and plants had, but rather a purely parasitic one, draining it and restructuring its wooden roots into a huge form that somewhat resembled a… a…

  I wasn’t sure. It had four arm-leg-things, each one at a right angle to all of the others, and its center was a large ball. There wasn’t anything else I knew like it in nature, and it moved in a jittering, stilted way that was rather unnerving.

  The power it radiated was also deeply concerning and a little strange as well. The budded monsters it had spawned were all in the low to mid third gate range, but this felt rather different. It was more like I was facing a cluster of five or more mages that had all been interconnected and linked together, allowing each of them to pull on the power of the others. The powers that made it up ranged from a reasonably powerful early fourth gate, to barely broken into third gate at all.

  “What in the–”

  One of its arm-legs snapped upwards, the ‘joint’ bending backwards completely to reach for me, and I flew upwards, dodging out of the way of the blow. I began to power Mantle Dragonfire as I stayed above the creature.

  It thrashed out with more tendrils, and I was easily able to pull above them. Honestly, for all of the power and menace that this thing had, the mere fact it had no way to get off the ground sharply reduced its level of threat.

  Even though I still wasn’t sure how exactly Orykson had the ability to fly, considering that he didn’t seem to be using an item and none of his mana types could be used to control the winds, I could see why he used it. Once I was able to combine my Foxstep with flight potions and Immovable Lock, I’d have an excellent amount of aerial mobility.

  I continued to cycle the dragon’s breath, allowing it to build power as the mycelial monster lashed up fruitlessly at me, then, once I was nearing the limit of my ability to control it, I released a beam of power down into the tangle. Thick, magmatic power burst against the thick cords, and flame rippled across the monstrous roots and mycelial threads. The giant amalgam shook, then sunk into the earth, delving deep. The fires went out, squashed by the damp soil, and the thing stilled.

  I hadn’t been pushing my mana senses below the ground before, but now that I knew where it was, I could still sense its immense power. I’d taken a bite out with my attack, but not enough to kill the thing.

  I could throw some firebombs, or even unleash another Mantle Dragonfyre attack, but I’d have to punch through the layer of earth it had soaked itself in, which would sharply reduce the efficacy of any attack I tried.

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  It waited, lurking below the ground, while I waited, hovering in the skies above. We stood at an impasse for a long time, and Kene’s voice came through one of the protective orbs flickering around me.

  “Mal,” they said, sounding both mildly annoyed and amused at the same time. “It’s a connection of a bunch of the same fungi that have overtaken a war root. Do you remember what you did the last time you fought a monster like that?”

  “Yeah, I drai…” I started, then trailed off and had to resist the urge to smack my forehead against something. Maybe if I was lucky, a bird would fly by and hit me.

  “Did you forget that you could drain it for power?” Kene asked, and even though I couldn’t see their face, I could hear their smug smile through the orb.

  “Okay,” I said. “In my defense.”

  “Yes?”

  “In my defense,” I repeated, but nothing especially came to mind.

  “Curse you,” I muttered, then reached out with my mana senses. I fired up Harvest Plant Life, then used the spell to make it a Mass Harvest, pairing it with Fungal Entwinement, targeting the mass of animation-fungi, then used the harvesting spell again to target the war root it was cannibalizing for power.

  Mana surged through me, and the thing erupted from the earth. It compressed its body and leapt at me, throwing itself upwards in a desperate attempt to crush the thing that was draining its power. It lost one of its limbs in the compression, completely destroying its structural integrity just to throw itself at me.

  I bolted upwards, continuing to drain its power, but its self-sacrificing leap was faster than my potion by a wide margin, and Kene’s orbs flickered around me in blue shielding and golden magic resistance spells as it wrapped itself around my body. We fell from the sky, hitting the ground with an earth-rattling boom. I jolted around, tossed about like a popcorn kernel in a covered pan, Kene’s shields the only thing that was stopping me from being crushed.

  The tendrils then began to squeeze, and the blue and yellow aura started to flicker around me violently. First one orb popped, then a second, and a third fell in rapid succession. I extended my mana senses, trying to stretch my spatial sense outside the tangle of mycelium to let me teleport out.

  Then a new source of magic joined with the mycelium, a churning mass of death above all, tinged with vast swathes of time, creation, mental, and even physical mana. The power felt old and heavy, and for a second I thought it might be some sort of variant of asomatous – naturally formed emotion spirits. But no, that wasn’t right. A shade? A ghost?

  The exact differences between ghosts and shades weren’t something I was the most educated on, but I knew that a ghost was the imprint of a person’s mind, while shades were impacts of a person’s magic. This thing seemed to be a bundle of spiritual power, wielding its dominion, mind, and memories as weapons, but it didn’t seem to have any echoes of its original powers. That put it squarely in the territory of being a ghost, then

  I only had a second to feel proud about my deduction though, as my mind was absolutely bludgeoned with hatred, anger, and disgust.

  “Vile beast-servant of the false one!” the ghost screamed into my head. “Through thy bloody sacrifice, might thee find peace! I absolve thee of thy sins and criminal mockery of me, so thy death might be used to destroy the three companions with whom desolation is brought to my rightful home!”

  My runelight lens slipped from my spirit, and I cast Placid Mind, wrapping my mind in the shell of my mana senses and shoving out the ghost’s influences.

  But the canny old spirit had chosen the right moment to strike. The final one of Kene’s orbs flickered out, and a terrible crushing weight slammed down on my body. I let out a gasp, then pulled myself into Dusk’s realm.

  I had been holding off on that, because I wasn’t entirely sure it would work. I could stow away items pretty much instantly, but opening portals still took a bit of work. If it hadn’t worked there, I would have had to try and teleport out before it crushed me, which might well have wound up with me breaking more bones. I was already in a sling, I didn’t need another. Or a rib cast, or…

  I shook my head. Maybe the fall from the sky had been a bit more costly than I’d thought.

  Dawn shot over to me then, and I felt her dominion seep into her bones. She seemed to focus on me, and though understanding her was difficult, I had the impression she wanted to know my plan, how I was going to respond.

  “That’s a good question,” I said, running Starfish Regeneration through my body. I felt a bit of the minty cold rush over my body, especially my head, and I started to cast spells.

  First, I used Raven’s Shade Messenger to send a message to Kene, letting them know I’d slipped into Dusk’s world, since they wouldn’t actually know that. Opening the tiny portal to let the shade out didn’t let the mycelial menace in, and I suspected that the ghost wouldn’t oppose another spirit. After all, if it had a problem with natural shades, there wouldn’t be so many in this area.

  Then I grabbed a spirit-gourd. I couldn’t cast the Spirit Trap spell, but this would have to work for now. With my life and death mana to power its natural trapping arrays, it should be enough. My only concern was that I didn’t know how powerful the ghost was – if I was dealing with an arcanist rank ghost, then there was no way my third gate gourds would be enough.

  As I prepared to teleport way up into the sky again, using my exit as a reference point, Dawn sparked a bit of golden light and gave me an impression of wanting me to wait, and a glimpse, for just a moment, into her strange, still protean, half-formed understanding of the world.

  She wasn’t ready, not completely. Her first gate, if I could even call it that, wasn’t completely ingrained, and she wanted to ingrain them before moving forward.

  I hadn’t even realized how many spells she had – it felt like she had five spells: three mastered, two ingrained.

  I’d only ever seen her cast the crystal self-harvesting spell, though, and that was only one of the mastered spells. I had never seen her use any other magic.

  Had I?

  Then she was calling on me for the power needed to overflow her garden and break into second gate.

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