Chapter 122: Matthew: I Will Be the Apex of the Food Chain
Kin?
Matthew, floating in the cloud cover, paused.
Something that considered him kin and was broadcasting from this location. That had to be the Megamycete.
He sent a response into the mental channel without hesitation: "Oh, my kin. Where are you?"
It had probably never encountered another of its kind before, let alone had a conversation. His reply visibly excited it. The fragmentary mental transmission came back with something warmer in it.
"Below... cave..."
"A cave."
That aligned. Miranda had first found the Megamycete in a cave. By the sound of it, the thing hadn't relocated in the intervening century.
"Wait there," he sent back. "I'll come find you right now."
"Right... now?" The Megamycete seemed puzzled. "Horse... on top?"
Matthew considered this for a moment. "It means soon. Very soon."
"Ah." A pause. "Good." Then silence.
He pocketed the response and picked up his radio.
"All units, listen. Any suspicious cave formations, report immediately. For this operation, unless a specific exception arises: no area-effect weapons. Nothing with a blast radius."
The last part was necessary. He didn't want his teams bombing the Megamycete by accident because they hadn't been told what they were actually looking for.
"Primary objective: locate and recover any research materials Miranda left behind. Any documents, records, experimental results you find come back intact. Nothing gets destroyed."
"Yes, sir."
He cut the transmission.
His gaze locked onto the signal direction. He adjusted the gravity orientation around himself and moved.
To an observer, this would have looked like flying. In practice, it was considerably less elegant. He wasn't propelled like Superman. He was being thrown by one gravitational vector and caught by another, with his body absorbing both the launch and the stop in sequence. Every application of the ability required his body to take the full force of what was being thrown at it. Push past the tolerance without preparation and he wouldn't fly anywhere; his skeleton would separate from the rest of him mid-transit and he'd end up as something difficult to describe to a coroner.
This was why two months of training had been necessary before he tried anything faster than a careful hover.
He came to a stop above a large rock face. Not a cave. The Megamycete's signal was inside the mountain itself.
He thought about this for a moment.
Then he decided to make his own entrance.
Eighty tons per square meter. Two opposing gravity vectors applied to the same flat plane.
He would split the rock, mist through the gap, and close the distance from the inside.
He stood in midair.
The mountain trembled.
The crack spread from a point directly below him, widening with the sound of something fundamental giving way: rock fracturing and separating the way a continent does when the pressure has been building for too long.
He misted in.
Narrow at first, barely enough to move through. Then the passage deepened, hundreds of meters of descent in seconds, and then the space opened: suddenly, completely, in the manner of things that have been sealed a long time and finally see air.
He re-solidified in a cavern large enough to hold a sizable building.
Above him, at the center of the cave, suspended from the ceiling by a web of dense mycelium that had grown into every crack in the surrounding rock: the Megamycete.
Its body was composed of black E-Type Mold, shaped into something like a four-petaled flower bud, closed on itself. The bud was roughly a hundred meters across, and it rose and fell in a slow continuous rhythm, like breathing.
"You... came."
The four petals began to open. Inside them, cradled in the center, a pink form shaped vaguely like an infant.
"I did." Matthew floated in the space below it, looking up.
The Megamycete processed his presence with its collective perception. Something about it produced confusion.
"But... why..."
"So... small?"
A pause.
"Like... animals that... worship... me..."
It understood that he carried mold within him. It could sense the connection. But shouldn't kin be its own size? He was the scale of the small things that drifted near it over the years, accumulated spores and went on living their small lives nearby.
This was strange.
But it didn't matter.
Because either way:
"Merge... as one!"
The petals unfolded completely and the Megamycete showed what it had actually intended since the first moment it sensed him.
Mycelium erupted from every surface of the cave, pouring toward Matthew in a massive continuous wave of black.
Matthew wasn't surprised.
He hadn't come here for a friendly meeting either. The version of the Megamycete already fused inside him had been registering its wild counterpart since he entered the cave's airspace, and what that internal version was producing was not recognition. It was hunger.
He reached forward and made contact with the pink infant-shaped core.
The E-Type Mold in his body responded like something that had been starved.
It consumed. Rapidly, completely, without any interest in being gentle about it.
The wild Megamycete was doing exactly the same thing to him, matching aggression with aggression, pulling at the mold essence it could sense and trying to draw it back.
To accelerate the merger, the Megamycete constructed a chamber around Matthew: dense mycelium closing in from every direction, cocooning him completely.
This suited him perfectly.
The mycelium filled the space and kept moving.
Then the wild Megamycete noticed something odd about its kin.
The mold was there. He was definitely carrying E-Type Mold. But the composition was wrong. Not pure. Like a bowl of rice that was more than half gravel. You could try to chew it, but you'd break something in the attempt.
And the impurity wasn't slowing him down. If anything, it seemed to be protecting him from being consumed while making him faster at consuming. He was advancing through the wild Megamycete's mass at a rate that made no sense.
The wild Megamycete recognized the problem.
Too late.
More than half its mass had already been absorbed.
The cocoon it had constructed to contain him had become the cage that was now containing itself.