The rusted iron ladder ended fifty feet above a floor of spongy, yielding organic mulch. Arthur Vance dropped the leftover distance, his combat boots sinking four inches into a dense carpet of violet and indigo moss that hissed softly as it tightly packed beneath his weight.
Arthur right away brought his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine up into his shoulder. He swept the integrated tactical illuminator across the vast underground expanse. What the beam revealed was not stone, iron, or machinery. It was an ancient, underground fungal jungle that stretched as far as the optics on his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe could resolve.
Towering thirty feet into the damp darkness were huge macro-mushrooms whose caps glowed with an eerie, pulsing bioluminescence. Delicate ribbons of semi-clear fungal silk hung from the cavernous ceiling like funereal drapes, swaying gently in a heat updraft that felt like the humid breath of a sleeping giant beast. Every breath drawn through Arthur’s tactical breathing mask tasted faintly of sweet, overripe melon, damp copper earth, and the sharp, spark prickle of dormant fungal spores.
Behind him, Titus dropped from the upright fissure, landing with a muffled, earth-shaking thud that sent clouds of eerie-glowing violet spores billowing into the air like glowing pollen. The ancient terrapin shook his massive black shell, his dark rock armor scales grinding together in deep distaste as he blinked his heavy yellow eyelids against the glowing fog.
