The smell of blood was heavy; it had seeped between the stones, mingled with fungal threads, and hung in the cold night air. Alexander could finally feel that the battle was truly over. There were no more snarls, no scraping claws, only the uneven breathing of the wounded and the steady drip of blood from somewhere unseen. For a brief moment, his mind loosened. The threat was gone, and the tension inside him, like a muscle clenched for too long, slowly unwound.
They had won.
But when he lifted his head and looked around, that relief shattered. The floor of the ravine was covered in bodies. Scaled forms. Torn limbs. Members of his own pack. Dark blood clung to the stone; severed claws, glassy eyes staring at nothing. The image was clear, but his mind was not. It felt as though a thin fog had settled over his thoughts.
How many?
He tried to count, slowly, with effort.
One… two… three…
His gaze caught on a smaller body. His size. Its chest torn open.
Four.
Another small one.
Five… six…
He stopped.
Seven.
He counted again, more carefully, more deliberately.
Seven.
Only seven remained from the pack. And of those seven, two could not even stand. Their wounds were open; bone was visible. Their breathing was ragged, their eyes hollow. Death was merely delayed. This was not victory. This was collapse.
"How did we fall this far?" The thought settled heavily in his mind. Five scaled Nuxali. Only five. The number turned over and over in his thoughts but refused to fit. The balance of power did not justify this. The calculation did not hold.
It should not have happened.
At that moment, one of the dying Nuxali stirred. Its chest was ripped open, one hind leg missing, yet it dragged itself forward. As if it had forgotten pain entirely, it crawled toward a small, pale mushroom growing between the stones five meters away. As though that thing held every answer.
Alexander's eyes locked onto the mushroom, and from deep within his mind a powerful urge rose.
Eat.
Hunger surged back instantly. His stomach clenched. Saliva filled his mouth.
Eat.
The urge intensified the longer he stared, nearly strong enough to drown out every other thought. But at the same time, another realization slowly surfaced.
"We ended up like this because of it."
The battle. The chaos. The fragmentation. The strange dullness in his mind had begun after the mushrooms. Now he felt the fog more clearly. Focusing was difficult. Numbers slipped. Logical chains fractured before they could complete.
Something was wrong.
"There is… something wrong with my mind."
And in that instant, the answer came to him.
The System.
If there was something wrong with his mind… it would tell him.
Alexander forced himself to think about the System. For a brief moment, nothing happened, and a spark of panic flickered in his numbed mind. Then, as if the fog before his eyes had thinned, translucent symbols appeared in the air. Pale. Unstable.
He tried to focus on the Statistics section. Even this simple act required effort. The letters refused to remain sharp. Their edges blurred, wavering as though seen underwater. He had to narrow his eyes and consciously anchor his attention; each time his focus slipped toward the scent of mushrooms, toward hunger, toward that warm, dull comfort, he dragged it back by force.
Lines scrolled past his vision.
Too many.
Irrelevant.
Find it.
At last, his gaze locked onto the line he was searching for.
INT: 5.8
At first, the number meant nothing. He stared.
5.8
It took time for the symbol to register. He tried to remember what it had been before, making a slow, painful comparison. The realization did not strike all at once; it assembled itself piece by piece, like fragments of a shattered structure fitting back together.
Lower.
Much lower.
His Intelligence stat had dropped. A delayed but heavy wave of awareness passed through him, and from within the haze something sharper began to rise.
Anger.
"My mind… what happened to it?"
The thought came unevenly.
"How did I become this… slow? This stupid?"
The answer surfaced with frightening clarity.
The mushrooms.
He didn't even need the System to confirm it. There was something in them. Something addictive. Something that dulled the mind and stole its edge. Something that traded clarity for comfort.
And even as he thought that, another sensation stirred.
Craving.
Warm. Insistent. Persuasive.
His gaze drifted involuntarily toward the nearby red caps. His stomach tightened. His jaw tensed.
"Just one more…"
The urge was strong. Now he could feel the split clearly. One part of him calculating, horrified. The other whispering that none of it mattered, as long as the hunger fell silent.
His claws dug into the stone.
"There is something wrong with my mind."
This time, the thought was steadier.
"And if I stay here… it will get worse."
He looked at the number again.
5.8
That was not him. Not the version who planned, adapted, survived.
"I need to leave. I need to get away from them."
He repeated it to himself again and again, suppressing the craving as he began moving through the narrow paths of the ravine. As he moved forward, the scent of mushrooms weakened. It was still there, faint, lingering in the air, but it was no longer suffocating.
Eventually, he reached the uneven descent carved along the wall, the same narrow and treacherous path they had used the first time they entered the fissure. He stopped beneath it and looked up at the thin strip of sky above.
He did not climb.
Not yet.
Instead, he turned and continued toward the far end of the ravine, the side he had never explored before. There were no mushrooms here anymore. None. The red fungal field that had seized their minds, and its heavy scent, were entirely behind him.
After a long search, he found what he needed: a shallow recess in the stone wall, barely deep enough to shield his body from two sides. It wasn't perfect, but it was defensible. Isolated.
He lowered himself into it and began to rest.
The Mushroom Urge still whispered inside his mind, a steady suggestion reminding him of warmth, fullness, comfort. His stomach tightened more from memory than from true hunger.
But he resisted.
Again and again.
Eventually exhaustion dragged him under. Sleep came heavy and hard, and with it, silence.
When he woke, pale sunlight filtered down into the ravine. It was morning.
His entire body ached from the battle, his back torn open, his abdomen bruised, his muscles stiff. But he welcomed the pain. It was sharp and clear. It helped his mind remain focused. It cut through the fog.
He opened the System again.
This time the translucent interface stabilized more quickly. The letters shimmered, then held in place.
He focused.
[STATISTICS]
CON: 17.9
STR: 15.3
AGI: 16.6
DEX: 12
INT: 7.2
[Biomass] - 14 / 23
[Drone Capacity] - 0/1
[Template Capacity] - 0/1
He froze.
7.2.
His Intelligence had risen. His mind was beginning to recover.
But shock overrode everything else.
And it whispered one thing.
"How many fucking months have I been stuck in this crack?"