The Archmage Became a Mushroom Tamer

Chapter 18 - What Grows Between

Chapter 18 · 1,276 words

The stone bench was cold against Aldric's back. He sat in the contestant area, a narrow strip of shaded stone between the arena and the low wall that separated competitors from the spectator rows, and let his body report its damage.

His forearms ached with a deep, persistent throb from mana channeling strain. The narrow channels in his arms, never designed for the throughput he had been forcing through them, were inflamed. His hands trembled when he held them out. The tremor came from mana depletion, the channels' walls contracting involuntarily, small spasms rippling through the tissue. When he stood too quickly, his vision dimmed at the edges, a grey narrowing that took two seconds to clear.

The taste of exertion was metallic and dry, coating his tongue. He had pushed his mana reserves to near-zero twice in succession, channeling through a body whose total capacity was twelve units against a need that had demanded twenty, thirty, more. In his previous life, mana depletion of this degree would have been a minor inconvenience, a restorative draught and ten minutes of meditation. In this body, it was a ceiling. There was no restorative draught. There was no meditation technique that could expand channels that had not been trained from childhood. There was only time, and time was the one resource the Trial would not give him.

Beside him on the work surface, Spore sat in its container. The mushroom's cap had not recovered from the previous round. The deep red was faded at the edges, darkening from brown toward the grey of tissue pushed past its functional limit. The stem was bent and curved, indicating structural fatigue. Thermal output was reduced to a faint warmth that he could only detect by pressing his palm against the cap's surface.

Spore was a living organism that had paid a cost for every shot it had fired. The thermal matrix, the pre-System mana pattern that gave the fireball its force, was embedded in the mushroom's living tissue, and every activation drew on the organism's own metabolic resources. Two matches, four fireballs, and the strain was showing damage that would take hours of fresh substrate and rest to repair.

Mira was already working.

She had positioned herself at the sideline work bench during the second match, and the moment Aldric had set Spore's container down, she had begun. Her hands moved through the substrate preparation with a competence that was no longer new. Compost from the staged raw materials. Mineral clay, measured by feel rather than by scale, her fingers knowing the proportion through repetition. Ambient-mana-absorbing moss, torn into small pieces and worked into the mix with a pressing motion that distributed it evenly.

The silverthorn tannin binding agent was the critical component. She measured it carefully, three milliliters per hundred grams of substrate, the ratio they had established through weeks of experimentation. Her fingers were steady. The vial was small, the tannin dark and viscous, and she let it drip in a thin, controlled stream while her other hand turned the substrate mix slowly, ensuring even distribution.

Aldric watched her. She had developed her own assessment protocol for Spore's condition, her own rhythm for the work. He recognized improvements in her technique: her substrate mixing was more consistent than his own, the binding agent distribution more even.

Mira transferred Spore to the fresh substrate. The effect was almost immediate. The cap brightened slightly as it contacted the new mix, the deep red deepening at the center where the tissue met the nutrient-rich surface. The stem straightened a fraction, the structural fatigue easing as the substrate's ambient mana began to feed the thermal matrix. The warmth returned, faint but measurable, radiating from the cap in a gentle pulse.

She checked the cap's color, deep red but not yet crimson, recovery in progress, and pressed gently near the stem to assess firmness. Her touch was careful, clinical.

"He'll be ready for the next round," she said. Not a question. "But the recovery margin is thin. One more round at this intensity and the fatigue threshold may not reset in time."

"I know."

She looked at him. Her eyes moved to his forearms, to the way his hands were resting on his knees, still trembling, the tremor finer now but present. She did not comment on it. She had seen the channeling strain before. She knew what it cost.

"Substrate patches for the next round?" she asked.

"Same composition. Different placement pattern. They'll be looking for the eastern corridor approach."

"I'll prep them."

She turned back to the raw materials. Aldric closed his eyes and let his body exist in the space between exhaustion and function.

Students were approaching the contestant area.

He heard them before he saw them, footsteps on the stone, the murmur of voices pitched low. He opened his eyes. Combat-class students were keeping their distance, walking past the contestant area with deliberate casualness, but their eyes were on him. They were watching. With the focused attention of people who were trying to categorize something that did not fit their categories.

A support-class student, a Shield-bearer by the look of his reinforced tunic, paused at the edge of the area. He hesitated, then asked a question: "The substrate patches. Are those, I mean, the smoke and the slippery surface, those are from the cultivation skills? Substrate Infusion?"

"Yes."

The Shield-bearer nodded slowly. "And the fire. That's, that's the mushroom itself."

"That's the mushroom."

He stood there for a moment, trying to fit this information into a framework that had no space for it. Then he moved on.

Behind him, two low-tier freshmen stood near the wall. An Earthworker and a Water-bearer. Aldric recognized the Earthworker from the spectator row in the first round. They were standing close together, their expressions a mixture of awe and something more fragile. Hope, the kind that hurts because it has been disappointed too many times to trust.

The Earthworker whispered something to the Water-bearer. She nodded. They did not come closer.

Aldric was too exhausted to engage. He understood the social dynamics. The low-tier students saw possibility; the combat-class students saw a problem; the faculty saw an anomaly. Each group would respond differently, and all of their responses would create new constraints. He was no longer the joke, the Mushroom Tamer in the storage closet. He was something undefined. Anomalous. Possibly threatening. Possibly inspiring.

He was no longer invisible. And visibility attracted attention that he did not have the energy to manage.

Mira's hands moved beside him. The substrate patches were taking shape under her fingers, thin, even layers of the compost-clay-moss mix, bound with silverthorn tannin, cut to sizes that would fit in the oilcloth wrapping for quick deployment. She worked with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that the next round might come in minutes.

Aldric's forearms throbbed. His mana reserves were near zero. Spore was recovering on fresh substrate, but the recovery margin was thin. The semi-final awaited. The opponent would be a top-tier combat class, a Shield-class or a Blade-class, someone with defensive capabilities that could negate environmental tactics, someone who had watched every round and built a counter-strategy.

The body had almost nothing left to give.

He sat on the cold stone bench and watched Mira work, and felt the warmth of Spore's cap brightening on the fresh substrate beside him. The partnership was an operational unit that functioned under pressure, that delegated and trusted and produced results.

The body was depleted. But the team was holding.

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