At last, everyone had burned a path through the yellow, furry "grassland," blasting the slime monsters—like enormous, wildly thrashing waves—into retreat until they had no choice but to leave a passage open. The group hurried forward. They had walked for less than two minutes when the brown "ground" grew darker, and the clusters of tentacles that had stood on it like fur were replaced by bone spikes and hooks like trees.
Only then did some relatively "normal" enemies finally appear.
Of course, "normal" meant these things at least had monster faces. But in practice, the way they appeared was anything but normal. They sprouted straight from the dark-brown carapace, like fungi in a jungle after rain, bursting with nutrients. First, thin shoots like mycelium poked out of invisible holes, gathering into moving masses shaped like enormous tentacles, then wrapping around the hooks on the carapace.
They continued to swell, as though one mountain after another were rising from the ground. Then the solid-bodied monsters broke free from the mounds of mycelium, like young Godzillas hatching from eggs.
If you ignored the final hatching step, the whole process did look just like mushrooms growing. But once the process was stretched out several times over, or even dozens of times, the scene became bizarre in the extreme. What was more, there wasn't just one of them—more than a hundred mycelial monsters were taking shape.
If the aura of willpower hadn't still been turning, someone's SAN would probably have hit zero again.
Then the monsters that had emerged from the "mycelium" mounds twisted and shook off their fuzz, revealing their terrifying forms. Each was a gigantic beast with four tusks. At first glance, they looked like a pack of hairless gorillas, with upper bodies far more massive and ferocious than their lower halves,