If the desert was a dry oven and the ocean was a salty bath, the Jungle of Xylos was a giant, green, steaming pot of soup.
"I am melting," Kaelen announced for the fourteenth time. He was currently hacking through a vine the size of a fire hose with his stone mace. "My fur is no longer a mane. It is a wet sponge. I have lost my dignity, Elara. It is somewhere back by the giant carnivorous fern."
"It's called a tropical rainforest, Kaelen," Elara said, wiping a mixture of sweat and bug spray from her forehead. "The humidity is 98%. And stop complaining—at least you aren't Zev."
They all looked up. Zev was currently tangled in a web of "Sticky-Vines" about twenty feet above the ground. He was hanging upside down, his wings pinned to his sides.
"I am a majestic predator of the sky!" Zev yelled, swinging pathetically. "Why does the grass have glue?! Why is the forest trying to hug me to death?!"
Roric moved past them like a ghost, his black fur somehow staying perfectly dry. He tapped a tree trunk with his dagger. "The trees are breathing, Weaver. I can hear the sap pumping. It sounds like a thousand tiny heartbeats."
"That's because the trees are the communication network here," Elara explained, checking her handheld scanner. "The Jungle Hive is a bio-organic collective. The trees, the bugs, the moss—it's all one giant brain. And we just walked into its frontal lobe."
The Mosquitoes of Unusual Size (M.O.U.S.)
The humor of the situation evaporated when the first buzzing started. It didn't sound like a normal mosquito. It sounded like a low-flying propeller plane.
"Does anyone else hear a drone?" Elara asked, pausing.
Out of the canopy dropped a mosquito the size of a small dog. Its needle-nose was made of a dark, iridescent chitin that looked sharp enough to pierce tank armor.
"PROTECT THE WEAVER!" Kaelen roared, forgetting his wet fur.
He swung his mace, swatting the giant bug mid-air. It exploded in a cloud of green goo.
"Disgusting!" Kaelen barked, wiping the slime on a leaf. "It had the audacity to try and drink the Royal Blood!"
"There's more!" Roric warned.
Suddenly, the air was thick with them. It was a dogfight. Zev, finally freeing himself from the vines with a surge of electricity, became a living bug-zapper.
"EAT VOLTAGE, YOU OVERGROWN GNATS!" Zev screamed, spinning in circles and throwing sparks.
The mosquitoes that touched him turned into charred husks. Roric was a blur of steel, slicing wings off mid-air before the bugs could even land.
Elara, meanwhile, was frantically digging through her bag. "I have the pheromone canister! Cover your noses!"
She cracked a glass vial. A thick, sweet smell of rotting fruit filled the air.
The mosquitoes instantly stopped attacking. They hovered for a moment, looking confused, then turned and flew away toward a nearby swamp as if they'd just been invited to a much better party.
"Rotten fruit?" Kaelen asked, sniffing the air. "You saved us with the smell of a bad peach?"
"In a hive, smell is law," Elara panted. "I just told them we're fermented and poisonous."
The Ant-Sized Lion
They reached the gates of the Hive—a massive, hexagonal tunnel made of hardened spit and mud that rose hundreds of feet into the air.
Standing guard were the Myrmidons: giant, upright-walking ant warriors. They stood eight feet tall, carried spears made of obsidian, and had mandibles that could snap a tree trunk.
The head guard stepped forward. His antennae twitched, tapping against Kaelen's forehead.
"You... smell... of... fruit," the Ant-Guard clicked, his voice a series of pops and whistles that Elara's translator struggled to keep up with.
"We are ambassadors!" Elara shouted. "We seek the Second Key! We come to speak with the Great Matriarch!"
The Ant-Guard looked at Kaelen. He looked at the Lion's massive muscles. Then he looked at the Lion's plastic yellow life-vest (which Kaelen had refused to take off because he 'liked the pockets').
"The... Golden... One... is... small," the Ant-Guard clicked.
Kaelen froze. His eyes widened. "Small? Did he just call me small?"
"To an ant who can lift fifty times his own body weight? Yeah, you're a featherweight, big guy," Elara whispered.
"I am a King!" Kaelen bellowed at the ant. "I have slain droids! I have smashed mountains! I am the Sun-Lord!"
The Ant-Guard tilted his head. He reached down, grabbed a fallen boulder the size of a small car, and tossed it casually into the air, catching it with one hand.
"Cute," the Ant-Guard clicked.
Kaelen turned to Elara, looking genuinely wounded. "I hate this forest. I want to go home."
The Audience with the Matriarch
They were led deep underground. The temperature dropped, but the humidity stayed. The walls were pulsing with a soft, green light.
In the center of a massive cathedral of wax sat the Matriarch. She was a colossal queen ant, her abdomen the size of a school bus, but her upper torso was elegant, almost human-like, covered in white chitin armor.
"The Weaver," the Matriarch spoke. Her voice didn't come from her mouth; it resonated directly in their minds. "You seek the Key of the Earth. But the Key is not a stone. It is a seed."
"A seed?" Elara stepped forward. "We need it to close the Rift. My cousin Aris said—"
"Aris is a creature of the salt," the Matriarch interrupted. "He understands the machine. I understand the Life. The Rift is eating the Jungle. The trees are dying. My children are born with broken wings."
She leaned down, her multi-faceted eyes reflecting Elara's face a thousand times.
"To take the Seed, you must prove you can protect the Life. My drones have found a 'Null-Growth' in the deep roots. A sickness from the Rift. It is a machine-blight. If you can prune the rot, the Seed is yours."
The "Pruning" Mission
"So, let me get this straight," Zev said as they walked down into the dark, slimy root-tunnels. "We are the Matriarch's gardeners? We traveled across an ocean to pull weeds?"
"Not weeds, Zev," Elara said, checking her scanner. "The Null-Energy is crystallizing. It's creating 'Grey-Gunk.' It's a self-replicating nanite virus."
They found the rot. It looked like a patch of the world had turned into black-and-white static. The roots were covered in a metallic, grey moss that was literally eating the color out of the jungle.
And standing in the middle of the rot was a Null-Shambler.
It was a creature made of glitching geometry—half-Feral, half-static. It moved in staccato jumps, appearing ten feet away, then five, then right in front of them.
"It is a ghost of the Rift!" Roric cried, his daggers passing right through the creature's chest. "My blades find no flesh!"
"It's out of phase!" Elara realized. "Physical attacks won't work! Zev, hit it with a high-frequency pulse! We need to stabilize its matter!"
"I am on it!" Zev flew toward the Shambler. He didn't use a bolt this time. He flared his wings and emitted a high-pitched, agonizing whistle of pure electrical resonance.
The Shambler flickered. It turned solid.
"Now! Kaelen!"
Kaelen didn't use his mace. He used the "World's Best Boss" mug he still had tucked in his belt. He had filled it with the fermented fruit pheromone earlier.
"EAT THE OFFICE SUPPLIES!" Kaelen roared, hurling the sticky, fermented liquid at the Shambler.
The organic fruit-acid hit the nanite-moss. The reaction was violent. The grey static began to dissolve, unable to process the complex biological sugars.
The Shambler screamed—a sound like a dial-up modem dying—and melted into a puddle of harmless black ink.
The Seed of Hope
They returned to the Matriarch, covered in black ink and smelling like a brewery.
"The rot is gone," Elara said, holding up her hand.
The Matriarch bowed her head. From the ceiling, a glowing green pod descended. It opened to reveal a pulsing, emerald seed the size of a basketball.
"The Second Key," the Matriarch whispered. "Take it, Weaver. But know this: The Third Key is guarded by the Sky-Eater. To reach the Star-Nest, you must fly higher than the clouds. You must fly until the air vanishes."
Elara took the Seed. It felt warm. It felt like a heartbeat.
"One more to go," Elara said, looking at her Alphas.
Kaelen was busy trying to scrape the black ink off his yellow life-vest. Roric was cleaning his daggers. Zev was trying to see if he could eat a piece of the wax wall.
"Hey," Elara called out. "Pack your bags, boys. Next stop... the atmosphere."
Kaelen stopped scrubbing. He looked up at the ceiling, then at the sky through a ventilation shaft. "Wait. If we go to the stars... will my swivel chair still spin in zero gravity?"
"That," Elara laughed, "is a scientific question we are about to answer."