Chapter 17: Red Deadly Bloom

The dark came fast, and the red grass came faster.

Within an hour of passing the second barricade, the waist-high fields had swollen. The blades thickened, grew taller, pressing against the trucks’ hulls with a wet, fibrous sound like fingers dragging across glass. The headlights cut pale tunnels through the stalks, but the light seemed to be swallowed a few meters ahead, as if the grass itself was drinking it.

"It’s getting thicker," Reuben muttered, peering through the slitted window. "This ain’t normal."

Tabitha, sitting beside him, had gone partially invisible out of habit. "It’s like... it’s growing around us. On purpose."

She was right. The grass wasn’t just standing there. It was leaning. Curling. The blades flexed toward the heat of the engines, toward the body warmth of sixty people packed inside three armored trucks. Not like flowers toward sun.

Like mouths toward meat.

"Scanners up, full sweep," a soldier barked from the lead truck. "Watch the grass."

Every wrist in the convoy lit up, scanner lights sweeping in tight arcs. The readings were inconclusive. Not individual creatures. Not ranked bioforms. Just a low, ambient bioenergy signature humming through the ground beneath them.

As if the earth itself had a pulse.

Then the first vine hit the windshield.

It came from below, erupting through the cracked asphalt like a spear. Thick as a man’s thigh, dark red and glistening with sap, it wrapped around the lead truck’s front axle and pulled. The truck lurched forward, tires screaming against the road, before the vine snapped taut and yanked the entire front end down with a shriek of metal.

"Contact!" the driver screamed over the bracelet. "We’re snagged! It’s got the chassis!" ℯℯ𝑙.

Before anyone could respond, the road erupted.

Vines burst through the asphalt in dozens of places, thick and muscular, coiling around tires, wrapping around bumpers, threading through the gaps in the truck hulls. The red grass on both sides of the road surged upward, growing three, four, five meters in seconds, arching over the convoy like a closing ribcage.

And then the spores came.

The grass released them in a thick, rust-colored cloud. The particles were fine as dust, glowing faintly, drifting through the air with a sweet, cloying smell that cut straight through the filter masks.

"Masks aren’t holding!" a soldier shouted, voice cracking. "Spores are eating the seals!"

Gio felt it too. A burning in his throat. A pressure behind his eyes. The world blurred at the edges, colors bleeding together. Around him, recruits coughed and gagged. Melody’s cat ears flattened against her skull, her pupils blown wide, her tail lashing in agitation.

"I can’t...I can’t breathe," she gasped, clawing at her mask. "It’s getting through. It’s—"

She choked, doubling over.

"Lloyd!" Gio shouted, grabbing the noble’s shoulder. "Her mask’s done...give her yours!"

Lloyd hesitated. Just a fraction of a second. Then he ripped his mask off and jammed it onto Melody’s face. The spores hit his bare lungs instantly. He coughed, violently, his face reddening, but he grabbed Melody’s arm and hauled her upright.

"Don’t breathe deep," he rasped, voice already going hoarse. "Shallow. Just...shallow."

Melody stared at him, eyes wide behind the borrowed mask. She didn’t argue. She just nodded.

Around them, the convoy was losing the fight.

Soldiers fired plasma bolts at the vines, burning them back. But for every vine they severed, two more erupted from the ground. Reuben swung his stone mace, smashing roots to pulp, but they regrew in seconds, knitting themselves back together with wet, crunching sounds. Blaze torched a cluster of vines, but the fire spread through the grass and triggered another spore burst, making the situation worse. His fire wasn’t strong enough to burn it, and spores was eating at his breathing and stamina, he couldn’t maintain his flames.

"Physical attacks aren’t working!" Kojiro shouted, teleporting away from a vine that lashed at his legs. He reappeared on top of the nearest truck, katana drawn, hacking at the stalks curling around the roof. "It’s one organism! Cutting it just pisses it off!"

Gio heard him. And the words clicked.

One organism.

You couldn’t stab a forest. You couldn’t punch a field. You couldn’t shoot something that had no brain, no heart, no single point of failure.

But you could burn it, just that blaze wasn’t strong enough. But...

Gio closed his eyes. He reached inward, past the haze of spores choking his lungs, past the panic screaming in his chest. He found the thread of light connected to his second Bioform.

’Come.’

White light exploded from his palm. The Iron-Boned Bear materialized on the road ahead of the convoy, towering over the trucks, its iron-dark plates gleaming in the spore-choked air. It roared, and the sound shook the vines loose from the nearest truck’s hull.

"Cover your eyes!" Gio screamed to the recruits. "Everybody! eyes closed, heads down!"

He didn’t wait to see if they obeyed. He focused on the bear, felt the furnace burning in its chest, the combustion building in its lungs.

’Burn them. Burn it all.’

The bear opened its maw.

The fire that poured out was nothing like Blaze’s flames. This wasn’t a spray or a stream. It was a wall of white-hot destruction, dense and liquid, roaring from the bear’s throat like a river of magma. The sound was apocalyptic. A sustained, thunderous bellow of flame that turned the night into day.

The crimson grass screamed.

A high, keening sound, like tearing metal, ripped through the air as the fire hit the vegetation. The vines recoiled, snapping back from the trucks. The spore clouds ignited in mid-air, burning into harmless ash. The thick stalks that had formed a cage overhead blackened, curled, and collapsed.

The bear swept its head from left to right, painting the road in fire. The flames carved a corridor through the bloom, fifty meters wide, the asphalt melting and bubbling beneath the heat. The grass on both sides pulled back, retreating from the blaze with a sound like a thousand snakes hissing in unison.

"Drive!" Darwin’s voice roared over the bracelets. "All trucks—through the burn! Now!"

The engines screamed to life. The three trucks surged forward, tearing through the burning corridor, tires crunching over charred vines and blackened stalks. The bear held its position, jaws still open, still breathing fire, keeping the corridor clear as the convoy thundered past.

Gio held the connection. His Bioenergy drained steadily.

[Bioenergy: 69%]

He kept the bear burning until the last truck cleared the corridor. Then, with a final command, he dismissed it. The construct dissolved into white light, and the darkness rushed back in, filled only by the crackle of dying flames and the distant, fading shriek of the retreating bloom.

Silence.

Then, slowly, coughing. Ragged breathing. The sound of engines idling.

Gio’s knees buckled. Kojiro caught him, steadying him against the truck’s hull.

Lloyd was still on his knees, maskless, coughing up rust-colored phlegm. Melody stood over him, her borrowed mask hanging around her neck, her expression torn between gratitude and fury.

---

The convoy didn’t stop for another two hours.

They drove through scorched earth, the red grass thinning, the air clearing, the spore-choked sky giving way to open stars. The trucks’ hulls were scarred and dented, the tires shredded in places, but they were alive.

And then the headlights found it.

Darwin’s voice crackled over the bracelets. "All trucks. Stop."

The convoy slowed. The headlights converged on a shape in the middle of the road.

It was a truck. Armored. Military-grade. Its hull was torn open like a tin can, its tires flat, its engine block cracked and gutted. Vines had grown through the chassis, thick and old, blooming with pale white flowers that swayed in the night wind.

Painted on the side, beneath a decade of moss and rust, were the words:

EXPEDITION 66

The recruits stared. Sixty souls had ridden in that truck. Soldiers. Civilians. Nobles. Prisoners. All of them had passed the same gates. Swallowed the same cores. Faced the same odds.

None of them had made it back.

Darwin stepped down from the lead truck. He walked to the wreckage slowly, his boots crunching on the cracked asphalt. He circled the torn hull once, his bionic arm raised, scanning the damage with the detached precision of a mechanic inspecting a faulty engine.

He crouched beside the largest tear in the chassis. Ran his fingers along the edge of the rent metal. Measured the depth of the gouges. Straightened.

"Hmm."

That was all he said. Just that single, flat syllable.

Then he turned to the convoy, his voice carrying over every bracelet, calm and clinical.

"So that’s how far the last bunch got. Good to know." He glanced at the wreckage once more, then looked past it, down the dark road ahead. "Which means whatever stopped them is past this point. Eyes up from here."

He climbed back into the lead truck.

That was it. No silence. No ceremony. No acknowledgment that sixty people had died inside that shell. Just a data point. A mile marker on a map.

Melody’s ears flattened. Lloyd’s jaw tightened. Even Blaze, who had never shown a shred of sentiment in his life, looked at the wreckage with something sour in his expression.

Gio felt it too. A cold knot in his stomach. Not just at the dead. At the living. At a commander who could look at a grave and see only a warning sign.

"Commander," one of the soldiers called out, hesitant. "Should we... recover the remains? Log the bodies?"

"No time," Darwin said, already fading behind the truck’s door. "We’re moving."

The engines rumbled to life. The headlights swung forward, leaving the wreckage in darkness.

No one looked back. But everyone remembered.

Gio watched the Expedition 66 truck disappear in the rearview window, swallowed by the night.

Sixty-six teams before them. All gone.

And somewhere ahead, in the dark, whatever had killed them was still waiting.

[Bioenergy: 69%]