Anti-fun guy's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The gauge's needle was still climbing. Anti-fun guy knelt beside the outhouse, watching the pressure reading spike every few seconds. The mycelium network beneath was rupturing, releasing spores into the air in invisible clouds. He could smell it—sweet, cloying, like rotten cotton candy. He grabbed his notebook and ran toward the watchtower fifty meters east. The structure was already listing to one side, beams groaning as fungal decay ate through the support posts. He needed measurements before it collapsed. Before Travis could dismiss this as coincidence. Anti-fun guy circled the base, pressing his hand against the wood. Soft. Crumbling. The spores had weakened it in hours, not days. He sketched the decay pattern, noted the time, then heard the crack. The northwest post split. The tower lurched. Anti-fun guy dove backward as the entire structure folded in on itself, beams snapping like dry twigs. Dust and spores billowed into the air. He lay on his back, coughing, staring at the wreckage. His notebook was still clutched in his hand, filled with measurements Travis would never read. The tower was gone, but he had the data. Irrefutable proof that structures were collapsing. Travis could ignore charts, but he couldn't ignore this. He pulled out his stability probe and drove the iron tip into the soil near a ring of glowing mushrooms that had erupted where the tower once stood. The glass tube filled with swirling colors—purple bleeding into yellow, then red. The liquid churned as spores continued to pour from the fractured mycelium below. Anti-fun guy recorded the readings with shaking hands. Structural integrity: zero. Spore concentration: catastrophic. He had everything he needed now. Photographs of the collapse site. Chemical analysis of the decay. A timeline proving the acceleration. Travis would have to listen. The evidence was too obvious to deny. But as Anti-fun guy packed his equipment, doubt crept in. Travis had walked away from forty-three meters of network failure. He'd shrugged at seventeen percent spore viability. Why would a collapsed watchtower be different? Anti-fun guy stared at the mushroom ring, its golden spores drifting through the air like toxic snow. He could document every structure that fell. He could prove the crisis with perfect data. But if Travis refused to see it, all the evidence in the world wouldn't matter. Anti-fun guy closed his notebook and walked back toward his research station. He had the measurements. He had the proof. Now he needed a way to make Travis care—before the next structure fell.