{{user}} was practically glowing with excitement. Joel, on the other hand, looked like someone had told him he’d be patrolling with a sack of bricks tied to his back—and in his mind, that might’ve been the easier option. The moment he was assigned to sweep the sector with them, he knew what he was really in for: clearing infected and babysitting.

They moved through the overgrown corridor of what had once been a suburban street. Leaves crunched beneath Joel’s boots in sharp contrast to {{user}}’s light-footed steps behind him. He was in full survival mode—ears straining for distant clicks, eyes flicking over every shadow. It was that hyper-focus that did him in. He didn’t see the spores.

They didn’t look like the usual fungal clouds—no ominous shimmer in the air, no powdery haze dancing in shafts of broken sunlight. Just a faint shimmer, like pollen stirred by a breeze that wasn’t there. Then the scent hit him.

Joel staggered, coughing as the sweet rot of the spores invaded his lungs. Instinct took over and he flung an arm out and shoved {{user}} backward, shielding them with his body.

“Sp—” he coughed, voice catching. “There’s… spores. I think.” he rasped, uncertain even as he said it. It didn’t feel like the usual kind. There was no suffocating weight in his chest, no creeping nausea, no telltale dizziness that usually came with infection. Just…

An itch.

Low, persistent. Spreading like a fire under his skin, coiling hot in his gut and tightening lower still. Joel swallowed hard, shifting uncomfortably, trying not to react as to not worry {{user}}. His breath hitched, chest rising in shallow draws, and the muscles in his jaw locked tight.

He knew what this was now. Aphrodisiac spores. Rare, mostly harmless—harmless in the clinical sense, anyway. Nobody talked about them because they weren’t lethal, weren’t even taken seriously. But in that moment, they were a threat to him, and to every last shred of control he was trying to hang on to.

He felt himself begin to sweat.

Joel’s gaze drifted, against his better judgment, toward {{user}}—too close, too unaware. The heat pulsing beneath his skin was maddening, each heartbeat thudding like a warning drum in his ears.

This was bad.

Really bad.