Chương 47: The Circle

Mia found the trail in under ten minutes, and none of them needed her to explain it. Something the size of a car had come through here in numbers, and it had gone home fat and slow, and it had dragged things. That was the part Alex kept looking at, the long smooth channels between the churned ground, the marks that were not footprints. He decided not to mention it and found out later that everyone else had made the same decision.

The nest was an hour northeast, sitting in a shallow bowl of land with a wall of its own, and the wall was better than the human one they'd left that morning, which said something Alex didn't enjoy. They went up the ridge on their bellies to look, and got their first proper sight of the things that had gone over Ray's wall.

"Oh," Liam said quietly.

"That's horrible." The upper body was a woman. That was the whole problem with it. From the waist up they were human, or close enough that the eye refused to file them anywhere else, arms and shoulders and a face that had cheekbones, and below that the torso ran into the bulk of a spider, eight legs and a heavy segmented abdomen carrying it all over the ground with a fluid, patient, wrong sort of grace. Their eyes had the red in them.

Their faces held expressions, and the expressions were the worst part, because expressions meant somebody was home. [Tainted Arachne, Level 9] He worked through the ones he could see, and the levels came back the same over and over. Nine. A handful of eights. Which surprised him, because the Canifolk fortress had run nines too, a week ago, when he'd been a very different fighter.

"They're not scaling," he said.

"Or not fast. The dungeon waves are climbing hard and these aren't."

"Is that good?" Ace asked.

"It's good for us. I don't know what it means yet." Then he found the boss, near the center, and stopped talking. [Tainted Arachne Matriarch, Level 14] It was half again the size of anything else in the bowl, its abdomen swollen and dark, and it wasn't moving. It sat at the edge of a cleared circle of ground and watched what was happening inside that circle, and Alex followed its gaze and felt his stomach turn over. The circle was full of people. Dead ones. Arranged.

Laid out in a pattern with space between them, deliberate, unhurried, the whole thing built with the awful neatness of a thing that had been done before and would be done again. Eleven of them, and Alex did not have to work very hard to remember where he'd heard that number this morning. He had seen this once before. There had been a circle like it inside the Canifolk fortress and he had run past it with his heart in his throat and no time to think about what it was for. He still didn't know what it was for.

He knew it was a ceremony, and he knew the monsters had gone to the trouble of carrying eleven bodies four hours home instead of eating them where they fell, and something about that sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.

"Alex," Jeremy said quietly.

"I see it."

"Your hands." Alex looked down. He had put a crack in the rock he was gripping. He let go, breathed out, and rolled onto his back to lay out the plan, because being furious on a ridge was not a tactic.

"Same as the fortress, with changes. I go in front and I hold them. Jeremy backs me, stays mobile, takes anything that gets past or around. Liam, ground control, I want the middle of that bowl to be a swamp. Mia, whatever's closest to killing me." He looked at each of them.

"Nobody stands next to me. I mean that literally, if you're within ten feet of me you're in the wrong place."

"How do we get them out?" Ace asked.

"Do we breach the wall?"

"I was going to. I've changed my mind." Alex sat up.

"I don't want to spend twenty minutes and everybody's mana knocking a hole for them to filter through. I'd rather they all came out at once and came out angry." Liam's face did something complicated.

"You're going to yell at them."

"I'm going to yell at them." He went up the wall alone. It was easier than it should have been. Hhis stats made the climb a chore rather than a risk, and he came over the top into the smell of the place, which was old meat and something dirty underneath it, and he stood there for a second in full view of two hundred arachne and let himself look at the circle one more time. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Then he opened Taunt as wide as it would go and roared.

He had more mana than the last time he'd done this. Considerably more, the profession's Intelligence quietly stacking up behind him for two days, and he poured every point he could spare into the skill and shaped it the way he'd shaped it at the wave, at all of them, at the big one especially, look at me, and the sound came out of him and rolled down into the bowl. The whole nest turned.

Two hundred faces with human cheekbones came around at once, and the Matriarch rose up off her legs at the far end, and Alex was already off the wall and running, hitting the ground outside the gate hard enough to leave prints. They came through the gate like water through a broken dam.

Alex met the first rank with a Cleaving Strike and did not hold anything back, thermal running the edge and gravity riding the fall, and the arc of it came off the blade and went out across the front of the charge and took the legs out from under four of them in a single pass. They went down screaming, and the scream was a woman's scream, and Alex made himself keep swinging. Behind and around him the machine started up. The ground in the bowl's mouth turned traitor almost immediately.

Liam had his hands out and his face set, and forty feet of packed earth came apart into loose grain, an arachne's beautiful eight-legged mobility becoming eight separate problems at once, and where they floundered the sand came up in tendrils and took hold of legs and pulled. Then the arrows started arriving, and the arrows were new. The first exploding shaft hit an arachne through the side of the abdomen and did not stop being an arrow until it was already inside, and then it stopped being an arrow all at once.

The thing came apart from the middle out. Alex saw it happen in his peripheral vision and had one clear thought, that Mia had just killed a level nine with a non-lethal hit, and then had no time for a second thought because the wave arrived properly. He fought the way he'd fought at the gate two days ago and he fought it richer. That was the difference, and he felt it in every exchange. Two days ago he'd rationed Cleaving Strike like a man counting bullets.

Today he had a pool built by a Rare class and a profession that had been quietly stuffing Intelligence and Wisdom into him for two days, and he could simply use his skills, over and over, whenever the moment called for it. Cleave through the front rank. Reset. Cleave again. Boost when the press got heavy. It was the first fight of his life where the limit was his body and not his budget, and there was something almost obscene about how good it felt. Jeremy was a rumour on the edges of it.

A crack of white and a spear through the back of something's neck, then gone, then a crack forty feet away and another one down. He never engaged anything for longer than two seconds and nothing ever touched him. Then the arachne started spitting, and Alex's entire understanding of what was happening got worse. He expected webs.

Everything about them said webs, and what came out instead was water, a hard concentrated jet of it fired from the abdomen with enough pressure to knock a man flat, and the first one caught him in the chest and moved him three feet. It stung. Not much, a flat hard slap spread across his ribs, the kind of thing that would have cracked a normal person's sternum and left Alex with a dull ache and nothing more, but it was more than the mages had managed, which was its own small insult.

Then a second one hit him from the left while he was recovering from the first, and a third took him in the hip, and the damage stopped mattering because the pushback didn't. Every jet moved him. Alex found himself being slowly walked backward out of his own line by a species of high-pressure water pistol, feeling almost nothing and losing ground the whole way.

"What," he said out loud, to nobody, blocking a claw with his forearm.

"Why." It was the most annoying thing that had ever happened to him. Not one drop of it hurt. All of it moved him, and every foot he lost was a foot of Liam's swamp that stopped being useful, and Alex made a note in the burning part of his brain that said gravity, anchor, learn it, learn it now, and dug his heels in and kept swinging. He was still doing that when the Matriarch came through her own people.

She came fast for something that size, shouldering nines aside without appearing to notice them, and Alex clocked the way the front of her body carried and knew immediately that this was not a level twelve sheepfolk. This was the thing the fortress boss had been, and he was ready for it. He cast Star Core. It came up over his palm the way it had in the dark, thermal first and then gravity poured into the fire itself, and it came up faster than it had last night because his hands already knew the shape of it.

The core shrank. The colour climbed past white into something the eye refused to hold. Somewhere off to his right a crack went off and kept going, further and further away, and Alex did not need to look to know what it was. He had said it once that morning while they were walking, and once was all Jeremy had ever needed. If I am ever holding something you cannot look at, leave. Do not ask me about it, do not shout back at me, just be gone. The arachne closest to him began, remarkably, to back up.

He threw it into the middle of them. The bowl turned white. There was no boom that Alex heard, or if there was, it arrived after everything else. What arrived first was a wall of light and then a wall of pressure, and the pressure picked him up off his feet and threw him back thirty feet into the churned ground, and he lay there while the heat rolled over him and his own skill declined, politely, to burn him. When he got his eyes working the nest was gone. Not the wall.

The wall was still there, scorched black on the inside face. But the fifty were not fifty anymore, and what was left in the middle of that bowl was ash and charred shapes and a scattering of things at the edges still moving in the way that things move when the moving is nearly over. The grass was on fire in a ring a hundred feet out. The Matriarch was at death's door. She had put something up, some shell or shield, and it had bought her exactly enough to still be here while being furthers from the explosion.

Her legs were gone on one side. Her upper body was burned down to something Alex didn't want to keep looking at, and she was dragging herself forward on the remaining limbs toward him with her red eyes still working, and she was going to take a very long time to die. Alex reached for his mana to finish it and found little there. He was unable to cast a cleave strike but before he could blink. Jeremy killed her with the spear through her head.

He arrived in a crack of white, put it through the base of her skull, and stood there with his hand on the haft until she stopped, and then he turned around and looked at Alex sitting in the dirt like a dropped bag.

"Can you stand?"

"Give me a minute."

"You really are something else" Jeremy said.