The burns from the Purification Chains throbbed with a deep, sickening heat, a constant reminder of the exorcist's touch. Yuki stumbled through the labyrinthine undercity, a maze of forgotten service tunnels, collapsed sewers, and crumbling substructures far beneath the city's bustling streets. The air grew thicker, heavier, saturated with the stench of stagnant water, rotting vegetation, and something else… something cloyingly sweet, like overripe fruit left to fester in the dark.
The hum in his bones was a discordant buzz, the scars on his arms pulsing erratically around the raw, weeping burns. Kage's presence was a cold knot of fury and frustration. You broke them, the demon's voice hissed, laced with a grudging awe. The Chains of Purification. Few tainted souls possess such… defiance.
Defiance. Yuki felt no defiance. Only exhaustion, pain, and a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the tunnel's dampness. He needed to hide. To heal. To think. But the undercity felt… wrong. The sweet, rotten scent grew stronger, clinging to the back of his throat. The shadows seemed deeper here, thicker, moving with a life of their own.
He rounded a corner and froze.
The tunnel ahead was gone.
In its place stretched a vast, cavernous space, hidden beneath the city for decades, perhaps centuries. And it was filled with a web.
Not a spider's web of silk. This was something far more terrible. Strands of thick, glistening, greyish-white material stretched from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, forming a complex, three-dimensional labyrinth. The strands were thick as Yuki's wrist, pulsating faintly with a sickly internal light, and they hummed with a low, dissonant thrum that vibrated in his teeth. The sweet, rotten smell was overwhelming here, emanating from the web itself.
Trapped within the web's sticky strands were things that made Yuki's stomach clench. Not insects. Rats. A large dog, its fur matted, its eyes wide and glassy in death. And… other shapes. Humanoid shapes, wrapped tightly in greyish cocoons, some twitching faintly, others utterly still.
The Spider in the Web.
Yuki felt the hum in his bones resonate with the web's thrum. The scars on his arms pulsed hungrily. Rich, Kage whispered, the voice thick with anticipation. Fear. Despair. Decay. A feast.
A movement drew his eye. High above, near the cavern's ceiling, partially obscured by the thick strands, hung the creature. It was immense, easily the size of a car. Its body was a bloated, pale sac, pulsating rhythmically. From it sprang eight long, multi-jointed legs, each ending in a glistening, razor-sharp point. But the worst part was its head.
It had too many eyes. Dozens of them, clustered together on its cephalothorax, each one a multifaceted, jewel-like orb that reflected the web's sickly light. They were all focused on Yuki.
And it was smiling.
Its mouthparts weren't mandibles. They were long, flexible, glistening proboscises, interwoven like writhing serpents, constantly twitching, dripping a clear, viscous fluid that sizzled when it hit the web below. The smile was formed by the arrangement of these proboscises, a grotesque parody of human expression.
Welcome, a voice echoed, not in Yuki's ears, but directly in his mind. It was a chorus of whispers – the voices of its trapped victims, layered over a deeper, more alien gurgle. Welcome to my larder, little morsel. You smell… corrupted. Delicious.
Yuki took a step back, his heart hammering. The web's thrum intensified, pressing in on him. The sweet scent made him dizzy. He needed to run. But where? The web blocked the only way forward. The way back was towards the exorcist. He was trapped.
Run? the Spider's voice chuckled, a sound like stones grinding together. There is no running from the web. Only feeding.
One of its massive legs detached from the ceiling with a soft thump. It landed on a thick strand of web, the leg sinking slightly into the glistening material. The creature began to move, not walking, but flowing down the web towards him, its dozens of eyes fixed on him, its proboscis-mouth twitching in anticipation.
Panic surged. Yuki raised his hands, focusing on the scars. Burn!
Crimson energy erupted, lashing out towards the approaching Spider. The energy struck the web strand the creature was on.
The web didn't burn. It absorbed the crimson energy.
The strand pulsed with a sudden, intense crimson light, the sickly greyish-white turning a deep, bloody red for a moment. The Spider paused, its multifaceted eyes seeming to widen in surprise. Then, it let out a sound that was part gurgle, part shriek – a sound of pure, ecstatic pleasure.
Yes! the chorus of voices screamed in his mind. More! Give me more of that delicious pain! That wonderful corruption!
The crimson energy flowed along the web strand, not destroying it, but feeding it. The strand thickened, pulsating brighter. The entire web seemed to hum louder, resonating with the stolen power. The Spider resumed its descent, moving faster now, its proboscis-mouth drooling more heavily.
Yuki stared in horror. His power wasn't a weapon here. It was food.
He turned and ran back the way he came, ignoring the searing pain in his arms. He had to get out of the cavern, away from the web, away from the thing that fed on fear and pain and corruption.
The Spider shrieked behind him, a sound of fury and hunger. You cannot escape the feast, little morsel! The web hungers! I hunger!
Yuki ran blindly, the dissonant thrum of the web chasing him, the sweet, rotten scent filling his nostrils, the image of the smiling Spider and its trapped victims burned into his mind. He burst out of the cavernous web-chamber back into the narrower service tunnel, not stopping, not looking back, driven by the primal terror of being prey in a hunter's larder.
He didn't stop running until his lungs screamed and his legs buckled. He collapsed in a damp, dark alcove, gasping for breath that tasted of rot and fear. The burns on his arms throbbed in time with the fading echo of the web's thrum. He was safe. For now.
But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than the exorcist's chains, that the Spider was still up there. Waiting. Hungry. And it had tasted his power. It would crave more. He had escaped the larder, but the Spider knew his scent now. The hunt was far from over.