The skittering was a wave, a tide of chitinous sound washing through the oppressive silence of the jungle. It came from everywhere and nowhere, echoing off the weeping iron-bark trees, vibrating through the cold, black mud beneath Adam's bare feet. He crouched deeper in his root-hollow, the obsidian spear clutched so tightly his knuckles were white. His breath hitched, a shallow, panicked rhythm he fought to control.
Use everything.
The thought was a cold ember in the storm of his fear. He had his Aspect, a weapon of deception. He had a stolen spear, a weapon of last resort. And he had the voices… a liability that had defined his life, but which the Spell had labeled a "blessing."
The skittering intensified, resolving from a generalized rustle into the distinct, horrifying rhythm of multiple, large bodies moving in concert. They were close. Too close. And they were between him and the deeper jungle, the direction he had been fleeing.
Then, a new sound cut through the din—the frantic, terrified shouts of humans. The slaves. They had broken free, but they hadn't escaped. They were being herded, not by guards now, but by whatever was making that skittering noise, driven back towards the narrow path between the boulders.
A man—the wiry, praying slave—stumbled into view, his eyes wide with primal terror. "Back! Go back! The way is blocked! By the gods, they're everywhere!"
Behind him, the rest of the ragged group poured back into the small clearing where the revolt had begun. The big man who had started the rebellion was with them, his new club now slick with a dark, viscous fluid that wasn't human blood. Of the four guards, only one remained, his insectoid helmet cracked, his movements sluggish. They were all trapped, caught between the memory of the Nest and the fresh horror in the jungle.
The big man slammed his club against a tree, the sound a dull thud against the rising cacophony. "Stand together! Form a circle! They're just bugs! Crush them!"
'Fool,' a voice whispered in Adam's mind, this one new, sharp and laced with a condescending arrogance. 'To think a blunt instrument could shatter a cursed web. He sees only the legs, not the pattern.'
Adam flinched, pressing his back against the damp wood of the tree root. This wasn't the frayed, maternal whisper. This was different. Colder.
'He is not entirely wrong, for all his simplicity,' a second arrogant voice joined the first, this one smoother, more analytical. 'Force applied correctly can break any structure. But his application is… primitive. Watch. The geometry of their demise is already written.'
The slaves and the lone guard formed a ragged defensive circle, their backs to the massive boulders. They held makeshift weapons: sharpened stones, the guard's jagged spear, the big man's club. For a moment, there was only the sound of their panicked breathing and the ever-present skittering.
Then, the forest moved.
From the shadows between the trees, they emerged. Not a horde of small spiders, but a half-dozen creatures each the size of a large dog. Their bodies were bulbous and covered in coarse, grey hair, their eight legs like polished black daggers that punched deep into the soft earth. But it was their abdomens that stole Adam's breath. They glowed with a faint, pulsing crimson light, and from spinnerets that twitched with eerie precision, they vomited not simple silk, but ropes of liquid, blood-red thread.
The threads shot through the air with impossible speed, not aiming to entangle, but to pierce. One caught a slave in the shoulder, punching straight through flesh and bone with a wet thunk. The man screamed, a high, shrill sound that was cut off as the thread retracted with a sickening slurp, pulling a chunk of meat and a spray of arterial blood back with it. The spider hauled its grisly prize back into its mandibles.
"Gods! They're shooting us!" the guard yelled, his voice cracking.
The big man roared and charged, his club swinging in a wide, powerful arc. He smashed one of the creatures, its carapace cracking like ceramic. Ichor, black and reeking of ozone, splattered the ground. But as he raised his club for another swing, two crimson threads hit him simultaneously—one in the thigh, one in the side. He grunted, his momentum halted. He tried to pull free, his immense muscles straining, but the threads held fast. With a brutal, synchronized yank, the two spiders pulled in opposite directions. The sound of tearing muscle and snapping bone was deafening. The big man fell in two bloody pieces.
The defensive circle disintegrated into chaos. Slaves screamed and ran, only to be picked off by the relentless, piercing threads. The guard fought with desperate skill, his spear a blur, severing several threads mid-air. But he was one man. A thread caught his armored calf, another his wrist. He was dragged to his knees, his helmeted face turning towards Adam's hiding place for a fleeting second before a final thread took him through the eye socket.
It was a slaughter. A calculated, horrifyingly efficient harvest.
'See?' the first arrogant voice purred. 'The Blood-Silk Spinners. They do not hunt. They cull. They are the shepherds, and your kind are the flock.'
'Note the coordination,' the second voice added, its tone that of a lecturer. 'A hive mind, or a close approximation. The larger one directs the symphony. It is close. Weakened, but its mind is the true weapon.'
Adam watched, paralyzed, as the last of the slaves—the wiry man—was run through by three threads at once. His silent prayer was finally answered as his body was ripped apart. In less than a minute, the clearing was silent again, save for the wet, tearing sounds as the spiders fed.
He was alone. The only human left alive in a grove of death.
And then he saw it.
It moved from the deepest shadows, and the very air grew cold. This was no dog-sized predator. This was a nightmare given form. Its body was the size of a ground car, a grotesque, sagging mass of scarred chitin and weeping sores. Two of its eight legs were shattered stumps, dragging uselessly behind it. One of its eight milky, multi-faceted eyes was a ruined crater, and a deep, pulsing crack ran across its cephalothorax, from which a faint, sickly light emanated. This was the source of the command, the Cursed Terror. And it was, as the voices had said, on the brink of death.
But a dying terror was still a terror.
It dragged its immense bulk into the center of the clearing, its movements slow, pained, but still radiating an aura of ancient, malevolent power. Its remaining eyes scanned the carnage, and then, as one, they fixed directly on Adam's hiding place.
It knew he was there.
'It is curious,' the first voice mused. 'It senses the marks upon your soul. The Chaos. The Divinity. The Unknown. You are an anomaly in its perfect, bloody geometry.'
'It is also starving,' the second voice stated coldly. 'Its own life force ebbs. To consume a soul so strangely marked… it might be the only thing that can stave off its final end. You are not just prey. You are medicine.'
A single, thick strand of blood-red silk, thicker than Adam's arm, began to form at its spinneret. This was not a piercing thread. It was a binding cable.
This was it. Fight or die.
Run, every instinct in his body screamed. But where? The smaller spiders—the ones that had just massacred two dozen people—were still out there, flanking him, their crimson abdomens pulsing in the gloom.
The Terror took a labored step forward, its weight shaking the ground. The spear in Adam's hand felt like a toothpick.
Use everything.
His Aspect. [Mimic]. Useless? He had to try.
He focused on the big man, on his roar of defiance. He poured his will into his throat, into the memory of that sound, the raw, brute force of it. He opened his mouth and let it out.
A perfect, guttural roar erupted from his hiding place, echoing through the trees. The effect was immediate. The smaller spiders flinched, their coordination breaking for a split second. The Terror paused, its head tilting, its many eyes blinking in confusion. It had just seen that human die. The anomaly had confused its senses.
It was a tiny victory, but it was something.
'Crude,' the first voice sniffed. 'But effective. For a moment.'
'It has bought you seconds. Use them,' the second commanded. 'Its weakness is the crack in its carapace. The light within. That is its life, its mind. Strike there.'
"How?" Adam whispered, his voice raw with terror. "It's twenty feet tall! I can't reach it!"
'Then you must make it lower its guard. Or make it bring you to it.'
The Terror recovered, a low, chittering hiss of annoyance rattling from its maw. The binding strand of silk shot out, not at Adam, but at the tree above his hollow. It wrapped around the thick root he was hiding under with a sound like cracking stone. With a terrifying display of strength, the dying monster yanked.
The world upended. The root, his shelter, his shield, was torn from the earth. Adam was thrown clear, tumbling through the air to land hard on his back in the cold mud. The wind exploded from his lungs. The obsidian spear flew from his grasp, skittering away into the darkness.
He was exposed. Disarmed.
He scrambled backwards, his eyes locked on the Terror. It began to drag its massive body towards him, its intent clear. It would pin him with its weight and consume him at its leisure.
'The voices,' the first arrogant one whispered, its tone shifting, becoming insidious. 'The ones that made you an outcast. The ones you fear. Let them out, little light. Let them sing.'
'No,' Adam thought, desperation clawing at him. "They'll think I'm crazy. They'll…" He didn't know who 'they' were anymore. The PSO? The world? It didn't matter. The voices were his shame.
'You are about to be eaten,' the second voice stated, its logic brutal and unassailable. 'Is your pride, your sanity, worth more than your life? The Spell calls it a Blessing. Use it. Scream.'
The Terror was almost upon him, its shadow falling over him, the stench of its rotting body filling his nostrils. Its good legs raised, poised to impale him to the forest floor.
Something in Adam broke. The carefully constructed wall he'd built around the cacophony in his mind, the defense that had let him function, shattered.
He stopped trying to be sane.
He opened his mouth, and he didn't mimic a single sound. He let it all out. The years of fear, of loneliness, of being the crazy slum rat. He didn't just replicate the voices; he became their conduit.
A dozen different voices, pitches, and tones erupted from him in a single, horrifying wave of sound. The worried whisper of his mother. The frightened cry of his sister, Dust. The guttural curses of ossuary thugs. The arrogant knowledge of the two entities in his head. The chittering of the spiders themselves. It was a symphony of madness, a weaponized psychosis.
The effect on the Terror was catastrophic.
The monster recoiled as if physically struck. Its legs buckled. The coordinated light in its many eyes flickered and swam. The [Mark of Chaos] on Adam's soul was doing its work—this was not a sound that belonged in any sane reality. It was a variable its hive-mind could not process. The [Blessed by the Unknown] allowed the alien noise to resonate with the fabric of the nightmare itself, amplifying the disorientation.
The Terror stumbled, its head crashing down low to the ground, its one good eye mere feet from where Adam lay.
The crack in its carapace was right there. The pulsing, sickly light was exposed.
This was his chance.
He lunged, not for a weapon, but with his bare hands. He didn't have the spear. He didn't have strength. He had only the desperate, ossuary-born instinct to fight with whatever he had.
He jammed his right arm, up to the shoulder, directly into the pulsating, glowing crack in the Terror's skull.
Agony. White, searing, absolute. It was not a physical pain, but a psychic one. It felt as if his soul were being dipped in acid. He felt the Terror's ancient, cursed mind—a vast, dark web of hunger and pain—scraping against his own. He felt the chaotic chorus of the smaller spiders, now panicked and leaderless. He felt the death of every slave, every guard, echoing in the monster's memory.
He screamed, his own voice lost in the maelstrom of others still pouring from his lips.
The Terror thrashed, its legs flailing, trying to dislodge him. But he was in too deep. His body was wracked with convulsions. With a final, monumental effort of will, he focused not on pulling away, but on pushing deeper. He imagined his [Mimic] aspect not copying sound, but copying the silence of the void. He imagined his [Mark of Divinity] as a purifying flame, and his [Blessed by the Unknown] as the absolute nothingness that would consume the cursed light.
Inside the crack, surrounded by the dying Terror's essence, he found a core of solid, crystalline pain. And he bit it.
There was no physical teeth involved. It was an act of pure, predatory will, the final, vicious act of a boy who had been prey his entire life.
The crystalline core shattered.
The world went white.
Then, silent.
The thrashing stopped. The Terror's body went rigid, then limp. The pulsing light in the crack died, leaving only a dark, empty fissure. The smaller spiders, their connection severed, let out a collective, dying shriek and collapsed where they stood, their own internal lights flickering out.
Adam fell backwards, his arm pulling free with a sickening slurp. It was numb, lifeless, covered in black ichor and flecks of the Terror's internal crystal. He lay in the mud, staring up at the bruised purple sky through the canopy, his chest heaving. The only sound was the drip of water and the faint, fading echo of his own madness.
He was alive.
A chime, soft and crystalline, resonated in the heart of his being.
[You have slain a Cursed Terror, blood woven.]
He didn't feel triumphant. He felt hollow. Scoured. He had won by becoming the very thing he had always feared: utterly, completely insane. He had welcomed the voices in, and they had saved him by annihilating his last shred of self.
He tried to push himself up with his right arm. It didn't respond. He looked down.
From the mid-bicep down, his arm was gone. Not torn, not bleeding. It was just… absent. As if it had been unmade. In its place was a smooth, seamless stump, the skin perfectly healed over as though it had been that way for years. The psychic backlash, the final clash of his will against the Terror's core, had erased it from existence.
He stared at it, numb with a shock deeper than any pain. He had lost an arm. He had sacrificed a part of his body to the madness, and it had taken its payment in flesh.
A weak, ragged laugh bubbled from his lips, a single, clean sound in the silence. It was the laugh of someone who had nothing left to lose.
He looked at the colossal, dead spider, then at the stump where his arm used to be.
"Thank you," he whispered to the nightmare.
Then, darkness took him.