Before opening the satchel, Yao knew its limits. A Bronze-tier spatial storage item meant four slots, five kilos maximum capacity. Four categories of items, and if a single thing—like a rifle—took up one slot and most of the weight, the others became decorative. Its utility was in clever application. Things with negligible weight, like her Gossamer strands? She could pack an absurd amount into a single slot, a hidden arsenal to be unleashed all at once. The possibilities were already unfolding in her mind.
Opening the extradimensional space, she found all four slots occupied.
Slot 1: Wind-Arcana Skill Tome – Pacing Art: Zephyr Step.
Slot 2: Eight certified bank notes. (Face value: 1,000,000 copper notes each.)
Slot 3: Green-tier Equipment – Level 5 Cloud-Wolf Brigandine. Attributes: Agility +300, Constitution +250, Strength +180. Skill: Upon being struck, 20% chance to activate a damage-reducing shield (20% mitigation). Weight: 2kg. Durability: 60%.
Slot 4: Tier 1 Equipment Enhancement Item – Pandora's Shard(A flawed fragment of a legendary artifact. Can be used to attempt an advancement on Green or Bronze-tier equipment. Success rate: Green 10%, Bronze 50%. Failure destroys the equipment.)
Killing one man had netted her roughly the lifetime earnings of Oaks's mother. She'd profited from player-kills before, in the game, but the real-world weight of it was different. A flicker of cold pragmatism noted the hunter's liquid assets seemed low, but sense prevailed. He'd have a bank account. The eight million copper notes were just walking-around money. For her, currently a financial non-entity, it was a massive infusion. But the real prizes were the other three slots.
The Green armor was expected; he'd used it. Chest pieces had a high drop rate. The Pandora's Shard, however, was a surprise. The full Pandora's Box was a Sapphire-tier nightmare, a gamble that could make or break endgame gear. This shard, downgraded to Green, was its pathetic, risky cousin. A 10% chance on Green gear was basically setting your equipment on fire for fun. 50% on Bronze was better, but using a Green-tier resource to upgrade a Bronze item was… inelegant. Most Bronze gear had poor foundational stats; even if it succeeded, the result would be a trash-tier Green.
Her eyes drifted to the Arachnid Ascension Ring on her finger.
Do I risk it?
Failure meant losing the ring, her single greatest tactical asset. 50% was a coin flip. But if it landed right…
She steadied her breathing, pushing the decision aside for now. She retrieved the hunter's bow from the skimmer, where she'd stashed it after fishing it from the creek. Ranged weapons, not being directly 'worn,' often dropped separately. It was a clean prize.
Bronze-tier, Level 5 Recurve Bow (w/ Quiver). Agility +80, Strength +50, Constitution +20, Attack Speed +3%, Range +25m. (Comes with a 25-arrow quiver). Weight: 2kg. Durability: 75%.
Weapons were the hardest drops to get. Even for a hunter of his level, a Level 5 Bronze bow was a solid find. The world of Arcane Thronehad no 'class skill tomes.' Abilities were earned through grueling study, innate talent, or, for the privileged, elite academy training. Chen Lixing's Zephyr Stepwas a useful wind-cantrip for mobility, but Yao had no intention of learning it. It would consume a precious Skill Point. Her path was one of extreme specialization; a movement speed buff for running was a crutch her monstrous Agility made redundant. It was a beginner's tool, its value inflated by the desperation of those who needed to flee.
She stored the tome, equipped and bound the Cloud-Wolf Brigandineand the bow. The bow vanished into her new satchel, the bag itself becoming an intangible weight on her soul, not her back. The gear shift caused her attributes, already inflated from three rapid level-ups, to swell again.
[Level: 7]
[Spirit: 1010]
[Strength: 601]
[Constitution: 753]
[Agility: 2722]
[Skills: Arcane Missile Lv.4, Emberburst Lv.2, Forest Thorns Lv.1, Verdant Locust Wing Lv.1]
"Green gear adds hundreds," she murmured, the numbers a cold comfort. "No wonder noble scions are monsters. Xie An's favorites probably have full Green sets. Their stats at my level would dwarf mine." The gap was real, but it didn't breed despair, only a sharper focus. She shelved the idea of gambling the ring. It was her lifeline. She couldn't afford to lose 70% of her survival capability on a coin toss.
Patience. She began the tedious, vital work of channeling Gossamer strands directly into a satchel slot. They weighed nothing. She could store a small mountain of it. As she worked, she drank Lesser Spirit Tonics to replenish the constant drain.
Roughly ten minutes in, her enhanced hearing caught the sound from the cave. Not the scratch of claws. The collective, angry whirrof thousands of chitinous wings beating at once. A lot of them. Gronk had done his job well. Maybe too well. She had to move, or he'd be overrun before he could submerge.
She lit the piled tinder, then used a minor Arcane Missile to blast air into the base of the fire, stoking it violently. Thick, oily black smoke billowed forth, caught by the wind, and poured into the cave mouth.
Inside the wind cave, Gronk was sweating beneath his fur. He wore a breather mask, but his nerves were frayed. The cave was a labyrinth, and the angry buzzing behind him was getting louder. He desperately wanted to sink into the earth, but the cooldown on his racial ability hadn't reset. He thought of trying to mentally shout to Yao, but the damned Calamity Field played havoc with basic signals.
This was a mistake. She's probably already cut her losses. Humans. All talk.
Just as despair began to curl in his gut, the smoke came. Not a tentative trickle, but a rolling, choking wave. Perfectly timed, as if she'd been listening at the door. He blinked. She'd committed. She was doing her part.
A weird, fierce warmth cut through his fear. He shot a rude gesture over his shoulder at the approaching drone, waggled his stubby tail for emphasis, and broke into a sprint, leading the enraged, smoke-addled swarm on a chaotic chase through the twisting tunnels, keeping them in the thickest of the fumes.
Outside, Yao listened. The swarm wasn't emerging. He's leading them on a smoke tour.The little… he was buying time, ensuring maximum exposure. A grudging respect tempered her urgency. She began laying Gossamer strands in a complex web across the cave mouth, anchoring them to rocks.
Soon, the sound changed. A frantic scrabbling, then Gronk's voice, muffled by soil. "—not a groundhog, I'm a Battle-Scarred Marmot!"
A patch of earth just inside the cave mouth erupted as Gronk's rear end, then his hind legs, vanished into a freshly dug hole, kicking dirt back to plug it. An instant later, the leading edge of the swarm reached the entrance. Furious, disoriented, and smelling prey, they ignored the blocked escape hole and shot towards the open air and daylight.
They hit the Gossamer web. The first ranks slammed into the nearly invisible filaments, their already-weakened bodies tangling instantly. Yao, feeling the strain through the ring, held for a second as weight piled on—hundreds, then thousands of pounds of struggling insect. Then she released the anchors on one side. The web didn't collapse; it enveloped, a silken shroud snapping closed around the initial wave of roughly two thousand swarmers. They were trapped, suspended, continuing to inhale the drifting smoke. A slow, suffocating death sentence.
But more kept coming. Another three thousand, weak and furious, boiled out of the cave.
Gronk popped out of the ground near the fire, looking like a furry chimney sweep. He didn't pause. In a display of practiced efficiency, he detached the rifle's standard barrel and slapped on a wider, drum-like attachment—a Pyro-Conversion Nozzle. From a bandolier, he loaded a fat, crimson canister marked with flame runes. Incendiary Rounds. As a final touch, he produced a scroll from a thigh pouch and cracked it over the weapon. The script glowed: Awei's Pavement-Pounder Inferno Scroll(a cheap, infamous brand favored by arsonists and desperate adventurers).
He hefted the now-comically oversized weapon onto his shoulder, aiming at the seething mass. "Tremble, vermin!"
WHUMPF-WHOOOOOSH!
A cone of concentrated hellfire, amplified by the scroll, roared from the muzzle. It wasn't a stream; it was a wall. A third of the remaining swarm was vaporized or turned into falling, crispy flakes. The smell of barbequed insect filled the valley.
He packs a punch,Yao acknowledged, even as she began her own assault. Wind, Fire, Wood. The Triad. She and Gronk became a well-oiled, if impromptu, firing squad, picking off the stragglers from a distance.
"We need to hurry," Gronk yelled between shots. "No boss in the outer tunnels. Something feels off. I didn't go deep. If this many are just the welcoming committee… there's a lot more in there."
Yao's brow furrowed. "The reproduction multiplier shouldn't be that high. If you pulled five thousand from the periphery, the core nesting area could hold fifty thousand." The numbers were wrong. In the game, such discrepancies were clues, warnings of hidden raid bosses or nasty surprises.
Before Gronk could question her bizarrely specific knowledge, a wave of disorientation hit them. A mental fog, a pressure behind the eyes. Daze Debuff.
Yao shook it off first, her high Spirit and Agility resisting. Through the lingering smoke and fire, she saw it. Emerging from the cave, larger than the one she'd killed. The size of a young ox, its carapace a darker, nastier green. Tier 8 Verdant-Brown Swarm Leader. Its eyes glowed with a malevolent red light. The Daze was its aura.
"It's calling the rest! Stop it!" Gronk shouted, seeing the creature's antennae vibrate.
Yao didn't have a rifle. She had a bow. In one fluid motion, she nocked, drew, and loosed. The arrow, propelled by her absurd Agility, was a gray streak. It struck the Leader's throat, not piercing the tough hide there, but thunkingin deep enough to gag it. The nascent shriek died in a wet gurgle.
Gronk didn't need telling twice. His rifle barked, rounds hammering the same spot, keeping the creature off-balance, preventing it from sounding the alarm. Yao noted his damage numbers—over 200 per shot. Hers were barely over 100. He'd spec'd heavily into Strength. She was a scalpel; he was a sledgehammer. A good combination.
"Keep its throat busy. Cover me," she ordered.
Cover you? For what?Gronk wondered but obeyed, laying down suppressive fire. Yao began to move, her attacks becoming sporadic, less damaging. The Leader's fury, logically, fixed on the noisy, painful source—Gronk.
The pressure on the marmot increased. "I can't tank its Daze pulses forever! If it gets one off—"
"Aim for its abdomen when it pulses," Yao's voice came, calm and instructional. "The air distorts. The grass quivers. Hit the distortion."
As she finished speaking, she vanished. Cloak.
Gronk, armed with this new insight, watched. The Leader, enraged, gathered itself. The air around its abdomen shimmered. Gronk shifted aim and fired. The bullet struck the shimmering zone. The gathering Daze pulse fizzled with a sound like crumpling paper. It worked!
But where was she? His Eagle's Sight couldn't pierce her invisibility. The Leader, thwarted, began a lumbering charge towards him, its weight shaking the ground. Gronk backpedaled, fear rising. "Where are you? I can't—"
A flicker of movement above. Yao dropped from the cave mouth ceiling, suspended by a Gossamer strand. She landed squarely on the Leader's broad head. It sensed the weight, bucking. In that microsecond of instability, her hand flashed. A Verdant Locust Wing, point-blank, fired directly into its giant, faceted eye.
Pop-Squelch.
Green ichor and optical fluid exploded. The creature's shriek of agony was deafening. Yao used the strand to swing away, already shouting. "The other one!"
Gronk didn't hesitate. As the monster reared, blinded and thrashing, he took careful aim. His rifle spoke one more time.
CRACK.
The remaining eye vanished in a spray of gore.
Now blind, the creature was helpless. Yao landed, and the two of them unleashed a torrent of attacks, a symphony of violence. The creature's health bar plummeted. Victory was seconds away.
Then, blackness. A second, more potent Daze engulfed them.
How?!
Yao's vision cleared just in time to see a secondTier 8 Leader drop from the cave roof above the entrance, where it had been clinging, unseen. It landed on them with the force of a falling tree, massive pinning claws slamming down.
They were caught. Trapped. The downed creature's mandibles, dripping corrosive saliva, descended towards Gronk's face. The marmot, in pure survival panic, roared. "EARTH'S GRIP!"
A yellowish-brown light sheathed his forepaws, morphing them momentarily into stone and metal. He shot them up, crossing them just as the mandibles closed. There was a screech of stone on chitin. He was holding the jaws apart, his whole small body trembling with the strain.
Above Yao, the other claw pressed down, the tip digging into the Cloud-Wolf Brigandine. The Green armor flared, absorbing the crushing force, but she felt her ribs groan. She couldn't match strength. But her hands were free. A thought. Gossamer strands shot from her ring, not at the monster, but at the burning fire-pit. They latched onto burning logs and yanked.
A hailstorm of flaming timber and embers rained down on the creature's softer underbelly.
HISSSSS—SCREEE!
It convulsed in agony, the claw lifting instinctively. The moment the pressure eased, both Yao and Gronk scrambled free, putting desperate distance between them and the twin terrors.
Gronk, gasping, looked for Yao. She was gone. Cloakagain. She ran! Of course she—
Then, a pained shriek from the first, blinded Leader. The invisible Yao hadn't fled. She'd gone back. A Verdant Locust Wing, fired with surgical precision up through the ruined eye socket, into the brain.
[Tier 8 Verdant-Brown Swarm Leader eliminated. Experience +5000.]
Experience flooded them, split evenly. Ding. Ding. They both leveled up.
In that transcendent slice of a second—the system acknowledging the kill, new power flooding her veins—Yao made a decision. Instinct, honed by a thousand gaming superstitions. Loot windows are lucky. Level-ups are lucky.She pulled the Pandora's Shard from the satchel and slapped it against the Arachnid Ascension Ring.
Now or never.
A flash of gentle, emerald light. Not the flash of destruction. The glow of transformation.
Arachnid Ascension Ring (Green-tier). Agility +1000, Strength +300, Constitution +300. Skill: Gossamer Tempering.
Her Agility rocketed past 3700. She moved, a phantom. The remaining Leader fired a point-blank Scorch-Orb. She wasn't there. It pulsed a Daze. The debuff washed over her… and MISSED. Her Agility was too high. It couldn't lock on.
"Your earth-form! How long?" she yelled at Gronk.
"Twenty-five seconds!"
"Aim for its abdomen. Now!"
The dynamic flipped. Yao became the aggro magnet, a blur of impossible motion dancing around the Leader's furious attacks, drawing its ire. Gronk, safely at range, became the artillery. Bullet after bullet hammered its belly, the softened chitin from the fire now cracking.
After a furious barrage, Gronk's voice held panic. "Running low on ammo!"
Of course. This wasn't a normal dungeon crawl.
"Almost there. Be ready!" Yao called back. The Leader's health was a sliver. It seemed to sense doom. It planted its feet, wings beating furiously, and its body ignited with a furious crimson aura. Enrage. A wave of superheated air and concussive force, a wide frontal cone, blasted out from it.
Yao didn't dodge backwards. She pulled. With a mental scream that drained her Spirit to the dregs, she invoked the new skill. "Gossamer Tempering!"
All around the creature, at its feet, wrapped around its limb joints, strands she'd laid during her evasive dance—strands that were soft, pliable, nearly weightless—suddenly changed. They gleamed like mercury, hardened like adamantine steel. With a final, brutal yank on the master strand connected to her ring, she pulled.
The physics were simple, the result horrific. Wires, when slack, entangle. When pulled taut with immense force against resistance, they cut.
SCREECH-SNAP-CRUNCH!
The Leader's legs were severed at the joints. It collapsed forward, a tower of meat and chitin crashing to the earth.
Gronk saw his chance. He took a flying leap, landing on the creature's shuddering head. He shoved the rifle's hot muzzle against its remaining eye. "Eat this!"
BOOM.
Over a thousand points of damage. Brain matter painted the rocks.
[Tier 8 Verdant-Brown Swarm Leader eliminated. Experience +5000.]
Two. Two bosses, felled. They stared at each other, panting, then simultaneously looked at the cave mouth (buzzing ominously) and the far end of the valley (from which the sounds of combat and young, eager voices could now be heard).
Another team. Drawn by the boss screams. Coming to steal the kill.
They were spent. Spirit low, ammo low, cooldowns ticking. Now what?
Gronk looked at Yao, his beady eyes expectant. You're the devious one. Plan?
This damn dungeon was too crowded. 250 people was a mosh pit.
Yao didn't even think. "Loot the cores. Leave the junk. Follow me."
They scrambled, grabbing the two shining boss cores and a few other glowing items that dropped. The thousands of smaller drops were impossible.
"I've got it!" Gronk said. He made a sweeping gesture. A skill—Area Loot—and the field of glittering copper notes, tonics, and low-tier materials vanished into his own storage. The kid had tools.
Yao didn't comment. She shot a Gossamer strand up the cliff face. "Up!"
She grabbed Gronk by the scruff of his neck and his tail and scrambled up the sheer rock like a spider, the newly fortified strands bearing their weight effortlessly. In seconds, they were on a narrow ledge twenty meters up, hidden from view below.
They peered over. A team of five young Arcanists, looking slightly worse for wear from fighting through a swarm, were hurrying into the far end of the valley. And from the cave mouth, the vanguard of the true, massive swarm was beginning to emerge, a living river of anger.
Gronk wiggled with glee. Loot to sort, and a front-row seat to the chaos about to unfold below.
"Heh heh heh! You really are the most devious human I've ever met!"
Yao sighed. "It's called tactical repositioning and resource conservation. How is that devious?"
Gronk was already pulling out their combined haul, his eyes shining. "Your 'tactics' are what other people call 'schemes.' If it's your first instinct, you're devious by nature." He gave her a look of pure admiration. "Admit it."
Yao chose to ignore him, focusing on the scene unfolding in the valley below. The show was about to begin.