As the group walked into the cave, the sound of water droplets reverberated into their ears like shrieking screams.
Every sound felt amplified to them. They were slightly scared.
The aura coming from within the cave was menacing. Syra, Falco, and Argon looked fairly normal as they walked through the caves; however, the same could not be said about the rest of those in the cave, who were all shaking like leaves.
"Can we turn back." Zelon asked with a shaky voice for the hundredth time, and this time just happened to be Syra's breaking point.
"God damn it, Zelon, grow some fucking balls."
"..."
"Like seriously. All you do is complain and laze around all day, while people like us have to carry your slack. What is the point of you being here? To annoy us to death before the spider can get to us?"
"..."
"..."
"..."
"I've genuinely had enough of your shit. You're not the only one who's terrified, yet you're the only one I can fucking hear complaining all the god damn time!" Syra spat to the side with a slightly hateful look on her face as she increased her pace and walked in front of all of them.
"Holy shit, bro, you made Syra, of all people, angry," David whispered mockingly, yet everyone else was too shocked to say anything.
Even Herla had her mouth slightly open when she heard what her friend had said. It had been quite a long time since she had last heard her curse, and even then, it was because she stubbed her toe.
"S-Syra..." Zelon tried to call out, but at this point, she seemed to have had enough of everyone and walked so far ahead that it would be plausible if she could no longer hear them.
Of course, that wasn't the case due to the armor she was wearing, but that was the excuse Zelon put into his head when she ignored him.
"You know she's been agitated lately. You shouldn't have done that." Herla sighed.
Looking forward, her eyes caught onto Argon's figure walking toward Syra and begin talking to her, and even though Syra looked like she might be dismissing him in the conversation, unlike the last encounter with Zelon, she didn't shout or curse at him. She simply turned her head away and argued back.
After a bit of arguing between the two, they seemed to finally come to some sort of agreement. They stopped bickering against one another and walked in silence.
That walk lasted a couple of hours.
They might not have realized it before, but what they had entered was not an ordinary cave. It was a cave system that led pretty far underground.
It said on the mission that the spider would most likely be within one of the tunnels; however, as they walked through the tunnels, it felt more like a maze.
Fortunately, they had been placing torches down wherever they went, allowing them to see whether or not they were going in the right direction.
Since they knew that they would be in a cave, they had collected many branches on the way to it. Herla would use her earth magic to hold the branches up, while Zelon would light them on fire. These wouldn't last nearly as long as regular torches, but they would do the job. Branches here were tempered by mana. Even while on fire, they would last much longer than any wood back on Earth.
Throughout their journey, they massacred almost a hundred spiders in the cave alone. They would come in batches of five, but sometimes, they would group together to create clusters of ten or even fifteen.
And eventually, they got a sign that they were closer to the nest than they had first thought they were.
"Hmm. It's much closer to the surface than I thought. This tunnel goes upwards, and not in the direction that we were going in." Argon commented while pointing with his blades.
"They most likely have several entrances. Spiders don't usually burrow, though, yet this tunnel system looks... Unnatural." Syra squinted
"Why do you think they burrowed?" Herla stepped forward and asked, yet all Syra did was look at her momentarily before contemplating her question.
"Maybe they got flooded?" Zelon tried to ask, yet Syra didn't acknowledge him at all.
"These don't seem to have been burrowed through by a spider, but instead by something with claws. It does seem a little old thought, so maybe the spiders took over after killing whatever made these tunnels?" Syra suggested while the others nodded.
"But that doesn't matter. Our goal is to kill whatever is at the top of the spider hierarchy. Or whatever they are called. We've been killing its children so far, so the mother is most likely going to be much stronger. A grade or two is stronger." She looked at the weaker people in the group.
"We can handle ourselves. You take care of yourself. We take care of ourselves." Herla sighed.
She was aware that she was the weakest alongside David and Zelon.
"Are you sure?" Syra looked at her with a slightly worried expression.
"Of course. My armor is pretty good, and if anything bad happens, we have potions." Herla smiled back at her.
"A-Alright." Syra sighed and began to walk up the tunnel.
The spider web was getting much thicker up here. Actually, not only were the webs getting thicker since there was so much of them, but the quality was getting better too.
It was getting much harder to cut through the webs as they traversed upwards. At a certain point, David's water cutter didn't do anything to the web in front of him other than giving it a small cut, causing him to have to put more mana into every spell he used.
And when they finally got to the top, their eyes slightly widened as a wide area could be seen before them, as well as hundreds of red spider eyes glowing in the dark, some bigger than others...
However, there was one much bigger than the rest.
A pair of 8 enormous eyes looked at them before they moved upwards, and a bone-chattering screech left its maw, sending sound waves in all directions.
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