Chapter 28: Surrounded
They walked for nearly thirty more minutes.
The forest had changed around them without announcing it, the way bad weather sometimes did. The canopy above, which had let scattered light filter through earlier, was now woven so tightly overhead that it looked like a ceiling someone had built on purpose. Darkness swallowed anything past a few dozen meters in every direction.
The air dropped a few degrees. It sat heavier in the lungs.
Even the smell had shifted — the damp-earth scent from earlier had given way to something thicker, something that clung to the back of the throat.
Venom. And underneath it, faintly, decay.
The Spirit Wolves slowed without being told to. Even the resurrected spiders, which had been marching with mindless confidence for the past hour, started picking their steps more carefully.
Malrik noticed immediately. "...They’re nervous."
"They should be," Eliza said quietly. "This is the deepest part of the nest."
A few more minutes, and the forest simply ended.
Malrik stopped walking.
In front of him was a cave entrance that made the term "cave" feel inadequate. It rose more than ten meters high, wide enough for several full-grown Morveth to walk through shoulder to shoulder. The cliffs surrounding it were buried under layers of webbing — some strands thin as thread, others as thick as a man’s forearm, draped in heavy curtains that swayed gently with no wind to explain the motion.
Past the entrance: nothing. Total black.
Just silence, and somewhere far back in it, the faint scraping of countless legs moving against stone.
"...So this is the nest," Malrik said.
"Yes." Eliza’s eyes stayed on the darkness. "The deeper we go, the higher the numbers climb. Level. Population. Both." She paused. "Most of the Level Fifty spiders stay deep inside."
Her gaze shifted to him.
"Are you certain you want to continue?"
He didn’t answer right away.
Instead he turned to the line of resurrected spiders behind him, and an idea settled into place with a small smile attached.
"...Lead the way."
Fifteen of the spiders stepped forward immediately, moving toward the cave without a flicker of hesitation.
Eliza blinked. "...You’re using them as scouts?"
"They know this nest better than either of us ever will."
She looked at him for a second, then smiled despite herself. "...That’s surprisingly clever."
He shrugged. "They’re more useful alive than dead. Loosely speaking."
The army moved into the cave, and the dark closed in around them almost instantly. The only light came from the soft emerald glow radiating off the bound souls — just enough to make out the shapes of the tunnel walls, nothing more.
The webbing here was everywhere. Strung across the ceiling in overlapping sheets, wrapped tight around stone pillars that rose out of the floor like the bones of something much older than the spiders themselves. In places it had thickened into a kind of fabric, opaque and yellowed, stretched so densely it looked load-bearing.
The deeper they walked, the quieter it got. Their own footsteps seemed to vanish into the silence rather than echo off it.
Only the ticking persisted — distant, small, multiplying.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Eliza’s expression sharpened with every step. Instincts built over years of actual combat were telling her something her eyes couldn’t confirm.
We’re not alone.
She scanned the dark. Nothing moved. Not a single shape, not a single eye.
The feeling didn’t go away.
Every part of her was certain they were surrounded, and every part of her training told her that not seeing the threat was worse than seeing it.
She glanced at Malrik.
He looked completely unbothered, walking like a man taking an evening stroll through a slightly damp garden.
If he’s not worried, I won’t be either.
She tightened her grip on her sword hilt anyway, and kept walking.
The tunnel widened gradually into something closer to a chamber — and then several chambers, connected by branching passages that disappeared off into more darkness than any torch could have covered. The further in they went, the more eggs appeared.
Thousands of them.
Some were small, barely larger than a human head, clustered in groups along the lower walls like pale stones someone had stacked deliberately. Others were enormous — easily reaching Malrik’s waist — half-buried in silk cocoons that hung suspended from the ceiling in clusters, swaying very slightly, as if something inside each one was still settling.
The cave didn’t feel abandoned. It felt occupied. Breathing, almost, in the way a place does when there’s far more inside it than what’s currently visible.
"...This many eggs." Malrik turned slowly, taking in the scale of it. "The nest is bigger than I expected."
"It is," Eliza said. "This colony’s been here for decades. No one’s ever wiped it out."
He glanced at her. "Why not?"
"Because it’s useful. A training ground. If the colony disappeared, the younger generation would lose one of the few places where they can safely test themselves against something stronger."
That tracked. He nodded and kept walking.
A few more minutes passed before the fifteen scout spiders stopped — all of them, at the exact same moment, like something had pulled a single string connecting all of them at once.
Malrik narrowed his eyes. "...Why’d they stop?"
The answer arrived before he finished the question.
Crimson lights opened across the darkness, slow and deliberate, like eyes blinking awake one by one.
One pair. Five. Ten. Twenty.
Fifty.
Then hundreds — embedded in the walls, clinging to the pillars, even pressed flat against the ceiling far overhead. The entire chamber was lined with them, packed into every surface that could hold weight.
Eliza’s hand moved to her sword without her thinking about it.
"Young Master." Her voice stayed level. The grip on her sword did not. "We’re surrounded."
More spiders dropped from the dark, crawling out of crevices and gaps in the webbing.
[Venom Spider Level 42]
[Venom Spider Level 45]
[Venom Spider Level 47]
[Venom Spider Level 49]
More kept coming, until the cave floor itself seemed to ripple with the sheer number of bodies moving across it. Thousands of legs scraping stone, all at once, filled the chamber with a sound that was less like noise and more like pressure.
Then, for a heartbeat — silence.
Malrik smiled.
A real one. Wide, genuine, the kind that made Eliza distinctly uneasy.
His eyes swept across the swarm filling every direction.
"...Perfect."
She turned to him, genuinely thrown. "...Perfect?"
Her grip tightened. "Young Master, if we retreat now, I can get you out before they finish closing in. There’s still time."
"No." He shook his head, the smile not moving an inch. "There won’t be any need for that."
He raised his right hand slowly. Emerald and black mana began gathering in his palm, thickening, building toward something.
"I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this."
"This is your stage, Lilith."
"Show me what you’re capable of."
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