#17. The Dungeon Master, Aranea (2)
#17. The Dungeon Master, Aranea (2)
A white room.
No—a room filled with white thread. Aranea, nearly a ton in weight, dangled effortlessly from a thin strand.
‘That must mean the web is strong.’
Crrrrick—crrrack—crunch!
The hunter it had dragged up lost his head. Blood gushed between Aranea’s fangs and stained the pure white web a deep red. Death, plain and simple. The first to react was a man clutching a spear—clearly the dead hunter’s comrade.
“Wha— you fucking—!”
He sprang nimbly up the threads, but every strand of web was part of the creature’s domain. That is to say, every inch of this “white room” lay within Aranea’s reach.
“No!”
A female hunter—Yu Ah-hyeon—nocked an arrow. The motion was swift and clean. But the moment Aranea’s foreleg twitched, the hunter who had been scaling the web slipped. The strand beneath his foot coiled in an instant, binding him and his spear together.
“—Ngh?!”
The spearman thrust out, struggling. Before the web could wrap him fully, Yu Ah-hyeon’s arrow struck the knot where the strands converged. It didn’t sever. Instead, the silk pulled tight and constricted.
“Gyaaaagh!”
The hunter screamed. The archers rushed to loose again, but a middle-aged hunter shouted them down.
“Don’t! If you can’t cut through it, don’t fire at all! That’s an Aranea—a monster with a recommended difficulty of B-minus!”
Recommended difficulty B-minus. Meaning you would need a B-class hunter to take it down alone. He shouted something else, but I couldn’t make it out.
‘—If I die here anyway, it’s over.’
I didn’t hesitate. I had to save him. To survive—and to clear this dungeon—a united front with the hunters was essential. If an alliance was going to form, I would have to be the one to reach out first.
‘If they decide I’m an enemy too, that’ll be a problem.’
I had to make them see me not as a monster to hunt right now, but as the enemy of their enemy—a temporary comrade. It would take two seconds to reach the spearman bound tight in silk. Aranea had been watching me from the start. Naturally, it checked me the instant I moved.
‘You think this is going to be easy!’
The creature had its eyes on me, but I’d been watching it just as closely.
Perception and Intuition told me how the webs would shift ahead of time. I rode the swaying threads like a rhythm, like a wave, and closed in instantly. Then I reshaped my fangs.
‘I have to cut through it!’
Slice and sever. My teeth changed into a form suited for that—thin, dense, and sharp. They became like a saw blade, and I bit straight into the web.
‘So tough!’
Even with 123 Strength stacked with Hardening, the thread refused to give. Only when I poured mana into the bite did I manage to cut through. And the moment I got that far—
“Fuck. Two monsters in the boss room?”
—not even D-rank Stealth could hide me from the hunters’ senses at this range. For an instant, I felt every gaze fix on me as I tore through the rest of the silk and pulled the trapped hunter free.
“H-hoff! Hrk! Puh-hek!”
He’d been suffocated by the web—clutching his throat and coughing—but I had no time to wait. I hurled him, spear and all, straight down.
“H-he’s falling! Ji-hoon, catch him! Catch him!”
Thrown from ten meters up. I trusted they’d manage. More than that, I had no leisure to watch. Aranea manipulated the threads as fluidly as a puppeteer, as if the entire web were its marionette. Strands came at me from my blind spots, from every direction.
‘……!’
How in the world could it control a web that filled an entire room? Was it mana? Or an innate ability of the creature called Aranea?
‘Any open space?’
None. While I was thinking, thread filled every compass point. But for a single instant, a tiny gap appeared.
‘A trap?’
I had no choice. I had to go! At my core, I am a slime. I squeezed through that razor-thin opening with barely a hair’s breadth to spare. Barely a second later, the strands slammed into each other in a tangled crush. What would have happened if I’d been caught in Aranea’s web—tougher and harder than steel?
‘Instant death…’
“What did you just do?! Why that Wolf?!”
The middle-aged hunter’s accusation, aimed at Yu Ah-hyeon, was half-buried under the sound of my landing. She still held her bow. She must have shot the web’s convergence point.
“…….”
“…….”
“Mmmngh!”
An odd tension stretched between us and them. But Aranea’s renewed threat forced everyone’s attention away. Whatever the case, a more immediate danger loomed over us all. And faced with a common enemy, humans will take one another’s hands.
‘Even if I am a monster.’
“That Worg can wait. Right now, Aranea is the priority. Does anyone here actually know anything about it?”
“Stupid fast, uses webs like a—!”
“We all know that! Is there anything else?!”
“What about using fire?”
At the warrior’s suggestion, Yu Ah-hyeon clicked her tongue, but she seemed ready to grasp at any straw—she scraped the arrowhead with her nail. The tip ignited, even though the arrowhead wasn’t flammable and had no powder on it.
‘Mana?’
Using mana to pull off a sleight of hand fit for a stage magician… how ironic.
“You’re not seriously planning to shoot that?”
“Do I look that stupid?”
Twisting one corner of her mouth, Yu Ah-hyeon took hold of the arrow shaft. Aranea still looked down on us placidly from on high. The rippling webs encroached silently on the space around us.
‘Fast!’
The speed had picked up. Aranea was beginning to take this somewhat seriously, then. Not a single hunter dared try to hold back the wave of silk, and we were driven helplessly back.
‘Is it herding us?’
We were being played. Like a skilled sheepdog, it pushed us into one corner of the room. Meanwhile, the moment Yu Ah-hyeon’s arrow shaft touched the web, a section of it caught fire.
“Cough! Cough!”
It was certainly effective, but the smoke was overwhelming. That must have been what the middle-aged hunter had worried about before. Everyone covered their mouths with their sleeves, but the fumes were even harsher than they’d imagined. Lighting a fire would choke us to death long before it burned through all the web.
“Fire’s… not usable. Dammit.”
The spearman I’d just rescued swung at an encroaching strand and cut it. He was channeling mana into the blade, clearly.
‘Without spending mana on every single cut, we can’t even touch this web…’
The gap in rank hit me like a physical blow. And Aranea hadn’t even used its greatest asset yet—its Agility. It was toying with us without budging from its position.
“Uwaaagh!”
Another hunter was dragged upward. I’d seen it coming and severed the line, which made Aranea’s cluster of eyes swivel with a distinctly unpleasant spin.
‘I have to do something about this.’
The thing wasn’t even making any special moves, and yet just the fact that it was fixated on me was a constant stressor. Worse, there was no way I could go on cutting through a roomful of silk strand by strand. I needed a decisive answer.
‘If I can just break that one node…’
The convergence point Yu Ah-hyeon had shot earlier. I didn’t know the principle behind it, but that was where all the strands gathered into one nexus. Thread only has meaning when it’s connected. No matter what kind of monster it was, severed thread was useless. I launched myself straight at that point.
“They’re being pushed back!”
“Block it! Just block it however you can!”
Pushed to the very limit, the hunters were cornered. With the middle-aged man at the head, shields locked together.
“Fuck… why the hell is an Aranea in a dungeon like this?!”
“Instead of yapping, block! You idiot!”
A wave seeps into the earth and vanishes. The creature’s silk did not. Strands layered and overlapped, their weight compounding, until the hunters’ boots began to scrape across the floor. Chopping the webs apart with mana only made the incoming tide feel faster. As the warriors’ feet slid, the archers behind them shoved against their backs with everything they had.
“Hold!”
“Goddamn…!”
Yu Ah-hyeon used the lead warrior’s head as a springboard and leaped. Landing between the webs, she worked her feet into the gaps between strands. I expected her to slip and be trapped, but she gripped the silk like she was scaling a rock face, wrapped her hands and feet in mana, and somehow kept her center even amid the undulating tide.
‘She’s good.’
Gu Sang-seop had been the same. Hunters, every one of them, had tenacity. While I was distracted by her movement, the web surged. I read it with Intuition and Perception and dodged by a hair’s breadth—only to lock eyes, by chance, with Aranea’s goosebump-inducing stare.
‘—Before this thing starts moving for real.’
Once it began to move in earnest, stacking all my skills would make no difference. Before that happened, I needed to at least neutralize the web. While it was still looking down on us.
“Web from the side! Seal it uuuuup!”
Their formation crumbled. The pressure forced the shields tighter, and the narrow gaps already there compressed like a rush-hour subway car. The hunters below had no visible way to dig themselves out.
“Skreeeek!”
When every one of Aranea’s eight eyes fixed on me, I felt a phantom paralysis ripple through my body—no, I genuinely couldn’t move.
‘……!’
I’d never experienced it before, but I knew what this was. An Evil Eye. Each of those eight eyes was a facet of a magic eye. The activation requirement must have been for all eight to observe the target at once.
‘Paralysis? Petrification? Rigidity?’
I couldn’t tell what type of eye it was, but that monstrous 244 Magic Power held me still.
[All Damage Reduction (D) Lv.3 proficiency at maximum. All Damage Reduction (D) Lv.3 → All Damage Reduction (D) Lv.4]
All Damage Reduction had been born when Physical Damage Reduction and Mana Damage Reduction merged way back at E-rank. The eye’s power lessened. On top of that, I hauled up every last drop of my 94 Magic Power, and just barely, I could move.
‘Son of a bitch!’
The cost was that my mana ran completely dry. And because of that, I was forced into a choice I couldn’t avoid.
[Magic Regeneration (D) Lv.1 skill acquired.]
[Skill Points remaining: 4]
Like a well drawing up groundwater, my magic slowly began to refill. The dizziness from my mental exhaustion lifted just enough that I could climb the webstrands for what felt like an eternity, and at last I reached one of the anchoring junctions. Aranea had been manipulating her silk to obstruct me when her evil eye proved useless. But I’m not stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice.
“Now! Push them baaack!”
The moment her gaze and her threads concentrated on me, her awareness of what was happening below slackened. The warriors advanced with shields forward and punched through the web encirclement. Immediately after, a rain of arrows from the archers sought out the spiders of the labyrinth.
“Help Lady Ah-hyeon! Keep Aranea in check!”
The arrows flew as one. Aranea threw up a curtain of silk to block them, but this time it didn’t hold. Arrows saturated with mana were no longer arrows in the ordinary sense. Anti-materiel rifle rounds—no, they packed more force than that. Aranea dodged every single one with contemptuous ease.
“Reload! Warriors, form up tight!”
At the middle-aged hunter’s command, the hunters became a single cohesive unit and held back the surging webs. Shields buckled under the crushing pressure, but no one paid it any mind. They had nothing else to lean on.
“Krrrgh…!”
The silk strands at the junction were far tougher than I’d imagined. I had to burn through the magic I’d only just recovered, and the vertigo came rushing back. Still, the moment the junction was severed, every white strand that had blanketed the chamber came crashing down.
“Block with your shields! No, dodge! Dodge, damn it! Dodge!”
KABOOM!
A heartbeat too late, a tangled mass of silk slammed into the floor. The whole chamber shuddered, and dust erupted into the air. If they’d tried to block that… if they’d been caught underneath… Cold sweat trickled down the middle-aged hunter’s forehead. One wrong order would take them all to their graves.
Not every strand had fallen yet, but it was safe to say that most of the silk that wasn’t directly attached to Aranea’s legs was now on the ground. Thinking they might finally have a moment to breathe, the middle-aged hunter took stock of the situation again.
‘That crazy—!’
Yu Ah-hyeon had her bow aimed at Aranea. She hadn’t been heading for a junction at all. From the very beginning, her target had been the spider itself!
“……!”
“No! Get back! I said get back!”
The middle-aged hunter was right. It was insanity. Suicide. Had she lost her mind? No, she didn’t look as though she had. She simply didn’t know.
‘Aranea’s only been playing with us so far!’
The thing hadn’t even moved. This whole time, it had done nothing but toy with its little puppets. Its true terror wasn’t in manipulating silk—it was in that staggering 438 AGI that I couldn’t even properly register.
“I’ll kill you!”
Yu Ah-hyeon drew her bowstring. Her form was textbook-perfect, the kind of posture you’d see at the Olympics or in an instruction manual. The nearly 200 points of mana she poured into that arrow surged forward with enough force to pierce anything—until it struck the silk and fell to the floor, utterly deflated.
“Huh?”
What she didn’t know.
Was that Aranea had mana of its own.
Of course the arrow had been blocked. Magic power approaching 200? Aranea’s mana far exceeded hers. The only reason arrows had been able to penetrate the webs before was because they’d been infused with mana. Turn that around, and it meant that the moment Aranea infused its own silk with mana, there was no way to pierce it at all.
‘You goddamn idiots!’
When the archers’ arrows had punched through the silk earlier, they must have jumped to the conclusion that Aranea had no mana whatsoever.
Sssss — a spine-chilling sound. The spider’s eight eyes fixed vengefully on the female hunter, and her body locked up, rigid. The other hunters belatedly tried to save her, but they were already too late. The only exception was me—because I’d already been running.
“Ghk?!”
Before the creature could move, I bit into Yu Ah-hyeon and hurled her aside. The middle-aged hunter caught her, and I immediately activated Hardening.
‘I can’t dodge this!’
Even with the broken combination of Intuition and Perception, there was nothing I could do. The thing was right on top of me. That one strike, I couldn’t avoid.
“……!”
A massive impact sent me flying. I’d collided with Aranea before I’d even registered what was happening. There was no pain, but I couldn’t find my balance at all—was the mental exhaustion still lingering? Elasticity was useless. Impact—incoming!
‘Nnngh!’
I didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if I hit a wall at this speed. How much of my body surface area would I lose? It wouldn’t kill me instantly, would it?
“Eeeik!”
Right before the crash, someone caught me. With a single sharp groan, they scraped the floor several times, struggling with everything they had, and came to a halt just before slamming into the wall.
“…Phooooh!”
I turned to look. It was that spear-wielding hunter I’d saved earlier.
“Fuck. I never thought I’d end up saving a monster.”
The hunter wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and caught his breath with great difficulty. But his legs had already given out, and he couldn’t move.
“…Phoooh!”
“Hold the line! Don’t let a gap open! Get those arrows nocked!”
Starting with the charge that had sent me reeling, Aranea began to move in earnest. AGI 438. Even with Intuition and Perception giving me a glimpse ahead, it was a speed nearly impossible to react to. The hunters were getting picked off one after another, mercilessly.
“Urk!”
One hunter, shield and all, was skewered by Aranea’s foreleg.
“Eeeik!”
A hunter whose name I didn’t know had their head torn off with a sickening crack between the spider’s fangs.
‘1 against 7…’
Seven hunters remained. No—with the spear-wielder here, it was 1 against 6. In that interval, Yu Ah-hyeon’s arrow struck true. It pierced through Aranea’s thick body hair and sank into its torso—but it did nothing except stoke the spider boss’s fury.
“Fall back and tighten up! Retreat! Retreat!”
Moving in perfect unison, they pulled back and put their backs to the wall. The middle-aged hunter and the warriors set their shields and held fast while the archers covered them. Against a normal opponent, that would have worked—but this opponent was anything but normal.
“Don’t let them break through!”
The middle-aged hunter roared from somewhere deep in his gut. But before the cry had even finished leaving his mouth, one of the warriors took a massive hit. The middle-aged hunter rushed to support him, but in an instant the formation was broken. The spider’s target was Yu Ah-hyeon. Bow in hand, she looked up at it, her eyes hollow.
“You f-fucking goddamn spider bastard!”
“No! Come back! I said come back!”
In that moment, a warrior charged in. He tried to shoulder-tackle with his pauldron, but the difference in strength and weight was overwhelming. Aranea didn’t budge, and the warrior was instantly seized. He snatched a short-range teleportation scroll from the pouch at his waist and ripped it, but—
“Ugh, hk…”
Before the scroll could activate, the spider tore him apart. All that was left was his mangled corpse, belatedly enveloped in light and displaced, painting the floor in blood.
‘Ah.’
The scent of blood—different from an animal’s—filled the labyrinth chamber. Three were dead in the space of a breath. One against five. Did we ever have a chance? Had there been a chance from the very start? Aranea was strong. If I’d stopped them from coming in at all. No—if I’d at least tried to hold them back.
I knew. I, the only one who had seen Aranea before, knew. I was the only one who had known.
—Maybe it was me who had led these people to their deaths.
“What are you doing! I didn’t save you just so you could— hngh!”
My spiraling thoughts shattered. The hunter fixed his fierce eyes on me and shouted.
“Go! Get out there and fight! What’re you standing there staring at, you monster bastard?!”
Clutching his ribs, which were clearly broken, his face pale, he shoved me from behind. The hand pushing me had no strength left, and his shuffling footsteps were so unsteady he looked ready to collapse at any moment without that spear as a crutch.
“Move. I’ll… ngh! I’m going to fight.”
And yet he didn’t stop.
He pushed past Yu Ah-hyeon just as the middle-aged hunter barely managed to block a strike from Aranea. The female hunter, having belatedly snapped back to her senses, drew her bowstring—but it was blocked again, uselessly. The spider’s scythe-like foreleg was swinging down, and in that instant, the spear-wielder threw his weapon aside and ran like a madman.
—Shwaak!
The hunter who had just been shouting at me was cleaved in two, torso from legs, and crumpled. Just like that, without accomplishing anything, he lost his life.
The man who had yelled that he would fight, who had yelled for me to fight, had only managed to delay Yu Ah-hyeon’s death by a handful of seconds. Was there any meaning in that death?
If he was fated to die like that, what meaning had there been to the life he’d lived?
“Ji-hoon! Seo Ji-hoon! Seo Ji-hoon!”
“Get a hold of yourself! He’s dead, I tell you!”
“Nock! Nock again!”
Aranea’s crimson eyes swiveled lazily. Several of them drifted toward me before fixing back on the hunters, as though I wasn’t even worth the attention.
Almost as if it was mocking me. As if to say you’re beneath my notice.
‘……!’
In that moment, someone shouted.
It felt as though something was pushing hard against my back.
Thump— thump— thump—! Thump-thump! Thump-thump!
A pulse I didn’t have. A heart I didn’t have. They throbbed. The magic I’d completely exhausted surged back in an instant, flooding me like a well overflowing. The body that had been sluggish and dizzy from mental exhaustion found its balance.
[Willpower stat…]
Had his death meant anything? Had all those who’d fallen been fated to die?
[Destruction probability…]
I don’t know.
But trembling in terror.
Facing one mortal crisis after another.
Watching more people die meaninglessly.
[0.03% of Karma…]
—I was done with it.
[Experience Points have reached the maximum. Lv.19 → Lv.20]
[Evolution condition met.]
[Faint Sixth Sense (F) Lv.9 proficiency has reached the maximum. Faint Sixth Sense (F) Lv.9 → Faint Sixth Sense (F) Lv.10]
[Faint Sixth Sense (F) Lv.10 has reached the maximum level. Faint Sixth Sense (F) Lv.10 → Weak Sixth Sense (E) Lv.1]
[Selecting the Path of the Demon Wolf (魔狼)!]