EP.19 House of the Spider -4
EP.19 House of the Spider -4
I pulled my right foot back, dodged the spider leg hurtling toward my thigh, and in the same motion drew my sword and sheared the leg off.
Then I spun half a turn to evade the webbing fired from behind, and kept spinning the other half.
A horizontal slash riding the centrifugal force of my spinning body. It cleanly bisected the spider's body.
It might not be as sharp as Alice's crowbar, but my blade held enough edge to slice through a spider with ease.
I had carved through Divine Beasts tougher than these like they were tofu, so why would a spider be any different?
I had struggled to fight the spiders until now, but that was purely because the spiders were disgusting, so I'd simply been reluctant to fight them.
Not because they were a truly difficult enemy.
I burned the raining strands of webbing out of the air with fire, and whenever an opening appeared, I whipped up a gale to send the small spiders hurtling away.
Against the human-sized spiders, I brought my sword down in a vertical slash and bisected their torsos. I cast an illusion on the large spiders to make them fight each other.
In this way, I could respond to the swarming spiders one by one, methodically.
Before I gained my abilities, taking down even a single one would have been a struggle, but things were different now.
I could fight back against Divine Beasts in my own way.
However...
'It's impossible for me alone.'
With my own power alone, I couldn't push a Divine Beast to the brink of death.
When I fought Taotie or Bulgasari, I was able to defeat them only because I had help from someone else each time.
There was still no Divine Beast I had brought down wholly by my own strength.
Right now was no different.
I had tried my hardest to get close to Arachne, but the distance I had covered was a mere 100 meters.
And while moving that distance, I was pouring every ounce of my strength into fighting Arachne's spiderlings.
Even against just the young spiders the situation was this overwhelming—if the mother herself joined the fray?
I could predict that the tide of battle would tilt decisively in their favor.
But for her part, she merely stood there watching blankly, as though the battle between me and her young was nothing more than an amusing play.
'In the end, is my only option to hold out...?'
There was nothing stopping me from trying to escape through the door I'd entered by.
Except that if I did, Arachne would surely start moving in earnest.
Because no spider in this world lets prey that has entered its house slip away.
So this situation was all one phase.
The act of waiting for the prey caught in the web to thrash and exhaust itself.
If I showed the slightest intent to flee or displayed any sign of fatigue, that giant spider would sink her fangs into me.
"Kgh...!!"
The remnants of webbing left on the floor hindered my movement, and I ended up allowing a spider's attack to graze me.
It wasn't a critical problem yet, but if mistakes like this kept repeating, I'd be in serious trouble.
A future where the spiders actually devour me might not be far off...
'No choice.'
I snapped every air thread around me taut in a violent pulse, momentarily blocking the spiders' approach.
I shook my sword hard to fling off the blue ichor fouling it, cleaned the blade just enough, and sheathed it.
Then I leaned my upper body forward as far as I could and took a stance. Like a runner crouched at the starting line.
The moment the wind went still was the starting signal. Holding that in my mind, I shifted my gaze toward the exit door.
Two spiders were blocking the door, my objective. They were still trapped in the illusion, locked in a brawl, beating each other senseless.
At this point, having them vanish would be convenient. So I planted a suggestion that they should each end the other's life.
The wind gradually calmed, and as I had decided in my mind, I bolted toward the door.
I ignored every strand of webbing shot from behind and every spider that lunged at me. I poured every ounce of focus solely into reaching my target point.
As I began to close in on the exit, the corners of my lips started lifting on their own.
The hope that I could escape made me smile.
"Did you think I would let you go peacefully?"
But along with an explosive sound from behind, a shadow fell over me.
Arachne, who had been on the stage, leaped and flew all the way to the door in a single bound.
At this, the corners of my lips, which had been rising... lifted the rest of the way.
"No. I expected you wouldn't."
The future I could see was limited to three seconds, but I was certain that Arachne would never let me go.
And sure enough, as if this turn of events had never been in doubt, the giant spider was hurtling straight toward the exit door.
"So I've been counting the seconds, waiting for this exact moment!"
Right now, the air thread beneath my forward-stepping foot and the thread ahead of me were twisted up in a dense mass.
I released every single thread I had wound tight, purely for this one instant.
With that, a sudden violent gust erupted from in front and below me, hurling my body and everything nearby in the opposite direction.
"Human! A pathetic trick...!!"
"It's called strategy. You stupid spider."
Meanwhile, Arachne, unable to change direction in midair, continued straight toward the exit. Our paths crossed as we grew further and further apart.
Soon enough, once I had flown beyond a certain distance, I stopped the wind.
Gravity immediately pulled me down into a fall, but I created an air cushion on the floor and touched down softly.
This multipurpose hall had a split-level structure.
The place where I'd entered was the fifth floor, which meant there was also a separate entrance leading to the fourth floor.
And the spot where I had just arrived, because I had grasped this layout, was precisely in front of the door connecting to the fourth-floor corridor.
Even for Arachne, it would take time to fly all the way here again.
In other words, my victory, having escaped her web...
"Did I not tell you? I said I would never let you go quietly!"
"Hell's bells...!! Are you a damned huntsman spider?!"
The giant spider had crept up right behind me before I knew it, with a soft rustling sound.
It was a moment when my loathing for spiders grew even deeper.
***
"Nothing here."
"Not a thing..."
The fox and the rabbit who had climbed relentlessly through the building, all the way to the top floor.
But the government agency's rooftop lounge was completely empty, and without even a strand of webbing, it was immaculately clean.
"It seems Arachne was on a lower floor after all."
"We made a completely pointless trip."
"Now that I think about it, the numbers of young ones coming out dropped the higher we climbed... As much as I hate to admit it, it seems we were tricked by a spider."
"A stupid fox who gets fooled by a spider of all things."
"The words 'we' include you as well, you know? Does it never occur to you that the one who can't understand the meaning of those words is the more stupid one?"
Seon-ju had made a good suggestion with the intent that they not fight, but as if it had meant nothing, the two Divine Beasts kept grating on each other's nerves.
The mood was such that it wouldn't have been strange if they had started tearing into each other at any second.
However, Miho turned her steps toward the stairwell first, and the situation shifted into a ceasefire.
"Count yourself lucky, rabbit. If I weren't worried about my husband, I would have dismantled you right here on the spot and turned you into stew meat."
"I have no time to waste. I must return to the boss's side at once rather than keep talking with an incompetent fox."
Unlike Miho, who headed for the stairs, Alice climbed up onto the rooftop railing.
And then she simply hurled herself into the empty air.
Gravity eagerly pulled on the rabbit's body, intent on smashing Alice into the ground.
But without so much as blinking, Alice calmly used her ability.
Alice calculated perfectly from the time she was suspended in midair to the time she would touch the ground.
Alice's ability, possessing the concept of ignoring cause and collision, allowed her body to land safely on the ground, disregarding gravity.
Having returned to the first floor, Alice intended to climb the building's interior once more and reunite with Seon-ju.
But then, a faint noise was picked up by Alice's keen rabbit ears, and with a look of shock spreading across her face, she stared up at the upper floors of the building.
"Boss...!!"
The sound of impacts had begun around the fourth floor, but the humans and Companion Animals outside the building were unable to detect it.
Only Alice could hear that sound, and she urgently used her ability to breach the building's interior.
Amid the ceaselessly shifting field of vision, Alice calculated the timing of her leaps without issue and raced without pause to the fourth floor, the source of the noise.
In a form akin to the Chukji technique often seen in martial arts novels, Alice reached the fourth floor. There, she came face to face with the person she had been trying to reach.
But...
"Boss?"
"Huh... Alice? You went to the upper floors... No, more importantly, run for it right now!!"
Behind Seon-ju, the giant spider that filled the entire corridor was in the lead, and behind her stretched a long line of spiders.
Just as the two Divine Beasts had realized only after reaching the top floor, Arachne had been positioned on the lower floors, no higher than the fourth or fifth floor.
It was Seon-ju who happened to discover this fact first, encountering Arachne in the process.
However, with the level of skill Seon-ju possessed, he could not bring Arachne down.
So, keenly aware of his own limits, he had chosen to flee, hence the current situation.
"Human, do you truly think you can escape from me?"
"Aaargh! Fuck!! Can't you get that disgusting face of yours out of my sight?!"
Seon-ju was sprinting so hard he was practically kicking off the air itself, but compared to Arachne's crawling speed, he was hopelessly slow.
The gap between them steadily narrowed, and at last, Seon-ju came within striking range of Arachne's forelegs.
The sharp tip of the giant spider's leg shot out toward his body.
Without hesitation, Seon-ju drew his sword and barely managed to parry the thrusting leg.
But his legs, which had been driving him forward with all their might, came to a halt on the spot, and from beneath the giant spider, spiderlings leaped out and rushed at Seon-ju.
For Seon-ju, who was already struggling just to block Arachne's attacks, the assault from the young spiders was an unquestionably lethal situation.
However, Alice was not one to simply stand by and watch. In a single second, she reached the spot where Seon-ju was and immediately brought her crowbar down.
The first spider's head was crushed, and the other young spiders following behind burst one after another under Alice's swinging crowbar.
"Boss, I'll join you."
"Th-thanks! You saved my life! And I'm sorry! Because I went somewhere weird instead of following you guys..."
"It's okay. The problem was that I and the fox left the boss's side first. So the boss doesn't need to apologize."
"I mean it—thank you for saying that."
"Don't mention it. But more importantly, boss. Can you leave this to me? I want to win the contest against the fox."
"Ah, that's right, there was a competition going on... Alright! I feel bad about dumping this on you, but I'll leave Arachne to you!"
"Mm!"
Fluidly deflecting Arachne's sweeping legs, Seon-ju pressed forward and cut down a spiderling.
Arachne's attacks came at him again, but Alice's crowbar smashed the attacks away and blocked them.
"Bring it, spider. I'm your opponent."
"A feeble human, a feeble rabbit... Every single one of you manages to fray my nerves beyond belief!"
"You're a spider who can't do anything but spin thread and give birth. It's only natural to look down on you."
"You'd better watch that mouth! Rabbit!"
"Wah, I'm Mama Spider. Babies, protect me."
"You insolent, mannerless rabbit...!!"
Arachne's leg stabbed down over Alice's head.
But the spider's leg was driven into the empty floor, and the rabbit watched it and sneered.
A provocation more perfect than could be asked for.
Driven out of reason by the taunt, Arachne no longer paid Seon-ju any mind and moved her legs without pause for the sole purpose of tearing the rabbit to death.
But to the rabbit who leaps through time, the spider's attacks were practically nonexistent.
And so the rabbit could only find Arachne's actions laughable.
Having leaped three seconds into the future to smoothly evade the spider's attack, Alice landed atop the spider's abdomen and drove the sharp tip of her crowbar straight down into it.
A groove was gouged into Arachne's abdomen, and blue ichor oozed from within.
"Kiieeeeek!!"
"Ugh...! So loud!"
Writhing and shrieking in agony, Arachne. She let out a scream so loud it shook the entire floor where they stood.
At this, Alice sprang far away from Arachne and folded her long, protruding rabbit ears down.
Being a rabbit with excellent hearing, she had no choice but to be acutely sensitive to Arachne's shrieking.
It was one of the few weaknesses of a rabbit against whom physical attacks were useless.
"I'll kill you!! I will kill that damned rabbit no matter what it takes...!!"
"Oogh...!"
Alice was in pain from the spider's eerie screeching.
She rose from her spot, wanting to inflict more damage by any means, but she could not approach the spider.
Because the closer she got to the ear-piercing sound, the harder the ordeal became for the rabbit.
Realizing she needed a different means of attack, Alice tried to step back to devise a method.
But Alice had noticed something had gone wrong, and a look of bewilderment began to spread across her face.
"My ability isn't activating...?"
There were three cases in which her Time Leap ability wouldn't activate and she would remain still.
The first was when an object occupied the position at the point in time she was leaping to.
The second was when the cooldown from a failed leap hadn't ended.
The last was when she couldn't move in the first place.
For Alice, who had used her ability countless times and grown fully accustomed to it, the first and second cases were impossible happenings.
That meant there was only one reason: the sticky webbing spread beneath Alice's feet.
A web trap that, unless melted by fire, could never be escaped by one's own power.
It was a clear mistake by the rabbit, who had charged past without recognizing the situation behind Arachne.
And Arachne, who had just witnessed this, began to laugh even as her face contorted from the unending pain.
"Hahahaht!! Serves you right! You must not have realized that I had been continuously producing webbing behind me?"
"Dammit...!"
Alice struggled frantically, tried to gouge out the webbing with her crowbar, and made every effort possible.
But the webbing that clung stickily to her showed absolutely no sign of coming loose.
Meanwhile, the giant spider was closing in on the rabbit, baring her lethal venomous fangs...
"Little rabbit, let's see you scream in agony as well...!!"
"Ugh...!!"
—Crunch!
Without the slightest mercy, she lunged and drove her fangs straight into flesh.
Soon after, the sound of flesh being pierced rang out, followed by the sizzling sound of the flowing venom dissolving skin and muscle.
Alice thought she had been struck down pathetically due to a single mistake.
With her eyes squeezed shut, she stayed still for a moment, bracing for the pain about to hit her. But then, sensing yet another twist, she cautiously opened her eyes.
And there, in front of her...
"B-Boss...?"
There was only Seon-ju's back, his body pierced by the venomous fangs in her place.