I Had to Retreat
The final exam the party members proposed was no ordinary monster subjugation.
It was a solo mission meant to prove he could stand completely on his own.
The exam began the moment he reached the entrance of an uncharted forest on the empire’s outskirts—the first gate that would test how well he handled the supply and management of goods, the very role that belonged to Reno the porter.
The gear Zick packed before setting out was shockingly sparse. He had stuffed nothing more than the absolute bare essentials into his bag.
Around the same time, far away in their hideout, Ainz set down his teacup and gave a light flick of his fingers. A round screen blossomed in midair. On it, the clear image of Zick’s back as he walked toward the empire’s outskirts came into sharp focus.
Drake, watching that feed, furrowed his brow.
“Old man Ainz.”
“What is it?”
“That magic tool you gave the hero. You said it was for escape, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Then why the hell does it have a surveillance function too?”
“Because we have an exam to administer.”
Ainz’s shameless, utterly unbothered answer left Drake speechless. The rest of the party, seeing the sheer insanity of the tool’s capabilities, could only gape inwardly in shock.
A magic tool of this grade… only a handful of mages in the entire empire could even make one.
They all wondered, yet none of them voiced the question. It was thanks to the unspoken rule that had formed after Zick thoughtfully refrained from prying into their secrets. So they buried their doubts and returned their attention to the young man on the screen.
“He’s already being careless with supplies. Deduction right from the start.”
Reno unhesitatingly marked the demerit in his ledger. Even in a world of magic and mystery, thorough logistics on a long journey could mean the difference between life and death.
But that was merely Reno’s misunderstanding. This was Zick’s carefully calculated build-up—so he could put every lesson his comrades had drilled into him to full use in the field. He had deliberately avoided packing bulky or perishable ingredients that would only drain his stamina.
Perhaps because he did not know the full details of how the others had put Zick through the wringer, Reno simply watched the screen with a faintly disappointed look.
The journey to the forest on the empire’s outskirts took several grueling days. Throughout that time Zick put every skill he had learned from his comrades on full display.
First he employed the commercial sense and negotiation techniques Reno had taught him, tracking down a merchant caravan’s wagon. With his natural gift of gab he haggled the fare down and hitched a ride, slashing his travel expenses dramatically.
Once he disembarked he switched to the survival skills and poison lore Drake had hammered into him. Weaving through the woods, he unerringly filtered out every toxic plant, mushroom, and fruit, gathering only safe ingredients for his meals.
Reno could not help but be impressed.
“I thought he’d just cut supplies recklessly to save money… but he’d calculated the terrain and schedule down to the last detail.”
He immediately cancelled the earlier demerit and freely awarded bonus points instead.
Drake, still watching the screen, bared his teeth in a grin.
“Keuk. Hero’s got some real sense. Drop him anywhere on the continent with that instinct and he still won’t starve.”
At last Zick set foot in the forest on the empire’s outskirts—the true site of the final mission.
The moment he stepped beneath the canopy the air itself changed. Sunlight barely reached the forest floor, blocked by the dense lattice of branches overhead. The damp scent of earth and the stench of rotting wood hung thick in every direction. Somewhere far off, an unknown bird cried with a bizarre, eerie note, and now and then came the intermittent crackle of something stepping on dry leaves.
The empire’s outskirts. A forest where raw, untamed danger ruled—and where magic beasts, not humans, were the true masters.
Completely hidden among the undergrowth, Zick recalled the contents of the commission once more and muttered under his breath.
“Objective: locate and reconnoiter the nest of intermediate-rank magic beasts—Arachne.”
It was believed that Arachne—giant spider-type magic beasts the size of wagons—inhabited this forest. If only ordinary specimens were present, Zick’s current skill should have been enough to scout the area and withdraw safely.
The real problem was the slim but very real chance of a queen.
A queen Arachne was a high-rank magic beast: lower body of a spider, upper body of a human woman. Her personal combat ability might not be overwhelming, yet her mere presence would explode the nest’s command structure and overall fighting power. Worst of all were the soldier Arachne—combat-type spiders only a queen could produce. Those things were walking disasters. Unlike ordinary Arachne that a steel sword could still handle, their carapaces were so hard that nothing short of aura or magic would even scratch them.
If a queen and her soldiers were present, the nearby villages and towns would drown in blood. Therefore Zick’s main mission was not to fight. He only needed to pinpoint the nest’s location, confirm whether a queen existed, and retreat unharmed. The party had recommended the job precisely because they judged the odds of finding a queen to be vanishingly low.
“Just do it the way I was taught. Don’t go deep—only follow the traces.”
Zick called up the tracking techniques Drake had drilled into him with merciless severity. Creatures as large as Arachne always left signs wherever they moved.
Pushing deeper into the forest, he parted the thick undergrowth and scanned the ground. Early on he made a few mistakes, chasing the wrong animal tracks. Drake, watching on the screen, propped his chin on his hand and muttered.
“Tsk. You should’ve checked the left thicket there. Eyes still aren’t open yet.”
The worry lasted only a moment. Zick soon shook his head, realized his error, calmly changed direction, and began sweeping a wider area. Before long he spotted tree bark that had been scraped and cleanly sliced by something sharp. Closer examination of the soil revealed enormous leg prints far too large to belong to any ordinary beast, sunk deep into the dirt. That was not all. Old, sticky spider silk hung between the bushes, and half-melted carcasses of wild animals—eaten beyond recognition—appeared one after another. When he finally found blackened patches of venom that had dripped onto leaves and scorched them, certainty settled in.
Zick followed the distinctive trail of spider-type magic beasts without missing a single sign. Drake’s lips curved into a faint smile.
“Still, the feedback is quick. Some mistakes, but he’s doing pretty well.”
Noah leaned closer to the screen, looking intrigued.
“To pick up Sir Drake’s notoriously finicky tracking arts this thoroughly in such a short time… Hero truly has frightening absorption.”
Zick also never neglected the stealth techniques of erasing his own footprints and masking his scent. Arachne’s sense of smell was not particularly keen, but this sinister forest held more than just spider beasts, and he had no desire to invite unnecessary trouble.
After hours of meticulous tracking he finally reached his goal.
“Found it.”
He whispered the words and held his breath. Beneath a massive rock cliff yawned a dark cave mouth. The entrance was densely, grotesquely veiled in ashen-white spider silk that sent a chill down the spine even from a distance. From deep inside came a constant, regular scraping—unpleasant, almost mechanical.
Kieeik.
Kigigik.
The sound seemed to swallow even the forest’s natural noise. Zick swallowed hard. His chest tightened until breathing carefully felt like a risk, yet he forced himself steady, dropped behind a boulder, and carefully marked the location on his map.
Now he had to check the interior. Infiltrate directly under stealth, or create another variable? After a brief deliberation he chose the latter. Arachne’s sense of smell might be dull, but their vibration sense was unnaturally sharp. Anything that snagged the dense webs surrounding the nest would alert every spider inside at once.
Zick pulled out the wild animals he had captured while traveling. Using knowledge Drake had taught him, he had fed them a mild sleeping agent. He timed the dosages with surgical precision so the creatures would all wake and thrash at the same moment, then hung them as bait on the outer webs.
Moments later the drug wore off. The animals began struggling violently. The webs around the nest shook hard. The effect was immediate. Sensing the vibrations, Arachne poured out of the cave in a chittering flood of grotesque friction sounds, their attention locked on the bait.
“Now.”
Zick did not waste the opening. He slipped swiftly into the nest. Time was the core of the plan; the bait would not last long. Heart hammering, he pushed deeper into the cavern until he reached a vast hollow chamber—and the instant he saw what waited there, his heart plummeted.
In the deepest recess, upon a throne lavishly draped in silk, the silhouette of a magic beast reigned. Rising from the body of an enormous black spider was the upper torso of a woman whose skin was a grotesque, pure white. She was beautiful enough to be captivating—and at the same time so horrifying that every hair on Zick’s body stood on end. It was the sheer wrongness of two utterly alien beings forcibly fused together. Her blood-red eyes gazed into empty air, slowly surveying her nest, radiating an overwhelming terror.
“Holy shit—there’s actually a queen?!”
The worst-case probability he had half-dismissed had just hit the jackpot. At the same moment Zick froze in shock, every comrade watching the feed in the hideout shot to their feet. The scene inside the nest was pure horror.
Drake pressed a hand to his forehead as if he could not believe it.
“This is insane. Hero’s luck is pure poison. He punches through that tiny chance and still finds the queen?”
“What are we going to do about our hero? That thing is completely beyond him right now!”
Noah fretted at the screen while Reno, face paper-white, looked desperately between Gerard and Ainz.
“This wasn’t in the plan, was it? We have to pull him out immediately!”
Even at Reno’s urgent cry, Gerard merely kept his arms folded and stared at the screen in silence.
“No problem. That boy will read the situation and retreat at once.”
He spoke in a heavy, level voice as though nothing were wrong—yet cold sweat already soaked his palms. The queen’s appearance was a far more dangerous variable than any of them had imagined.
Inside the nest, soldier Arachne clad in black carapaces harder than steel stood guard around their queen. At the sight of those spear-like legs gleaming with menace, Zick’s hand instinctively clamped hard around his sword hilt. Breath came short and sharp up to his throat. Yet a moment later he forced his trembling fingers to let go.
The second I start thinking about fighting, I die.
The brutal maxim of real combat Gerard had beaten into him flashed through his mind. This mission was not subjugation. It was bringing the information back alive.
Zick crushed the goosebumps racing across his skin and instinctively silenced his footsteps, easing backward.
This is as far as I go. Taking on those soldiers at my current level is suicide.
He had to report this intelligence to the Hero Management Bureau and his comrades—and retreat at once.
Just as he silently turned and prepared to withdraw, a faint sound reached him from the corner of the nest where silk cocoons were piled high—the prey storeroom.
“Ugh…”
A tiny, barely-squeezed-out groan. Zick’s foot froze in midair. Thinking he had misheard, he strained his ears. The sound came again.
“Save… me…”
It was unmistakably a human voice. His gaze snapped toward the source. There, bound head-to-toe in spider silk like living cocoons, were people—frozen in terror and despair, only able to shed silent tears. The image burned itself into his eyes.