Days. Kallen and Puddle had spent days in this tomb of silk and darkness. The true scale of their horrifying bad luck was beginning to mount, and unbeknownst to them, the long and arduous Iron Silk Campaign had begun in earnest.
His arm had mostly recovered, and he'd moved to bandaging small wounds littered across his body. He hadn't even had time to think about the vision he'd gotten, signifying that he was once again going to have to take down a Leviathan of some kind. Current matters, unfortunately, were more pressing.
The first wave of returning hunter spiders passed Kallen and Puddle's hiding place, a dozen iron plated arachnids dragging the carcass of something that might have been a shark once. Then came the workers, spinnerets glistening, and then finally the warriors.
By his estimation, the workers were probably Awakened Beasts—like the one he'd already killed. The hunters and warriors were likely monsters and demons respectively.
When the war parties returned from battling rival nightmare creatures for food and soul shards, the nest became disturbingly lively. These were the moments that made Kallen the most nervous.
The spiders weren't completely mindless as he had hoped. They were strangely organized. Rhythmic clicking could be heard echoing through the tunnels. Signals that called for different types of attacks or rotations he assumed.
This probably suggested a sort of alpha spider
He wasn't just in a small settlement of awakened nightmare creatures. He was in the heart of a damned army of them.
~~~
Kallen leaned against the silk coated wall, picking at the frayed edges of his makeshift bandages. "So Mystery Person," he said, voice low. "How's your day going?"
Silence. The mystery guy that Kallen had invented hadn't been very vocal in his first nightmare either.
"Ah, of course. You're terrified of spiders. Can't blame you." He gestured to the walls and ceilings. "They really are impressive though."
Puddle flicked his tail in agreement.
"Thoughts on our odds here?" He continued. "Because I think we've got just about two options. One, we stay pu—sit tight and hope they don't notice two idiots pretending to be part of the wall. Or two, we make an exit and fight our way out."
Kallen paused as if waiting for a response.
"Well, you've always been a coward."
Option two was what Kallen was going to go with. But it had issues. Firstly, the silk. The entire nest was reinforced with the stuff, strong enough to slice through steel. Even with Hydra, cutting his way out would take countless hours.
And secondly, was Puddle's attention span. He glanced at the Veilray, who was currently batting at a loose thread of silk as though it had personally offended him.
The plan A that Kallen had come up with—such as it was—had taken a while to formulate. The spiders moved in six hour cycles, with the sentries swapping out. That was their window.
Puddle's job would be to create an illusion. Not to hide them this time, but to distract and lure. A phantom scent of prey, a false vibration in the webbing here and there. Anything to draw them out
Then, move fast and quiet before they realized a corridor they'd sealed off weeks ago was now open and empty.
Simple. Which meant it would probably go wrong immediately.
Of course, Kallen had several backups in place just for the outcome of plan A failing. Which was fairly likely all things considered. He couldn't scout the nest, so he could only hope that Puddle's distraction would pull as many fighters as possible.
If escaping was impossible due to the intelligence of the spiders under an alpha, then Kallen only needed to move to plan B. Assassinate that alpha.
It probably wouldn't work the first time he tried it. But he could regenerate where the Nightmare Creatures couldn't. Probably. If he bided his time, then he could execute diversion after diversion. It didn't matter how much damage he sustained so long as he and Puddle could escape in time and hide themselves.
That way, he could slowly whittle them away.
If plan B proved impossible—which could be due to any number of variables—then Kallen would simply come back to he and Puddle's hiding spot anyway, or hide in another small corridor, and quickly weave the illusion to convince them that he had disappeared.
If he was trapped in the nest with the spiders and they wouldn't let him escape, then he was going to make damn sure that they regretted that.
~~~
A few hours later, Kallen moved silently through the silk-lined tunnels, Puddle clinging to his shoulder like a strange epaulet. He would use their own patrol gaps against them, slip through their blind spot, and vanish into whatever lay beyond the nest.
But the nest had other ideas.
The first sign of trouble came when the vibrations lining the webbing changed. No longer the steady pulse of patrolling spiders, but something sharper, more deliberate. A signal.
Kallen froze, pressing himself against the wall as a wave of skittering echoed ahead. Not the usual scouts. Not the workers.
Warriors.
Dozens of them, moving in formation, their iron-plated legs clicking against the silk in perfect unison. They weren't searching. They were herding.
Kallen backtracked, expecting something like this, slipping into a side passage. He held his breath as Puddle helped convince the warriors that he was still heading away, his heart hammering in his chest as a few of them crawled by.
The two of them barely made it back to the corridor alive. They had run into a small procession of three workers. Hydra flashed, severing limbs as he practically fell over himself to get away.
By the time he stumbled back into the relative safety of their hideout, his arms were slick with blood. His and theirs.
Kallen slumped against the wall, gasping for breath as Puddle flopped to the ground, exhausted. He didn't even have time to question where in the hell he was relative to the dream world. All of his focus had to be spent on escaping this nest with his life.
Over the course of the next few days, Kallen got to laying the groundwork for plan B. Puddle's distraction on their initial escape attempt had worked well, but he'd need an even more stellar performance from the little guy this time around.
In what Kallen would deem: The False Predator Maneuver, he would ambush any Spiders that came by his corridor alone. He would intentionally leave their bodies, and when he built up about five or six of them in a single day, he would make for his second escape attempt.
Even if this one didn't work, the spiders thinking that he was a predator from here on out would be an invaluable boon.
Kallen started the ruse by making a few claw marks here and there throughout the nest. He didn't make any more than a few dozen yards in either direction, but he wanted it to seem that there was a hidden nest invader that they would hopefully interpret as him and Puddle.
As he made these marks, occasionally, he would send vibrations through the nest, amplifying them with his strange attribute. Puddle would then mimic deep growling noises, hopefully believable enough so that they would think some sort of abomination was inside the nest.
He had seen workers and hunters carrying various amphibious or marine horrors throughout the nest, so it wasn't difficult to guess he was somewhere under water. At least he hoped. The only thing that gnawed in the back of his mind was that vision he had received a few days ago. In it, he'd seen a towering crimson spire and a labyrinth of blood red coral.
Regardless, Kallen's first real attempt at 'The False Predator Maneuver,' went swimmingly. He had laid his marks, and Puddle had executed his portion of the plan flawlessly. Predictably, the Iron Spider nest didn't come crashing down on him the moment he'd sent out the signals.
The spiders has responded by sending only two probing scouts. A cautious plan and one that practically told him there was a higher level of consciousness directing the almost mindless workers and hunters of the nest.
When the first worker came crawling by, watchfully skittering down the hall, Kallen lunged from his hiding spot, courtesy of Puddle veiling him, and slashed, removing the spider's head from its abdomen in one quick swipe. Aided by [Threefold], the spider was dead before it knew what happened.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast: Iron Spider].
Kallen placed his back to a narrow opening as he heard more movement. When the second scout was within inches, he lunged again. His initial swipe of Hydra was blocked by one of its forelegs, but he quickly shifted and hacked again, cutting through the Beast's face.
After marking the dead spiders with the same territory symbol he carved into the walls, Kallen slipped back into his main disguise in no time, breathing heavy from the adrenaline.
Damnation but those things are terrifying.
The Spiders didn't react immediately. The nest remained silent for an eerie few hours, tension thickening in the air until Kallen could taste it.
The first thing he noticed was a change in his enemy's rotation. No longer did they scout in isolated shifts as they may have before, now they traveled in packs of two or three.
The second thing he noticed was that they seemed to avoid his area altogether, which was more than fine with him.
It wouldn't last, but it gave him time to set up traps and recover his body back to one-hundred percent. His biggest issue, for now, was the lack of any sort of variety do his diet.
He had been surviving off of three apples a day, which wasn't sustainable. The days passed by in a cycle of him eating three apples, counting a full 24 hours as three eaten apples. Since the apple of eden regenerated at a constant speed, he needed to make sure he didn't deviate from his schedule lest he forget how long he'd been here.
Kallen had spent nearly a week in the nest and he was already suffering from the effects of an extreme calory deficit.
At first, it'd started as a nagging hunger. Over time, his body started to adapt to the change and the hunger pangs began to decrease in their intensity, but he was beginning to display signs of obvious hypoglycemia. He had difficulty concentrating at times, and he suffered from bouts of shakiness.
More than a few times, he found himself staring enviously at the corpse he could see at the end of his hallway. The spider's friends hadn't dared come retrieve the body like they usually did, and he was beginning to have dangerous thoughts.
But on the fifth day of operation: The False Predator Maneuver—the first phase of the Iron Silk Campaign as he'd come to call it—the spiders sent their first worker back into Kallen's small territory.
It started with a vibration. Not the usual patrol patterns. Something new. A single beast approached, a worker, but not one scouting danger. It was a messenger.
This spider moved with deliberate and unhurried steps. In its mandibles, it carried something: the carcass of a large fish, freshly killed, scales still gleaming. The spider placed it carefully at the entrance of Kallen's corridor, then retreated without fanfare.
Puddle let out a confused chirp.
They… are they feeding me?
The realization hit Kallen. The arachnid nest hadn't taken his False Predator ruse as a threat to stay away… they'd taken it as claim. They thought something powerful had marked this territory, and now they were appeasing it.
Perhaps it was a ruse of their own, or perhaps not. Regardless, a slow, grim smile spread across his face.
This changed things.
~~~
Sunny
Cassie, the blind oracle girl was slowly doing better. She didn't look well per se, but they had been able to reign her in enough to get her to talk. When she did, Sunny almost wished that they hadn't pressed her.
"... did you dream of another vision? You can tell us if you want," Nephis was saying.
Cassie hesitated. "I… don't know. Maybe it was just a nightmare."
Sunny and Nephis exchanged glances. They both doubted what Cassie saw was a simple nightmare. After all, people usually did not dream in the Dream Realm. The blind girl, meanwhile, continued:
"I don't really remember. It's all in fragments."
"You can just tell us what you remember," Nephis said. "Maybe we'll be able to make sene of it together."
Cassie sighed and tentatively nodded. After a long pause, she finally found the courage to speak.
"At first, I saw a… a boundless darkness locked behind seven seals. Something vast was churning in the darkness. I felt like if I directly saw it, I would lose my mind. As I watched, terrified, the seals broke one after another, until only one remained. And then that seal broke, too.
After that… I don't know. It was as though my mind shattered into a thousand shards, each shard reflecting its own image. Most of them were dark and terrifying. Some I have already forgotten. The other…
I saw the human castle again. Only this time, it was destroyed and ruined. It was night time, rain falling as rivers of flame spread through its streets. But as time passed, a slow, insistent water crept up, dousing the fire. I saw a golden man sat upon his throne, a trident in hand. The waters lapped at his feet.
I saw twin stars rejuvenating injured people of the castle, one healing, one enhancing them. I saw a shadow and a ghostly man rage against a dragon with clipped wings; a woman with a bronze spear drowning in a tide of monsters; an archer trying to pierce the falling sky with his arrows.
In the end, I saw a colossal, terrifying crimson spire. At its base, seven severed heads were guarding seven locks.
And at the top a… a dying angel and a withered shadow were being consumed by the encroaching tide of a dreadful Leviathan. When I saw the angel and shadow bleed, I suddenly felt as though… as though something so precious that it can't be described with words was taken from me."
Her voice softened.
"Then, I felt so much sorrow, pain, and rage that what little remained of my sanity seemed to disappear. That was when I woke up… I think."
~~~
Some time later, Sunny, Nephis, and Cassie were walking through the crimson labyrinth. Night had gone and with it, the tide had as well.
Cassie's vision had made him terribly uneasy, but he tried his best to not think about it, focusing on his shadow to scout the way ahead. He had been almost ready to give the all clear when he noticed something peculiar.
Something very peculiar.
A young girl was punching a gargantuan creature encased in stone. She was pointing westward, an angry grimace on her childlike face as she struck the creature again and again.
Sunny went quiet as he observed the scene. It was only a few hundred yards beyond them
He had gone so quiet, that his companions began to grow worried.
"Uh, Sunny… do you see something?"
Compelled by his flaw to answer, he nodded slowly. "Yeah. Yeah I do."
Noticing his strange reaction, Nephis pressed up beside him. "What is it?"
"A young girl… I recognize her. She was the only one who took the wilderness survival course with me."
Nephis frowned as she regarded him. "How young? Like… the little kid that was at the academy with us? The one who followed the Nightwalker around?"
Sunny nodded again. "Yeah, she's just ahead of us, not that far away."
Cassie stayed silent as Nephis considered their options. Even a capable Sleeper would slow them down in their trek westward, let alone a ten or eleven year old girl who was separated from help. She would probably die without their intervention though, and so Sunny knew that Nephis had already made up her mind the moment he'd pointed her out.
"Are there any scavengers between us and her?"
Sunny sighed. "Yes, but there's a few safe paths ahead. It shouldn't take long.