Maybe the smarter play was simpler: keep this place from vomiting another army. Burn time destroying eggs. Collapse key lanes. Seal exits with earth. Make the surface safe enough that the kids didn’t have to fight the sky and the ground at the same time again.

A practical solution. A boring one. But the problem with boring was that it left unanswered questions behind… And Ludger was tired of mysteries.

Tired of enemies he couldn’t name. Situations he couldn’t read. Threats that only showed themselves when they were already biting.

Last night hadn’t been random. The coordination hadn’t been luck. Something here had decided to hit them from above and below at the same time.

And if he left without knowing what waited at the end of this labyrinth…he’d be gambling his people on ignorance. His fingers flexed, swollen joints tugging at skin. He exhaled once, slow, and felt the decision harden.

“No,” he muttered.

He lifted his head, eyes narrowing as if he could stare through the webbing and force the dungeon to show him its secrets. He would quicken his pace. Not by sprinting blindly. By moving like he meant it.

He triggered Rage Flow just enough to make each step longer, faster, smoother. He narrowed Seismic Sense into a forward spear, mapping routes and skipping dead ends. He stopped wasting time on every single egg sack in every corner and instead focused on the veins, the main corridors, the junctions, the routes that fed movement toward the surface.

Kill what mattered. Ignore what didn’t.

And most importantly… He wouldn’t leave. Not until he knew.

Not until he saw what was waiting for him at the end of the labyrinth, whether it was a guardian, a gate, a factory, or something that explained why the sky and the ground had moved like they shared a brain.

Ludger stepped forward into the webbed hall, pace accelerating, mana humming in his veins like a drumbeat.

“If you’re going to be a problem,” he whispered to the labyrinth, voice flat, almost calm, “then show me your face.”

Eventually, Ludger stopped pretending this was a careful expedition and changed his tactics.

He triggered Wind Step and the world shifted, his feet didn’t just run, they skimmed. Each step caught a pocket of air and threw him forward, the corridor blurring at the edges as he cut through the web-choked hall like a knife through cloth.

He stopped being polite with the eggs too.

At first he’d used pebbles, clean, efficient, controlled. Then the pace demanded something cheaper.

When he passed a cluster of sacks hanging from a wall, he simply reached out and smashed them with his hands. Palm through membrane, fingers tearing through layered silk, wet contents collapsing onto the floor with a sound that made his skin crawl. He didn’t look down. He didn’t slow. He just kept moving, leaving broken nursery piles behind him like he was ripping pages out of the labyrinth’s future.

More eggs. More sacks. More alcoves. He crushed them as he went, sometimes with a fist, sometimes with a backhand, sometimes by slamming his shoulder into a web-thick corner and feeling it pop and sag around him.

It was crude. It was fast. And it worked.

When the white spiders finally started showing up in his path, actual defenders instead of lurking ambushers, he didn’t give them the dignity of a spell.

One lunged in from the side, legs stabbing low.

Ludger sidestepped, planted his foot, and kicked.

His heel slammed into the spider’s head with a dull, brittle crunch. The creature’s body flipped sideways, legs flailing, and he finished it by stamping down once, hard enough that the pale skull plate split and leaked dark fluid into the webbed floor.

Another spider tried to block him head-on.

He didn’t even slow. He drove a knee into its face as he passed, felt a chitin crack, then shoved its body aside with his forearm like moving a chair out of the way. He was moving too fast for them to coordinate properly.

Wind Step carried him through junctions and wide halls, his Seismic Sense kept tight and forward so he didn’t waste time on dead ends. The labyrinth’s thick mana kept his core fed, but his body was still paying for the work, lungs burning, arms heavy from repeated impacts, muscles tight with controlled violence.

And the smell…

At some point, it became unbearable. Not the faint rot of the labyrinth. Not the dusty cloth scent. Him.

His coat, his sleeves, his armguards, splattered with spider fluid, egg slurry, and broken membrane residue. The stench clung to him like grease, sweet and rotten at once. Every breath through his nose tasted like old meat and wet silk.

Ludger’s expression tightened. He felt genuinely grossed out for the first time in hours.

Then he ignored it. Because he reached the stairs leading to the second section.

The air shifted. The ceiling rose higher. The walls widened. And he stepped into the second section. It was bigger.

Not just wider corridors, everything felt scaled up, like the labyrinth had stopped pretending to be a tunnel network and started acting like an underground district. The main passage opened into a broad chamber with multiple branching routes and high arches that disappeared into shadow. Stone columns, actual columns this time, not “pillar-shaped rock”, stood in rows like the skeleton of a grand hall.

And the webs… They decreased.

Not vanished. There were still strands along corners, still a few draped sheets like thin curtains, but nothing like the first section’s suffocating carpet. The thick egg clusters were rarer too, no heavy sacks packed into every alcove, no bulging nursery walls.

Which made no sense. Ludger slowed just enough to let his senses drink it in.

More space… fewer eggs… fewer webs… he thought, frowning. But why?

It looked less like a breeding ground and more like… a working zone. And yet there were still plenty of spiders.

White shapes moved in the distance, bigger on average than the first-section swarmers, bodies sleeker, legs longer, movement smoother. They weren’t scattered randomly either. They traveled in purposeful lines, shifting around columns and through side corridors like they had routes.

For a few seconds, Ludger couldn’t tell what they were doing. It didn’t look like hunting. It didn’t look like guarding eggs. It didn’t look like mindless roaming. It looked like… tasks.

Then his boot scraped a thin strand he hadn’t noticed. The sound was tiny. The response wasn’t. The spiders’ movement stuttered for half a heartbeat. Then dozens of heads turned at once. Not just eyes, attention.

The entire chamber’s rhythm snapped toward him like a net tightening.

Every spider in view stopped pretending it had a job and started treating Ludger as the only thing in the world worth killing. Ludger exhaled slowly, fingers flexing despite the sticky grime on his skin.

“Alright,” he muttered, gaze narrowing as white bodies began to shift into attack lines.

“So this is where you were all working.”

He took one step forward. The second section didn’t greet him with an ambush. It greeted him with intent. The spiders moved like they’d been waiting for a reason to stop pretending they were busy.

White bodies slipped out from behind columns and arches, legs clicking against stone in a clean, synchronized rhythm. Ludger didn’t waste breath talking. He inhaled once, centered his balance, and let Wind Step coil under his feet like a spring.

The first line came in.

Fast thrusts, two spiders stabbing from the front while another tries to hook his ankle from the side. Their legs shot forward like spears, tips aimed at joints and ribs and throat. No dramatic leaps. Just efficient, repeated impalement attempts.

Ludger moved.

He slid sideways on a burst of wind, letting the first stab pass in front of his chest. He ducked under the second, felt the wind of it scrape his hair, then pivoted into the gap between them.

A webshot snapped toward his face, thick, bright strand fired like a harpoon.

Ludger twisted in place, shoulders rolling, and the strand whipped past his cheek and splattered against a column behind him with a wet slap. It immediately tightened, fibers contracting like muscle.

He didn’t let it become a problem. A short mana bolt flashed from his fingers and clipped the strand near its source, severing it mid-air. The loose end recoiled, snapping harmlessly.

Another webshot followed, lower this time, aiming to bind his knees. Ludger jumped.

Not a high leap. A tight vertical hop powered by Wind Step, his body lifting just enough to clear the line as it hissed beneath him. He tucked his knees, rotated his hips, and spun in the air like he was turning on an invisible axis. As he rotated, his heel smashed down.

The kick landed on a spider’s head, hard enough to crack the pale chitin and drive it into the stone floor with a blunt crunch. It twitched once and went still.

He landed already moving.

The chamber tried to close around him. More spiders arrived from the side corridors, creating angles, two to stab, one to web, one to grab. Their legs punched in rapid sequence, alternating like pistons, while their mouths fired silk in quick bursts designed to slow, bind, and funnel him into a kill pocket.

Ludger refused to be funneled.

He slid under a stabbing leg, the tip scraping stone close enough to throw sparks. He rolled through the gap, came up on one knee, and drove his palm forward. A compressed mana bolt hit a spider’s foreleg joint.

The joint didn’t “injure.” It failed.

The leg snapped sideways, useless, and the spider’s weight shifted wrong.

Ludger took advantage instantly.

He stepped in and punched, bare fist, no flourish, straight into the spider’s head plate. Wind Step added momentum. His knuckles sank into the chitin with a sickening crack, and the creature folded as if someone had turned off its spine.

More webs came.

One strand caught his sleeve and started to pull. Ludger didn’t tug back. Tugging was how you got dragged off-balance.

He turned with it, let the pull rotate his body, and used the motion to spin again, an ugly, efficient whirl. The webline tightened, then abruptly went slack as he severed it with a quick earth spike rising from the floor like a guillotine.

Then he was airborne again, not jumping away, but jumping through.

Wind Step burst. He vaulted past a column, used it as cover for a fraction of a second, and then snapped out the other side into a spider that had been lining up a clean webshot.

His elbow slammed into its mouthparts. The web shot misfired, splattering against its own face. Its legs stuttered.

Ludger grabbed one of those long white legs, only for a heartbeat, only to redirect, and yanked it sideways with brutal intent. The spider’s body twisted, exposing its underside.

He drove a knee up. Chitin cracked like thin ceramic. The spider collapsed, leaking dark fluid into the stone grooves. The chamber was now full of motion.

Legs stabbing from all directions. Web strands crisscrossing the air like trap wires. Bodies climbing columns, dropping down to cut off retreat. The spiders weren’t mindless, they were trying to wrap him, force him into a slowing net, then finish with impalement once he couldn’t dodge.

So Ludger did the opposite. He sped up.

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Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep