Chapter 116: Death On Eight Leggs

[Inspect]

Name: [Atrax Stalker]

Monster Power: E+

Class: Arachnida Gigantus

Abilities:

[Steel Exoskeleton]

Boasts high defensive abilities thanks to its hardened outer shell. Though resistant to cutting damage, structural brittleness makes it vulnerable to crushing force.

+40% resistance to Slash/Cut damage.

-20% resistance to blunt damage.

-20% resistance to flame damage.

[Ceiling Walker]

Ignores movement penalties when traversing vertical or inverted surfaces.

[Paralyzing Bite.]

Has a 10% chance to cause paralysis when attacking. The chance goes up to 60% if it uses its mandibles.

[Sticky Webs]

The Atrax Stalker’s webs are highly adhesive for the first few seconds of their creation, then they become malleable with a high stretch tolerance.

Lore:

A predator that specializes in ambush tactics. Atrax Stalkers rarely lose sight of their prey and boast a high success rate when hunting in groups.

Not many lived to tell the tales of their colony structure. And those that did would have seen horrors beyond what their minds could describe.

****

The blue glow of the inspect window painted Kael’s vision for a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat, the building around him felt even more wrong.

The floor beneath his boots was cracked concrete and exposed rebar. The air tasted stale, like burnt plastic and old dust. Every open side of the skeletal building invited wind and daylight, but it did nothing to make the place feel safe. If anything, the emptiness made it worse, because there was nowhere to hide when something that should not be here decided to move.

Kael’s eyes cut from the text to the mini-map again, then back to the text, then back to the mini-map, as if repeating it would make the situation change. Red dots packed the level like spilled blood, and they were not goblins. These dots were cleaner, tighter, steadier. Predatory. All of them Atrax.

“Shit,” Kael said as he realized what he was dealing with, and there were about a dozen or so surrounding them.

His throat went dry the moment he accepted the class name.

Arachnida Gigantus. Not just some oversized spider in a basement, not some low-floor trash that claws at ankles. The inspector didn’t need to say “ambush” for him to feel it in his skin. The quiet up above earlier suddenly made sense.

Silence was not safety. Silence was them waiting.

“Run,” he said.

Peter blinked like his brain was buffering, his gaze flicking toward the empty stairwell, then toward the open edge of the floor where the city burned in the distance.

“What?” Peter asked.

Kael’s jaw tightened so hard his teeth ached.

“Don’t what me, fucking run!” Kael howled as he sprinted first toward the stairs.

He moved before his fear could argue. His legs pushed off hard, boots scraping grit, shoulder brushing a broken cubicle wall that crumbled into black flakes. Right now, all Kael had was momentum and a brain that finally stopped trying to be polite about survival.

Seeing Kael running away meant that if he made enough distance from him, the spiders would most likely turn their mandibles to him.

So he sprinted and slipped; the slip was ugly.

Peter’s foot skated on something slick, maybe dust, maybe goblin blood from earlier, maybe just the building sweating rot. His hands hit the ground, palms slapping concrete, and he scrambled up like a man trying to outrun a nightmare he could not name. Kael did not slow for him.

He did not look back with sympathy. He looked back with calculation.

When running away from predators, you don’t need to be the fastest man in the world. All you need is to be faster than the one running behind you.

And that realization was all too clear here.

It tasted bitter in Kael’s mouth because it was true, because it was human, because it was ugly, and because it worked. If Peter fell too far behind, the spiders would choose the easier meal first. That would buy Kael time. That would buy him distance. And distance, inside a building full of vertical surfaces, felt like the last currency that mattered.

The stairwell was a ribcage of concrete and broken metal rails. Kael hit the first steps and immediately started skipping them, two at a time, then three. His boots landed hard, shock running up his shins, but the pain barely registered. Every landing was measured against the sound behind him, against the skitter that was already beginning to rise.

Peter finally managed to stand up and bounded his way after Kael, shouting wait was too foolish of a notion for even his own mouth to utter. So he ran, and ran.

The spiders, like a cat being agitated with a toy, immediately jumped behind their prey.

Kael caught the first glimpse only as a shadow sliding down the open side of the stairwell, too fast and too smooth to be goblin movement. Then another shadow dropped, then another, and the air changed. It was not just the sight of them. It was the way the building seemed to accept them. Like the structure was made for them, like this place was an arena they owned.

The sound of their steel-like feet skittering around the concrete was enough nightmare fuel for a lifetime. It was not a normal click. It was metal on stone, repeated in bursts, a rhythm that never stumbled.

Each tap carried weight, and each weight carried intent. Kael heard it from behind, from above, from the side, and that was the part that made his stomach turn. The sound did not come from one direction. It came from everywhere.

Though they were running down the building, several other spiders had the intelligence to not merely chase after and clutter and bunch up with their kin on tight staircases, but instead lowered themselves to lower floors and entered them, waiting for interception instead of chase.

His mind did the math without asking permission. They were not trying to catch him with speed. They were trying to catch him with certainty. With teamwork… with Stalking.

About four spiders were chasing behind them on the stairs. Five or so were still above the floor they descended to, and the remaining four had entered the floor below them. The minimap informed.

His throat tightened as the trap closed in layers. Four behind meant pressure. Five above meant they could cut off retreat. Four below meant the exit was already poisoned. The building had become a funnel, and Kael could feel himself running deeper into the narrow part of it.

They were trapped. And couldn’t get out in time, nor find any way to escape.

The staircase spat them out onto another floor that looked like the last other floors, broken cubicles, exposed beams, sunlight slicing through missing walls, but now the emptiness was a threat. There were too many angles, too many places for legs to come down from. Kael’s breathing stayed controlled, but his ribs felt too tight around his lungs, like his body wanted to start panting, and he refused to let it.

The building had no walls, so it was easy access for spiders, and unlike the spiders, they couldn’t simply jump out of the building.

Outside was a fall that would shatter bones. Inside was a kill box. Kael’s eyes flicked to the open edge anyway, because part of him wanted to choose the honest death over the smart one, but survival did not care about pride.

Survival cared about what still moved afterward.

“What now?” Peter said as he saw Kael stopping, he could only hear the spiders skittering below them, not see them.

He was trying to stand like a teammate and not like bait. But his hands were shaking, and Kael noticed, because Kael noticed everything that could get him killed.

“Shit, we have to fight,” Kael said.

It was not courage. It was constraint.

Kael hated fighting when running was an option, and he hated running when running led into a box. So much for passivity when you were forced into actively surviving.

The mini-map had become a blunt truth. If they kept moving, they ran into the four below. If they went back, they ran into the four behind and the five above. The only way out was through, and Kael did not have enough mana to pretend he was a hero.

“Fight? Are you insane? Their bodies are literally hard as steel.”

Peter’s eyes darted as he said it, as if expecting the first stalker to already be there.

His imagination filled in what his eyes could not see. That was almost worse than the real thing. Fear made monsters bigger, faster, and smarter, and these ones were already smart enough.

“Brittle a glass,” Kael said.

He spat it out like a correction. Steel exoskeleton, yes, but brittle structure. That one line from the inspect anchored his brain.

“I suppose you have a hammer for that then?” Peter tried sounding sarcastic. It didn’t fall well; he only received a sigh from Kae.

“This is a loan,” Kael said as he handed Peter the Flame-imbued Axe.

The axe moved into Peter’s hands and immediately looked wrong there. Too clean. Too tower. Too valuable. Peter’s fingers curled around it like he was afraid it would bite him back. But unlike his hatchet, this was better and felt slightly safer. Perhaps it might even save his life if it lands properly onto a spider or two, or even Kael’s back to use him as bait.

“Wait, why? What are you going to do?”

Peter tightened his grip as he asked, knuckles whitening, shoulders lifting like he expected the stalkers to drop on him the second he blinked.

He did not understand why Kael would hand him anything powerful. In the tower, gifts were traps. Alliances were debts. Peter knew that. That was why the question sounded like suspicion disguised as confusion.

“I’m making a stand, to try and save our skins, try not to die,” Kael said.

He said it flat, like that was the whole plan, like the details did not matter.

The details mattered. Kael just did not have time to explain them to a man who might freeze anyway.

But in reality, Kael wasn’t that worried; he was worried, but not nearly as much as Peter.

The difference was simple. Peter’s fear was raw. Kael’s fear had a leash.

After all, if shit hits the fan, he can always use [Presence] to dip out.

That thought sat in the back of his head like a dirty coin. He could spend it. He could vanish. He could leave Peter to get peeled open. He could live.

But, he couldn’t give up the [Exsice] rune, not when he was this close, especially after all this trouble.

He finally realized why the Ifrit’s Rune was the easiest, because every other damned rune on this floor had a deadly trap waiting to close on the neck of anyone too foolish to go for shine, thinking it was gold.

The mini-map still pulsed with that route, that stupid little promise at the top of the building. He had to obtain it no matter what, even if he had to sacrifice Peter for it. He’s done it before. He can do it again, after all, only the survivor tells the story.

He immediately pulled out the gauntlet from his inventory and slid it onto his right arm. “Move out of the way,” Kael howled.

The gauntlet locked into place with a weight that felt familiar now, like a tool that belonged to him, not an item he stole from luck. The sockets along his arm were there, the runes seated like teeth in metal. Anchor. Heft. Fire. A chain that could either make him a monster or make him a corpse.

Peter didn’t have any inkling to hesitate or go against Kael, especially when he saw the bunched up spiders trying to fight for the first bite.

And right now, all Kael had to do was survive. Live, fight, no matter how desperately, how dangerously, he had to fight.

A stand, an Active Stand.

“Screw being passive, let’s cook some spiders!”

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