Chapter 120: Empty Nest

“Hurry,” Kael said as he rushed toward the upper parts of the building.

The stairs groaned under their weight, every step biting into old stone and half rotted wood that had no business still holding together.

The Atrax Stalkers had finally broken off the chase, not out of mercy, but out of instinct. Kael could feel the shift even without staring at the map every second.

They had stopped hunting prey and started guarding territory. After seeing so many bodies piled, split, burned, and left behind, the colony’s mind had snapped into survival mode. Survival always preceded the hunt, even when the hunt was how you survived.

And right now, Kael was too fiery to be worth the risk. That pressure still clung to him, that lingering heat under the skin that made him feel like a walking flare. The risks were too great, not for him, for them. It was easier for the red dots to watch, retreat, and hold their nest than to keep throwing themselves into a grinder.

Many of the red dots decided it was better not to chase.

“Thank god,” Peter said as he was a few steps behind Kael.

Kael didn’t slow. He didn’t even bother glancing back until he reached the next landing, and even then, his eyes were already scanning angles and shadows out of habit.

“What does god have to do with the mess we’re in?” Kael asked.

Peter sucked in a breath like he wanted to complain, then thought better of it and chose explanation instead. “Ah, you don’t know. Right, Atrax Stalkers are usually a colony-type monster. They’re always accompanied by a leading figure, a boss of sorts.”

Kael stopped for a second and checked the map, because Peter’s words weren’t useless. The blue dot that mattered was still above, fixed and patient, the rune waiting like it didn’t care whether they lived long enough to touch it.

There was no other dot on the top of the building but the blue one for the rune. No fat red mass. No oversized marker. No obvious matriarch sitting like a crown at the top.

“And, you think that this colony doesn’t have a leader?”

“Yes, no matriarch. We’d have seen her if there were, and trust me, there would have been thousands of these spiders instead of this few. I guess it was mercy from the tower for only having a few of its kin instead of a whole colony. A taste of sort.”

Kael resumed moving, taking the next set of steps two at a time. “That taste almost killed us,” Kael said, moving up.

Peter hurried to keep up, boots slipping once on a patch of damp grit, and he caught himself with a hand against the wall. “You look like you’re rushing toward a goal…” Peter asked.

Kael nearly said no out of instinct, because saying yes meant admitting he was chasing something specific.

And admitting that meant Peter would start asking questions, and questions in the Tower always ended with either secrets bleeding out or someone bleeding out.

If he did tell Peter he had a means to find treasure, he’ll probably have to kill him so he can keep that secret. The thought wasn’t emotional. It was practical, the way you thought about whether you had enough rope before climbing.

“Smell,” Kael said, “I smell something good up there, same smell the axe had.”

Peter’s eyes widened for half a second in a way that was almost comical. Greed and hope did that to people. “Oh, yeah, your nose is really good,” Peter said as he remembered the first time Kael entered the Sun Clan’s hideout, when he revealed the existence of a Doppleganger thanks to his nose.

Little did everyone know, it was actually Kael’s special map. The “nose” was just the excuse that sounded believable to idiots and convenient to the suspicious. People accepted instincts.

People trusted their senses. People did not like thinking a man might have information he refused to share, so Kael gave them a story they could swallow.

“Now stop interrupting me and let’s go,” Kael said as he rushed up the stairs.

The higher they climbed, the more the building changed. The lower floors had been cracked, dusty, and broken in the way abandoned places always were. Up here, it was different. The air had weight to it, sticky with the faint smell of a nest. Every breath came with a thin taste of something organic and damp. The light was worse, too, because the holes in the walls didn’t let in clean daylight anymore. They let in thin blades of gray that made everything look sick.

Every floor they went up, they began noticing something different.

Unlike the lower floors, here, there was a lot of silk. No, spider silk. Not in webs, but on the ground, thrown and discarded.

It wasn’t decorative webbing stretched for traps. This was the messy stuff, the refuse of a nest, thick cords and torn sheets that had been ripped free and left in piles. It stuck to Kael’s boots when he stepped wrong, stretching and snapping with a wet sound. In some places, it was layered like bedding. In others, it was clumped around corners like someone had tried to stuff the building with cotton.

Kael would occasionally grab a bunch and pocket them in his inventory. He didn’t do it because he liked carrying trash.

This special silk has a value of its own. It could be traded, crafted, used as a binding, or used as material. You learned quickly in the Tower that anything that came off a monster could be turned into an advantage.

This was where the spiders nested. And right now it was empty.

The emptiness didn’t feel safe. It felt like a room holding its breath.

Several corpses and carcasses of goblins and a few unfortunate climbers were either fully consumed, leaving nothing but bones, or cocooned for consumption later.

The cocooned ones hung in corners, wrapped so tight they looked like pale statues, some still shaped like people, others already sagging where the insides had been drained.

Bones were scattered in piles where something had fed quickly, leaving cracked skulls and snapped ribs like leftover sticks. The smell wasn’t fresh blood. It was rot and old meat, the kind that settled into wood and stone and never fully left.

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