Chapter 99: Crawler’s Demise – I

Lucas’s Perspective:

Bro, do you think this sounds good?

System’s holographic interface flickered in front of me, blue lines and diagrams floating midair like a digital spiderweb of chaos. I’d spent the whole night working on this plan—well, half working, half pretending to.

「 You mean my strategy? 」

Ah, here we go again.

Yes, System, what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is… still mine. Same thing.

「 Monkey boy, I swear, you’re the biggest scammer alive. If plagiarism was a crime here, you’d already be serving life. 」

Game is game, buddy. Anyway, give me the basic gist.

The hologram pulsed once, and a clean tactical outline unfolded before my eyes.

「 The target: Frost Crawler. A centipede-class magical organism. Frost-based exothermic gland system, capable of flash-freezing terrain up to twenty meters. Emerges at night from a subterranean cavity. Vulnerable to fire and high-frequency light attacks. 」

I rubbed my chin, nodding like a military commander even though my brain was half asleep.

「 Step one: You use fire-elemental magic to neutralize the surrounding ice zone. Step two: Deploy light barriers to seal off its escape routes. Step three: Celia immobilizes it with her Cursed Chains before they freeze over. Step four: You decapitate it using light-blade compression magic. Simple. Efficient. Probably suicidal. 」

“Probably suicidal?” I muttered.

「 Statistically, you have a 36% chance of losing a limb. 12% chance of dying. 100% chance of looking cool doing it. 」

I smirked. “Those are odds I can live with.”

But the System wasn’t done.

「However, the plan has six critical flaws. Want the full roast or the summary version?」

“Give me the roast, I can take it.”

「 Flaw one: Fire and light magic can destabilize each other if cast in overlapping radii—your mana flow synchronization is mediocre at best.

Flaw two: Celia’s cursed energy reacts negatively to your celestial based light field. Expect a small explosion of divine radiation.

Flaw three: Frost Crawler’s exoskeleton secretes a cryogenic enzyme that can nullify Cursed bindings within thirty seconds.

Flaw four: Oxygen depletion inside the frost zone could cut your spell efficiency by twenty percent.

Flaw five: Ice reflections might refract your light beams.

Flaw six: You forgot to factor in the creature’s subterranean molting cycle. You absolute clown. 」

“…Alright, maybe I slept during biology class,” I muttered.

「 You didn’t even attend it, genius. But—Kaiser can patch all of it. His adaptive combat pattern allows him to dynamically reposition and alter heat conduction ratios. Basically, he can turn every one of your screw-ups into an advantage. 」

I sighed. “Yeah… he’s the crown jewel we found in a dumpster.”

I stretched, leaning back into the ridiculously soft bed the fairies gave me. The whole room glowed faintly with blue pollen drifting through the air. It smelled like frost and honey.

“Either way, the three of us can handle this. I’ll send the plan to Kaiser later, wherever he’s stuck grinding monsters underground. Then I’ll forward it to Sylaphine.”

「 Why him first? Priorities seem… personal. 」

I smirked. “Because he’s the type of guy who could sell a bottle of water to a drowning man. He’ll tweak the plan, add a few of his schemes, and somehow we’ll end up looking like heroes and getting paid for it.”

「 Opportunist. 」

“It’s called talent.”

I turned on my side, the gentle hum of fairy lights filling the silence. My eyelids felt heavy, but my mind was already wandering.

What kind of hellhole is Kaiser crawling through right now? Probably something with rats, cockroaches, and an ego problem.

I chuckled softly. “Good luck, buddy. You’re gonna need it.”

The System flickered once before dimming.

「 You too, monkey boy. Try not to die before the next update. 」

Sleep came slowly that night, and somewhere in the cold labyrinth beneath us, I could almost feel the ground tremble.

Something big was moving.

Sylaphine’s Perspective:

The room was silent, save for the whisper of quills and the faint shimmer of magic blooming along the edges of parchment.

Paperwork. Endless, trivial, necessary.

When the final signature met the final seal, I let my fingers slip together—interlaced, palms stretching forward as my bones released a quiet sigh. The sound echoed softly.

Then, I rested my cheek against my hand and closed my eyes.

Peace should have come easily. Yet it didn’t.

My thoughts betrayed me, circling back to that… moment.That human—no, that man. Kaiser.

He had the audacity to pat my head and call me cute.

How strange.

The word itself was harmless. But the warmth of his palm lingered, almost… familiar. As if echoing through seven millennia, touching something buried deep—something I had long abandoned to dust and time.

My hand drifted toward my chest, feeling the faint pulse beneath.It was irregular. Confused. Almost human.

“This isn’t emotion,” I whispered to the empty chamber. “It’s memory.”

Yes. That was safer to believe.

It reminded me of another hand, another warmth.A boy—fragile, human, and reckless—who once dared to play among fairies. My closest friend in the earliest age of dawn.

He, too, was human.

The man who changed everything.

The reason humanity survived when all others sought their end.And then… the one whom history devoured, rewriting itself to erase his name.

My grip on the desk tightened. A single crack slithered through the wood like lightning before I eased it away. The irritation faded as quickly as it came—buried, disciplined.

“It’s been seven thousand years,” I murmured. “And still, your ghost lingers.”

The silence pressed closer, heavy yet gentle. And before I realized it, my lips parted—releasing an old melody my kind once sang under the moonlit sky.

The tune drifted like mystic wind, wrapping the air in soft silver notes.

He used to say,First comes love, silent as snow—

You and I, one and whole.Then come our wishes, the winds we chase,You are you… and I am me.And in the end, when all falls still,We whisper—what are you… and what am I?

My voice trembled at the end, fading into nothing.

For a moment, I forgot who I was—the Queen of Fairies, the eternal protector.

And simply became Sylaphine.A woman remembering what fun once felt like.

Strange. I had forgotten that hearts could feel heavy even without breaking.

I pressed a hand over my chest again. The beat beneath it felt distant, foreign.

“Who were you…” I whispered to the quiet, “…to make me feel like this again?”

The wind outside shimmered in reply, as if the world itself held its breath.

And somewhere deep within that labyrinth, a faint tremor rippled through the ice—signaling the beginning of something neither mortal nor fairy could ever undo.

I have to ask him.

Myself.

Kaiser’s Perspective:

“ACCHU!”

I sneezed so hard the dust in the air probably filed a complaint. With a groan, I used the rolled-up pages of Lucas’s “strategic masterpiece” to squash a cockroach scuttling across my cell floor.

“BRO—who in all nine realms decided it was a great idea to release cockroaches into my cell?”

The paper cracked against stone. One down. Fifty to go.

I narrowed my eyes toward the glowing barrier that served as my door. Somewhere out there, I could feel the smug giggles of the fairy guards.

“I swear to God, those tiny, glittering menaces are behind this,” I muttered, smacking another roach that tried to take flight.

The sound echoed—a small victory. Until I turned around and saw rats.

Rats.

Munching on my supplies like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

“What the hell is this, a dungeon or a zoo?”

I kicked them away, muttering curses as I heard faint laughter—high, musical, definitely fairy laughter. They were using illusion magic to lure pests in here, I just knew it.

Brilliant. Imprison the human who confessed to their queen and make him the main attraction of Pest Utopia.

I slumped back onto the cold floor, holding up Lucas’s plan, which now had more stains than dignity.

“Ugh. Life.”

I exhaled, scanning his notes again. His plan was decent—very “Lucas.” Structured. Overthought.

“Yeah, nice try, but no.”

With a small smirk, I began mentally rewriting the whole operation.

Fire, light, chains—good foundation, but too simple. I could already see ten ways that crawler could break free if we didn’t adapt. Biological flaws. Chemical timing errors. And of course—Celia’s emotional instability, which could melt the entire strategy faster than her cursed aura.

Plus.

I need more benefits than a win.

“I’ve already sent him the revised version,” I muttered to myself. “He’ll get it soon enough.”

Now if only I could deal with these mosquitoes of hell before sunrise—

Footsteps. Light ones. Not the kind that scurry or flutter, but glide.

I looked up, my instincts snapping into place.

Sylaphine.

Her voice drifted through the corridor like moonlight over frozen water.

“Why are my guards lingering near his cell?”

I couldn’t make out all their words, but the guards’ panicked apologies said enough.

“Just a harmless prank, Your Majesty!”

Harmless, my ass.

I froze mid-motion as another cockroach took flight, soaring toward me.

“Oh, you picked the wrong target.”

I rolled up Lucas’s plan tighter—my makeshift bat—and swung. Crack. The roach went flying, slammed into a rat, which ricocheted into the wall and hit another cockroach that collided with a spider.

I blinked.Did I just hit a combo?

“Wait—SPIDERS? They brought spiders too!?”

I looked up. Nine of them, staring down from the ceiling like executioners in a silk council.

“Yeah, I’m cooked.”

Just as I was contemplating my tragic life, her voice echoed again—melodic yet commanding:

“Exsurgat timor, recedant quae humiles; visus periculosus mentibus animalium fiat.”

The air shimmered. The spell rippled through the cell like a soft gust of silver light. Within seconds, every crawling, skittering, squeaking creature panicked, scrambling out through cracks and shadows as if chased by death itself.

Silence fell again.

I blinked, lowering my “weapon.”

“…Well, that works too.”

Then I saw her—standing beyond the barrier, her emerald eyes reflecting faint light. Calm, unreadable. But something in the way she looked at me wasn’t purely judgment.

It was… curiosity.

“Hmm.” I tilted my head, letting a half-smile form. “Seems like it worked. Apart from the cockroaches.”

The corner of her lips curved—barely perceptible, but there.

The Queen had arrived to meet the fool.

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