The mont Dante and Tendo stepped through the narrowing stone throat of the tunnel, the world abruptly widened.
The ceiling arched so high it disappeared into shadows, the cavern so vast it could have swallowed a cathedral whole.
Bioluminescent moss clung to cracked walls, painting the world in a cold blue glow that shifted with every breath of wind.
Tendo slowed first.
"Sll that?" he muttered.
Dante didn’t answer. He sniffed and felt it inside his throat. Rotten eggs and wet fur mixed with sothing sharp and acidic.
His hand instinctively hovered close to the hilt of his weapon.
Dante’s gaze swept slowly across the chamber.
The floor wasn’t smooth rock at all, but a layered graveyard.
The sound echoed strangely, brittle and hollow. He noticed it.
Bones. Thousands of them. Small skulls and snapped femurs mixed with torn leather straps, rust-bitten daggers, even the twisted remnants of armor plates half-buried beneath webs.
"What the hell happened here?" He exclaid.
Tendo arrived beside him, his eyes arched into a frown. "I didn’t see this kind of thing when I was fighting the other giant spider."
The cave walls curved inward like the ribs of so colossal beast.
High above, the cavern ceiling vanished into a suffocating void.
Only when Dante squinted did he catch movent, slow, deliberate swaying threads of silk
Cocoons. And there were dozens of them.
They continued their way. The deeper the cave went, the more the air thickened.
Webs clung to every surface.
So strands were as thin as hair and others as thick as braided rope, glistening with moisture and venom.
A faint vibration pulsed through the air like a heartbeat that wasn’t theirs.
Tendo shifted uneasily, boots sinking slightly into sticky ground.
The place felt wrong. The vibe was similar to the one Dante got from the dungeon.
Dante’s shoulders rose in a slow breath. And then, from beyond the pillars, sothing heavy dragged its weight across stone.
The sound ca first like a low, gritty scrape like chains being pulled across granite. Then the pillars shuddered.
A tremor rolled beneath their feet, dust spilling from unseen cracks above.
Tendo braced lightly, weight shifting. Dante instinctively raised his guard.
From the darkness beyond the final row of stone columns, sothing massive moved.
Eight red eyes opened, one pair at a ti, each glowing like embers stirred awake from long sleep.
They hovered above the ground, too high for any normal spider. Dante used the word Normal when referred to the giant spiders they were facing.
Then the creature erged.
The Mother Spider crawled into the open chamber, a mountain of chitin and hunger.
Her body was the size of a small house, covered in segnted plates that resembled overlapping black armor, each scale etched with faint blood-red veins pulsing with mana.
Her eight legs stabbed into the earth like spears, jointed wrong, clicking and flexing with unnatural rhythm. Every step cracked bone underfoot, bones that had long since stopped belonging to anything alive.
A massive abdon dragged behind her, swollen and pulsing, streaked with webbing patterns like jagged lightning.
Bulbous sacs along her underside throbbed, as if sothing inside struggled to get out.
The air changed.
The sll of acid, rot, and pure predatory dominance slamd into them like a wall.
Dante’s heart skipped.
A guttural hiss rumbled from her throat, vibrating the very webbing in the room. Rows of needle-like fangs clicked together like knives being sharpened.
Across her back, jagged spines rose from hardened carapace, slick with venom.
And between those spines, strange rune-like lines glowed faint green.
She was a monster that had lived long enough to evolve.
A queen.
Tendo’s fingers wrapped around his katana.
Dante’s mana pulsed through his veins, involuntary, primal.
His heart was pounding in a frenzy.
Then, Dante realized for the first ti. He truly felt sothing. Sothing mysterious. And yet he understood it perfectly.
The queen was a Tier 3 monster.
The queen didn’t scream, roar or lunge blindly.
She vanished.
One mont the Mother Spider crouched before them, her body massive, impossible to miss.The next, she blurred into movent so fast Dante barely caught the rush of displaced air.
Web scattered into a storm behind her.
Dante’s eyes widened.
"Move!"
Tendo was already springing aside, boots cracking bone and stone.
The spider slamd into the space they’d just stood in, her legs punching deep cracks into the marble floor. A shockwave burst outward, rattling the air like thunder trapped underground.
Chunks of rock exploded up around them.
Venom sprayed from her mandibles in a wide sweeping arc, sizzling wherever it landed, eating stone, dissolving bones into sludge.
"Gross."
Dante threw his arm up, mana instinctively forming a barrier-like shell around him. Acid splashed and slid off but every droplet hissed angrily, stripping mana like a sword scraping his skin.
Tendo slid across the webbed ground, katana drawn in a single smooth motion.
"That thing’s fast." Tendo said.
Dante gritted his teeth. "Huge, and pissed as well."
Above them, the spider reared up again, eight legs arching, abdon glowing faintly as muscles tensed.
She ca down again, this ti a full-body slam.
The cavern shook.
Webs snapped loose from ceilings. Dirt and crystal rained like hail.
A deep crack chased across the floor toward Dante like a lightning bolt.
He pumped mana into his legs.
Swift Dash.
He vanished from where he stood, reappearing near a pillar just as the ground he’d been on imploded into a pit of venom and rubble.
The spider turned with cold intention.
Eight burning eyes locked on Dante first.
She knew exactly which prey was more dangerous.
And she was wrong.
Dante blinked back into reality, boots skidding on slick webbing.
The Mother Spider pivoted unnaturally fast for her size, eight legs clattering across the marble bonescape.
This ti she didn’t leap. She spun fast.
A spray of thread blasted outward like a living net, strands sparkling with poison.
Dante knew if they touched him, he wasn’t cutting free, not without losing half his skin.
He thrust both palms forward.
Mana trembled around his fingers, thread-thin currents weaving invisible patterns in the air.
The silk storm slowed, not stopped, but its angle warped.
The web snapped against the wall instead of him, sizzling as venom burned deep scars into stone.
Tendo appeared in that stolen second. He didn’t make a noise.
His katana drew a clean arc downward, but the world seed to fold around the swing. The blade was still ters away when the strike landed.
A sharp line carved itself across the Mother Spider’s flank, chitin splitting like fruit under a knife.
The spider wailed for the first ti, an ugly, grinding screech that set Dante’s teeth on edge.
Tendo landed lightly and flicked his wrist, letting the blade line up with his arm again.
"She’s thick," he said calmly, eyes narrowing.
Dante gulped, already pushing mana into the air around them, shaping it without forming attacks.
"I’ll pry it open. Just you do the cutting."
Tendo grinned a small, confident curl of his lip.
"Good plan."
The spider spun again faster, angrier and slamd a leg down toward Tendo.
He t the blow head-on.
Steel humd, mana rippling outward like invisible shockwaves as the katana sheared the limb clean at the joint.
Black blood sprayed.
Dante pushed harder manipulating the ambient mana, thinning the heavy air around the spider while thickening it behind Tendo, creating invisible "currents" to push and pull motion.
A trick he couldn’t have done in the past.
Now, his mana manipulation skill was advancing.
He knew that if he stopped right now, he could gain a system notification about his skill.
Now Tendo moved like the cave itself was helping him.
He blurred.
A slash across the abdon.
A piercing strike through a weak point near the thorax.
Each hit clean. Precise. rciless.
The spider writhed and staggered back, ichor pouring.
Dante breathed faster, his manipulation wasn’t free. Mana burned through his veins like molten tal, though he reaped what tiny amounts splattered toward him.
Tendo spun the katana around his wrist once, blade humming.
"She’s preparing sothing."
Dante nodded and lifted both hands, mana gathering around him like a storm waiting for its shape.
He willed the mana to transform into wind mana.
"And we’re not letting her finish." Dante added.
The cavern trembled.
The Mother Spider hunkered low, her abdon swelling, veins bulging like black roots under stretched chitin. Mana surged through her body in brutal waves.
Dante’s eyes saw it clearly now, glowing ugly green through her plates.
"She’s going to explode sothing," Dante muttered.
Tendo didn’t move.
He simply squared his footing, blade at his side, expression bored.
Dante didn’t know he was masking his panic or it was just his normal expression. Either way he didn’t need to worry about him.
The Mother Spider lashed out.
Eight legs hamred downward in a storm, each strike carrying enough force to crater stone.
Mana in the strike was denser than Dante ever saw. Denser than Thomas’s white sun.
The first blow slamd into Tendo’s shoulder.
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