Chapter 27
“All right. All right. You can do this. You’re fine.” Harald rubbed his palms over his hips as he fought to remain calm.
Damn. He was an entire eight levels deeper.
“At least I’m not here alone,” said Harald, infusing some fake jocularity in his voice as he turned back to where Exeros’ mote floated.
The mote of light was gone.
“Huh.” Harald stared. He’d come to take the mote for granted. Ignored it, even. But for the Seraph to have disappeared…? Had he been filtered out by the Interstice? Whatever that had been? Left on the 12th Level? If so, the Seraph had to be spitting mad.
“Not my problem,” whispered Harald, and returned to surveying the environs. The Fallen Angel thought this the most appropriate level for him. Which meant he wasn’t hopelessly outmatched by whatever lived here, right?
Though he had absolutely no idea what he’d be facing.
He was going to have to play this smart.
With his Thrones burning at a low ebb, Harald exuded shadows about himself and moved slowly, carefully, to crouch behind the closest chunk of shattered masonry.
His powers meant he should be hard to find.
Unless, of course, the Level 36 monsters could just see right through his shadows.
Thought Reavers from the 27th felt almost quaint, now.
Dawnblade in hand, Harald took his time surveying the titanic ruins.
Green mist floated slowly from hollow to hollow, reducing the ground itself to a blur.
The hills of shattered blocks rose like islands from the murk.
The brightness of the sky was ominous, unnatural, and didn’t really illuminate much.
It formed a backdrop more than anything else, against which the walls and columns that rose hundreds of feet into the sky looked even darker.
Silence.
The place was damned eerie. It reminded him a little of the Endless Castle on the 16th Level. Green palette, gigantic ruins. But this felt more open, more deadly, somehow, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Well. He couldn’t remain hidden forever.
Time to explore.
Reaching into his Cosmos, Harald summoned Shadowpaw. The huge mastiff appeared off to one side, dark mist burning off his thick pelt. The hound gazed about curiously, raised his muzzle to sniff at the air, then pricked his stubby ears at a sound Harald couldn’t discern.
“This is the plan,” whispered Harald. “We’re going explore. Slowly. Carefully. If you find anything, come back and get me. No attacking by yourself. Clear?”
Shadowpaw made a chuffing sound, shook himself out, and padded away fearlessly into the low-lying green fog. Moments later, the darkness took him, and he was gone.
“Good.” Harald peered around again. Still nothing. But he wasn’t defenseless. With shadows clinging to his form, with his very essence now melded with darkness, he could move about with some measure of security.
Right?
Harald made sure the Tyrant’s Halo wasn’t active, and with a final deep breath and hitch of his sodden pack, set off.
He kept to the walls, darted from gigantic column to column, skirted around the base of the shattered stone hills.
Up ahead a slope of tumbled blocks rose to an ornate archway larger than his entire old manor home.
The rocks were softened by the strange, rubbery bushes that looked more like moss or some kind of fungi than actual shrubs.
Might as well head up and take a look.
Slowly, pausing frequently to peer around and listen, Harald ascended the slope. His heart was hammering. If only something would move. If only he could get a sense of what he was up against.
On he crept. Higher and higher. The huge ornate arch loomed above him. There had to be something for him to fight. Something that would come for him.
Hadn’t there?
Harald reached out for an outcropping to haul himself up a near-vertical stretch, then froze.
A filament of soft golden radiance extended from the tip of the rock to fade upward into the air.
Harald followed its trajectory. Tilted his head, and in so doing, caused a subtle play of light to play over a complex cradle of lines above him, the pale gold almost dissolving into the background chartreuse.
Harald’s blood ran cold. “Not spiders,” he whispered.
The web was huge. City block huge. Slowly, cautiously, he gazed about himself, and realized the situation was even worse than he’d thought. Strands of gold were laid between rocks, horizontally, here and there, around him, behind him even, forming a gauntlet, a maze into which he’d wandered.
Sheer luck had prevented him from passing through one until this point.
Harald willed Abyssal Attunement to sheath the Dawnblade in purest night.
Bit his lower lip and considered. Where was the spider?
A web this vast meant the spider had to be equally large, right?
It wasn’t hanging in the web’s center. No.
It was waiting in the darkness somewhere. A shadowed nook, a hidden cleft.
Harald searched the sides of the giant arch, the promontories and slabs of the hill he was climbing.
Nothing.
A Level 36 spider.
The angels wept.
He flared his fingers on the hilt of his blade, mind blank, unsure what to do next. For a long while he just stood there, and then a decision came to him.
For better or worse.
Moving cautiously, deliriously paranoid about hitting a golden strand, he moved to a shadowed nook of his own that afforded him ample view of the terrain and the hill’s peak and then summoned the Gauntlet Golem.
Its huge frame settled on the screen and loose rock, and without being bid, it lit its twin white swords, which caused the green fog to sizzle and spit.
Clearly, it wasn’t happy about the new environment.
“Trigger a web strand,” whispered Harald. “Pass a sword through it.”
The golem trained its deep eyes on him and, despite its lack of expression, Harald could clearly sense its exasperated incredulity, and then it shrugged, shook its head, and moved with surprising skill to the closest strand of gold.
And slashed through it.
The great tumbled slope distended, parts squeezing together, other stretches expanding as if the rocks had grown repulsed.
The sky fractured so that in some panels Harald saw parts of the walls, in others nothing.
The golem seemed suddenly twice as far away, though he caught slivers of its reflection in other spaces around him.
It was as if the entire area had been a mirror, and the golem had just stomped on it.
But there was no sound. No grinding of rock. Nothing tumbled free to roll down the slope. Dust didn’t sift down, the ground didn’t shake or tremble.
Harald closed his eyes to ease the sense of vertigo and immediately felt himself secure once more. The boulder was cold against his thigh, the air still, the silence near total.
So. Just a visual effect, then. The terrain had remained undisturbed.
Wait.
What was that sound?
It caused the hairs on the nape of Harald’s neck to prickle. A chitinous whisper, accompanied by precise clicks like spear points being driven down firmly into stone.
Dry swallowing, he opened his eyes and peered out into the fractured landscape.
There. High above, emerging from behind a peak of fallen masonry.
A giant fucking spider.
Its body was the size of a carriage, its legs like articulated saplings. Teal green with golden filigree tracery across its body, it moved with almost dainty precision, its abdomen huge and pendulous, its huge, furred fangs quivering as it rose into view.
The angels wept. It looked huge and ancient and deeply magical.
What he wouldn’t give for Chyron’s Scourge, the Solace of Aurelum, and the Aureate Master now.
A deep breath.
How he hated spiders.
But that just meant he had to kill this one all the faster.
“Attack the spider!” Harald hissed to the golem and then began picking out a path that would take him wide and around and back into its huge, horrific, disgusting, nauseating green flank.
The golem had lowered itself into a fighting crouch. It gave the slightest of nods, and then stomped its foot.
The rock beneath the spider erupted upward as huge, pointed plinths lanced up into its underside.
With impossible dexterity, the spider leaped, evading the explosion to land upon its cradle of golden threads some fifteen yards up and there skitter out across its near invisible web.
The sight made Harald’s stomach gurgle and try to invert itself. For the spider flitted across the broken panes of his vision, disappearing from some, appearing abruptly in fragmented form in four, five shards, then dropping again into a single shape in another.
Keeping track of it made Harald want to gag.
The golem charged up the slope, the white spherical shield appearing around it. It had the spider’s attention. Harald gauged where to go, and deliberately unfocusing his gaze, scrambled over the rocks to ambush it.
He realized he’d passed through a golden thread only after a cold sense of drain shocked him into stumbling. His vitality was sucked up in the thread like water up a straw, ending the moment he’d passed through it—but the spider’s huge body quirked about as it gained awareness of his position.
Damn it.
Harald summoned the Tyrant’s Halo. His authority flooded forth, his dread will, his furious disdain. He willed it to swamp the spider’s loathsome form, to chill its legs, to inhibit its instincts, to make it fear him as the apex predator.
Instead, the golden filigree that swirled in esoteric patterns across its back, which embellished its legs and ornamented each of its many eyes, began to burn brightly.
Great. It had a defense against his authority.
Then let’s see how it handled a Demonic Edge. He swung his blade and launched forth a caustic arc of expanding black fire. As if they had worked this out before, the golem did the same with its own two blades.
The spider blurred.
How could something so large move so fast?