Book 5: Chapter 19: The Stuff of Nightmares
Even with the sun going down fast, Sen managed to put substantial distance between himself and that little hollowed-out place where he’d found the mushrooms. Yet, even moving fast with his qinggong technique, there wasn’t even a remote chance of getting to the bottom of the mountain before true dark set in. He just kept going until he figured he had enough time to put up a galehouse and set up some particularly nasty formations. While Falling Leaf hadn’t woken up yet, she looked more or less healthy again. He figured she was just sleeping off the fatigue from a combination of the venom and the healing pill. While he’d never been bitten by a giant venomous spider, he had been injured plenty of times and felt the fallout from those healing pills. They weren’t something you wanted to take without shelter very close by.
When he found a clearing that was as level as he was likely to find on the side of the mountain, he gently put Falling Leaf down and got to work putting up the galehouse. He kept it small. It was really just two small bedrooms and a common area with a fireplace. After he got Falling Leaf settled on some blankets inside, he settled in for some serious formation work. While he hoped that he was wrong, Sen had a feeling that killing all of those spiders was going to have some repercussions for them. He wanted something a bit more substantive protecting them during the night. When he was finally ready to drag himself inside, he’d created a multi-layered set of extremely violent offensive formations, along with several layers of defensive formations. Absolutely nothing was getting in or out of the area immediately around the galehouse without him knowing about it. He didn’t even begrudge needing to use up a bunch of his recently acquired spirit beast cores to keep those formations active.
It was only then that he let himself relax enough to go inside, seal the doorway behind him, and flop down next to the fireplace. While he didn’t trust the situation enough to sleep, he did let himself drift down into a semi-restful doze. He’d pushed harder than usual with both earth qi and fire qi. Combined with the concentration necessary to design and set up the formations protecting them, it had left him feeling mentally tired. His body was back to rebounding pretty fast, so he had to pay attention to how sluggish his thinking became. While the doze wasn’t as helpful as true sleep would have been, he knew that it would take the worst edges off of his mental fatigue if it lasted a couple of hours.
While the gods of good fortune had seemingly been ignoring them earlier in the day, they did smile on Sen’s quasi-nap. It was around three hours later before he heard the first sounds of something being killed by the formations he set up. Grumbling to himself, Sen got up, made a doorway, and walked outside. True night had settled on the mountain, so it took him several seconds to make sense of what he was looking at. A ring of fire formed a bright orange and yellow circle approximately thirty feet out from the galehouse. At first, all Sen could make out was that fire. After a moment or two, though, he saw the circle flare up. As time passed, the fire flared more and more. He finally understood that the undulated writhing mass beyond the flames weren’t just shadows but spiders. There were thousands of them. Many of them were no bigger than he’d expect, but there were exceptions. Some of the spiders were as big as his own head. Some were as large as dogs he’d seen. All of them were the stuff of nightmares.
Standing in the middle of that writhing mass of death, Sen could see a human figure or something that approximated the human shape. He also knew it wasn’t a human being because he could see the firelight reflecting off of the chitin that the figure had in place of skin. It chittered something at the spiders and a small tide of eight-legged death surged toward the galehouse. Sen watched that approaching tide with a bit of clinical detachment. The ring of fire was just the first line of defense, and it wasn’t even down yet. Spiders died by the score in those flames. Sen immediately wished that he had thought to prevent the smell from getting inside the perimeter, but it was too late for those kinds of changes. When the ring of fire went out, the pseudo-human figure let out a chittering noise that sounded almost triumphant. The spiders surged again and set off the second layer of the formations.
Lightning crackled into life and punched through the ranks of the spiders. Many of the smaller ones simply exploded. The larger ones thrashed wildly on the ground, legs snapping in and out spasmodically and clearly without input from the spiders themselves. Their flopping motions were grotesque and stomach-turning to Sen’s eyes. He found himself relieved when they finally lay still. Of course, more spiders crawled over their corpses only to receive the same treatment. That happened again and again until the beast cores powering that layer of the protections gave out. The diminishing mass of the spiders threw themselves forward, just to trigger the third layer of offensive formations. Wind blades twenty feet across lashed out at different heights. Some of the blades cut through the smaller spiders near the ground, while higher blades deprived the larger spiders of life. As all that death littered the ground, Sen simply stared at the humanoid figure with his eyes cold and his face impassive.
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Like a great many people, Sen had a near-automatic aversion to spiders. Some of it was natural, and some of it stemmed from his childhood experiences with spiders taking shelter in the same places he wanted to take shelter. That aversion made it very easy indeed to watch the death of all of those spiders with basically no care or concern in Sen’s heart. He suspected at least some of them possessed self-awareness, but that had been subsumed beneath the will of the humanoid figure. Whatever those other spiders might have become in the future, it had been stamped down in a bid for vengeance or the simple need to kill whatever was different. Sen supposed it didn’t make a difference in the long run. Dead was dead, no matter which way he looked at it. Yet, it seemed even that humanoid figure had limits to the losses it was willing to endure.
With a burst of chittering, the spiders backed away and left what remained of their siblings and cousins in piles of smoking chitin and seared limbs. Sen wasn’t sure what to expect, but the human figure stalked forward until it was standing just beyond the limits of the formations. Enough residual fire remained for Sen to see that it had retained the multiple eyes so common among spiders. Each of those eyes was glaring black, shiny hatred at him. He met that gaze without flinching, even though he very much wished to look away. He had a sneaking suspicion that any sign of weakness would force him to scour the mountain clean of every spider life on it. While he'd do it if he had to, he didn’t want to do that. It was stupid and wasteful. Especially since he was leaving already.
“You speak and expect to be heard, but you do not listen. You hear only your rage.”
Sen knew that rage. He knew it all too well. It had driven him to so many acts that he wished hadn’t happened. Now, he was on the other side of it and faced with the prospect of something else he feared he would regret. He wanted to make this matriarch of spiders understand, to make her retreat. If he couldn’t find a way to pierce that rage, though, it was hopeless. If words wouldn’t do the trick, perhaps a demonstration would. Sen fixed the matriarch with his gaze and leveled his auric imposition on her. It didn’t drive her to her knees, but he could see that it had been a close thing. His killing intent followed on the heels of his auric imposition. That pressed her down. He couldn’t see the fear in her alien eyes, but he could feel it all the same. Sen spoke again as he summoned a spear forth and began cycling for multiple threads of lightning.
“I have barely acted against you so far. Bear witness to what it would mean to truly face me.”
He let one of the threads of lightning crackle around his body and the spear, giving himself the appearance of something wholly mythical. The rest of the threads were sent skyward as he thrust the spear upwards. With a downward swing of the spear, dozens of bolts of lightning fell into that horde of spiders, leaping from chitinous body to chitinous body, reaping lives by the hundred. Those bolts of lightning were accompanied by thunder that exploded at ground level. The sonic shock tore through even more of those spiders like they were made of paper. Hundreds more were flung in every direction. Some even fell into the formations where even more lightning ripped them apart. Through it all, the spider matriarch was screaming and thrashing as more of her children died for nothing.
Sen walked toward her, the formations parting around him like water as he closed the distance. That final thread of lightning still being fed from his own qi. A few brave or stupid spiders flung themselves at him and were vaporized before they got within three feet. He didn’t stop until he was towering over the matriarch. He could see his reflection in her several eyes. He looked as inhuman in those reflections as the matriarch looked to him.
“Take your children, those that remain, and go. Do that, and I will not pursue you. I will not seek retribution.”
While he retained the lightning around himself, Sen withdrew his auric imposition and his killing intent. The matriarch stared up at him for much, much longer than Sen thought was necessary before she chittered out something that was clearly a command. The mass of spiders slowly retreated until there was no sign of them in the darkness. The matriarch slowly rose, never letting her gaze leave him.
“We will not forget this,” she rasped.
Sen knew she meant it as a threat, but he chose to take it another way. “I sincerely hope that you don’t.”
