The Beasts' Forest:

Grinding his teeth hard, Adam flew through the dark forest with the long dense trees, destroying branches and sometimes entire trees when they stood in his way.

He couldn't believe that he had fallen for a simple trap like that, after all that he had been and lived through, this was what managed to take someone from under his noes, to be outsmarted by stupid beats, unacceptable!

Adam felt as if a fire was burning in his heart as he used dozens of milky white arms to pull himself through the forest, he would make sure that he would finish them as soon as he gets to them.

Adam understood that he had to go faster, but he was already at the limits of what the sixth gate could achieve, even for him.

The only way that he would be able to go any faster would be to loosen the seal and step onto the fifth gate, but that was out of the question, he had reapplied and strengthened the seal just a while back, him loosening it anytime soon would be a huge disaster for him.

The sixth gate was already the lowest he could push the seal towards, if he continued using his powers willy-nilly, then the seal's power would get even lower, and the lowest level he would be able to return to would be the fifth gate.

Remembering that only made him feel the need to destroy those things even more, he hated being pushed to his limits like that, especially because of small errors that he would have been able to deal with easily if he was just a bit more attentive

The arms Adam was using right then were different from the hands he usually used, the first difference was of course their numbers and their sizes, there were thirty arms and they were the size of normal ones, the second was that unlike the two gigantic hands he used before, that floated freely and mimicked the movements of his real hands, these were connected to his back and he could control them as if they were a normal part of him.

With the thirty milky white arms extending from his back, Adam moved through the forest as if he was flying, with the hands pulling, dragging and pushing him along the way, using the ground as a foothold.

He did not doubt that if anyone saw how he looked at that moment in the pitch-black forest, then he would be mistaken as some kind of monster for sure.

The trail ahead of him was vague, but he was still able to feel it, he was still able to follow after those damned spiders, each time the milky white palms hit the ground a scan would spread all over the ground, revealing the trail and sending Adam in the right direction.

The spiders were still under the same spell they were under when he met them for the first time in the cave, they were still hidden from most of his senses, if not for their footprints in the ground, he wouldn't have been able to follow them all this while, that spell and his carelessness were the sources of all his problems then.

Remembering what happened again, he couldn't help but release another repressed shout fueled by anger and irritation.

***

As he took the first step outside, Adam gave the place in front of him a glance again, the cave was facing a medium-sized clearing with the forest being just around ten meters from him.

He was trying to see if he could notice anything new, but like what happened before, he couldn't find anything at all, either the space in front of him was really as it seemed, empty, or the spell that kept whatever it was that was outside hidden was better than he expected.

Thinking about it for a bit, he decided to change the way he was going through that with, getting back to something that worked a bit, half crouching, Adam touched the ground with his palm before sending continuous pulses of mana all around the place, using a bigger amount of mana this time so he can get better feedback.

Soon, he was able to find the footprints that he guessed were from some kind of insect, following those trails, he noticed from the patterns that it was walking all around the borders of the forest, moving along its edge without setting foot inside the clearing.

Suddenly, Adam felt as if his scan had met something, at the exact place where the trail ended, his mana felt some resistance from the other side of the clearing, as if something was still on the trail there.

"Found you," he murmured with a faint smile on his face.

He was able to sense the other party freezing for a second when his mana touched it, and he wasn't going to waste that chance, he was confident that he would be able to finish it before it can run away.

Adam was already moving as soon as he felt the difference and the resistance from his scan, shooting up like an arrow where he felt it at.

He soon made it there, with him already knowing that the insect was already there, Adam was able to determine where the trail was leading, and being that close, he was able to catch a glimpse of the blurry figure of a huge spider.

Just as he lifted his hand to send a fireball to the figure, his heart missed a beat as he sensed something from behind him.

Turning around with his face paling a bit, Adam was just in time to see something that made his blood freeze; Susan was standing at the mouth of the cave, looking at him with wide confused and fearful eyes as she hugged her shoulders tightly.

And above her, he noticed a thin silver line hanging from nowhere under one of the trees at the cliff.

Adam opened his mouth to shout at her, but unfortunately, he never got the chance to, the line fell down fast, and as soon as it touched her shoulder, it appeared as if it was an elastic robe that was pulled to its limit before being released, pulling her up with it wrapping her as it retracted.

Susan disappeared from behind the edge of the cliff in a second, leaving behind her a half-muffled scream.

For a fraction of a second, a shocked expression covered Adam's face, but his body didn't wait for his mind to understand what was happening.

The first thing he did wasn't go after Susan and what took her, instead he turned to look behind him as milky white wisps swirled around him before gradually condensing into thirty arms extending from his back, that shot towards where he thought the beast was.

The beast was trying to run away, as was clear from the blurry shape and the fast retreating footprints, but he for sure wasn't going to give it that chance, he followed its movements with cold eyes and a dark expression.

The monster seemed to have noticed the arms and tried to evade by making a sharp jump to the side, but while it was still in the air, it froze as those arms were still a distance away from it as the spell keeping it invisible disappeared, revealing the beast's real appearance and also the big wound that caused its death: its head had exploded.

As soon as that had been dealt with, and with the corpse of the monster still in the grasp of the milky white arms that reached it a second after, Adam turned around and headed after what had kidnapped Susan as fast as he could.

The long flexible arms dug into the cliff face as they lifted him up fast.

As he moved, Adam turned some of his attention to the corpse of the monster that he was still holding on to. He studied it for less than five seconds before finally throwing it aside concentrating on following the other beasts as different pieces of information about what he had noticed from the huge spider got filtered through his mind till he found a match.

The spider was a jumping spider, it was around three meters long and had a black unreflective fur covering its whole body, on its face, it had six eyes, with two big central ones and another four with each two on a side, those two big eyes gave it somehow of an expressive face and it also had big jaws-like fangs on the front of its head. On both sides of its head, it had two long nimble limbs.

Adam soon recognized it as a Hunting Weaver, a type of jumping spider that were extremely active in their search for food, they lived in burrows under the ground that they would dig themselves or they would just find a cave or a hole to use. They were nocturnal hunters and depended on surprise and their nets to hunt, it also wasn't unheard of for them to hunt in groups.

The Hunting Weaver's use for their net in their hunts was diverse, fine and smart, With them using different techniques for each prey and each hunt, and also coming up with new ones for the situation they find themselves in, using the long nimble arm-like limbs on both sides of their faces to control their nets. They were some of the smartest and most cunning low levelled creatures in the Beasts' Forest, they were usually around the fifth gate.

Adam's expression lightened up a bit when he remembered that for most of the time, Hunting Weavers wouldn't inject their prey with poison immediately after catching it and warping it in their silk, their first priority then would be to return to their burrows to hide.

But even with that, he still had a strong urge to kill, he never was someone who would accept that he had been upped.

With the gigantic jumping spiders running up ahead, disappearing from one moment to the second with each jump they did, and Adam chasing behind them with his ghostly arms that destroyed everything in their path as he tried to reach them, this settlement remained for a few minutes.

As time went on, the frown on Adam's face only grew as the burning fire inside him lit up higher and burned brighter, for many times he seriously considered loosening the seal a bit, only the consequences of him doing that while he was in such a mental state stopped him from entertaining that idea, he didn't want to cause another disaster.

Adam suddenly lifted his hand as milky white wisps of energy swirled around it, but he soon lowered it as he let out an annoyed growl from deep down his throat.

Susan was under the same spell that affected the spiders after being wrapped by their silk, he wasn't able to tell which one of the three blurry figures in front of him had her, and sending an attack their way, under those circumstances, would be extremely dangerous on her.

Just as he was repressing for the who knows what time the idea that loosening the seal for just this once won't be much of a problem, his shining pupils contracted as his expression changed.

His eyes then focused on a certain spot where weak milky white lights started appearing as if light entering a dark closed up place from small cracks.

From nowhere, the white light started flowing into the world, slowly and weakly at first then strongly, till the light turned blinding.

The light lit up what the thing it was inside was, it was what seemed to be a cocoon that was carried by one of the blurry figures, the one in the middle.

The light seemed to have spooked the Hunting Weavers, as the ones on the sides of the one holding the cocoon jumped aside as the one holding it seemed to be in shock, not knowing what to do with the cocoon it was holding between its front long limbs.

Adam saw his chance, he lifted both hands, manifesting a white spear in a fraction of a second in each hand before sending them flying towards the spiders on the side.

The spears travelled in a white blur and reached their targets in a second. Of the spiders didn't even get the chance to avoid, as it had just landed from a jump and wasn't able to do anything before the spear hit it straight to the head.

The other, though, was able to jump to the side before the spear reached it, but that didn't matter much as the spear changed its path halfway through its journey, heading to where the spider landed and hitting it in the centre of its body.

Adam didn't care much about that, most of his attention was on the spider that had Susan.

As the light from the cocoon continued to shine brighter, the spider holding it got more flustered and stopped in its place, half-blinded before finally dropping it.

With it being flustered because of the light from the cocoon, the spider slowed down before stopping entirely at the end, while Adam didn't have to slow down at all, heading towards it at once.

With cold eyes and hidden anger, Adam stepped towards the blinded spider, even before reaching it, his white hands had already landed open it, with each two or three of them catching hold of one or two of its feet before starting to pull

The spider released a high pitched screech as its limbs were ripped off by force. After only a body was left of the spider, the arms moved to the head and other body sections and started pulling them apart too.

Even as the arms were killing the spider in cold blood, Adam made some of them go and deal with the cocoon that warped Susan.

As the spider finally died and with Susan free, Adam turned towards her to make sure that she was alright.

At that moment Susan was unconscious, she had no wounds or bite marks on her and neither did she seem to be poisoned, so he finally calmed down a bit, then he turned to the most eye-catching and interesting thing at all about her at that moment.

In front of Susan, a sphere that was a bit familiar and extremely bright was floating, Adam studied it for a while till it started dispersing on its own at the end.

"Huh..." He finally said with a hint of his usual light-hearted and light tone.