Chapter 7: First Hunt (Part Three)

I didn’t tell any of my Brothers about my Surging. Instead, I offered to take up the first nightwatch tonight in exchange for doing later nightwatchs on the nights to come. They agreed. The first nightwatch is always the easiest. After you finish your turn, you could sleep uninterrupted for the whole night.

Walking over, I laid myself against the trunk of a tree. It was a safe tree—we had already checked for any dangerous beasts.

I gritted my teeth against my cheeks, hard—I tasted the blood in my mouth.

The night of my attempted Surge Awakening came rushing back to haunt me. I relived the images over in my mind. How my throat became raw…scratched from my own screaming. How my blood felt like molten fury. How my veins had become channels for living fire. Then the explosion of blood.

I was gasping now, attempting to suppress my breaths which came in quick intervals. I looked toward my Brothers.

Thankfully, they were still sleeping.

My hand, as if guided by the memories of that night, moved toward my chest. My hand did not obey me. It was as if it had a life of its own.

My vision became crystal-clear. Night was no longer a small hindrance to me. It felt as if night had become day. My hearing became sharper. I could almost hear the soft breaths of my sleeping Brothers. And I could almost hear the blood running in their veins. It was like something in the furthest back of your mind. You could almost grasp it, but it was like an elusive fish. Like something you forgot about and wanted to desperately remember. It was that sort of feeling.

By now, my whole body felt as if my own blood was besieging every point, ever orifices. I felt a trickle of wetness down my nose. I wiped it away, and saw the dark redness of it. Blood.

My blood.

But there was a strangeness to it. The scarlet liquid looked as if it was alive. Squirming, and wriggling. Like the bodies of dying beasts. Like the last lights of their eyes before they became extinguished, like the dying embers of a campfire.

Hastily, I wiped it away onto a patch of grass beneath me. Like a disgusting stain I had to remove.

Then I watched in horrid fascination at the unexpected result. A verdant green turned into red. The grass, almost half as long as my forearm, quickly became devoured by my blood. The small stain of blood stretched itself, like a viper widening its jaws to swallow its prey.

My thoughts turned cold at that.

This was too strange. Too freakish. I couldn’t let anyone find out about it. Not even my Brothers.

Had my Surge returned after all this time? My thoughts turned bitter. Two and a half years.

Surprisingly, I notice my pain receding. No longer was my blood boiling, attempting to crawl out of each and every pore of my body. I only felt a simple warmth, which also gradually receded.

I let out a sigh of relief.

For the remainder of my nightwatch, I kept my eyes open, slowly holding onto my blade-spear. I practiced a few forms with it. Silently. Ever so quietly, so that I would not wake my Brothers.

In that long night, my weapon was my only comfort. Like a mother. Like a lover. Like family.

The third morning came easy. Breakfast was the nearby prey we hunted, consisting of a Bigger Ronat, various smaller creatures, and fish we caught in the bigger river upstream.

“Sometimes,” Brother Leaping Fox started to say. “Whenever I eat a Ronat, I feel as if I am eating you, Brother Ronat.”

“Next, you are probably going to say the teats of a mother Ronat are similar to Brother Ronat,” Little Bird muttered as he ate the cooked fish.

We were quite diverse eaters. Raw or cooked. It didn’t matter. We did, however, agreed upon that the still-warm flesh and the still-warm blood of our prey tasted better at the moment of their deaths.

And perhaps, just perhaps that morning, Brother Leaping Fox’s flair for words had left him.

Our next set of points resulted when we finally tracked down a group of Bristles which were foraging for some skyweed in a densely vegetated area of the forest. Don’t get me wrong, these Bristles were mostly carnivorous, only resorting to eat a few fruits and plants now and then.

Skyweed was a famous attraction for the Bristles. And that was only because when the creatures ate them, they would feel as if they were in the sky. High as the sky, the saying would go, for the creatures who would eat the skyweed.

My Brothers and I had tried them before when Hunter brought a few of these plants to us. One moment, we were all normal, and the next moment, we were high as the sky. Then we started playing Catch the Beasts. And when I was the hunter, all I could do was rub against a tree trunk, thinking it was one of my Brothers.

Definitely as high as the sky.

Still, it has its uses. If you ground it up into a paste and cover your wounds with that paste, it would reduce the pain and increase the rate of blood clotting.

There were four Bristles in the group we tracked down. A group of Bristles was worth thirty points, and the reason they were worth so much was due to the difficulty in catching them.

The creatures had the appearances of porcupines smashed into a monkey’s back. They were flexible bastards, able to roll into a ball of sharp quills. Dangerous opponents if one did not know how to deal with them.

They were also provoked quite easily. And with their features, the creatures were the natural enemies and predators of the sky vipers. Yes, they could climb like monkeys too. Like I said, quite dangerous for the ignorant.

Brother Leaping Fox jumped out of the way as a ball of quill came rolling toward him. Then he made a quick turn, smashing into the ball of quill with an overhanded swing, making sure that only the blade of the spear touched the creature’s body.

It was a wise move. Brother Leaping Fox cared greatly for his blade-spear. He didn’t want any quills stuck onto the weapon’s shaft, and though the wood was easily harder than metal, and lighter to boot, Brother Leaping Fox did not take any chances.

The Bristle that came for me was an easier opponent. I dodged the ball of quills which was almost as large as I was, and it immediately became stuck between two trees. A whine of anger and mixed howls exploded from the Bristle as I stabbed at one of its weak spot, the joint which allowed the Bristle to flex into a ball. It was an easy kill.

The other two Bristles were even easier opponents. They were higher than the skies themselves. Too much skyweed could do that to someone. The two Bristles were rolling around in circles, not even able to directly attack my Brothers. We waited for them to grow exhausted and to open up their ball forms. The rest was easy then.

“That was a bit too easy,” Little Bird said with a hint of disappointment. “They didn’t even shoot any quills at us, or even climbed onto the trees.”

I shrugged at that. “You don’t look a gift Ronat in the mouth.”

The next battle took place in the afternoon, when we spotted remnants of leftover webs.

“Arachne,” Hidden Shade said, pulling apart a strand of web with his fingers, and inspecting their quality. “Possibly of the red species.” He tasted it. “Female by the taste of it.”

Both the jaws of Leaping Fox and Little Bird dropped at that. “You can tell their genders from the taste?”

Hidden Shade had a calm look on his face as he explained. “There’s a slightly sour taste when a female red Arachne makes it, whereas if a male makes it, there’s a bitter taste. It’s a very gentle difference, slight and almost unnoticeable. But, it is what differentiate the genders.”

“What! Let me taste it then.” Leaping Fox moved toward the strands of remnant webs. “I don’t taste anything at all.”

“Same here,” Little Bird added.

Eagle Above Skies sighed at that. “Brother Hidden Shade is pulling your spears. You cannot tell the gender of an Arachne from the web it makes.”

“…”

Both Little Bird and Leaping Fox were speechless. Brother Hidden Shade rarely, if ever, made jokes.

We laughed at the two.

“Looks like you need to brush up on your forest lore, eh, Brothers,” I said, my face all smiles.

We moved onward then, with Little Bird and Leaping Fox muttering to themselves.

“Just between you and me,” Big Bear suddenly whispered to me, “I didn’t think Brother Hidden Shade was joking either.”

“I see.”

I could only think that some of my Brothers were quite naïve in certain aspects.

The tracking of the red Arachne took close to two hours. We had to proceed very slowly. An Arachne was a dangerous creature. With a dozen legs and an extra four smaller hands, it had half the number of limbs as all of us Brothers combined. Having sixteen limbs was nothing to scoff at.

But that wasn’t what made the creature truly dangerous, giving it a formidable sixty points. The creature was dangerous due to the venom it could inject and exude from its row of fangs. Not to mention the fact that it could shoot out webs from its two appendages on the sides of its spinneret.

There’s nothing quite easier in scarring your mind than seeing a hideous Arachne with dripping venom from its rows of fangs that could devour your entire head with one easy bite. The creature was almost as large as a Scylla and easily twice as dangerous.

Along our tracking, we kept a lookout on all sides, and almost in every direction, especially the skies. The red Arachne were master weavers. They made their webs everywhere. Between the branches of trees, between trees, between grounds, between the trunks of trees—everywhere.

They were smart too. Their webs were sometime painted in venom. One ignorant touch, and it could fell a formidable beast. Even a Scylla with all its humongous body would die if it took in enough venom.

After each careful measure of our surroundings, we proceeded, following the remnants of the webs. Red Arachne migrated homes quite often, especially after it had eaten all the prey in its territory. Or scared away all the prey…

Perhaps an hour of time passed as we continued our tracking. We were now in a section of a forest where the trees had grown denser. The trunks of decaying trees were scattered onto the ground, like giant behemoths slowly dying.

We avoided them like we would a wildfire. Anything could be living in the hollows of these trunks. We slowly weaved through them, watching out for any alarming sounds from the usual din of buzzing insects and chirps.

We arrived at a ring of trees with sparsely scattered boulders the size of a full grown Demona Hunter. Seven feet tall, and arranged randomly. There were also fallen trunks and every type of plants growing. “Stop,” I said, just loud enough for my Brothers to hear. They stopped immediately.

It was tiny thing, almost imperceptible. Even Hidden Shade had not noticed it. Right between the bottoms of these scatter boulders, under and behind tall growing grasses, I noticed strands of web. And with the few shafts of afternoon sunlight piercing down onto certain spots, it made the strands of web almost invisible.

The Brothers grew pale upon seeing it.

“Good eyes, Brother Wolf,” Eagle Above Skies praised.

My vision was feeling particularly keener ever since last night.

We proceeded even more cautiously, watching out for any ground traps. We paled even more upon discovering a series of connecting small web of strands that led through the tree trunks, under grasses, behind grasses, behind boulders, and behind everything possibly hidden.

Eagle Above Skies narrowed his eyes. “This creature is too cunning. It is laying ground traps everywhere. If we had triggered or cut through any of these strands, it would have alerted the Arachne.”

Hidden Shade crouched down, inspecting the small strands of web. He shook his head. “No, these webs seem too weak. I am sure they belong to smaller Arachne.”

“A nest?” Brother Little Bird said, a little nervousness creeping into his voice. He didn’t like Arachne; I knew from seeing him already have small troubles toward spiders.

“Probably her younglings,” Hidden Shade answered. “It must have been why we saw so many remnants of webs. She was most likely moving to find a better home. A better breeding ground.”

“Well,” Leaping Fox started. “I don’t like my chances of facing a pair of red Arachne. But if the female already gave birth to her younglings, that means the father has already become nourishment.”

“Possibly,” I said. I knew a lot about Arachne. Perhaps even more than Hidden Shade, who was the master of forest lore among us. “It could also go the other way and mate with a purple male Arachne, which is a much stronger species. The female red Arachne does not turn the male into nourishment for the younglings then.”

I gave a grim smile. It did not reach my eyes. “In that case, the male turns the female into nourishment and devours more than half of its younglings.”

A chirp of a chuckle. “Sounds like a challenge,” Little Bird said, the nervousness plain in his voice. “A purple male Arachne is the third most challenging creature in the northern forests, one of the three kings and worth 75 points.”

In Hunter training, we were only taught the theories behind battling a purple male Arachne, and the general colored Arachne. We had, in reality, never faced an Arachne before. Not to even mention a purple one.

We prepared a few escape routes and discussed plans before finally finishing. The designated guard would be Brother Ronat.

“Shall we start the hunt then?” Eagle Above Skies said, holding onto his blade-spear with a tighter clench.

“A bloodbath it shall be,” we said.

Little Bird took a deep breath. “Yes. Let us begin.”

To our surprise, it took more than half an hour of cautious walking to reach what was known as the cocoon web of the Arachne. There, from a distance, on an elevated clearing, we saw a gigantic web made up of smaller interconnected webs, which spanned across close to two dozen trees.

If we were to move under the web, there would have been no doubts in our minds that the web would have been able to block the sun out. Night would be the domain under the web.

Straining our necks to observe the cocoon web up in the sky, we could barely make out what was happening in the center of the cocoon web.

It was a scene that would haunt our minds forever.

In that center was the purple male Arachne devouring the female red Arachne. Half of her body was stuffed inside its mouth, abdomen first, and four of her legs were crooked. All of us felt as if we could hear the crunches of the armored chitin breaking into pieces as the mandibles of the purple male Arachne did its works.

From atop the half-devoured abdomen of the female red Arachne, multiple Arachne younglings were crawling away to escape their father. They crawled over one another in their haste. They were like ants scrambling over a dead insect.

No, they were indeed like ants. Their father did not even care as his children scrambled for an escape. He merely continued chewing the body of the female red Arachne. His eighteen legs and four smaller “hands” twitched in what seemed to be ecstasy. Its twenty beady violet eyes, eight on each side, and two in the middle, were unblinking.

Then, to our horrified fascination, the jaws of the female red Arachne moved. It was still alive!

Was it shrieking out its last death cries?

“Dear All Father.” Little Bird let out a half squeak, his face so pale it could have been compared to my skin. “I think I am going to be sick.”

“Me too,” Leaping Fox added. “Now I know why you hate Arachne. The small spiders are already disgusting enough.”

Eagle Above Skies looked on with measuring eyes. “It’s large.”

“That’s an understatement…you mean it’s damn gigantic,” Little Bird corrected.

He ignored the words. “It’s possibly larger than the Scylla. I am not exactly sure from this distance, but it should be around that size.”

Hidden Shade narrowed his eyes. “I agree with your estimations. It seems to be around that size, perhaps larger.”

Beside me, I could see Brother Big Bear twitching with excitement, his grip on the blade-spear so tight that his palms had probably turned white, and his bones probably creaking from the force. “We are fighting it?”

We looked at each other eyes, then nodded.

“I think we can handle it,” said Eagle Above Skies.

“Fun.” The glint of battle-lust became even more distinct in Brother Big Bear’s eyes. Like other Demona born with the Hunter type bodies, us Brothers mostly had dark-colored eyes ranging from black, grey, and red. Brother Big Bear was no exception. His eyes were scarlet and as red as blood could be. With the battle-lust, they almost seem to glow.

We made our way across the cocoon web, each of us wary for any stray webs on the forest grounds. We avoided unnaturally shaped tree trunks, boulders, and hollow grounds. It took more than ten minutes of walking before we reached the outer layers of the cocoon web.

We stopped, hesitating on whether to proceed further. The ground webs had become denser and denser as we moved closer toward the center of the cocoon web. Above us, we saw that the purple male Arachne had already eaten more than two-thirds of the red female Arachne. And in its boredom, its many legs stabbed out at the Arachne younglings.

“I don’t think we should proceed any further,” said Hidden Shade.

It was sensible advice. I wouldn’t have wished to get stuck inside the cocoon web. Not even for my enemies.

“Well, Brother Wolf Under Stars, up to you now,” said Eagle Above Skies. His blade-spear suddenly flew outward and it slashed at an Arachne youngling that had dared to climb down.

Curiosity killed the spider.

Then again, not that an Arachne looked anything like a spider. No, it was too big for that. It also had too many limbs.

I nodded. From one of my three waist pouches, each only a little bigger than a hand’s length, I took out two small bombs. I had another bigger pouch with me, but that was for my three throwing knives. The black leather pants and fur-tipped boots of a Hunter was not only for show. It was adapted for many situations and could carry many items.

The two small bombs were what was known as Essence Bombs. Each of them was a little smaller than the circular diameter your index finger and thumb could make.

Small, but deadly were the words that came into mind.

The ones I held were Fire Essence Bombs and they were currently sealed by a strip of enchanted papyrus made from a plant fiber. If the strips were removed, the bombs would be activated and a more-than-slight resistance would cause them to implode. If not removed, then it would take a lot of resistance to cause an explosion.

These Essence Bombs were quite useful, made in concert with the efforts of Magus, Weaponsmiths, and Blacksmiths. The Magus would manipulate the Fire Essences of the world and refine them, not into Anima, but into denser Fire Essences. They would then put them into the bomb containers with the help of the Weaponsmiths and Blacksmiths.

I took aim at the tree where the thickest of the cocoon web was, and where there were dozens of Arachne younglings crawling over each other. Like father, like son, the younglings also fought each other, cannibalizing their dead.

The tree was about close to two hundred feet. An easy throw. It wasn’t as if I had to aim for a precise target. I had a wide margin of error to fall back on. There was a sea of web after all.

The Fire Essence Bomb made a massive explosion as soon as it hit the tree trunk. I fell a little short of my target, but it didn’t matter. The initial fiery explosion gouged out more than half of the section of the humongous tree trunk. Chunks of wood fell down like small meteorites, raining over the sea of web. Some of the unlucky Arachne younglings were instantly dead as a chunk of wood their size flattened them into a fiery mess. One chunk of wood even landed about ten feet away from our group.

A blossoming effect took place as the web caught on fire. And as the blaze grew stronger from devouring the webs and the wood, the tree itself fell down, crushing a multitude of Arachne younglings that had been unlucky enough to be under its swathe of destruction. A four hundred feet tall tree of destruction.

There was no comparison. It was undisputed.

Essence fire was by far the stronger fire compared to normal fire. Its will to devour everything that lay before its path was far greater, almost as if the fire was alive. And the heat of the Essence fire, there was no need to even mention it.

I smiled at the destruction of dancing flames. A good Hunter loves himself a fire when it’s the right time. And this was the right time.

I had to admit. Ever since that attempted Surge Awakening so many nights ago, I have had a penchant for fires. The larger the better. Perhaps it was a way of covering for my trauma. Or perhaps not. It could have just been the fire in my blood.

It was time to add more fuel.

I threw the other Fire Essence Bomb, this time closer to the purple male Arachne, who was still busy eating the now-dead female Arachne. A minute passed by, but the purple male Arachne did not even bother doing anything against the fire.

It only got up when there was only the head of the female Arachne left, the head of its mate. Former mate. This, he crushed under one of its legs. Then it screeched out loud, all twenty of its beady, small eyes trained upon us—the source of the disturbance of its meal.

The creature flew from the spot of web cocoon it stood upon. A leap that carried him and all twenty two of its limbs into a tree more than a hundred feet away. Its eighteen legs punctured into the thick tree trunk, flinging away many pieces of bark.

Its screech was like the screams of the dying except it was in a voice that was impossibly high. Just the sound alone could have made a Ronat piss in fear.

“Oh my All Father. That ain’t an Arachne. That’s more like a damn bird,” Little Bird said.

We ran after those words, Little Bird in the forefront. He was smart enough to know not to fight under such a terrain where it was advantageous for the Arachne. There were just too many trees and webs here.

The Essence fire was also hard-pressed to devour the thicker and tougher strands of web in the center of the cocoon web. It went for the easier prey. The trees flared up. The leaves blackened, almost crumbling into ashes. And the branches became akin to that of dry kindling.

In that moment, with the encouragement of the screeches of the purple male Arachne, we ran faster than we did in our entire young lives. We smashed through remnants of webs, jumping over fallen logs, and cutting through thick plants.

The sight of the clearing was a blessing for us all. There were less trees there and we had a wide enough space to fight on even terrain. There were even some covers we could hide under. Of course, we had also mapped out an escape route just in case.

We went up the small elevation, sprinting toward the middle of the clearing, and throwing our two backpacks at a safe distance away. Then we split up into eight directions as we saw a big shadow descend upon us.

The ground trembled as the purple male Arachne, one of the three kings of the northern forests, landed onto the clearing, gouging out large chunks of dirt and grass in the process. It was the first time I saw such a clearer and closer look of the massive creature.

Just one of its eighteen legs alone was twice as tall as Brother Big Bear, who was by far the tallest of us all. And the width of the leg was no laughing matter. It was as wide as our chests. The rough, black wiry hair that grew upon its legs and purple armored chitin was also as long as my index finger.

As soon as I managed to run into a decent position, I turned around to face the purple male Arachne. It had its back toward me, and its black and violet patterned abdomen loomed at me like a huge, evil face. On its spinneret, there were two flexible appendages that could shoot out webs, not including the main spinneret.

I ran toward the Arachne, knowing that it would soon be attacking Brother Big Bear who was the closest and the one the creature was facing toward. Blade-spear in one hand, I rushed toward it. To my sides, I could see Leaping Fox, Little Bird, and Hidden Shade also rushing toward it. We had the same idea by the looks of it—we would jump onto the Arachne, and dance death upon its body.

The closest Brother to me was Little Bird, and throughout the whole sprinting, I could hear him muttering excessively about piss-poor Arachne. They weren’t clean words.

I was close to its ugly abdomen now. A simple ten feet more, and I could touch it with my hands. Not to mention cutting it with my blade-spear.

On the front, I saw Big Bear clashing with one of the legs. Strength against strength. Blade-spear against purple armored chitin. The clash produced a jarring noise, harsh on the ears. But it was the music of battles.

You didn’t have to love it. You also didn’t have to hate it. It was just so.

Seven feet. Six feet. The creature was close now, already within reach if I chose to enter into Kiss of the Lunging Moon, a spear lunge that would easily close the distance.

I didn’t though. Cuts and hacking would work better on such an armored creature.

Five feet. Then four feet. I was the first to reach the Arachne. I could see the shaking of the hair on the legs of the creature as it kept moving to battle against the other four of my Brothers.

I started to gather into a jump. It would take all my strength to jump onto the Arachne’s body. I gritted my teeth. I had more than twelve feet of height to jump.

I paused then. Something was wrong. Call it instinct, call it fear. Or perhaps even the heat of the battle. Perhaps even my strangely sharp vision from the strange Surging.

That hesitation saved my life.

The purple male Arachne went half upright and turned around in less than a blink of an eye, facing. It’s a strange sight, seeing such a gigantic beast pivot all the way to its back. Horrifying also, in fact.

I rolled over just as four of its slimmer limbs, “the four hands of the creature,” pierced into where I stood just a half second ago. I landed onto the ground hard, and with my hands still held onto my spear, I used the momentum to stand up.

There’s an art to falling onto the ground with a weapon. A bad fall and you could kill yourself with the weapon. A worse fall, and you could die from your own self-inflicted gut wound.

I learned this art when I was five years old. Since then, I have never once released my grip on a weapon.

“Damn!” Hidden Shade shouted. “It looks like the Arachne can sense the vibrations our steps make on the soil!”

“No wonder it knows when I am attacking!” I didn’t see who shouted those words out loud, but from the voice alone, I knew that it belonged to Big Bird, whose silence had been broken by the excitement of the battle.

“Good dodge, Brother Wolf!” Leaping Fox called out from above the Arachne’s abdomen. He had made good use of the timing of the creature’s attack to jump onto its body unnoticed.

Beside him, Eagle Above Skies was already stabbing into the creature’s abdomen. Little Bird, on the other hand, chose not to go on top of the creature. He chose to start hacking at the legs of the Arachne.

The bloodletting began then.

It became a mining competition on top of the abdomen, but instead of picks, the two Brothers used their spears to thrust into the armored chitin. Down below, it became a woodcutting competition, but instead of axes, we used our blade-spears to cut down the legs that substituted for trees.

The purple male Arachne screeched at the injustice, the noise alone almost shattering our eardrums. A few minutes passed by before we finally managed to cut off half of its one leg. A stream of black and violet blood goo spurted out. This time, the shrieking was so loud that our hearing became disoriented.

We made sure that none of the blood got into our eyes or mouths. On our bodies, the potent blood of the stronger species of Arachne would be close to harmless, but once it got inside, you would become delirious with dream fever. You wouldn’t die from that fever, but you would be weak as a baby Ronat for an hour or two while having dreams.

A mad glint entered its twenty beady eyes.

It jumped upward. And even with one of its legs cut off, the jump of the creature seemed barely affected by the loss. On top, Brother Leaping Fox and Eagle Above Skies held onto for dear life, their fingers gripping onto the hairy half-chipped armored chitin abdomen as the creature tried to shake them off.

We backed away, careful of the explosions of dirt the aftershocks of the jumps left. Each of us took out our throwing knives. I aimed for one of its eyes. There were plenty of targets.

My blood was singing with battle music, dancing to unknown tunes. My vision felt sharp. My sense of smell felt keener. I felt confident.

I took an eye out easily, preventing the creature from further jumps.

My Brothers looked at me with surprise. None of their knives had hit any of its eyes. It’s not easy to hit such an erratic target shaking here and there violently in the air. Even Leaping Fox, the best knife-thrower in our group, would have been hard-pressed to replicate such a feat.

I shrugged. “Lucky shot?”

“Not luck, just skill.” Little Bird grinned, an impressed look on his face.

Eagle Above Skies and Leaping Fox took the opportunity to jump down from the abdomen. It was getting too dangerous to be on top of the body.

When the purple male Arachne finally stopped screeching in pain, no longer wildly trashing out, its nineteen eyes looked at us with pure malice. There was a black fire of hatred burning inside those eyes.

All of its limbs became tense, and for what seemed like an eternity, we stared at each other.

Sixteen eyes on our side and nineteen eyes on its side.

Those gleaming eyes of the creature almost seemed to say something. We felt the intent of the creature. Something about its atmosphere also changed.

No longer would it treat us as its prey. It would treat us at its equal enemy, vying for the position of one of the three kings of the northern forests. It would no longer look down upon us.

The Arachne had suddenly become more dangerous.

It bared its mandibles and its rows of sharp fangs. Violet venom, the most potent poison in all of the northern forests, could be seen dripping down from the mandibles and the rows of sharp fangs.

I took up a position in the back of our encirclement as we slowly surrounded the Arachne from eight sides. I could not avoid its eyes. The enmity in them almost made me flinch. It was the deepest hatred I had ever seen among the beasts.

An eye for an eye, they seemed to say.

Wherever I went, the Arachne eyes followed, sizing me up, measuring me. Coldly calculating some unknown thoughts.

In my life, I have met many beasts and men that could nurse their grudges well, biding their time, waiting for the most opportune moment to serve their cold vengeance. The Arachne is one of the best at this.

When the creature suddenly moved, the battle began again.

It rushed toward me, while my seven Brothers rushed toward its sides.

One of the best advice I have heard were from some humans. “If you see a creature multiple times your size, pray to your grandfather and run like the wind. Away from it. Not toward it.”

I could have used that advice back then. But then again, thinking back, I didn’t listen to it when I was older either.

I ran toward the creature multiple times my size. I didn’t try to go under the Arachne. That would have been running toward my grave. Being under more than eighteen sharp pincer-like limbs, each of them honed more finely than a sword, can only spell for one thing—certain death.

Instead, I went for right before its front leg, almost underneath those fearsome mandibles that could have gored a large bear to death. I felt the wind rush toward my face and chest as I narrowly dodged a pincer-like leg.

It was a close thing. I almost lost my footing from the sudden violent explosion of dirt and the echoing tremble of the ground.

Let me tell you. It’s a hard choice choosing to stay under a fountain-like mouth spewing out potent venom or under multiple pincer-like legs. I chose the safer route.

I stayed close to those front legs, narrowly dodging each one whenever they came down. One leg in succession. Two legs in succession. Then a sudden rows of fangs dripping potent venom that came crashing down upon me. One scratch, and I would have died.

It wasn’t long before the Arachne gave up on targeting me. It turned to my Brothers who were brutally chopping at the legs of the creature, as if they were precious firewood for the winter.

All the time, the creature kept on screeching as it steadily kept on losing one of its legs. We worked in silence, each of us keeping a steady pace, not even speaking a word for fear of losing focus.

When the creature lost four of its legs, it suddenly got the idea of shooting its webs at us. We changed strategies then.

Brother Big Bear took up the frontlines, using his massive blade-spear to poke at the eyes of the creature. That kept the creature busy, making it lose focus. The webs shot from the spinnerets and the connected appendages never came close to hitting us.

I heard Brother Big Bear roar out in pain. He hadn’t dodge in time. There was a long slash wound on his chest where the front pincer leg of the Arachne had cut through. On the outside, it looked like a massive wound, but it was just the surface of the flesh. Bloody, but not deep enough to be fatal to one of our kind.

Retaliation was on his mind, and the battle-lust was plain to see in his scarlet eyes that seemed to glow like the embers of a campfire. With a roar, the armor on one of the two largest front legs of the Arachne became dented from the slash of his blade-spear. The leg looked freakishly bent, as if a joint or the bone had been broken.

I wondered at how much strength was needed to do that. It definitely reinforced my desire to not get into a brawl with Brother Big Bear. His strength was unusual for his age.

Leaping Fox managed to get close to the creature’s abdomen, and hacked off one of its spinnerets, rendering the web-making useless. The webs could no longer hit any of us with accuracy.

We would have to be blind to get caught up in one of the shot webs. And blind we were not.

After what seemed like another half hour of fighting, the creature was finally on its death throes. Each of us Brothers had taken a turn at keeping the creature’s head busy. And all of us sported small cuts from the narrow dodges and bruises from when the limbs of the Arachne suddenly twitched outward violently.

My turn came again. The Arachne came charging at me on what remained of its former twenty two limbs. It was a half-crawl, half-limp. But I didn’t underestimate the creature. I knew that it came with a dying vengeance.

I battled against the head for a minute or two before the purple male Arachne finally settled down, its body going still. Its remaining three eyes were looking at me with confusion. The blood loss and the pain had made the creature no longer aware of its surroundings.

It could not even crawl to get up now. The creature only had two of its front legs remaining and two of its back legs. Eighteen of its severed limbs were lying in random areas of the clearing along with the holes it had made.

We waited until the lights finally died, and its eyes turned glossy.

Then we waited some more.

None of us trusted the cunning Arachne. It could still be feigning its death for all we knew. We waited for what seemed like half an hour before we finally dared to come closer. Then we took our spoils of the hunt.

All of us worked with haste. We wanted to finish obtaining our spoils before the dream fever would set upon us. All of us except Brother Ronat had gotten some of the potent blood of the Arachne into our open wounds. We had chosen Brother Ronat as the designated guard before our battle with the Arachne.

We took the violet-colored spinneret and one of its severed joint as the spoils. It nearly filled half a backpack and that was only because we cut it down into small pieces.

When the dream fever came upon us, we fell down inside a cave which we had cleaned out just before tracking the Arachne. We, of course, had already prepared a few simple traps for any invaders. And Brother Ronat guarded us throughout our weakness.

Before falling down into the dream fever, Little Bird managed to croak out a sentence. “This is why I hate spiders.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Leaping Fox managed out a gasping reply.

“Shut it,” Little Bird retorted.

Leaping Fox gasped out a chuckle. “Don’t call out your Mina in your dream fever.”

“Both of you shut it,” Eagle Above Skies butted in, his patience wearing thin after that arduous battle.

Beside me, Big Bear let out a wheezing laugh. He had the deepest voice out of all of us. “A hundred more points to go.”

Big Bird only sighed at that.

The dream fever set in then.

I was the last of the infected Brothers to fall into the dream fever.

As I wondered at the strangeness of the fact that I was the last one to fall into the dream fever, the last scene I saw was Brother Ronat shaking his head with a slight grin on his face. He was probably wondering at how Little Bird and Leaping Fox could still keep at their arguments even with the dream fever upon them.

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