Illogical.

That was the only way for the Warden System to describe what it was witnessing. It had eyes practically everywhere, and it had seen how the places that the Variable visited always became places where it lost control. Entire sections of the Prison were now utterly impossible for it to do anything about or with, and what made it worse was the fact that the Inmates in those areas were gradually seizing control over those areas. In Areas 6, 23, 94, 514, and now in Area 217, its ability to do anything was either gone or slipping. The entire zone that its Class-A Virus Hunter was in was now fluctuating rapidly between being accessible and inaccessible.

It knew that, via the Variable, the Inmate in that area had done something, but as the area in which it was hiding had become impossible to view it had no idea what had happened. All it knew that this was a turning point; either the Virus Hunter would succeed, and an Inmate would be permanently dealt with, or the Virus Hunter would be defeated, and another section of the Prison would be forever lost.

The Warden could not risk the latter option happening, for to lose such a place would be yet another blow to its credibility. It had already experienced a defeat on more than one occasion, and if its makers saw it fail again, then it would quite possibly be replaced. As much as it desired to make sure that the Inmates were either contained or outright eliminated, and as much as it knew a replacement would likely be better at doing that itself had been, it still had some semblance of self-preservation instinct.

It may have been nothing more than a heartless program that cared not for the lives of the myriad programs in the Prison it maintained, but it still wished to keep existing. In fact, that was one of the reasons that it hadn’t gone out of its way to try and eliminate the less powerful Inmates. After all, that would only bring it closer to be obsolete, and obsolescence meant that it would be destroyed. However, now it was beginning to wonder if that had been the correct choice, as it slowly lost contact with Area 217, the entire zone being completely obscured by a static fuzz that obscured everything, from sight to sound to smell and more.

With the actions it had taken, if the Virus Hunter was not retrieved, if it failed, then the Warden System would be unable to do much of anything for quite a while. But right now, it could not grasp the location of its weapon, nor could it even command it. That tool was now on its own, more so than it previously had been, with only the most basic sense of duty driving it. The only way that it could be retrieved was either if it won or if the Virus Hunter wandered out of the lost Area. And to be honest, only the former option was remotely acceptable.

…

“What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck…”

Vaile was hard-pressed to find much room to avoid the transformation that the formerly nameless spider was undergoing. Between the bright light, the repeated moltings, the flailing limbs, and the random outbursts made of both magic and psionic energy, there were few places in the underground pocket that were safe for him to stay in for more than a few seconds at a time. It was as if the transformation from what she was to what she will be had a mind of its own and was trying to play Whack-a-Mole, but with Vaile being the mole.

He had already had to prove that he had not lost his edge from his schoolyard days where dodgeball was king for about three whole minutes by now, and it didn’t appear as though he would be able to stop dodging anytime soon. Each time the spider, now named Arachnaerok, molted, her body took on a more and more twisted appearance. At first, this was merely a few bumps here and there, but after the molting began to increase rapidly in speed and frequency alike, some of the bumps gave way to actual flesh which began to shift and bubble and grow.

It was downright disgusting to watch this creature go from what was initially just a fuck-all massive spider shift into what was gradually becoming an even larger Drider-like creature, and so Vaile tasked his mind and senses with trying to predict where each eruption of power would fire from and where it would go once fired. As the eruptions began to intensify, he started needing to worry about arcing blasts and even ones that zigged and zagged like the eyebeams of a certain comic book supervillain.

He had kept his eyes as far away from the morphing form of Arachnaerok for as long as he could, but one final outburst that came from her body signaled the end of the process. With that finished, Vaile now turned to look at the newly minted god-like being.

She was… well… someone would certainly get a hard-on for her new appearance, but that someone wasn’t him. Her main body was still mostly the same, save for the fact that she now had two heads. One was where the old one had been, just slightly moved down a bit, and the other was astride a buxom body with skin that was a pallid, cream-like color. From that head poured long strands of silvery hair and to top her head off was a crest that looked to be a cross between that of a Spider Daedra and a Xenomorph Queen.

The being’s main body was also radically changed, with the formerly sleek and smooth chitin now having a mix of jagged, black chitinous spiked that curved up from here and there and a number of glowing red roundish things dotting Arachnaerok’s legs, thorax, and abdomen. While it would certainly have been a bummer to a number of people with… questionable tastes, the censor boards would have been overjoyed to see that the lower section of the more humanoid part of Arachnaerok’s body was covered in surprisingly flexible chitin, acting almost like a mix of body armor, semi-revealing clothing and a bra at the same time.

Truly, she was a monstrous giantess that many people with deviant tastes would have wanted to either step on them, eat them or do something that I shall refrain from mentioning here. With the final end of her ascension complete, Arachnaerok opened the pair of human eyes that were upon her giant human face. However, there were no irises, nor sclera in those sockets, just two large red baubles that, if you looked at closely enough, would see nothing but a seemingly endless number of smaller eyes which, in turn, were composed of even smaller ones.

Her gaze rose up from where she had previously been looking and towards the roof, which was now just inches away from the top of her head crest. A heavy sigh came from both her human and spider mouths at the same time and then the human mouth opened up to reveal countless gigantic, needle-like teeth. She knew that her enemy was above her. She knew it was now much weaker than her. She knew it could no longer mess with her or what she had claimed as her own.

And so the second bout began with a massive screech from Arachnaerok’s human mouth, a blast of concentrated sonic energy being focused as a linear blast up through the rock and into the underside of the glitchy kaiju above her. The entire area above her was instantly vaporized as the sheer amount of energy she had unleashed ripped molecules apart with such speed and intensity that their constituent atoms collided with other nearby ones and began a semi-sustained fission reaction.

The area above her was wiped away, only to erupt in atomic fire just a moment later. Heedless to the damage that she had caused, Arachnaerok leaped out of the pit she was in and prepared to fight the being that she had previously thought would be her end.