Chapter 190

One thing that Luke really, really liked about the spider forest was the trees. More specifically, he liked how much space there was between the trees. It was far more open than the almost jungle-like density he’d pushed through in other forests on the western continent, even if those openings were clogged with thick spider webs. Since killing spiders was what he was here for, Luke just took the webs as a sign he was going in the right direction.

After their first near-disastrous trip, at least from everyone else’s point of view, Jalet and Hakiro had taken a few hours to walk the trails near their hunting camp. They’d come back with the conclusion that whatever might be happening, it was far enough away that the local populations were feeling at most a ripple effect from it and that the different colonies were still placed in the same formation they’d always been in. Individual borders might have shifted a bit, but it was nothing for the human hunters to worry about.

That had led to Luke’s first hunt in the trees themselves instead of just being assaulted on the trails. Most of the forest was spacious enough to pass between trees without issue, and the underbrush was thin enough that it more suggested a path than demanded it. The real problem was the abundance of spider webs with lines as thick as his pinky. Often, they were as much as ten or fifteen feet wide and just as tall, if not more so. Worse, there was a ceiling of webbing overhead that the spiders used to get around without ever descending to ground level.

Come to think of it, all that extra webbing blocked out enough sunlight that it probably had something to do with why there was so little vegetation on the ground. More importantly to Luke, it was also the staging point where most spiders liked to ambush their prey, which meant he spent just as much time looking up as he did forward.

It turned out that the group that had fallen on them the first day had been some sort of raiding party or something, and that most spiders were closer to level 5 than they were to 15. Luke killed a few hundred the next day, but he only got a fraction of what he needed for the next level. When he grumbled about it, Hakiro told him that was far more typical than their first encounter, that if they’d been out with a normal group of trainees, they would almost certainly have lost a few of them.

That was all well and good, but now that Luke was finally gaining XP again, he was eager to get on with the process. The next time something like the hentai demon popped up, he wanted to be able to put it down quickly and easily.

The days started blending together, and he quickly grew sick of spiders, but Luke put in the work anyway. It wasn’t like someone else could do it for him.

* * *

At the beginning of the second week, Luke finally took a night off to sleep. He and Zea were sharing a room, a fact which seemed to be upsetting Sando to no end. Luke only knew because he’d overheard the trainee out in the courtyard talking to Hakiro about it while he was eating dinner. Sando had been told in no uncertain terms that it was none of his business and to keep his mouth shut, lest he offend Luke or Zea.

Luke chuckled, shook his head, and went back to his meal. It wouldn’t be the first time someone who disapproved of interspecies relationships made some noise about it.

When he got back to the room, Zea was sitting on the flood with her portable worktable in front of her. “What are you making today?” Luke asked.

“Just playing around with some runes I haven’t used before,” she told him “I’m trying to integrate them into some ideas I had back on the ship, but the mana keeps cascading through the enchantment and breaking things apart. I think I can fix it with a set of regulation runes at the fourth axis, but that takes up space I need for the dispersion runes, and if I move them back any farther than the sixth axis, I have to add even moreregulators.”

Luke nodded along while she ramped up her explanation. He understood almost nothing she was saying, but it was obviously important to her, so he listened without complaint. There wasn’t much he could do to help besides offering moral support, but he liked to think he did that like a pro. About five minutes into her mini rant, she stopped suddenly and glanced over at the rock she’d been working on.

“Thought of something?” Luke asked.

“Maybe… I think… It might work. I need to test it,” she said absently.

“Quack, quack,” Luke muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he told her. “You go ahead and see if your idea works.”

Thanks to the time he’d spent reading his dad’s journals, Luke was spending a lot more time thinking about his family lately. And he had plenty of memories of listening to Curt drone on and on about a problem he was trying to solve, only to cut himself off in the middle of his rambling explanation about why it was a problem and why a certain solution wouldn’t work. Then he’d call Luke his favorite rubber duck and run off to implement whatever solution he’d invented.

Luke missed Curt. He hadn’t been perfect, but he’d been a hell of a good brother.

“I’m going to take a nap,” he told Zea, who waved him off while she examined the rock she had placed in the middle of her worktable.

* * *

Luke found the XP grind went much faster when he went out on his own. Both Hakiro and Jalet objected to that at first, but after the fifth day straight that he came back unharmed, they eventually stopped bitching at him to stay with the group.

Without having to slow down or split the XP, Luke killed well over a thousand spiders in that time. Some were as small as the ones back home. Some looked like they’d crawled straight out of Australia and were the size of his face. And then some looked like they came out of an RPG video game. Of the bigger varieties, most came up to his knee, some reached waist-height, and a few could look him eye to eye to eye to eye to eye. Luke did not like those ones.

But finally, after a week of work, he heard that ding in his mind and checked his notifications.

[You have slain Wolf Spine Recluse (lvl 9). 82 XP awarded.]
[This creature has slain 116 other creatures.]
[Total kills for this type of creature: 47.]
[Highest level kill: 12.]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 45. 45 AP awarded for use.]

“One more to go,” Luke muttered, eyeing up his new total of 122 AP. If only he hadn’t wasted 3 AP, he’d have enough now, but that wasn’t how it had worked out. If he could take his AP back from his neglected [First Aid] or [Stealth] skills, he would in a heartbeat. The system didn’t allow for that, though, so he’d just have to gain one more level. That was probably for the best anyway, since it’d give him a bank of 43 AP to use in case of emergencies.

It was still a good milestone to stop at for the day. He’d been out hunting spiders for six hours straight and it had been overcast and raining all morning. What had started as a light misting had slowly turned into a cold drizzle. When Luke turned to head back to the trail, however, he blinked in surprise.

One of the bad things about having such high perception was that he noticed a lot of little details, and the dark didn’t hide much from him these days. There had to be about a thousand spiders in the trees looking at him. They weren’t making any aggressive moves, but every time he took a step, they shifted in place. He was not by any means an expert on spiders, but if Hakiro and Jalet were to be believed, wolf spine recluses were territorial and there should be barely any other spiders nearby.

Luke took a moment to use [Analyze] on a few dozen spiders and confirmed they were all crystal fang widow makers, which shouldn’t be anywhere near where he was at in the woods. Worse, crystal fangs were among the smartest species in the forest. They weren’t gathered for no reason, and while he’d been carving his way deeper into recluse territory, they’d apparently been trailing along behind him and stringing their own crystalline webs, ones that were razor edged and required a great deal of care to navigate unless he wanted to show back up at the base camp looking like he’d lost a fight with a weed whacker.

The trainers had both been insistent that Luke not fuck with crystal fang widow makers, despite his assurances that he could handle the poison they injected when they bit. It was supposed to harden internal organs into calcified lumps, and while he was confident that [Life Surge] could burn it away before it could do any real damage, he was happy to forego the experience. Besides, there were plenty of other spiders that weren’t venomous, able to shoot razor wire out of their asses, and smart enough to work in cooperative packs.

“Okay guys, I’ll tell you what. You’re all set up over there already, so I’ll just go around this way,” Luke said. “And you all have a good time taking over this territory, okay? You don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you. Everybody wins except those wolf spine spiders, and who cares about those guys, right?”

The spiders, predictably, remained silent as their thousands of eyes stared at him.

“Right, good talk. I’m just gonna… Yeah.”

The creepiest part of that was that so many of them had snuck up on him. That was not supposed to happen, but the widow makers were completely silent and damn near see-through with their crystal needle hairs. Luke glanced back frequently to see the spiders slowly filling the area he’d left behind, spinning their webs and claiming new acreage in the name of the crystal fang widow maker colony.

It took Luke about twenty minutes to get back onto the main trails and away from the widow makers. They had apparently been following him for quite a while, slowly moving in and taking over more and more new territory without him noticing. Maybe it was the rain helping hide them. Whatever the reason, he had to circle through a new stretch of woods instead of backtracking, which resulted in him killing a few dozen more spiders that tried to attack him as he walked.

Luke made it back to the gate and slipped inside with a wary eye behind him. Their camp was the only spider-free part of the entire forest, thanks entirely to the enchantments powering the wall and the mesh canopy overhead. The only way for spiders to get in was when someone entered or left. Even burrowing spiders couldn’t get underneath the wall.

He didn’t expect any of the widow makers to follow him, and he’d already checked to make sure none were hitching a ride on his clothes, but he was still cautious. That whole scene had creeped him right the fuck out. As soon as he was through the gate and closed it behind him, he went looking for Hakiro.

“You’re not going to believe what I ran into,” Luke said. “About a thousand crystal fang widow makers deep into wolf spine territory. The damn things were stalking me, spinning new webs after I killed the local spiders and moved on.”

“There have been too many instances of aberrant behavior lately,” Hakiro said with a frown. “I am tempted to end this expedition early. Tell me, how close are you to obtaining the AP needed for your new skill?”

“About 20,000 short still,” Luke said after consulting his status.

“At least another few days then, even with you going out alone. Be careful, something is amiss in the forest.”

“You can say that again,” Luke said, shuddering as he recalled thousands of eyes all staring at him intently.