Chapter 100: And Shit Gets Worse [100 - Milestone!]
Chapter 100: And Shit Gets Worse [100 Chapter Milestone!]
Dennis, who was right in front of the spiders, stared in horror as one of them ripped a chunk of the dead spider’s essence core straight out of its body and swallowed it whole.
"They’re eating their own," he muttered, disgust and disbelief warring on his face.
There was no time to dwell on it. More spiders kept coming, dropping from higher up the rock face, scuttling out from below, filling every available space with their twitching legs and clicking mandibles.
Bradley’s team, several meters away, was dealing with the same problem. Fireballs lit up the night as Bradley unleashed everything he had despite his leg, his teammates scrambling to cover each other’s blind spots as best they could.
Uhtred and Zara descended from their higher ground in seconds, landing among Dennis and Diya just as another wave of spiders surged forward.
"Don’t bother trying to harvest anything," Uhtred growled, cleaving through two spiders with a single arc of his battleaxe. "We don’t have the time."
He was right. The moment a spider died, others were already converging on the corpse, tearing into it before the body had even hit the ground. It was like fighting a tide that ate its own dead just to keep moving forward.
Diya’s hands trembled slightly as she healed a shallow gash on her arm, courtesy of a spider she hadn’t reacted to fast enough.
"There’s too many of them," she said, breath ragged. "We can’t keep this up!"
Uhtred gritted his teeth. She wasn’t wrong. The spiders themselves were not particularly strong, every single one of his crew members had no problem killing the spiders. But it was their numbers. They kept pouring out of every nook and cranny of the rocky formations in an unending stream.
Even if it were Uhtred alone, despite his primordial great core, if he should continue like this, this would only drain his reserves without purpose.
And as if to make matters worse, as Uhtred and the crew fought with the unending stream of spiders, the ground continued to tremble madly, increasing in intensity by the second.
They had all realized by now that it wasn’t the spiders that were causing this at all, rather, the vibrations were coming from the flat sandy plains behind them!
Dennis paused mid-fight with a frown on his face, moving to a temporarily safe spot behind Uhtred, Zara, and Diya. The short pause provided him the brief time to observe all that was going on.
His eyes moved from the cracks in the rock face, to the spiders still pouring out of them, to the swarm steadily approaching behind them from the horizon, and something in his expression shifted.
"We need to leave," he said. "Now."
"Leave?" Diya glanced at him briefly before refocusing on the spiders. A look of incredulity colored her face like she thought he had lost his mind.
"Dennis, there’s a swarm coming and the ground won’t stop shaking. ’Out there’ is worse!"
"No, listen to me." Dennis grabbed her arm, his grip firmer than his current state should have allowed. "This high ground was supposed to protect us. It’s doing the opposite. We are trapped between these spiders at our front and whatever is making the ground tremble, coming from behind along with that swarm. If we stay here, we get hit from both sides at once!"
Uhtred’s battleaxe paused mid-swing.
He didn’t like it. None of them did. But Dennis wasn’t wrong.
"He’s right," Uhtred said, already moving. "We move. Now."
It took everything in Diya not to argue. The idea of leaving solid ground for the open sand, with jackals circling and something massive tunneling toward them, felt like madness. But she had seen Dennis’s instincts prove right too many times already to start doubting him now.
With immediacy, they began their descent, cutting down spiders that blocked their path while ignoring the rest, no longer bothering to finish anything off cleanly. Every swing was the bare minimum needed to clear a way through.
Bradley’s team saw them moving and didn’t need to be told twice.
"They’re retreating!" one of his teammates shouted. "Bradley, they’re leaving!"
Bradley, leaning heavily on one leg, watched Uhtred’s group descend with a calculating squint. He hadn’t survived to Level 10 by ignoring people smarter than him when it mattered.
"Move out!" he barked. "Now! Same direction as them!"
His team scrambled to follow, abandoning their section of the rocky formation as more spiders surged up behind them.
By the time both groups reached the base of the rock formation and spilled out onto the open sand, they had seamlessly merged into a single group without a single word exchanged between them.
Uhtred didn’t trust Bradley. Bradley didn’t trust Uhtred... in fact he hated Uhtred’s guts. But none of that mattered anymore. The logical thing to do here was to group together. More bodies meant more coverage. More coverage meant a better chance of seeing an attack before it landed.
The jackals were already circling, blurs of motion skimming along the edges of the group, testing for an opening. A few darted in close, only to flash away again the instant Uhtred or Zara turned toward them.
"They’re not committing," Zara muttered, cutting down a spider that had followed them out from the rocks. "Same as before."
Uhtred’s eyes tracked one of the jackals as it circled wide. For the first time, with a clearer view of it under the open night sky, he could make out more than just a blur.
[Sand Jackal (Level 15)]
He blinked, genuinely caught off guard.
He had pegged these things at his own level back in the afternoon, maybe close to it. Level fifteen was nowhere near that.
A few of the others he could make out as the pack thinned and spread out were even lower-leveled. Level 11. Level 9. One barely scraping Level 7.
It wasn’t strength that made them dangerous. It was speed, sheer overwhelming speed, paired with that weird mirage ability of theirs that allowed them to slip in and out of his perception like smoke.
The only reason they had been able to draw blood from him, cutting through his new black garb that could tank attacks from a Level 23 beast, if only briefly, was because of the sheer speed behind their attacks.
Uhtred reckoned that if he could land a single blow on any one of them, he would pulverize their bodies in an instant. But landing that vital blow was the problem.
Tch.
Uhtred hissed, but didn’t have time to dwell on it. Behind them, the spiders continued spilling out from the rocky formation in a relentless tide, swallowing each other’s corpses whole the instant any one of them died.
Bradley’s team was already struggling. Most of them were barely level nine, their reserves thin to begin with, and exhaustion was creeping into every motion.
One stumbled, caught himself, kept moving.
"Conserve what you have left," Uhtred called out, more for Bradley’s people than his own. "Don’t waste essence on a clean kill. Just keep moving."
Suddenly, just as Uhtred barked out his orders, the trembling from the ground beneath them peaked. A deafening crack resounded as the very earth broke apart for tens of meters, and a behemoth black figure burst out of the sand.