Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

What's that? Adon sent.

He transmitted the words without shifting his body to see what Samson saw.

He would not yet take his limbs away from Goldie. He was still pouring healing mana into her. He was not certain if it was making a difference now, but Adon did not want to do anything less than a hundred percent to speed her recovery. At some point, he would probably have to leave the spiders alone here, either to go and explain things more fully to Rosslyn and the party, or to try and hunt down the enemy alone.

When that happened, he wanted to leave the spiders as well hidden as possible and in as healthy of a condition as possible.

Adon, I am really all right, Goldie sent quietly. Thank you for the healing and for saving my life again. You can go ahead and examine Samson's evidence with him now. Remember, I can heal myself, too, if I need to.

Fine, Adon answered. At some point, I am probably going to have to leave you guys here to deal with this situation, though. I just want to make sure you're in the best shape I can before that.

Even though he still thought the attack on the spiders had been a ploy to separate the three telepathic arthropods from the group, that didn't mean the floor monsters would leave them alone once they were separate from the party. The dungeon core likely wanted every single member of the group eliminated.

I have survived worse, Goldie sent firmly. All I need now is a bit of rest. I will lay down tripwire threads before you leave, so that I have some advance warning of anything drawing near our position.

Good plan, Adon transmitted. He allowed himself to pull away from his oldest friend, and he walked on his slender butterfly legs to where Samson stood, silently examining the underside of Goldie's shed exoskeleton. What's that you're looking at?

Adon saw the top half of the exoskeleton and the bottom half of Samson poking out from beneath it. He could just barely see Samson's upper half examining something through the translucent sections of the exoskeleton, but Adon could not tell what it was that his brother was looking at.

Samson slowly backed out from under the exoskeleton and manipulated it with his forelimbs, flipping the husk over so that Adon could finally see what Samson had been looking at.

There was a piece of silvery-gray fiber attached to the underside.

I think it's a bit of spider web, Samson sent uncertainly.

That certainly appeared to be what Adon saw.

Goldie, is it yours? Adon asked immediately.

The spider shook her head.

I do not usually have globs of my own web stuck to my body, she replied. Not unless I tripped and fell while I was walking around in it. It is a big nuisance getting it off…

Plus, mama's silk is usually golden-hued, Samson pointed out. This is a common gray silk, like the spider that made it didn't care as much as she does.

Right, Samson, I have noticed that Goldie's silk is pretty, Adon sent back a little impatiently. That doesn't mean she couldn't have made this, so asking her was the quickest way to be sure. I guess we both know what this means now, though.

Samson nodded. The big boss enemy is a spider.

A spider who uses illusion magic, Adon transmitted thoughtfully. We know a lot about this thing now, but everything we know about it seems to make it harder to find. A spider might make its home anywhere along the walls or ceiling or within one of the tunnels, depending on what kind of spider it is, I think.

We also know that it is very intelligent, Goldie added. It separated us carefully from the group to target them, and it timed the moves carefully so that it could fool them into believing that Adon was the one attacking them. No spider that we have ever seen could do something like that.

No, it couldn't, Samson agreed, even though he had not encountered any spiders other than members of his own family as far as Adon knew.

Yeah, it's no ordinary spider, Adon sent. Do we have any other clues from the silk?

He clambered over onto Goldie's shed skin to get a closer look.

Nothing that I could see, Samson sent.

After a few seconds of contemplation, Adon agreed. All he saw was a bunch of gray strands entwined together to make a slender rope, which had been broken off at some point, either when the enemy released its hold—or lost its grip—on Goldie, or when Adon had scraped her exoskeleton against the rocks and pulled her free from them.

No, I think it got broken before that, Adon decided after a moment. The threads did not look like they had been scraped off against stone to him. Rather, they had suddenly snapped as if yanked. At least, that was what Adon thought he was seeing. He recognized that he was not some sort of forensic technician, and the best he could do with this was still guesswork.

Broken before what? Goldie sent.

Oh, I meant that I think the enemy yanked the thread extra hard to break it, instead of the thread getting ripped off by something I did, Adon replied. Either that, or they snagged it on something like the rocks the ants were trying to crush you with, and it ripped that way.

Pulling us at such high speeds and scraping us against rocks could do it, Goldie sent. Probably not just a hard yank. We spiders are very strong, but our silk is usually the strongest thing about us. If the other spider could break it with just a pull…

It would have to be a very strong spider, Adon finished.

Understatement, Goldie replied.

But she did not offer any further details. Adon recognized that his friend was just warning him. This enemy they were about to face was no small, weak creature, hiding because it could not fight Adon and was afraid to confront him. It was a powerful predator, concealing itself so that it could guarantee victory by picking off members of the party two at a time.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I'll be careful, Adon sent.

You had better be, Goldie sent back instantly. Do not leave us alone in this place.

I won't, he replied. I think I'd better take off now, though. I've got all the information we're going to have. I don't want to let too much time go by without doing something. That's time in which this spider monster has the chance to kill more of our side and frame me, or try to find you guys. I can't afford to sit still for long.

Good luck, Adon, sent Goldie.

You can do it, Samson added. And just think: this is clearly the big bad boss monster of this level. Once you beat it, it will be as if you defeated that wyvern from the last floor.

Thanks, Samson, Adon sent.

The butterfly wasn't certain from his brother's emotional wavelength whether Samson got that Adon was being sarcastic. Regardless, Adon took off at that point. Goldie was already putting down threads everywhere as the two brothers spoke their parting words. Adon felt comfortable that as long as nothing short of the actual boss spider showed up to confront them—and why would the spider single the two of them out, when the real threats were Adon and the knights?—they should be just fine.

He fluttered down the side of the wall, until he got down to a midpoint between the ceiling and the ground.

This is the best I can do, he sensed. At least I can extend it this much…

Adon expanded his field of Telepathy to its widest possible range, deliberately allowing it to be weaker so that he would not be able to read specific thoughts or communicate—just know that another mind was somewhere within his range. He would get a signal or nothing. It was like radar now.

Sure enough, as he expanded it to its maximum height, almost touching the ceiling, he felt the spiders again. They were still where he had left them, and no entities with a brain were anywhere nearby.

Adon rendered himself invisible, to make what he was doing as much of a mystery as possible. Then he started flying the perimeter of the floor, sticking close to the walls. He moved slowly at first, then began to perform his mission at speed. He got the occasional pings on his radar-like system to confirm that his Telepathy was working, but from the number of signals he would get at once, he knew that he was only running across groups of ants rather than this spider that seemed likely to be a lone hunter.

Actually, that reminds me, there was one detail we didn't discuss at all that we probably should have considered, Adon thought as he rounded a corner. The way the ants behaved. It was strange. If the ants had tried to grab Goldie and rip her apart or kill her with their venom or carry her off with them as food, that would be one thing. But they tried to crush her between rocks instead. That's very un-ant-like behavior.

The only logical conclusion to Adon was that the spider with the illusion magic also had Telepathy, which explained both why it was wary of the arthropods, with their Telepathy, and why Adon could not communicate with the ants. The spider must have created a special telepathic network somehow, that excluded outsiders like Adon from communicating with the spider's minions or allies.

Could it have a more advanced form of Telepathy than Adon possessed? Maybe. Or this was something that Adon could do, too, but he had never tried, or the spider was specialized in some specific form of Telepathy—or any of a number of possibilities he had not even considered. There were so disturbingly few answers.

This creature was certainly impressive. Adon knew that much.

It would be funny if this spider monster was the size of Goldie or me, Adon thought. Still small, to compensate for the fact that it has these ridiculous abilities that have allowed it to hunt us with impunity.

Adon found nothing suspicious as he continued on with his telepathic search for the hours it took for him to circle the entire floor. There was the odd lone ant, but whenever he went to investigate them, Adon found that they were exactly that: lone ants. Not a sneaky spider hoping to slide under the radar. Just lone ants.

It's probably underground somewhere deeper, Adon thought.

It made sense. In fact, there was a more specific area where the spider was probably hanging around, still awaiting its opportunity to strike. Adon had deliberately not gone near the group of humans that he had just fled. Now he returned to their vicinity, maintaining his invisibility but returning to his normal Telepathy mode for a short time.

Emotions were still higher than the normal baseline, unsurprisingly, but at least the number of people present was the same as it had been when Adon left.

The Dessians and Claustrians seemed to have split into two distinct, yet still connected camps, as if, although both sides knew they still needed the other group to survive the dungeon, they could no longer stand to be in close proximity to each other. Adon could guess what the impetus for that had been.

That damn spider…

The knights were cooking ant flesh around a campfire as the butterfly fluttered overhead. He was mostly focused on trying to scan for an invisible spider hiding underground nearby, but he could not help picking up the things that people were saying.

From the Dessian knights, there were snide remarks under the breath about "so-called mystic beasts, really monsters," and "that traitor princess." Even on the Claustrian side, though people kept their mouths shut and mostly stuck to cooking and eating their food, the knights were not in the best state of mind toward Rosslyn. Adon imagined that if the tension continued on, the Princess might be forced to return to the surface, having lost the confidence of her troops. Rosslyn herself was feeling unsurprisingly glum.

She sat by herself, not touching food, her expression stony, staring off into the distance—into the direction Adon had flown. He sensed that she had shunned company, even that of her most trusted people. She wanted to be alone.

Adon did not allow himself to watch for long or even to talk to the Princess, though it hurt him to see her so isolated.

He was here to find the monster that had been picking off their soldiers. Any telepathic contact that alerted the Princess or others to his presence might also indirectly warn the creature he was there to hunt.

Sentiment could not be allowed to take priority over survival. If Adon was the type of butterfly to let his emotions fully dictate his actions when death was on the line, he would never have survived the garden.

Freshly motivated, he descended below ground level, slipping into one of the pits that littered the ground around where the party camped. There, Adon expanded his Telepathy network again, turning it back into the radar mode that scanned for the presence of minds.

Finding few contacts at first, he began descending deeper.

After a minute, when he was almost out of range of the humans on the surface, he felt them beneath him.

The countless, seething masses of ants.

But I only sense ants, Adon thought. The Gold-Digging Ants had a distinct feel to their minds, in part because Adon was blocked from making more substantial contact with them. That can't be right, though.

He flew around underground for half an hour, looping through different tunnels, then finally exited and tried the tunnels on the opposite side of the canyon the group were camped alongside.

Nothing.

Adon flew out of the underground space and back up to where the party was. Half of them were getting ready for sleep or already sleeping, while half of each camp was on watch. The sleepers were tired enough, it seemed, that no one complained about sleeping outside, straight below the artificial sun's bright rays. Tellingly for the state of the group's esprit de corps, though, the two separate camps had each placed half of their people on watch, as if they couldn't trust the other side to get the job done.

If I don't solve this, in a day or two, these people might start killing each other.

He had checked the walls, below the ground level near the group, and ground level. Now it was time to check the ceiling. There were tunnels lining the ceiling, too, though they were far more limited than what was present at ground level.

Wait… no, it wouldn't, right?

Adon shifted his whole body until he was facing straight up, looking up at the artificial sun, directly overhead, embedded in the ceiling and glowing like some great golden egg.

This thing has illusion magic, but it wouldn't just hide in plain sight… right?