The Unmaker

Alice barely caught the end of Jiayin's voice through the pounding in her ears.

'Take Apocia," Jiayin had said, like she was handing off a little errand.

And a crooked smile stretched across Alice's lips.

Finally!

She rocked back on her heels, her fingers twitching with excitement. That little sharp, hot ache in her shoulder from the poisoned spines? Forget it. The ringing in her head? Never heard it. Jiayin was trusting her now—fully, properly—and if that wasn't enough to get her buzzing inside, nothing was.

She laughed, a bright, breathless sound that cracked in the smoky night air.

"Bring it on!"

The world snapped back into motion.

Thracia moved first in the distance, hissing and leaping towards a far roof like a shadow caught in a lightning bolt. Jiayin, Wisnu, Muyang, Emilia, and Blaire broke apart in the same instant, the rooftops shuddering under their weight as they vaulted after the younger sister in a coordinated scatter.

That left just Alice and Apocia on ground level. The burning sandstone street stretched out between them like a river of heat and smoke and broken stone. Fires guttered along collapsed awnings. Sparks floated like angry fireflies in the black sky overhead. Alice wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

Her blood smeared across her jaw, and she wove it into protective gauntlets for her hands.

Apocia wasted no time. The tarantula-limbed Spider God thundered forward, six arms reared high, two legs gouging trenches in the street as she closed the distance like a charging beast. Alice didn't flinch. She snapped all four arms back, silk threads bursting from her nails, and wove a massive war mace in a blink, the blood-red thread hardened into near-steel toughness.

She lunged forward and swung.

The clash hit like a thunderstrike. Apocia's claws crashed into Alice's mace with a booming impact that rattled the street under their feet. Stone cracked. Dust exploded upward. The shock ran all the way up Alice's arms, but she dug her heels in and grinned, leaning into it, refusing to be knocked back.

Apocia's many eyes widened, just a little. She mustn't have expected Alice to match her strength.

"Not bad," Apocia growled, her voice thick with poisonous mirth. "Didn't think a little brat could push me back."

Alice's arms shook under the strain. Her shoulder burned where the poisoned spines had dug into her earlier, and of course she made sure to hide it from Jiayin. Who would want a senior to know slow, gnawing fire was eating into her muscles? Jiayin wouldn't have entrusted Apocia to someone whose veins were filled with hot sand, so right here, right now, she had to make it count.

Grinning, she pressed forward and stood on her tiptoes, standing almost nose-to-nose with the Spider God.

"I'm the youngest Arcana Hasharana ever, bug!" she chirped. "I dunno what it means to be one of the twenty-one exactly yet—"

She swung her mace back and immediately brought it down with a brutal overhead crash that Apocia just barely caught on two of her arms, hissing.

"—but I'm pretty sure it means 'not losing'!"

The night air was thick with ash and heat, and the sandstone roofs beneath Jiayin's boots cracked and crumbled with every breath the burning city took.

Across the way on a broken sprawl of roofs, Thracia crouched low, her eight spider-limbs splayed against the sandstone, her spindly body nearly vibrating with barely-contained energy. Her venomous silk spears coiled in her jaws, glistening under the sickly light, and her many eyes gleamed with something between amusement and hunger.

Jiayin gripped the hilts of her twin shortswords tighter, grimacing as Thracia's voice floated lazily across the chasm of ruined street between them.

"Children." The word rolled off her mandibles with contempt. "Children in a world of gods. You're really raring to come at me now?"

Jiayin didn't answer. She knew better than to waste breath when the first move mattered more than anything else, so Thracia continued, undeterred. She straightened up a little, letting her six arms flare outward in a dramatic arc. Fine silk poured from her spinnerets in her jaw, coating her fingers until each clawed hand had five long strands attached.

Thirty threads in total, shimmering faintly with an oily and venomous sheen.

"I'm not bound by your 'systems,'" Thracia said, almost gently. "Not bound by classes, by tiers, by… points. I am a Spider God, first and last."

She whipped her arms out once in demonstration, and the thirty threads snapped into the air like striking serpents, cutting sharp lines through the smoke.

Jiayin's muscles coiled in response. That wasn't just fancy talk. Each of her thirty whip-like webs could cleave through sandstone buildings like they were made of mud. They were the raw, biological instinct of a spitting spider weaponised to their purest form.

Thracia grinned, all teeth and hunger.

"Let's see how long you last."

And the air screamed as thirty venomous whips lashed forward at once from a hundred metres away.

Jiayin didn't waste time shouting orders. Her body moved with the rhythm honed by countless years of fighting bugs: sharp pivot, low stance, short swords ready. She slashed at one of the incoming whips with both blades in a crosscut.

The thread didn't break.

It rebounded off her shortswords with a high, shivering note that vibrated up her arms and into her bones. She grimaced as she had to spin and sidestep at once to avoid another three slashing past her.

Tough threads.

Around her, the participants broke into motion.

Wisnu darted left, sawtooth greatsword flashing as she batted a whip aside, her yellow crazy ants skittering in a frenzy along her blade. Muyang ducked low, his massive beetle helm slamming a whip into the ground with a thundering crack. Otto fired tight precise shots that severed threads cleanly, his bullets somehow disrupting the weave. Blaire cackled, dodging with ungraceful but effective lunges, her syringe claws slicing through two threads while her movements stayed jittery and feral. Emilia, grinning despite the tension, twisted between the threads like a cat through falling beams, screeching out bursts of sound that deflected incoming silk away from her.

Jiayin narrowed her eyes, slicing another thread that was aimed at Muyang's exposed back. It didn't break, but it wobbled off course.

They were doing well enough for now, but Jiayin could already feel it—that exhaustion creeping into the edges of their movements. The subtle heaviness of limbs that moved a fraction slower after each desperate dodge. The way their breathing grew louder and harsher in the night.

Thracia was still crouched across her roof a hundred metres away, swinging her thirty threads around her like living things.

I can't get a good shot off without time to wind up, but she won't let me wind up with these threads whipping around.

No ranged attacks. Not in chaos like this. She had to find a way to get close to Thracia, but how?

Alice skipped lightly across the cracked sandstone, her silk mace unraveling in her hands and reforming itself mid-twirl into a shield, then a pike, then a flail, each shape blooming from her four silk-weaving arms without a second's pause. Her two human arms, though—those were busy with something else entirely, and she hummed a stupid little tune under her breath as she worked.

Humming was good.

Humming meant she wasn't thinking about the poison creeping through her veins. It meant she wasn't thinking about how she was barely holding on, or how the cuts lining her arms and ribs and shoulders were leaking blood faster than she could weave bandages.

Humming meant she was still winning.

Well, sorta.

Across from her, Apocia barreled forward again, her tarantula bulk tearing through fallen oil carts and shattered pillars like they were paper toys. The Spider God moved with a terrifying speed and a monstrous rhythm, six clawed arms rising all at once to crash down on Alice's head like a falling temple.

Alice pivoted and parried on instinct, snapping her flail into a spiked buckler and catching three claws. Her silk spear darted up with the other two arms, catching the other three claws.

Still, the force of the impact skidded her back several feet, the soles of her sandals scraping sparks off the stone.

"You should focus, little moth!" Apocia bellowed, her mandibles clicking furiously. "Or you'll die before you even understand why!"

To that, Alice simply grinned wider, her heart pounding so loud it drowned out even the crackle of fire and the thunder of rampaging bugs far behind them.

Focus, huh?

With a little flourish, she loosened her shoulders and tilted her head back, still grinning.

"You should focus, little spider!" she cooed, mimicking Apocia's voice. "Or you'll die before you even understand why!"

For a moment, Apocia froze.

A real, honest shudder rippled through her monstrous frame.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Because now, Alice's face wasn't Alice's anymore.

The delicate weavings of her human hands had finished their work behind Apocia's back: fine silk threads knitted into skin-like sheets, careful embroidery forming lines and wrinkles and terrible gleaming eyes.

She'd woven an exact, hideous replica of Apocia's snarling, spider-eyed face over her own.

The confusion was instant and beautiful. Apocia didn't stagger half a step back like would've been ideal, but her eyes were wide, her whole towering frame bristling with hesitation.

And hesitation meant opening.

From the smoke behind Apocia, a figure flared into view.

Alice barely turned her head in time to see Dahlia—her tattered cloak whipping around her like a sandstorm—come launching from the gloom. Sand and wind spiraled tight around her, kicking up grit and embers in a furious halo.

Apocia heard it too, spinning around with a guttural roar just as Dahlia soared into striking distance. The Spider God flicked a fan of poisoned spines up at Dahlia from her arms—sharp, glistening, and so fast that even Alice flinched instinctively—but Dahlia didn't falter.

In a blur, Dahlia crossed her arms in front of her chest. The spines struck her firefly bracers, throwing up a small shield of defensive lightning that sizzled and burned the spines away into useless ash mid-air.

Then Dahlia swung her warhammer up and over her shoulder—crackling lightning pouring down the haft and into the head—and brought it crashing down into Apocia's shoulder.

The hammer struck with a deafening thud, and Apocia staggered two steps sideways from the blow, her armoured plates visibly dented along the ridges of her collarbone.

Tch.

Even that hit isn't enough to actually injure her?

She's tough, if nothing else.

Alice cracked her shoulders, breathing hard and wild-eyed as Dahlia landed lightly beside her.

"You… okay?" Dahlia panted, glancing at Alice quickly. "I'm… I'm sorry. I thought that would… I thought that'd kill her in—"

In response, Alice reached up, ripped the woven Apocia-face off her own with a wet tearing sound, and gave Dahlia a bright, reassuring grin.

"Perfect!" she chirped, though she could feel her muscles trembling with every heartbeat. "That was a good hit!"

The air between them snapped tense again as a low growl rose from the flames, and both girls twisted back toward Apocia at once.

The Spider God straightened slowly, the heat from the burning streets painting her tarantula form in long, monstrous shadows. She rolled her hulking shoulders with a series of loud pops, cracking her twisted spine back into place.

"... Strange," Apocia rumbled, almost conversational. She flexed her claws, her eight black eyes narrowing. "I could have sworn... I saw the antlion's Art around you, little one. You twisted the sands around your body like the desert devours prey and… yet…" She tilted her head slightly. "Lightning. Firefly lightning."

Dahlia stiffened, her hands tightening nervously on the haft of her hammer.

"Are you a firefly or an antlion?" Apocia's mandibles clicked softly. "What bug are you?"

"..."

Dahlia said nothing.

So Apocia snorted dismissively, tossing the question aside like a scrap of trash.

"It doesn't matter," she declared, stepping forward, her massive shadow swallowing the broken street between them. "One child, two children, five. ten—it's all the same."

The ground cracked under her as she charged the two of them.

Jiayin and the participants were stuck on the defensive, boxed in by thirty slashing threads.

Wisnu stayed tight to the left, her massive sawtooth greatsword a grinding shield against anything that came too close. Muyang to the right, battering threads out of the air with the brutal strength of his horned helm. Otto positioned himself slightly behind them, his rifle spitting sharp, clean shots that severed any whip he could target fast enough. Emilia dashed through the center like a wild fox, screeching sharp bursts of noise from her throat whenever a whip got too close to anyone, while Blaire hacked and slashes through the webs with the kind of feral abandon that would make even a spider hesitate.

Somehow—clumsily, roughly—they were only barely managing to hold on.

But Jiayin wasn't.

The poison that'd been burning through her system since the beginning was starting to take its toll. Her vision blurred at the edges, colours growing sickly and wrong, and her hands shook no matter how tightly she clenched the hilts of her shortswords.
Her breathing hitched.

Her knees buckled.

The world tilted sideways.

She fell onto her knee after a particularly tough block and deflect, planting one hand against the scorched sandstone to stop herself from falling off the roof completely.

"Shit!" Emilia's voice snapped beside her. Jiayin blinked through the dizziness to see the girl skidding in close, knocking a whip aside with a burst of screeching sound before pivoting protectively in front of her.

A shadow loomed.

Blaire landed hard next to her, crouching in front of her face. The Plagueplain Doctor's eyes glowed an eerie green through the cracked lenses of her mask, and her whole body twitched with barely contained energy.

Without speaking, she stared straight at Jiayin, syringe claws gleaming wetly in the moonlight.

Jiayin grimaced.

Every instinct screamed at her not to trust a Plagueplain Doctor, but pragmatism had been beaten into her bones by years of survival.

"... Do it," she growled, forcing the words out between gritted teeth.

Blaire didn't waste any time. In one blur of motion, she dashed behind Jiayin and stabbed all ten syringe claws into the side of her neck.

The burn of the chemicals hit instantly, and it was like swallowing fire and steel at the same time. Her vision flared white. Her muscles spasmed—and then locked into steel-hard readiness.

She gasped in a fresh breath that felt like inhaling molten iron.

Thracia's whips slashed toward her again, but this time, Jiayin moved. Her legs steadied. Her arms solidified. Her swords snapped back into a ready cross-guard without even thinking. She lashed both shortswords outward in a tight, brutal X as she rose to her feet, slicing two whips clean through with a shuddering snap.

From her mouth, a cloud of fire escaped with her next breath, a residual effect of Blaire's adrenaline syringes igniting her own fiery blood

"Guard me!" Jiayin barked without turning her head. "Get me to Thracia, and I will end this!"

And she didn't wait for a response.

She kicked off the roof hard enough to crater it underfoot, launching herself forward with a violent blast of blood-propelled momentum. Her Art ignited her veins like gunpowder trails—red-hot explosions of force beneath her feet—and she blurred into motion, shooting across the shattered roofs like a comet.

The Spider God immediately coiled all thirty of her silk whips inward, snapping them to converge like a net around Jiayin's sprinting path. It was an avalanche of deadly silk, razor-sharp and faster than thought.

But Jiayin wasn't alone.

As the whips closed in, the participants followed her forward.

Emilia burst forward, screeching violently enough to vibrate half the web threads into snapping. Blaire dove sideways, carving through three more whips with one savage whirl of her claws. Wisnu slashed a wide arc with her greatsword, cleaving a handful of threads out of the air, while Muyang simply tanked several with his armored beetle helm, his massive form plowing through like a battering ram. And, from behind them all, Otto's precise rifle shots popped and snapped, severing threads that none of the others could reach in time.

In a single counterattack, Jiayin managed to cross a hundred metres without having to slash or block even once.

That was enough.

She gritted her teeth and hurled herself across the final gap, slamming into the rooftop where Thracia crouched, still mid-snarl. Then she twisted midair, crossing her twin shortswords in an X, channeling every scrap of borrowed strength and burning adrenaline into the strike.

This was it.

She'd carve this Spider God in two and end this.

Jiayin roared aloud, bringing the blades down in a shining crosscut—

And Thracia grinned.

"Close," the Spider God whispered.

Jiayin's instincts screamed too late as Thracia's mouth opened wide revealing a coiling, swirling spear of tightly compressed venomous silk.

The poison in her body—still lurking, still slowing her more than she realised—had dulled her senses just enough that she hadn't seen it coming.

And now she couldn't dodge. Not without letting that devastating spear plow straight into the defenseless participants behind her.

… Hah.

What a pain.

She dragged her swords up instead, bracing them into a cross-guard.

The spear shot out like a cannon blast.

The ground under Dahlia's sandals trembled again, the vibrations buzzing up her legs, making it harder to keep standing still. Her breaths came quick and shallow as she stumbled back a step, her hammer tight in her sweaty palms, her heart beating a frantic drumline in her chest.

Everywhere she looked, the sandstone streets were a burning ruin. Fires crackled in oily pools, and broken walls crumbled into blackened heaps. The sky above wasn't even dark anymore. It was orange, boiling with smoke and ash, but—

"Focus!" Alice snapped.

It was difficult to focus. The heat. The fatigue. She had one shot to land a lightning-infused sneak attack on Apocia, and she had landed it, but it'd dealt no damage. Now, she was stuck in a melee she had no place in. Apocia was large, fast, and strong. For every slash she blocked with her hammer, Alice had to yank her back and around and block five more for her.

She was slow and clumsy and too weak for this, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to continue dodging. She was the bait, the one perpetually backing off while Apocia hounded her down the street. She had to be the bait, even if her legs felt hollow and her stomach was trying to crawl up her throat, because she was sure Alice was the only one with the firepower to actually kill Apocia.

But then a sharp boom split the night air in the distance, Dahlia's head whipped sideways for a second, drawn instinctively to the noise. She barely caught a glimpse of it: a massive shockwave blossoming outward across the city like a blooming flower of smoke and debris, swallowing entire blocks in an instant.

Her gut twisted violently. That wasn't a normal explosion.

That was Thracia.

Which meant… the others…

Her heart seized up so hard it hurt, and for one awful second, she forgot about Apocia, forgot about Alice, and forgot everything but the sick, plunging fear that the others were gone. That they needed help. That she should be running toward them right now instead of dragging Alice down—

"Don't look!" Alice's voice cracked like a whip again, and Dahlia flinched back just in time to see a fan of black, glittering spines exploding out from Apocia's outstretched arms.

Too many. Way too many.

Dahlia barely had time to register them before they were slicing through the air toward her like a living storm. She knew she couldn't block them all. She knew that with horrible clarity. Her firefly bracers might burn a few of them out of the air, but there were too many. They'd tear her apart.

Still, she raised her arms anyway. Braced them in front of her chest. Called lightning to the chitin plates, feeling the familiar, sharp crackle across her skin.

Maybe she wouldn't survive. Maybe she would. But before the first spine could strike, a figure blurred across her vision.

Alice.

The Arcana Hasharana moved without hesitation and wove a massive shield of red silk right in front of Dahlia—so it came as an utter surprise when Dahlia saw the spines slamming into the shield, piercing through it like bullets through paper.

The shield buckled. Threads snapped. The spines punched through, burying themselves into Alice's small, defiant frame with sickening, wet sounds.

Dahlia could only stand there, frozen in horror, as blood sprayed out across the sand and fire.

… Huh?

If even Alice's threads… can't… then—

Apocia didn't wait. She crashed through the remnants of the shield with brutal momentum, and her clawed fists swung down, aiming to crush them both like bugs.

Alice didn't move away. She didn't dodge. She whirled around instead and hugged Dahlia, taking the brunt of the blow herself and intercepting the attack.

The impact still hit like a thunderclap, separating the two of them as they each flew different ways.

Dahlia felt herself flung through the air like a rag doll. Stone and sand spun around her as the world flipped end over end, and then she slammed into something hard— a cracked wall, maybe—while the shock rattled her bones.

Her hammer slipped from her grasp.

Her vision swam.

What… can I do?

How do we win?