The Unmaker

Dahlia's lungs burned as she sprinted through the tunnels, her shoes kicking up loose dirt and dried flesh with every step. The flickering glow of bioluminescent flesh on the walls cast eerie, shifting shadows around them, making the tunnels feel even more claustrophobic than they already were. She was sure she was fine with them before, but now, she didn't like tight spaces much at all—too much pressure, too many things that could go wrong—though maybe it was just a side effect of having spent the better part of the past month without seeing a lick of sunlight.

She kept close to Emilia and Otto, their hurried footsteps echoing alongside hers. Ahead of them, Alice, Blaire, and the Fool cut through the tunnels with the kind of certainty Dahlia wished she had.

Strangely enough, even Alice and the Fool were following Blaire, who kept her mosquito mask and nose to the air as she ran.

"I can smell them," she rasped. "Apocia's scent is still strong. She's close."

Dahlia swallowed hard. The idea that they were chasing an Insect God—two Insect Gods, in fact—made her stomach churn. Every rational part of her screamed that this was insane, that they should just turn back and leave this to the Arcana Hasharana… but she wasn't here to back down, was she?

The Fool's voice cut through the darkness, clear and steady as he filled them in on the situation. "For many decades, the 'Seven Spider Spinners' have been one of the continent's most prolific wandering bands of gods. They were relatively dangerous, yes, but never really the highest priority. Humanity has always had bigger threats to deal with, so it wasn't until the Era of the Long March—the ten or so years when the Worm God and the Thousand Tongue were still active—that humanity really started hunting them in earnest."

Dahlia's mind scrambled to keep up with both the conversation and her pounding footsteps.

"The Hasharana has killed five of them," the Fool continued. "Four of them over the past thirty years, and one of them just a few months ago—cornered and taken down by the Worm God. That leaves only the two youngest sisters left: F-Rank Apocia and Thracia, the former you've already met. We've been tracking the two of them for a while now, so we knew they were somewhere in the City of Feasts."

Otto, running just ahead of Dahlia, shot the Fool a pointed look. "If you knew they were here, why weren't they caught earlier? Three Arcana Hasharana are in this city. No offense, but shouldn't you have found them by now?"

The Fool didn't sound offended. "Good question. And it's one the Hasharana have been asking for the past twelve years."

All four participants grimaced as Blaire led them down a sloped tunnel, and they all started sliding down into a deeper cavern.

"Since Year Eighty-Eight," the Fool explained, "the Swarm has evolved in a way nobody could've expected. The bugs have always adapted over time with new mutations and strategies, but those were always localised mutations, and never anything on a continent-wide scale. In Year Eighty-Eight, though, they all started showing signs of being able to hide."

Otto frowned. "They learned how to… hide?"

"Well, I might've had something to do with that in Year Eighty-Eight," the Fool muttered, "but some of them started figuring out how to suppress their auras and camouflage them in dense human populations. It's ironic, because the stronger a human is, the stronger their aura, and the easier it'd be for bugs to blend it with their aura to stay completely undetected. That's why the three of us haven't been able to pick up Apocia and Thracia until now."

Dahlia felt a cold chill creep up her spine.

The Fool listed off several incidents: "The Threnodian's Resurrection in Bharncair, the Battle of the Vortex in the Whirlpool City, the Wake of Leviathans in Arcanthys, and the Moonwake Project in Sangkala Gunug—those were all wars, battles, and events in the past twelve years where humanity was completely blindsided because we couldn't see that the Swarm was already right under our noses. The fun part? It's not a biological mutation letting them suppress and camouflage their auras in ours. We've dissected enough Insect Gods over the decade to be sure of that.

"Something—or someone—has taught the Swarm how to hide."

A sharp memory jolted in Dahlia's head. The victims next to the bazaar… She remembered the bodies wrapped up in webs, hidden in plain sight on her first day in the City of Feasts. Had Apocia and Thracia been here all this time, just blending in with the crowd?

Emilia, who'd been silent until now, exhaled sharply. "Okay. So the firefly in the swarm is just another flicker, but it doesn't make any sense. If the Spider Sisters know how to hide themselves, why take the risk of coming here at all? What are they doing in the City of Feasts knowing this year's Hasharana Entrance Exam is here?"

The Fool was about to answer when, quite suddenly, the tunnel they were sliding down opened up.

And while none of them skidded to a stop—Dahlia herself hit the ground running straight forward, following the rest of the group—she couldn't help but look around in awe.

A true cavern.

No walls in sight. Just an enormous, open abyss stretching out before and around them. It felt endlessly large, swallowing all sound and light, but Dahlia's breath caught when she looked up, her eyes widening.

The ceiling wasn't rock. It was alive. Fleshy, curved, arched like the inside of a ribcage. Veins pulsed with a purplish-pink glow every five or so seconds, casting an eerie, pulsating light across the entire chamber periodically. When it pulsed, the cavern was bright. When it didn't, they only had Blaire and Otto's lanterns to light the way.

Somehow, Dahlia already knew where this was.

The heart chamber.

The place we were supposed to find.

Blaire, however, pointing straight forward, completely uninterested in the pulsing ceiling.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"There," she growled. "At the end."

Dahlia followed her gaze, and her breath hitched.

Two six-armed silhouettes running away from them.

Apocia and Thracia.

And beyond them, in front of them—pulsing and massive—was a crystallised organ fused into the cavern's far wall. It shimmered like a grotesque gemstone, translucent layers of webbing and tissue wrapped around it, vein-like constructs spreading away from it like It was the very heart of a giant cobweb.

It was a giant crystal heart embedded into the very walls of the cavern, pulsing with the same eerie glow as the ceiling.

… Whoa.

The Fool's voice cut through the pounding of her heartbeat. "As you all know, this City of Feasts was built on the carcass of one of the Seven Spider Spinners, and even though the spider herself is dead, the walls in this chamber still produce blood. Her body parts are still producing bioarcanic essence."

Emilia scoffed between breaths. "Yeah, I remember. This whole stage of the exam is supposed to be about harvesting a vial of thoraxwine from that heart in front of us, right?"

"Correct." The Fool nodded. "The Hasharana attempt to come down here every once in a while to harvest blood from this chamber, but, you see, the tunnels down here change every single hour of the day. Old tunnels and vessels collapse. New ones open. The spider carcass reacts to stimuli and makes it impossible for people to actually reach this chamber, so it's actually theoretically impossible to reach this chamber if you're purely following the tunnels. I'd know, because while Jiayin and Alice were on the surface looking out for the sisters, I spent the entire past month trying to solo navigate my way to this chamber. Couldn't get here no matter how hard I tried."

Dahlia blinked.

The rest of the participants blinked as well.

"But… if even you couldn't find it, how were we supposed to?" Dahlia asked.

To that, the Fool chuckled nervously.

[... He lied to all of you,] Kari murmured. [The Hasharana certainly 'attempt' to reach this chamber every once in a while, but nobody has ever stepped foot in this place before.]

She almost stumbled, but Emilia's sharp mutter snapped her back.

"You used us as bait," Emilia said. "Thoraxwine is certainly a real substance bug-slayers across the continent drink mid-battle, but you made up that whole briefing session about the Hasharana using this particular carcass to harvest thoraxwine every once in a while. You wanted us down here all so… you can lure the Spider Sisters out?"

The Fool glanced over his shoulder and grinned apologetically at them. "The fact is, we believe the Spider Sisters are risking everything being here because they want to consume the blood from their fallen sister. After all—"

"Cannibalisation of one's own kind is the fastest way to get stronger," Emilia finished. "A spider eating ants and flies will first have to convert the consumed essence types into their own, but a spider eating another spider can just absorb that essence as is without converting anything. It's much more efficient."

"And the blood of this fallen sister is still very potent and concentrated in essence," the Fool added. "If the Spider Sisters manage to reach that crystallised heart in front of us, they will be able to grow exponentially stronger and jump up one, maybe even two ranks in strength. They will return to their glory days when they were much stronger than they are now, before we started choking them out and limiting their consumption rate."

Otto spoke up again. "And they are able to reach this chamber when nobody else can because…"

The Fool shot him a sharp grin. "Because they're blood-related. They're the only two bugs in the world who can communicate with the living essence inside this carcass and manipulate the tunnels. They can choose to open the right paths and close the wrong ones."

"Then why were they—"

"But here's the catch," the Fool interrupted. "They may know the path to this chamber, but they can't come here alone. The moment they go this deep underground and stop blending in their auras with the rest of the city, we Arcana Hasharana would immediately be able to detect them and chase them down here. After all, the one time they left the city a month ago to feed out in an abandoned desert town, Jiayin and Alice immediately managed to track them down and engage them in a small battle. There's no background aura to hide theirs in out in the open desert, and it's the same down here. They don't want to deal with us again."

Dahlia was looking at Alice for confirmation—because she hadn't even known Alice had been fighting the Spider Sisters while she was preparing for the second stage of the exam—but then her mind caught up to what the Fool was actually saying, and the logic clicked into place.

"That's why you sent us down here," Dahlia mumbled. "So they can hide in our aura."

"It was the best shot we had to get them to show themselves," the Fool said, utterly unapologetic. "With you participants down here, the sisters had plenty of cover. They followed you, manipulated which tunnels opened and which tunnels closed to lead you here, and all the while, they made sure none of you noticed you were being followed. Once you reached this chamber, they'd also quietly get a few massive sips of blood from their older sister's heart, and then they'd follow you back up to the surface. I'm sure the moment they see sunlight again, they'd kill you and run far, far away from the city with their rejuvenated strength."

"And so the original plan!" Alice chirped, "was that you guys would reach the heart chamber, and then the Spider Sisters would lower their guard, and then the three of us shadowing you guys all this time would come out to kill the Spider Sisters while they're busy feeding!

...

Everything clicked into place again.

The Fool's plan had only gone sideways when Dahlia's group encountered Blaire, at which point Blaire somehow managed to notice Apocia shadowing their group. That must've aggravated Apocia and made her think her hand was forced, which drew her out of hiding earlier than expected.

And because of that, the Fool and Alice—who'd been trailing Blaire and Dahlia's group respectively—had no choice but to reveal themselves early as well.

Blaire let out a frustrated growl.

"That… wasn't my fault!" she snapped. "If you Arcana were doing your jobs properly, you wouldn't have needed all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense in the first place!"

Alice chirped back, unbothered. "Relax! Nobody's blaming you! I mean, we figured things would get messy sooner or later, anyways! An Insect God hunt is never supposed to be simple!"

The Fool clapped his hands together. "And it doesn't matter how things led up to this situation, only that our mission right now is simple: those Spider Sisters are gunning for that giant heart in the distance, and we're going to stop them—"

Before he could finish his sentence, the ceiling above them erupted.

A shockwave of shattered rock and dust tore through the cavern as something massive came crashing down from above. Dahlia didn't stop running, but she coughed against the debris. As did everyone else.

When they all ran out of the dust cloud, though, Dahlia noticed three more people running alongside them.

The Sun, Wisnu, and Muyang. Battered, but still alive and clutching onto their weapons.

Relief hit Dahlia like a wave.

The Sun, however, didn't spare any of them even a single glance. Her focus remained on the enemies' backs as she fell into step beside the Fool and Alice.

"That the Spider Sisters?" she asked.

The Fool nodded. "Yep."

"Good. Wisnu and Muyang have been filled in on the situation as well, so let's end this."

"Couldn't have said it better myself." The Fool glanced back at Alice, clicking his tongue. "Ready the slingshot."