The man blood into a calamity.
Six ters of muscle, chitin, and grievance unfurled from the kneeling figure as if a cathedral had decided to molt. Pink-violet myofibrils swelled beneath black plates that sprouted like tombstones along shoulders and ribs; six arms rattled out of him with a zipper’s fury; two legs thickened into pylons that made the pipe they stood on ring like a struck bell.
Then the man’s head ripened into a spider’s blasphemy—mandibles where a mouth had been, eight eyes blinking open in wet unanimity. The webs around the pipes sang with tension. The sewage roar went from background to orchestra.
Maeve filed all of that under a soft ‘ah’ and lifted her umbrella. She sank into a battle stance—heel canted, shoulders square—while Gael, professionally, took a step back.
Then another.
Then a dignified third, because one of them had to survive to jot down a few notes.
[Identification Complete]
[Na: Bark Spider]
[Grade: F-Rank Blight-Class]
[Passive Mutation: Bark Shell]
[Brief Description: The bark spider is clad in full body bark chitin that inherits fifty percent of its own toughness]
[Swarmblood Art: Sclerotize Silk]
[Brief Description: The bark spider can concentrate bioarcanic essence into the silk it produces, temporarily increasing their toughness to its own toughness]
[Swarmblood Aura: ~2,200]
[Strength: ~9, Speed: ~6, Toughness: ~10, Dexterity: ~8, Perception: ~2]
The good news was, the Myrmur was only an F-Rank Blight-Class. Sa as Lorcawn’s Blight-Class.
The bad news was that it was still a Blight-Class, and he had no idea what the fuck a bark spider was.
It pounced.
Six arms ca down like a falling clock, each claw another minute hand in a day that wanted them dead. Maeve snapped her umbrella up. When the first three arms struck her umbrella, the shock traveled through ribs and shaft and bone; the pipes shuddered so hard his teeth rembered older sins. The second three arms hit a heartbeat later, and the webs scread, triangulated ropes humming, anchor knots flexing like jaw joints.
He shifted his weight and made a thoughtful note: the pipes were surprisingly sturdy to have withstood two powerful impacts like that.
“I’m… still full from the noodles,” Maeve grunted, bracing and shoving back against the giant Myrmur. “Give … just one minute to warm up… so stand back sowhere and…”
She glanced over her shoulder. Unfortunately for her, her husband was a coward, so he was already twenty paces away—off on another pipe—and crouching comfortably, giving her a thumbs up.
“Gotcha,” he said.
Her scowl said she would rember this in his eulogy.
The Myrmur raked its claws again. She flowed under the strike and smashed the umbrella’s ferrule into its jawline, and the impact pinged down the steel and rattled its bark-like chitin plates like soone had tried to ring it. A wind of foul damp imdiately rose from the abyss below—the waterfall’s breath—and scattered a veil of cold across the shaft.
Between Maeve and the Myrmur’s fierce battle, though, Gael simply settled cross-legged on his pipe and pulled out his dicinal journal.
… Just to recap a bit, he thought, licking his thumb to flip the pages open. Grave-Class Myrmurs are larval endoparasites. Size: vermiform, one to four centiters typically. Capabilities: none worth noting. They feed on their Host and whisper the occasional dreams. Host Symptoms: subclinical malaise, uncharacteristic cravings (salt, iron shavings, dust), and subtle alterations in circadian rhythm.
Danger: very low. Grave-Class Myrmurs can’t really do shit to their Hosts.
The Bark Spider feinted left, then right, then reared, all six arms flexing, mandibles clacking. Maeve stepped in, shouldering and deflecting all of its slashes.
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She ducked past a scything forearm; the claws gouged a groove into the pipe where her head had been. Sparks skittered. She ca up inside the monster’s reach and jabbed the umbrella’s tip twice into a plate seam—bing-bing—and rolled back out with speed that would've made Evelyn jealous.
But when a Grave-Class Myrmur absorbs enough nutrients to beco a Wretch-Class Myrmur, it becos a bit more troubleso, he thought, turning the next page. Wretch-Class Myrmurs are exoparasitic manifestations tethered to its Host by an umbilical cord. The cord is both the lifeline and the leash. Size: can range from dog-sized to man-sized. Capabilities: echoing the Host’s deepest desires and nibbling at the edges of their cognitive functions. Host symptoms…
Well, he knew what the symptoms were. Wretch-Class Myrmurs were what he’d been fighting for the first six months since he t Maeve… until he t his first Blight-Class Myrmur.
Maeve hamred her umbrella across the Myrmur’s temple. A plate cracked with a sound like soone biting an uncooked bone, and hemolymph sprayed in a dark arc—thicker than blood, gummy like cold syrup—before steaming under her lantern’s light, which he admitted he enjoyed looking at.
Then Myrmur swept four arms in a scissoring cross, yanked whole swathes of webs off the pipes, and tried to slice Maeve to pieces with them. She jumped—dress flaring, umbrella flipping—landed on a side pipe, and swirled her umbrella like a drill to shred through the toughened webs as she went by.
The bark spider’s Swarmblood Art isn’t all that impressive, I guess.
Even if its webs are as tough as its chitin plates, that drill umbrella is really unfair.
So he turned a page casually and kept reading.
Blight-Class Myrmurs.
They are somatic endoparasites that manifest outside of the Host’s body, and are capable of turning into an exo-sarcophagus made from chitin, tendons, and muscles. The umbilical cord disappears—internalizes? Re-roots? Whatever. Point is, Blight-Class Myrmurs are capable of wrapping around their Host like a living armor, making them several orders of magnitudes tougher to fight than Wretch-Classes.
Against Wretch-Classes, the strategy was simple: Maeve—the Hunter—would take the manifested Myrmur while he—the Host—would take the Host with the Myrmur heart inside. One versus one on both fronts. Blight-Classes ruined that strategy. They turned every fight into a two-on-one where the ‘one’ was a walking fortress of muscle and malice, which ant it was more difficult for him to hop in without getting in Maeve’s way.
… But, well, it’d been a while since they killed Lorcawn’s Blight-Class Myrmur, and since then, Blightmarch had been birthing more and more Blight-Classes. He’d never even heard of them before he t Maeve, but for so reason, they’d had to kill six more Blight-Classes in the span of the past year and a half.
A part of him wanted to chalk it up to him being more attentive to Myrmur reports, but another part of him was more realistic.
It’s that Plagueplain Doctor.
The one who put three Wretch-Classes in Evelyn and the Blight-Class in Lorcawn.
He hadn’t seen that Raven’s shadow since he beat Lorcawn, so there was no telling what was going on behind the scenes. The only thing he did know for sure was that Blight-Classes were troubleso to fight, but not invincible.
The new strategy to beat them was, in a way, even simpler than the strategy to beat Wretch-Classes.
Because he didn’t have to lift a finger most of the ti.
He snapped the journal shut and tucked it away, humming the clinic hymn out of key when Maeve hit the pipe next to him like a thrown church pew.
Steel rang under them, and the impact rang him. She folded, slid a handspan, and crumpled with a short, involuntary groan.
He grinned at her, all bedside manner and bad timing. “Doing good?”
She lifted her head and gave him another scowl she usually saved for bandits and ill-calibrated tinctures. Using the umbrella like a cane, she ground her boots, pushed, and got up. The set of her shoulders said the extra bowl of noodles she put in her stomach just hours ago were now officially a tactical mistake.
While they stood there, shoulder to shoulder on the long run of pipe, the giant Myrmur hunched over itself and regenerated new bark chitin plates out of old fractures. Hemolymph clotted along seams and then sucked back in, re-pressurizing.
“We really have to stop giving points to the Saint’s Hands and start getting points for ourselves,” she grumbled. “I’m tired of getting thrown around by Blight-Classes.”
He made a sympathetic noise and adjusted his mask. “Sure,” he said pleasantly. “When our neighborhood stops being haunted by statistics and bleeding in the wrong places, we’ll be selfish as saints. In the anti, are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Winning.” He nodded at the spider’s chest. Their passive mutation, ‘Umbral Eyes’, allowed them to see the hearts of all living creatures—including those of the Myrmurs. “Open a hole in its chest. I’ll handle the rest.”
“Do you have a way to easily inject the elixir this ti? Because the last six tis you said ‘I’ll handle the rest,’ I had to fish you out of a gutter, a skylight, a moat, a confessional, a very confused tavern, and—”
“The fishmonger.” He sighed. “Yes. He keeps bringing that up.”
“You almost died in a pile of cod.”
He cracked his neck, put a hand to his gloam lantern, and winked at her. “Trust .”
Her gaze dropped to the lantern, white and still as a winter saint. The cold it shed wasn’t cruel, but he watched her process it—weighing skepticism against optimism—before it was her turn to sigh.
The Myrmur was almost fully regenerated, so she lifted her free hand, palm out.
“Fine,” she mumbled. “Do it.”
He grabbed her hand, turned on his heel, let his hips lead the motion, and spun—one, two, three—building centrifugal force with each spin.
The chain at their ankles laughed in tal, and then he chucked her forward at full speed.
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