Chương 39: Obsidian Nightmare

In the passenger seat, Kurisu rocked back and forth, his knees pulled to his chest and boots on the seat. He stared blankly through the windshield as Steven pushed the pickup down the inbound lanes, Kurisu's shallow gasps fogging the glass while he fought to control his breathing again.

"Kumo... kumo... kumo..."

"Breathe, Kurisu," Steven said, keeping his voice controlled.

"In through your nose and out through your mouth. You're hyperventilating right now." Fingers clawing at his neck, Kurisu fought phantom sensations crawling over his skin. Across the center console, Steven gave Kurisu's shoulder a firm shake.

"I need you to lock it down and get your head in the game. Look at the sky or zap the clouds if you have to. Just stay conscious. Boys, he's getting worse, I really think we should turn around""He said he's got it, he just needs to breathe. All it'll take is one shot from him to barbecue that thing." Kenji replied before turning to the huddle.

"We'd better make a plan B, just in case."

"Okay, so bullets bounce right off that shell," Ace said from the back seat.

"Normal fireballs will just splash against the armor. I probably need to condense the fire to plasma so it cuts like a torch."

"I'll try to anchor it," Kellevra murmured, cracking his knuckles.

"I can pull concrete from the sidewalks to make barricades and block the acid."

"It moves fast," Kenji interrupted. He leaned forward to watch the black column of smoke rising from the 16th Street Mall.

"Faster than the camera could even track."

"Kurisu is faster," Ace replied.

"Yeah, but look at him," Kenji noted grimly.

"We have to lead this one. I'll blind it with a flash. You two go for the legs. Maybe we can buy him enough time to get a clean shot at the main body."

"And if that fails?" Kellevra asked.

"Then we keep hitting it until something breaks," Ace said.

"Everything breaks if you hit it right."

"Or I keep it spinning," Kenji added as Steven took the exit ramp.

"Distract it so you guys get a clean shot at the joints."

"It liquefies flesh!" Kurisu shrieked, grabbing at the dashboard, his eyes squeezed shut.

"It drinks the soup! It is an abomination!"

"We're here!" Steven shouted, stepping on the brakes. Just shy of the National Guard barricade at Broadway and 16th, the truck skidded to a halt, the stench of gunfire and dissolving meat flooding into the cab while soldiers waved rifles, shouting at them to reverse.

"Out!" Steven barked, unlocking the doors.

"Go. I'll distract them!" Behind the seats, the back doors clicked open, the truck rocking as Kenji, Ace, and Kellevra hit the pavement running. Staring out the passenger window, Kurisu froze as a spiked leg smashed through the third-story window of the Republic Plaza a block away. He jumped as the door wrenched open, Kenji reaching in to grab his arm.

"Kurisu, move!"

"The eyes," Kurisu whispered, trembling.

"They all look and they all see." As Kenji's grip tightened on his arm, he shouted over the mayhem.

"That thing is going to kill kids! You have to decide right now if you're a samurai or just a coward!" Under Kenji's glare, Kurisu forced his breathing to steady, blinking the haze of panic from his vision." Ware, samurai nari."

"Hey, stop! What the hell are you kids doing?" a guardsman called out, grabbing at the empty air. Darting past the shouting soldiers who lunged forward in a failed attempt to intercept them, Kurisu and the others vaulted the concrete barricade. The shouts fading behind, he watched the spider scuttle up the side of the Republic Plaza. Above them, structural rebar groaned and snapped as the creature's legs pistoned into the skyscraper's granite and glass exterior.

In a shower of debris, the beast tore a six-foot slab of Sardinian granite from the wall, sending the rubble raining down on the walkway. The fallen block, flattening an abandoned kiosk, drove a vibration through the soles of their shoes as the group skidded to a halt.

"Kellevra, see if you can't slow that thing down! Ace, let's light it up!" Kenji shouted, tracking the ascent of the creature as its claws tore the architecture to pieces. Hands on the concrete, Kellevra sent a ripple of his will through the pavement. Beneath him, the street twisted, liquefying the asphalt and snapping it upward into restrictive bands around the arachnid's rear legs.

Simultaneously, Kenji and Ace unleashed their assaults, Kenji peppering the creature's flank with rapid bursts of solidified light that sizzled against the thick chitin, while beside him, Ace wreathed his arms in a vortex of orange flame, pushing the ambient temperature higher as he prepared a denser strike. With brute force alone, the spider continued its ascent, dragging the hardened street upward and breaking Kellevra's bindings as it lifted its legs.

A scowl on his face, Ace fought to compress the fire, his body trembling under the strain on his Keiraku. Through his Zanshin, Kurisu watched the Kaki knot and seize inside Ace's Tanden; the resulting physical cramp forced the boy to flinch, causing the blaze to loosen and expand outward.

"I can't condense it enough!" Ace yelled, panting as he let the heat bloom into a wide torrent of fire that rolled over the black shell, leaving the chitin unmarred.

"It's not breaking through! Normal fire won't crack that armor!"

"Keep it coming, I got you!" Kenji called back, stepping in front of Ace. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Channeling his own Ki, Kenji forged a ring of solidified light between his palms, holding the glowing aperture in front of Ace to create a focusing bottleneck. Perched on the ruined stone, the spider reoriented and fixed its cluster of eight eyes on the glow below as its rear legs coiled against the side of the building.

"Push it through now! It's coming! Go, go, go!" Kenji roared. Teeth gritted, Ace drove the heat forward, condensing the fire into the center of the glowing ring as Kenji constricted the aperture, forcing the flames to bottleneck and compress further. The spider kicked off the skyscraper, aiming its descent toward the boys.

"Oh shit!" Kellevra yelled, slamming his hands into the pavement and ripping a wall of asphalt up from the street. Bursting past the constriction, and construction, the trapped heat lanced out the other side as a concentrated beam of white-hot plasma, colliding with the descending Tsuchigumo in mid-air. The explosion checked the monster's forward momentum, dropping it to the pavement.

As the shockwave tore outward, it crumpled Kellevra's asphalt shield to dust, threw the boys backward, and stripped the stone facing off adjacent buildings while blowing out every remaining storefront on the block. Ambient moisture boiling in the resulting heat produced a cloud of steam that obscured the arachnid and carried the hiss of its stridulating bristles.

With the smoke clearing, Kurisu watched from his spot on the opposite curb, tracking the spider hauling its bulk off the cracked pavement and fixing its gaze on his friends. Across the creature's chest, the impact zone from a strike capable of melting a forge anvil yielded little more than an ashen crater; the armor, having blistered and cracked, wept bubbling ichor.

"It survived that? Jesus, how thick is that shell?" Kenji said, his voice trembling as he looked at the sizzling fluid. Before the steam could settle, Kurisu watched the monster lunge over the ruined intersection. He tried to move, but his legs remained locked in place as he tracked every shift of the creature's limbs closing the distance.

"Move!" Kenji shrieked, tackling Ace out of the way in a desperate dive that sent them both tumbling into the entrance of a ruined souvenir shop while Kellevra rolled far to the side. The spear of the spider's front leg drove into the asphalt, the downward strike buckling the street's sub-base and bouncing Kellevra further away. Kurisu stood alone on the far side of the intersection, the ground shaking under his feet as the spider's legs thrust into the concrete to turn its bulk.

With his katana drawn in a guard that wavered with the shaking of his hands, Kurisu faced the nightmare, his eyes tracking the demonic Tsuchigumo as it sought its prey. Beneath the surface of his skin, a wave of revulsion tore through his gut at the sight of its bristling hairs and the erratic, twitching micro-movements of its limbs. While in contrast, the surface of his skin was covered with cold sweat, his heart painfully pounding against his ribs.

Venom-slicked chelicerae swiveled toward him, the ancient silk-spinner coiling, before lunging with its fangs bared. Channeling Ki into his feet, Kurisu made for the creature's flank in a desperate Shindo, the rapid movement technique barely pulling him clear of the strike as his muscles locked, his breathing erratic, his hands so slick nearly dropped his katana. Initial bite missed, the spider bucked, lashing out with a bristled hind leg that connected under Kurisu's ribs and smacked him across the street.

He slammed into the brick facade of a nearby building, the impact cracking the masonry behind him as he dropped to the ground, gasping for air while he scrambled to his knees. Before he could finish standing, the spider had closed the distance, driving a spiked leg down into the exact spot where he'd stood just a fraction of a second prior.

Caught in the resulting blowback, he was lifted off his feet and thrown through a concrete planter, rolling to a stop, his stomach heaving as he vomited bile across the pavers beneath him. Across the street, the arachnid reared back, its bulbous abdomen convulsing.

"It's gonna spit!" Ace yelled.

"Get to cover!" In a series of splattering bursts, yellow-green phlegm erupted from its maw, the sludge striking the pavement with a sizzle, eating into the metal streetlamps and the stone facades. Ducking beneath a glob of the fluid that melted a planter into slag, Kurisu channeled a surge of Ki to his feet and jumped straight up the adjacent brick wall to escape the corrosive splatters.

At the peak of his ascent, the creature caught Kurisu with another leg, sending him careening back over the asphalt to smash into a bank wall, his body recoiling with a thud off the stone in a ruined window frame. After hitting the ground, Kurisu rolled through the broken glass and acid, burning himself as he struggled to find footing on the slick street. With another bout of fear paralyzing his movements, he watched helplessly while the nightmareish fangs closed in on him again.

A sting breaking his paralysis, Kurisu dropped his eyes to the smoking fabric of his jeans, catching a nod from Kenji before darting backward. Kellevra sent tremors rippling through the concrete beneath the creature, momentarily ruining the rhythm of its eight-legged gait, while Ace and Kenji bombarded its eyes with fire and plasma. Dodging a leg that tore through an abandoned city bus with the screech of scraping metal, Kurisu gave Kenji the opening to land a direct hit on one of the creature's eyes.

The orb exploded in a sizzling rain of ichor, the strike sending the monstrosity reeling backward into a gym's crumbled front wall. On their beige sectional, Roland sat beside Gloria sipping coffee, watching the television.

"It's a war zone," he muttered while the black arachnid tore through downtown.

"I can't believe the Guard is letting people get that close." Beside him, Gloria lowered her cup. Onscreen, the camera zoomed in to focus on four small figures retreating from the monster. Amidst the rubble, a figure tackled another boy out of the path of a strike, his hands glowing with the same white light they had seen illuminating their backyard several times before.

"Roland," Gloria said, the veins pulsing in her neck as she pointed a finger at the screen where Kenji scrambled to his feet.

"That's our son," she hissed, her grip tightening on her ceramic mug.

"That is Kenji standing next to a forty-foot spider." The lens zoomed in further, shifting to a boy getting knocked over the pavement by the spider's leg, his body tumbling through the wall of a nearby building.

"Oh my god," Roland stammered.

"I thought he was at the Miller house. Steven said they were sparring." Standing, Gloria snatched her purse from the end table, sloshing her coffee onto the carpet. She dialed Charlotte on her phone, activating the speaker. Charlotte's voice came from the device before Gloria could speak, her gasps echoing over the line.

"Gloria, I know! I'm standing in the driveway, come get me and take me with you!"

"You had better have a damn good explanation for this, Charlotte," Gloria snapped.

"It's a terrible one, but I can explain," Charlotte choked out, the sound of her front door slamming echoing over the line.

"Just hurry. Please."

"Be on the curb," Gloria said, ending the call.

"Let's go," she barked, walking toward the entryway.

"Gloria, the National Guard's blocked the city off," Roland said, following her. Ripping the front door open, she turned to look at him.

"To hell with the National Guard and to hell with that spider. Steven took my baby to fight a giant kaiju when he told us they were safe in the backyard. I'm going to get my son, and then I'm gonna kill Steven."