Chương 210: Chapter 286: Cat and Spider

Ants, ants ANTS! I knew that was a bad idea to poke the nest! I knew it and I did it anyway! The Devourer of Worlds reconsidered its life choices as it weaved between earth-shattering hooves smashing down from above, mind tucked tight inside its body as it experienced regret for the first time in its whole life. It didn't like it. The Devourer had nearly died when one of the ants had slapped itself in its sleep, nearly crushing The Devourer into a fine paste in a single blow.

That alone should've been enough of a warning, but The Devourer got complacent. With the strange net inside the ants, the Devourer had learned how to reinforce its body and the near-miss had also prompted it to invent a way to hunt from a distance. With these technological advancements, the Devourer's prey stood no chance. Without exposing its body to any kind of reaction, the hunt of the ants could continue…

The workers huddled inside their cavernous dens, easy prey for the Devourer, and even their soldier ants couldn't see their doom approaching. The Devourer was beginning to think these mindless beasts might never catch on. Until the soldier ant. It fixed its huge, grotesque eyes - so big that The Devourer could walk across them - on the wooden overhang The Devourer had taken as it's domain. It wasn't looking at The Devourer, certainly.

The Devourer was safely tucked between two wooden beams with no direct line of sight between them. And yet, it stared, making those strange hooting noises to the other soldier ants. In that moment, the Devourer understood the purpose of those hoots, because the other two soldier ants snapped their attention to looked straight up at The Devourer' hunting place, with unnerving accuracy. They're transferring thoughts through sound! What sorcery is this!?

If The devourer had hair follicles, they would've stood on end as it suddenly clicked that maybe these ants had some hidden depths to them that The Devourer didn't fully understand. And that was frightening. The complacency that had gradually filled it was scoured away by fear of the unknown. And while this realization crossed The Devourer's mind, the ugly four-limbed antlike creature continued to stare. Can it… see my mind?

The Devourer's mind had grown and organized itself over the last few days of hunting this anthill, adding a more comfortable number of eyes and creating a sturdier, more pleasing shape to its own sense of aesthetics. Objectively, 'aesthetics' was not a word it knew. It didn't know any words, but it did have a sense of aesthetics nonetheless. The soldier ant stared at The Devourer's mind. Is it really staring at me? The Devourer sent out a gossamer thread of one of its hunting strands. Let's see, I'll test it.

Sneak the net up from the side and just- The soldier ant welled up some random nonsense netting out of its left hand and brushed the thread aside with brute force. IT CAN SEE ME! The ants were swarming! RUNNNN! The Devourer collapsed its mind into its body, sending out hunting strands in every direction, wildly flailing in the hopes of hitting someone or something before it got killed. CRASH!

the wooden beams The Devourer was clinging to collapsed and were flung across the dirt ant-trail all the way to another wooden cavern. Squish! The wood landed on The Devourer, hard, slamming it up against the roof tiles of the other building. The Devourer's new invention that reinforced its body held, and the wood deformed around it, rather than the other way around. I can't see. Without its mind floating free in the ether, The Devourer could only see a few dozen body lengths ahead of itself.

After half a lifetime of being able to see into the infinite, this limitation nearly drove The Devourer mad. Being dropped into the same ignorant blindness a before was awful. Nearly intolerable. But… If The Devourer let its mind back out of its body just so it could see, that soldier ant would also see The Devourer's mind. This blindness worked both ways. I guess we'll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. The Devourer thought, albeit not in those exact words.

All I have to do is figure out the orientation of the sun and I should be able to… wait. I'M STUCK! The Devourer realized that it had been embedded into the wood and that wood had a tight grip on its limbs. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. It took time and effort to pry itself loose, but eventually The Devourer managed to unstick the last of its limbs from the wood.

Just as it regained itself, the wood it was perched on lurched in place, the wind suddenly picking up as its entire world shifted drastically. Strange hooting sounds washed over it, and The Devourer wanted more than anything to peek into the infinite scale with it's mind, but it suppressed the urge. Suddenly an enormous ugly creature's face appeared above The Devourer, looking straight down at it. The Devourer froze, debating whether or not it could kill this creature.

Unsure if it was the same soldier that could see its mind, or some other mindless worker drone. The decision was made for The Devourer as an enormous appendage with five limbs gently came down and brushed The Devourer off the wood, sending it tumbling to the ground.

"Huh, spider." One of the Climbers cleaning up the scene said, brushing a tiny black speck off of one of the shattered wooden beams from the collapsing building. The black speck felt to the ground before darting between the tromping boots of the cleanup crew and climbing a nearby wall, seeking safety in the eaves of the closest building. High above the Stronghold, Will was raking the surroundings with his gaze, looking for a flicker of miasma that aligned with what he'd just seen.

Try as he might, that thing didn't seem to want to resurface.

"What did it look like?" Loth asked, exercising her new wings to hover beside him. Will pulled the page out of his legend and manifested it, handing it to Loth.

"The picture doesn't do it justice," Will said, "It was moving and pulsing with intricate patterns across it, flickering like fire. Almost hypnotic."

"Looks a bit like a funnel web." Loth said.

"Although I've never seen a web this dense. Or with eyes."

"Looks like a dreamcatcher to me." Will said.

"Like if someone on way too much drugs tried to make a three-dimensional dreamcatcher."

"So how did it disappear?" Loth asked, handing the picture back.

"It kind of…folded in on itself until it was gone," Will mused.

"I haven't seen anything like that since…" Will snapped his fingers.

"Since the pickpocket who could do short-range teleportation." Will remembered the man's Ability, which would fold itself into a direction that didn't exist, simply vanishing, before returning to reality somewhere else, allowing him to reach into people's pockets from up to thirty feet away.

"It's possible it teleported away." Will thought aloud.

"Or tucked itself away in some kind of subspace until the danger – us – passes."

"I've never heard of a monster that is entirely miasma," Loth mused, looking intrigued.

"Seemed awfully skittish for a true monster title." Will mused.

'Monsters' were typically attack-on-sight, driven mad by the miasma in Climber's bodies. This thing behaved like a mid-level predator. Cunning and vicious but also more than comfortable running away from larger predators. Like a cat. Which of course made it significantly harder to catch when it didn't want to stand and fight.

"So how do we catch something like that?" Will mused.

"…Bait." Loth supplied.

"We are the bait, apparently." Will replied.

"Problem is there's too many of us wandering around. I can't keep track of everyone." Will and Loth glanced over at Carrie. The Lord was kept afloat by Summer beside them.

"You're asking me, A Lord with a public grievance against you, to displace my entire stronghold on your word? So you can hunt an imaginary monster?" Carrie asked.

"That about sums it up." Will said.

"You can't even prove it wasn't you that destroyed that building." Carrie replied.

"But you did see the guy fall on his own sword." Will replied. That was too outlandish to be a coincidence.

"…Yeah." Carrie groaned sliding her hand down her face.

"Alright. I'll move them out. If you don't find whatever did this, I'll kick your ass." Probably not an idle threat from the tournament's runner-up. Will cast one last look around the surrounding wilds, hoping to find that hypnotic pattern making a convenient bullseye somewhere outside of town. Unfortunately, the miasma creature was laying real low. Will watched as Carrie provided every one of her citizens a Door to the 11 th Floor.

It was a staggering expense of two thousand seven hundred and forty-four Influence per person, and Will could only imagine how she'd managed to accumulate that much influence. Extorting it from other Lords sounded plausible. Thankfully there were only a few dozen Climbers in her Stronghold, and in a matter of minutes, they were all gone, leaving Will, Maribelle and Loth alone in the newly abandoned Stronghold. Stronghold has been abandoned by it's Lord and citizens.

Do you wish to claim the 14 th Floor Stronghold 'Envar Forestry'? No, Will thought, dismissing the prompt. Trust was its own currency, and Will didn't need to be known as a backstabber. Will spotted Loth sitting crosslegged in the center of the street, her eyes closed.

"Whatcha doing? Setting traps?"

"Setting traps." Loth replied without opening her eyes. The miasma of Loth's Draconic Domain was forming delicate tendrils and packets of Miasma that were spaced evenly across the entire Stronghold. Will could see that the miasma packets she was creating were extremely similar to the Ability that created a bullet wasp. The fine tendrils…were probably some kind of trigger mechanism.

"What's it do?"

"Create a miasmatic structure and touch it." Loth said.

"Will it kill or seriously wound me?" Will asked. An important question where Loth's traps were concerned.

"It will not." Will made one of his little spheres of force and tapped the ground with it. Immediately an insect sprouted from the ground as if it had been hiding there all along. It was actually summoned by the packet of miasma that Loth had woven into the terrain with Draconic Domain. The bug was similar to one of Loth's torchbugs, but its abdomen was about the size of Will's palm, and it had wings instead of being a grub.

EEEEEEE The bug glowed a brilliant red that flooded the entire street with light, forcing Will to avert his eyes. Its wings seemed to vibrate against its carapace, creating an obnoxious, high-pitched sound.

"So you made an alarm!" Will raised his voice over the noise. Loth reached out and crushed the insect, silencing it.

"Yes." Loth said, wiping the incandescent juice on a rag.

"It should detect movement of miasmatic structures above a certain size, and make enough light and sound that you should be able to see it on your map. If a large portion of his map turned red, then Will would definitely notice it.

"Alright, I'm in," Will said, sitting down in front of Loth and turning his attention to his Map. Maribelle watched them for a long moment.

"…This is boring." The dragon complained, folding her front paws over each other and resting her chin on them.

"This is how humans hunt. Can't dragons sleep for years?" Will asked.

"If you're bored, take a nap or something. You might die in your sleep though."

"Pass." Maribelle said, shaking her head. After several hours of silent patience, Will's map turned red a couple miles outside the stronghold. Will shot into the air and flew towards the location at top speed. In the meantime, the Devourer of Worlds was staring at these strange bugs in confusion Gargantuan in size, they formed a ring around The Devourer as soon as it brought its mind out of its body to get a better look at the surroundings. EEEEE!

What are you doing you mindless insects, it's like you're trying to get caught!.. … They are trying to get ME caught! The Devourer shot out a travel net and tucked its mind back into its body. An instant later, the fearsome soldier ant arrived at mind-boggling speed, bringing a tempest of wind in its wake. That wind followed the path the travel thread had laid out for it, scooping up a leaf which in turn scooped up The Devourer and carried it far away.

The soldier ant gave chase, a blurry monstrosity below the tumbling leaf. How does it even know the direction I went!? The soldier ant was looking down at the ground, where a dozen or so of the red alarm bugs were making a straight line into the distance. It didn't notice the black speck on one of many leaves tumbling through the air above it.