Chapter 89: Core Extraction
The hive tunnels branched in every direction.
Holden moved through them like a ghost. The walls pulsed with bioluminescent slime that painted the darkness in shades of sickly purple. The air was thick and humid, heavy with the smell of rot and something chemical. Every time he got near a bug, it scrambled away in fear because it could feel his power.
The tunnels opened into a massive cavern.
It was a breeding ground. Hundreds of eggs sat in neat rows along the walls, each one the size of a watermelon, their shells glowing with internal light. Cords of purple slime acted like feeding tubes, connecting the eggs to the walls and delivering dark energy to them.
And at the very center, the Queen waited.
She was enormous.
The Abyssal Arachnid Queen filled the far end of the cavern. Her eight massive legs supported a body covered in thick, white plating that overlapped like dragon scales. She had eight glowing red eyes. Her fangs dripped venom that smoked when it hit the floor.
She was Rank 2, 6-Star. A monster that could tear through steel doors.
And she was aware of him.
The Queen’s head turned. Those eight red eyes locked onto Holden with predatory focus. The air changed instantly. The temperature dropped. Something pressed against his mind like a cold hand trying to freeze his thoughts with primal terror.
A psychic attack. The kind that made prey freeze in place so the spider could feed on them at its own pace.
Holden rolled his shoulders.
The fear bounced off his mind like water off a duck’s back. His 1,000x multiplier processed the psychic assault and discarded it as irrelevant.
He looked at the massive spider, then at the eggs surrounding her, then back to the Queen.
"I forgot to bring bug spray," he said aloud. "So this will have to do."
The Queen shrieked.
The sound was like metal scraping glass, amplified by the cavern acoustics to a pitch that made Holden’s ears ring. It was a sound designed to trigger every prey instinct in the human brain.
She lunged.
Her front two legs scythed through the air with enough force to cut a car in half. Those sharp legs hit the floor where he’d been standing a millisecond before.
Holden was already moving.
He didn’t dodge.
He attacked.
His sword was a streak of red-gold fire. He merged Asura’s Ignition directly into his Transcendent Iron-Cleaver. The technique transformed. His sword became less like a weapon and more like a line of pure heat given physical form.
The Queen’s first leg came down.
Holden’s blade met it head-on.
Clang!
The white armor didn’t slow the blade at all. The red-gold edge carved through it like butter. The leg separated at the joint and crashed to the floor.
The Queen shrieked again, stumbling sideways.
Her second leg swept low.
Holden ducked, rolled, and came up inside her guard. His blazing blade sliced through the second leg at the knee joint.
Crack!
She toppled sideways, now relying on her six remaining legs after losing two. She thrashed around in a panic, struggling to turn her massive body toward the threat she couldn’t understand.
Third leg.
Severed at the hip.
Fourth leg.
Chopped at the knee.
Fifth leg.
Completely gone.
The Queen was collapsing, her armored body crashing to the floor. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t run. She could only click and shriek and wave her remaining stumps uselessly.
Holden walked around her thrashing body, his blazing sword leaving trails of fire in the air. He positioned himself near her head.
The red eyes glowed with pure hatred.
He raised his sword overhead.
And brought it down.
Swish!
He stabbed the Queen’s head, and the blade went through its skull without any effort. Red-gold fire erupted from the wound, racing through her nervous system. The shrieking cut off instantly. Her eight eyes went dark.
The cavern went silent.
The purple slime on the walls stopped pulsing. The eggs went still. The entire hive held its breath.
The Queen was dead.
[Ding!]
[Rank 2 (6-Star) Abyssal Arachnid Queen Defeated!]
[Base Reward: 2,500 KP]
[Hive Boss Bonus: +1,000 KP]
[Abyssal Corruption Source Purged: +500 KP]
[2x KP Booster Applied!]
[Total: +8,000 KP!]
[Current Balance: 70,390 KP]
[Ding!]
[RARE LOOT DROPPED!]
[Gold Chest Opened!]
[Item Acquired: Rank 3 Aether-Battery!]
[Aether-Battery: Contains 5,000 units of pure, refined Aether energy. Can be absorbed directly or used to power high-tier equipment.]
Holden closed the system screens and looked down at the Queen’s corpse. The fire damage from his sword had sealed the wound clean. There was no blood or mess. Just a dead monster in a dead hive.
He crouched and picked up the Gold Chest. Inside, the Aether-Battery pulsed with soft blue light, warm to the touch. He tucked it into his pack and secured the straps.
Then he turned and walked back toward the tunnels.
The eggs were dead now, the corruption severed at the source. Without the Queen’s psychic control, the hive would collapse within hours. The remaining bugs would scatter. The infection spreading through the borderlands would stop at the source.
Base Camp was safe.
Maeve was safe.
Holden activated Gale-Step and vanished into the tunnels, a blur of red light disappearing into the dark.
Whoosh!
Holden sped through the forest, at a superhuman pace, leaving a trail of red-gold light behind him like a comet. The Shadow-Weave boots made his footsteps completely silent, but Gale-Step turned him into a streak of wind.
The trees around him were dead. Their bark was gray, and the leaves were dried up. Not a single bird or insect could be seen or heard. The Abyssal corruption had choked the life out of everything for miles. But that was ending now. Without the Queen, the infection would slowly fade.
He had been running for twenty minutes.
Then he heard it.
The screaming.
Not monster screaming. Human screaming. He could hear them mixed with the crack of energy weapons and the roar of beasts.
Holden changed direction instantly, sprinting toward the sound.