Chapter 173: The Boss Fight Part 1
They slipped back into the violet-lit chamber like hunters slipping into a storm.
The crystal glow above pulsed slow and sickly, casting the webs in bruised color. Silk coated the walls in layered sheets and ropy bridges, drooping into catenary arcs over a floor spangled with chitin shards and shed skins. The air was noisy in a quiet way—tiny fibrils humming, egg-sacs ticking faintly, a low breath that wasn’t theirs reverberating through stone.
Inigo raised one hand: hold.
The shadow at the far end wasn’t a boulder. It was a back—armored with layered plates the color of tarnished iron, stippled with white scars. The body filled a hollow between four columns of stone, legs folded in a throne of web. A sloped abdomen—vast, pitted, striated with ugly seams—rose and fell with that subterranean breath.
Lyra leaned close, voice thinner than a whisper. "It’s bigger than a troll."
"Big doesn’t change physics," Inigo murmured. "Joints, eyes, spinnerets. We blind her, slow her, break her stance. You take the highs, I take the lows."
Lyra’s nod was a feather’s weight. She knelt and drew three arrows, laying them across her thigh as she nocked the first. Inigo rolled his shoulders once; blue sigils crept under the skin like bioluminescent ink and settled over calves and feet. He flexed his hands—tendons hot, nerves tuned. The M4 sat snug against his chest, safety off, a round already chambered.
"On my shot," he said.
He sighted an eye, a glossy coal set deep in a cranial plate. He controlled his breathing—half in, half out—and squeezed.
CRACK.
The Broodmother uncoiled in a single nightmare motion. Legs like stacked scythes slammed to the floor, the web throne snapped apart, and a furnace hiss rose from her throat. The first bullet hit the eye; fluid misted. She reared, thrashing, smashing a stone column into rubble. Debris sprayed like shrapnel.
Lyra’s first arrow flashed bright and pinned a smaller ocular cluster along the left ridge; a second arrow followed, hard into the hinge where the forward left leg met carapace. The titan lurched, stumbled, and then—