Chapter 306: Decisions of the past, echo into tomorrow
Title: The Final Day of Belios Fetoni
Description: A short story that depicts the last day of a bright eyed almost graduate on his last big assignment. If all goes well, he’ll be able to become third year with a more credentials than any other in his generation. However…
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“Damn…never seen an eighth tier aether beast corpse up close before,” Belios commented aloud as he stared up at the giant spider leg that pierced the treeline.
With the added mist, it looked as if it was the finger of some sort of ancient giant, pointing towards the heavens.
In defiance or reverence, he’d never know.
It didn’t matter to him.
He wasn’t the religious type.
As Belios engrossed himself with the scenery, he failed to notice an upperclassman of his sneaking up behind him…until said upperclassman lightly smack the back of his head.
“Bah! Hey, why’d you do that Sawyer?”
“Quit your daydreaming Fetoni. We’re about to breach the carpace, so get your butt in gear” Sawyer told Belios as he urged him to move.
“Already?,” Belios asked, “I thought we had wait another hour or so for the reagent to weaken the carpace enough for us to break through.”
“Nah! We lucked out. One of the other students found traces for a Blaster Beetle of the fourth tier. The professors took it down and are using it to prepare a destruction array.”
“Oh? Excellent!”
“Oh now you run?”
Belios decided to pick up the pace once he heard how they were going to break through earlier than scheduled, prompting his friend to run up and catch up to him in the process.
The two of them eventually arrived at a spot that would become rather important in the future, but for now, served as the meeting ground for members of both Alchemy division and the History division. It was here the students gathered as they watched their expedition leaders, Professor Zelini, Professor Festeroy and Frederick Anterio, prepare an array designed to break open the spider’s leg shell via an explosive force.
The leaders were painting the array with the blood of a giant beetle corpse that was laying nearby, the aforemented Blaster Beetle.
As the students watched on, waiting for the breach to occur, small bits of conversation were forming among the waiting students.
‘Oh? Maybe I’ll hear something interesting again,’ Belios thought to himself as his ears perked up. This was a rare opportunity to indulge in a rather bad habit of his, eavesdropping.
“Huh…didn’t we break open a door couple days back? Ya know when…”
“Jaco got his ass mutated into a weird half bug thing? Yeah, we did.”
“Then how come we’re doing it again? Did the leg heal itself or something?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Ah…wait, what?”
“I wasn’t the one who saw it, but apparently when we were escaping the…you-know-whats, one of our classmates looked back to see if we were still being chased. They saw in real time how those creepy assholes stopped directly at the border of us exiting the leg and how the leg began to regenerate the damage we had done to it.”
“For real?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn…eighth tier aether beast corpses, man.”
“Eighth tier aether beast corpses.”
“Hmm.”
Belios had a small grimmace on his face as he overheard how the History division had apparently hid even more details about the place they were about to explore together.
Belios had heard them talk about coming here prior to now, and how their friend got mutated since he was the one who had helped to treat him, but now the place was infested with “you-know-whats”?
What was that supposed to mean?
(Un)luckily for Belios, he was about to get his answer very shortly.
“The array is set! All students, step away from the blast zone.”
“Clear!”
BOOM!
“HISS!”
“Wait, what?”
A cloud of smoke and dust was kicked up as the explosive power of the array blasted open a sizeable door in the side of the spider’s leg.
However, before anyone could give an “it’s all clear” signal, the sound of hissing caught the crowd’s attention, as dozens upon dozens of glowing red eyes lit up from behind the smoke and debris…
“Oh…shit.”
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[Huh…it looks like it wasn’t just people who died down here. That’s a…relief?]
‘I think the word you’re looking for is “horrifying”, Hurricroak.’
[Also applicable.]
Nepherage, Zhen Liu, Nausicaa and Hurricroak walked down the spiralling staircase, taking care not to disturb the hardened remains of past victims, lest they accidentally wake something that would be alerted by the sound of clattering bones and broken shells.
Surprisingly, while there were many skeletal remains belonging to both humans and bloodliners alike, the most common hardened remains they found belonged to predominantly…spiders.
Lots and lots of spider remains.
There were far too many species of spiders to name off, but there were quite a number that Zhen Liu recognized.
There were shells belonging to first tier Acidfang Greenbacks that were about as big as cats, their green shells looking especially verdant under Nepherage’s light.
There were shells belonging to second tier Iceweavers that were colored as white as snow and were about as big as dogs.
There was even the remains of a fifth tier Thunder Howling Tarantula found clinging to a wall, that was about as big as bear.
However, as the group continued down the stairs to the “bottom floor” (read: the part of the leg joint that was bent), Zhen Liu soon realized something important.
Nothing happened.
As in, the group walked down an entire flight of rickety “stairs”, covered in enough skeletons and spider remains to make a literal palace of the dead and fill at least two graveyards…and they weren’t attacked at all, they didn’t trigger any traps whatsoever and had somehow not tangle themselves in even a tiny spider web, despite all of the spider corpses everywhere indicating that that there should be at least a few living spiders running around.
In essence, there was more “death” in this corpse than there should be.
“Something is very wrong with this place…,” Nausicaa muttered under her breath.
“Agreed…,” Zhen Liu nodded as he tried to figure out why nothing was happening to them.
Logos and Pathos did state that the miasma they just vented out only affected those beneath Grandmaster stage at most, but in other words, that meant that fourth tier and above aether beasts shouldn’t be affected by it. And they had just passed by the bodies of several dozen spiders that were definitely at the fourth tier and above.
Which meant that if he wanted to find out what was going on, they would have to cause a little… dissonance.
‘Hurricroak, can you release a sound that would anger just spiders?’
[Huh? Yeah, that’s really easy for my vocal skills.]
‘Nepherage, I need you to burn…those three spider shells.’
[Uhhh…why milord?]
‘Weirdly enough, the shells of those three particular spiders make for a surprisingly potent insect and spider repellent when burnt. Kind of like incense.’
[Oh. At once then, milord.]
‘Cool…’
In rapid succession, Hurricroak released a long incredibly high pitch whistle that only insects could even remotely hear while Nepherage fired off three balls of fire that ignited the three spider shells Zhen Liu had pointed out.
These shells belonged to a Lavender Bristle Spider, a Eucalyptus Biter Spider and a Oily Lemon spider. All three were known to be first tier spider beasts with unusually pleasant smelling shells that could attract prey and repell rival spider species with relative ease.
That said, Zhen Liu probably should have warned Nausicaa what they were doing before they did it.
“What the fuck are you guys doing?!,” Nausicaa yelled in surprise before covering her mouth in shock at her actions. She was too used to being a mute hunter, that suddenly being able to talk threw her for a loop. Mentally, she prepared herself for an oncoming onslaught of angry spiders, ants, or any other monstrous insects that would have been aroused by the kaijins sudden actions.
However…there was nothing.
Seconds passed before she realized she heard nothing other than the sound of burning shells, minutes before the scent of the shells reached her nostrils accompanied by nothing else and then it dawned on her.
Nausicaa’s hands slowly dropped to her side as she realized that aside from her, the squishy boy known as Zhen Liu, the weird red horned one named Nepherage and the neon blue mixed-up one called Hurricroak, there was nobody else inside this of this corpse.
No opportunistic scavengers.
No guardians assigned to protect the body.
Nothing.
And in both her experience and in Zhen Liu’s, the sound of nothing was more terrifying than the sound of…something.
“I think it’s safe to assume that whatever is down that tunnel, is what killed everything else in here,” Zhen Liu pointed out, “and is probably why I’m down here.”
Right about now, Logos and Pathos would have made a snarky comment about his choice of words, but they were unusually quiet right now.
Maybe there was interference?
‘Probably got distracted by more pop culture.’
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=I mean something is interfering our connection and I can’t seem to clear it! We can see him and what they’re doing, but we can’t say shit or vice versa!=
