Chapter 625: Creepy Crawlies get under everyone’s skin
“Are you sure this is going to work this time? These guys look significantly more…elite, than the previous groups. They’ve probably trained to deal with torture.”
“Yeah, they’re trained to deal with physical torture and maybe some psychological tortures based on leverage about their personal information. They’re not at all trained for what I and the kaijin got planned.”
“Right…follow up question, why aren’t you in there this time? Don’t you usually try to put on a costume make yourself look like a super expert?,” Jin Fang asked Zhen Liu, point blank.
“That…”
In a sharp contrast to the previous times, where Zhen Liu had put on an elaborate persona complete with costume, this time around he was hiding out in a complete separate room, with Jin Fang and Rianna by his side, while using the recently created speaker system Logos and Pathos established to project his voice into a room where the seven or so assassin/spies/rogues were locked in.
Evidently, this wasn’t used before because Zhen Liu had no idea it existed until he had mentioned in passing to the spirits of the library about how he wished he had a speaker system. Apparently the two of them had established it sometime ago but never brought it up because Zhen Liu always seemed to have fun playing the “evil overlord”.
Zhen Liu proceeded to direct a rather sharp glare at the two of them for not mentioning this stuff sooner, since while he did enjoy playing the bit even he got tired of having to exaggerate his movements, but simply dismissed it with a heavy sigh. He had other things to worry about after all.
“I’m trying to be a bit more mysterious this time around. Otherwise my constant presence will eventually get noticed and someone will catch on and start blabbing…maybe.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’re feeling ‘antisocial’ after spending time at a rather hostile banquet?”
“…”
“Pathos taught me that word and we’ve been together for years at this point, you expect me to not notice this type of behavior?”
“Fair point.”
“Hey, I have a question of my own,” Rianna interjected, “why are you using Archanidame and Lacerage for this? Spiders and lacewings aren’t that scary in comparison to the animals that make up Hurricroak.”
At this statement, Zhen Liu had a weird look on his face.
“Huh? What are you…oh right you grew up around giant insects and spiders…to most other people, those kind of creatures are scarier than the things that make up Hurricroak. Well…unsettling at least.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Just watch.”
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*Bing-Bong*
Warning, the following scene involves the heavy usage of spiders and…incredibly unpleasant things involving the aforementioned spiders.
If you have arachnophobia, please skip ahead to the next scene transition.
Thank you, we now return to your regularly scheduled chapter.
…
Aight, why do you have a phobia warning in a book that is clearly marked as being “rated R”? You didn’t include this when you had all the gore stuff earlier.
|To be fair, the genre of the book already indicates things in regards to violence. Horror is another thing altogether.|
Right, sure…
|You don’t believe me?|
Not in the slightest.
|Well, thankfully I’m convincing the audience and not you.|
Yeah, keep telling yourself that.
|You mother-!|
COME AT ME!
*Bing-Bong*
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Curious as to whom they were going to “answer” to, the seven gagged warriors craned their necks upwards in order to see what kind of woman required the usage of a ceiling to appear.
That’s when they noticed a small black spot appearing in their fields of vision.
“Hmm?”
It took them awhile to figure out what they were staring at, but eventually, they figured out that the little black spot was nothing more than a simple spider that was traveling down a web.
“Mmm.”
Nothing too spectacular.
As such, the group of gagged rogues proceeded to ignore the spider and keep staring at the ceiling…until another spider appeared in their vision.
Followed by another.
Then another.
Then even more.
“Hmm?”
“HMMM?!”
From the darkness of the ceiling above descended dozens upon dozens of spiders, that when the group of gaged idiots finally took a closer look, were all radiating the same aura.
Not the same type of aura, the exact same aura.
This indicated to the group that either all of these spiders were under the control of a single aether warrior or that the swarm of spiders were actually part of a singular entity.
The group believed it was the former, because the latter was too absurd to be real.
Until they saw some of the spiders starting to gather with one another.
At first, it didn’t look like anything too special, just a bunch of dangling spiders colliding in the air with one another, the strands of silk suspending them becoming tangle in the process.
However, as they kept staring, the group finally noticed as a bunch of the spiders gathered together to form a distinctively humanoid arm.
This arm formation was then followed by the formation of yet another arm, a pair of legs, a torso and finally a featureless head.
These “body parts” hung in the air like fishes hanging on a hook or in a net, long enough for the people below to notice that the longer these body parts hung in the air, the more detailed and refined they were becoming.
This refinement kept going until, all of a sudden, the body parts suddenly swung into each other, ordering and attaching themselves into a proper humanoid body, and combining the threads that bore them into a single unified rope of pure silk that just so happened to hug around the base where the head connected to the torso.
The air became tense as the gagged prisoners had no idea whether or not this macabre display was over…until they heard a voice break the tension.
“Ah…”
A voice that didn’t belong to the speaker from earlier.
“It always feels so damn good to rebuild myself,” the newly formed spider humanoid said in a melodic, feminine voice as she began to rotate her head around the grooves of the silk noose three times over until suddenly stopping with a notable jerk of her head.
The sight of this unusual casualness threw the gagged observers off.
Was this…thing, really going to be the one to interrogate them?
“Ah…did I accidentally hang myself again? How annoying.”
*SLASH*
“HMM?!”
The humanoid spider took one of their hands, coated in an energy none of them recognized and proceeded to decapitate themselves in order to free themselves from the silk noose, simply sliding their hand across their neck like it was the most casual thing in the world.
Both head and body fell to the floor with a solid thud, but strangely, no blood was spilled.
Instead, what the unlucky people who were at the right angle to see down the severed neck stump or the head’s stump, saw a countless number of spiders crawling over one another in a frenzy.
*THUMP*
“MMM! MMM!”
“FFFUUUUUU!”
Before their very eyes though, the headless torso of the spider woman suddenly and slowly lifted themselves off of the ground before grabbing her severed head and reattaching it.
The group could see how the wound leftover from this impromptu decapitation, began to heal in the blink of an eye.
With their eyes now squarely focused on this strange spider woman, a single thought, a single question coursed through their minds.
Who, or more specifically what, was this strange woman?
“Now then, mon petit cheries. My name is Archanidame, or perhaps I should say, I’m going to be the reason why you’ll breakdown whenever you see a little spider passing by.”
“…”
“Too much?”
As far as the gagged people of interest were concerned, it was enough that this “Archanidame” spawned in due to spiders layering atop one another.
“Eh, whatever. Now then, I do believe I have the best compatibility with…”
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“Well…that was deeply unsettling to witness,” Nepherage commented.
“Yup,” Razorstella agreed.
“Out of twisted curiosity, can all of us do that?,” Spring Brawler asked his fellow kaijin,
“Don’t…know…”
“I’m pretty certain I’d just explode into a herd of animals instead of just a swarm of a singular type…,” Hurricroak mused.
“Too bad we’re stuck in here until called upon.”
“We’re not stuck though…”
“It’s an expression, Spring Brawler. Just a simple expression.”
Due to not needing their help for the time being, Zhen Liu allowed the kaijin to roam free or do what they wished inside the library, which in this case, entailed them sitting around a table that had a monitor displaying Archanidame about to instill the fear of the heavens and spiders into several poor, captured SOBs.
“Aight, how y’all think she’s gonna break the first one? Nightmares? Possession? Nightmares caused by being possessed.”
“I’m betting on it involved that weird swarm of her, although, a heroic ability involving a swarm would be cool.”
“Hah! Swarm hero.”
