Chapter 226: The Illusion Spider Goes Absolutely Berserk
“Lillian, you stay here. Take care of Eleanor and get her out of that cocoon as fast as you can. Rex—” Ryan looked at the sturdy warrior. “You hold this position. Protect them and guard the doorway. If things go wrong, or if we have to fall back, you’ll need to stop the first wave.”
This arrangement meant leaving the most vulnerable members—the wounded and the support caster—inside the relatively safer room, under the protection of Rex, who was best suited to holding the line head-on, while Ryan and the other two took the initiative and drew the danger outside.
Lillian’s lips moved. Her ice-blue eyes were full of worry. But after looking at the unconscious Eleanor on the floor, then at the ceaseless pounding outside the door and the new cracks spreading across its surface, she nodded hard. Her voice was tight with strain. “I-I’ll take good care of Senior Eleanor. You all… be careful.”
Rex, meanwhile, stepped forward and planted his greatsword heavily on the ground. “Don’t worry! As long as I’m still standing, I won’t let anything get through that door and hurt the young miss!”
Ryan nodded and said no more.
The plan was simple, even reckless, but in a deadlock like this, it was the only possible way to break through.
“Understood,” Vera and Ilyss answered in low voices.
The Shadow Spikes pounding at the door seemed to have reached a brief lull in their rhythm. For one instant, the barrage thinned.
“Now!” Ryan shouted.
“Thunderburst!” Ilyss thrust both palms forward with explosive force. The violet sphere of lightning compressed to the limit in her palms screamed outward, then detonated an instant before it struck the fractured stone door.
There was no deafening boom. Instead, there came a blaze of violet-white light so brilliant it seared the eyes, along with countless thick arcs of twisted lightning leaping wildly through the air like an inverted waterfall, swallowing the entire area beyond the door in an instant.
The light was so fierce it was impossible to look at directly. Even the air itself was thick with savage static, crackling and exploding.
At the same time—
BOOM!!!
The stone door, already riddled with cracks, finally gave way under the internal shock of the lightning storm and the relentless puncturing from the Shadow Spikes outside. It shattered completely. Countless fragments of stone blasted inward.
“Open!” Rex roared from inside the doorway. Earth-yellow magic surged forward like a solid wall, slamming away the incoming rubble and the remaining spikes, clearing a stretch of open ground at the entrance for the three attackers.
At the same moment, Lillian’s icy mist also billowed out, spreading low across the floor near the doorway and along both walls, rapidly dropping the surrounding temperature. Tiny frost crystals condensed in the air, providing a measure of cover for the team pushing out while also interfering with any heat-sensing ability the creature might possess.
“Go!”
Ryan charged out first. Under the fading afterglow of the lightning storm and the cover of the ice mist, his figure looked almost indistinct.
Lightning coiled around the short blade in his left hand. His right hand clenched around empty air, where a tightly spinning miniature cyclone of wind had formed in his palm.
Vera and Ilyss followed a step behind him, one on each side. With a sweep of her hand, Vera turned the remaining force of the Wind Wall into a gust that shoved all three of them forward.
Ilyss’s violet eyes were fixed on the smoke and dust ahead, where the lightning was already beginning to fade. New arcs were already dancing at her fingertips.
The three of them burst through the drifting smoke at the doorway and the lingering aftershocks of thunder-element Mana.
The nest came into view once more.
Dark.
Sweet and rank.
Massive webs swaying faintly in the distance.
And about ten paces ahead of them, the Illusion Spider’s huge body was slowly lowering itself, eight pure black compound eyes locked on the three intruders. The chitinous structures around its mandibles writhed slightly. The thunderburst and the crashing door had clearly left it uncomfortable—but compared to discomfort, what it felt far more strongly now was the rage about to erupt from its body.
Several of its legs were stabbed deep into the ground and the surrounding webs. Behind its body, near the abdomen, special glands were slowly swelling, their surfaces gleaming with an ominous dark sheen—the source of the Shadow Spikes from before.
There was no exchange of words. No standoff.
By the third second after they burst out of the doorway, the battle had already entered a white-hot frenzy.
The Illusion Spider swept two forelegs from left and right like battering rams, sealing off every avenue of escape. At the same time, it opened its mandibles and spat out a thick stream of purple-black venom like a pressurized cannon, drenching the air above the three of them.
“Spread out!” Ryan barked.
He flashed sharply to the right. At the same moment, he threw the short blade from his left hand. It became a streak of silver-white lightning as it shot toward the soft connecting tissue beneath the spider’s venom-spraying mandibles, trying to interrupt the attack.
Vera moved like the wind, drifting left and narrowly evading the sweeping spider leg at the last possible moment. Her hands traced an intricate pattern through the air.
“Wind Shackles!”
Several half-transparent currents of pale green air materialized out of nowhere and wrapped themselves around the joint of the spider leg that had just swept through empty space. Though most of them were torn apart almost instantly by brute force, they still managed to create a fleeting moment of drag.
Ilyss did not dodge left or right. She stepped forward instead. The light in her violet eyes flared brilliantly as she crossed both hands before her chest, forming a complex lightning sigil in an instant.
“Lightning Shield!”
A diamond-shaped shield blazing with dazzling lightning sprang up before her. The venom splashed onto the shield and let out a violent sizzle as it corroded the surface. Purple-black smoke rose in thick clouds, and the shield’s radiance dimmed rapidly, but it successfully blocked the first wave of the attack.
Ryan’s flying blade struck its target.
Lightning exploded.
The muscles beside the Illusion Spider’s mandibles spasmed violently, throwing off the stream of venom. The remaining spray splattered across the ground instead, eating smoking pits into the stone.
In that first exchange, the three of them barely weathered the assault through coordination, timing, and the strengths of their individual abilities.
But that was only the beginning.
The Illusion Spider was truly enraged now. Provoked again and again, struck again and again, it abandoned both venom spray and Shadow Spikes. Instead, it vented its fury through sheer brute force—through savage, crushing violence driven by its monstrous body and terrifying speed.
No longer content to remain in place, it lunged forward all at once. Its eight legs moved in alternating succession, so fast that in the dim light they left afterimages behind. Its scythe-like forelegs swung madly, slicing through the air with shrill, mournful screams as they came down on Ilyss, who stood farthest forward. At the same time, another leg swept viciously in from the side toward Vera’s lower body just as she was trying to reposition, while the creature’s entire massive bulk—like a moving fortress wall—smashed toward Ryan, who was attempting to circle behind it.
In an instant, the pressure surged.
Ryan’s eyes remained completely calm.
The extraordinary perception granted by the Seal of Enlightenment allowed him to see every attack clearly—the trajectory, the speed, even the turbulence raised by the spider’s charging bulk.
He did not try to block it head-on.
Instead, he slid backward as lightly as if he had no weight at all, barely letting the frontal charge graze past him. At the exact instant one of the spider’s legs brushed by his side, he slammed the condensed cyclone in his right hand against the shell covered in bristling hair.
“Wind Pressure Burst!”
The highly compressed vortex exploded inward the moment it made contact. Violent air currents drove themselves into the gaps in the shell, hammering the muscles beneath and the connecting joints. The momentum of the Illusion Spider’s charge faltered for the briefest instant, and the movement of that leg became momentarily uncoordinated as a result.
That moment of imbalance was all Ryan needed.
His left hand snatched through the air.
The short blade he had thrown earlier shot backward into his grasp once more.
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