Free Web NovelChapter 78: The Widow meets the Eater
Kei saw Team Umbra .
Rapax ,Asp , the Rite Cleric and the High Cleric behind them — the four of them running out of the northwest toward the joined bleed bark , out of the wrong direction at the wrong hour , driven there by the cacophony that was their pursuit and not their company . Kei’s eyes moved across them once , the operational count running ahead of recognition .
Only Rada was not among them .
His brows flinched .
Nothing more than that — the poker face holding the rest , the way it held everything , the single small motion at the brow the only place the count’s wrong answer reached the surface . Four where there should have been five . The one missing the one he had spent points on an hour ago without saying her name even to himself .
Team Umbra did not know Team Noctis was there .
They were running for the hideout the way prey ran for any cover that presented itself — and then they saw what was between them and it . The Choir-Eater , seventeen meters of it , stretched across the forest floor . The autonomous segments , the meter-and-a-half lengths of shed chitin wriggling the kill-ground . And the derived apparitions forming in their scattered places , more than a dozen on a rough count , volatile darkness pulling itself upright across the path they had been about to take .
Team Umbra halted .
The assessment arriving on every face at once — caught between the rock and the hard place , shadow predators in front and the biological hunt closing from behind , a team that had run from one death into the front yard of another .
A needle pierced the air .
It came from above and to the side , and it came at Rapax , and Rapax saw it and turned out of its path — the body moving before the mind named the threat — and his eyes followed the needle’s line back up to its source .
Doctor . Peeking from a fissure high in the joined bleed bark . Waving , the childish smile bright in the bloodglow .
Rapax understood it in the instant he saw it . freewebnovёl.ƈom
He made a single nod , and he pointed Team Umbra toward the joined trunks — and Team Umbra , seeing Doctor peering from the tree , felt the surprising relief they had never thought they would feel at the sight of him . That was the measure of how bad the open ground was . That Doctor , of all the things in the Cruentus , read as safety .
They moved fast and silent toward the tree .
Avoiding the shed segments where their paths crossed — and being avoided in turn , the autonomous lengths registering the running flesh and discarding it , their borrowed hunger fixed entirely on the manifesting apparitions , the shadow they were made to find . Team Umbra crossed the kill-ground of an apex predator and its scattered pieces and was ignored the whole way , because it was the wrong kind of prey , because it was only flesh in a place that hungered for shadow .
They reached the joined bleed bark and climbed .
Rapax went high , into a fissure near Doctor’s . The High Cleric and the Rite Cleric found their own concealments along the seam , the places Corvyn pointed them to from his . Asp climbed higher — and saw Kei peering from his fissure , and saw him point to the one beside his , the concealment in the joined trunk directly against his own .
She went to it . She got inside .
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" Asp . "
Kei’s voice came through the thin wall of trunk between their fissures — the inosculated wood pressed thin at the seam where the two trees had become one , thin enough to carry a low voice from one concealment to the next .
" Where is Rada ? "
Asp heard the question .
Something moved in the blue eyes that did not have a name — not the excitement that the berserk Widow had put there , not the flat predatory calm she wore through most of the world , something else , something the Spirit Naga’s register had no settled shape for — and she did not answer .
" Asp . "
She answered this time .
Her voice low , pitched to the thin seam between them , and she told him what had happened since Team Umbra had taken the north path — the run , the Widow’s hunt , the glade , the severed feet , the Viletails that had come down in silence . The whole of it , delivered flat and complete the way a report was delivered , the way the thing was easier to carry if it was carried as information .
The same account moved through the tree as she spoke .
Rapax telling it to Doctor in the high fissures . The Umbra High Cleric telling it to the rest of Team Noctis along the seam . The night’s loss propagating through the joined trunk in low voices , concealment to concealment , every member receiving it — frёewebηovel.cѳm
— except Tula .
Her fissure sat a little apart from the others , far enough down the seam that the low voices did not reach it , and no one crossed to carry the account to her . She received nothing . The one whose eyes had seen what the Choir had shown , left outside the thing the rest of them now knew .
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A large chitter rolled across the forest .
The Red Widow had reached the place Team Umbra had stood five minutes before , the place Doctor’s needle had thrown — and behind it , the crimson brood , a dozen or more , the red venom drooping from their mandibles in the bloodglow . The Widow looked across the open ground for the prey that had been there and was not . The eye clusters moving — recovered now , the blood that had blinded them on the floor of the north path cleaned away in the hours since , scarred at the torn margins but seeing again , reading the glade .
It found no prey .
It shrieked — not as high as the first call , but enough to rattle the Cruentus Heart a second time .
The Choir-Eater looked back .
It had taken three more of the nineteen since the teams last counted , the apparitions drawn into the circular mouth one after another , and it was stretching the seventeen meters of itself in the satisfaction of a thing well into a good feeding when the Widow’s shriek turned its forward eyes around .
Two apex predators regarded each other across the glade .
One part shadow and part nothing the eye could hold , the other fully and only biological — and neither afraid , and both exactly as dangerous as they appeared , the apex of the northern web and the apex of the deep silence taking each other’s measure across a kill-ground littered with the courses of the Choir-Eater’s feast .
Inside the tree , the teams watched , and went dark .
Team Umbra had been told the moment they climbed in — every shadow domain subdued , no shadow ability used , nothing in the shadow register that the Choir-Eater might read as the brightest thing in the glade . Nine practitioners holding the one discipline the tree survived on , made of flesh and nothing else for as long as they could manage it , while two things that could end any of them in a moment decided what to do about each other a few paces away .
The standoff held . Each probing the other . Each waiting .
And it broke on the stupidity of a spiderling .
A lone one , ahead of the brood , reaching the kill-ground before its siblings — and it collided with one of the wriggling shed segments . The segment ignored it . It registered the spiderling as flesh and moved past it toward the shadow it was hunting , indifferent — and the spiderling , the brood’s disposable ordnance with the brood’s disposable judgment , struck the segment with its hallucinogenic mandibles . The segment turned on it . Two meters of autonomous chitin rolling over the cat-sized spiderling and crushing it against the forest floor .
The Red Widow charged .
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The Widow crossed the glade toward the Choir-Eater , and the crimson brood charged behind her , and the Choir-Eater thrashed against the forest floor and gathered itself for a leap — its lone shed segments all turning at once , telepathically joined, scattering off the forming apparitions and toward the brood , flanking the dozen spiderlings from the sides , the parent’s hunt and the children’s hunt resolving into a single coordinated thing across the kill-ground .
The first strike was the Widow’s .
Thousands of web strands fired at once , the whole forest disappearing behind a storm of crimson silk , the air going solid with it — and the Choir-Eater did not dodge . Half its body simply became intangible , the phase-segments answering , the silk passing harmlessly through darkness where a moment before there had been chitin .
Yet not all of it passed through .
Several strands found the segments that had stayed physical — the phasing partial , never the whole length at once , always some part of it solid — and where the strands found chitin the web tightened instantly , drawing deep grooves across the black plating , the Widow’s silk biting into the parts of the creature it could reach .
The Choir-Eater answered with its nature .
Its eyes opened wider along the segments , the clustered pale eyes that fed by opening , and the darkness began to flow — toward its mouth , the way it flowed from every shadow thing the creature had ever fed on . The nearest web corridor trembled . And then it dissolved . Not burned . Not cut . Consumed — kilometers of silk unraveling into black particles that streamed across the glade and into the circular mouth , the Widow’s own architecture taken apart and eaten .
The Red Widow recoiled .
For perhaps the first time in centuries — the apex of the northern sections drawing back from a thing that did to her web what she did to everything else , something that ate the silk that had bound every prey she had ever taken . Something was eating her web .
And then she did the thing a berserk apex did when its first weapon failed .
She closed the distance herself .
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The Widow jumped .
She descended directly onto the Choir-Eater , the full weight of her dropping out of the air onto the seventeen-meter length , and the impact shattered the trunks nearest the glade — the report of it rolling through the forest , and through the joined bleed bark where the teams hid , the fused trunk taking the vibration and holding . The two inosculated trees that had grown into one across the slow centuries held where a single trunk would have split , the joint support of the fused wood the only reason the concealment did not come apart around its nine occupants .
On the glade , silk wrapped around dozens of the centipede’s segments .
And the Choir-Eater coiled upward like the serpent it was not — the long body rearing out of the Widow’s weight , folding back on itself , and its jaws found one of her forward legs and locked .
The leg did not bleed .
Darkness poured from the wound instead — the shadow that ran in the apex of the northern web, the substance the Choir-Eater had bitten down to find — and the creature began to feed . The pale eyes brightening along its length . The darkness flowing from the Widow’s opened leg toward the circular mouth in the thin continuous current it drew from everything it ate .
The Red Widow shrieked .
This time in pain .
